Please join us on Friday, February 28, for our Philosophy Department Colloquium with Professor Tony Laden.

 

The event will start at 3:00 pm in Claudia Cohen Hall 402, with a reception to follow in the lounge.

 

 

The Social Costs of a College Education

 

 

Abstract:  

Drawing on material from my recent book, Networks of Trust, I argue that colleges and universities impose hidden social costs on some of their students through the very process of educating them.  I focus on the role education plays in shaping the set of sources of information that students trust (their “informational trust networks”) and the grounds they have for deciding what kinds of sources to trust (their “informational ideology”).  While one effect of this process is to improve students’ capacities for knowledge, it nevertheless pulls some students away from the communities in which they grew up, communities who occupy and are held together by different trust networks. Political criticisms of higher education from both the left and the right can be understood, then, as giving expression to the anxieties this process provokes.