On Nov. 16, students at Roger Williams University organized what they referred to as “BlackOut” (pictured below) – a noontime demonstration in support of the students at the University of Missouri whose protests against the indifference of some senior administrators at the university to claims of racism on the campus led to the resignation of the system president and the campus chancellor.

RWU student leaders spoke and presented a proposed list of action steps they wanted to see taken by our campus and then invited me to speak. The prevailing mood at the demonstration was collaborative and civil – no “demands” were made, and no one’s resignation was sought. I was very proud of our students, and I told them that we would form a representative task force to develop a plan, with timelines and metrics, to address their entirely reasonable concerns. Then we returned to our offices and classrooms to resume the work of giving and receiving a university education. The local newspaper wrote a positive editorial about the event (“RWU students’ intelligent requests,” Bristol Phoenix, Nov. 19, 2015).

Given the altogether positive tone of the RWU event, I was more than a little taken aback when I opened my local newspaper two days later, and saw an op-ed with the ominous title, “The Death of America’s Universities” (Providence Journal, Nov. 18, 2015). Odd. I could see from the windows of my home that the Roger Williams campus, even early in the morning, seemed quite active. University employees were driving into the parking lots, as usual, steam was emanating from the roof vents, students were walking on the quad. All seemed entirely normal.

But before leaving for work, I decided to take time to analyze the claim made by the author of the op-ed – a gentleman named T. Robinson Ahlstrom, who identified himself as the “chairman of The George Washington Scholar Endowment” – that American universities had died.

Mr. Ahlstrom’s declaration of the demise of America’s universities was based on the events at the University of Missouri and actions that subsequently followed at other colleges and universities across the nation. Because, early in my career, I had served 11 years as a member of the faculty at the University of Missouri, I had closely followed the story, but it had never occurred to me that someone would equate the resignations of two administrators there with the death of America’s universities.

Mr. Ahlstrom sees the events at the University of Missouri as:

“the convulsive writhing of a patient who has been in rapid decline since the 1960s, when a motley assortment of Marxists, feminists, revenge racists, brats and anarchists embedded themselves deeply in our government, media and institutions of higher learning.”

In case readers missed his point, Mr. Ahlstrom doubles down, comparing the recent history of American higher education to “Hitler’s Germany” and referring to faculty as “ideological storm troopers.” Tenured professors “pitch pipe bombs of contempt onto everything ancient, lovely, sacred and sane.” “[T]he loss of the university will mean the loss of the West.”

Of course what is conveniently swept aside by his rant is the notion of any legitimacy to the concerns that students at the University of Missouri (and now many other universities) raised in the first place: the idea that too many universities remain bastions of privilege for the children of those who have been successful in our society, at the expense of being welcoming to those who have been marginalized by society – that is, people of color; low-income, first-generation college students; those who are not heterosexual; those who are not Judeo-Christian. It is easy to appreciate and understand the dissatisfaction and concern students from marginalized groups feel when they arrive at universities that seem designed to serve only the needs of students from white families who are in the economic mainstream.

We all recognize that the transition from high school to college is, for many students, a daunting challenge. Colleges and universities that truly care about their students have long been concerned about creating support systems for entering freshmen to help ease this transition. But these support systems were designed to serve the students who are from those segments of society that have, for generations, attended college, and too often have not been accommodating to those who are seeking access as the first members of their families to go to college. These students ask: “Where are the faculty who look like me? To whom do I turn for advice and support regarding my issues? Why am I always made to feel as if I don’t belong here? Why am I called upon in class to speak to ‘the black experience’ or ‘what it’s like to be Latino’”?

And perhaps most important of all: “Why are we still having to ask these questions, 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and more than 50 years after the Stonewall riots and the beginning of the LGBTQ movement?” Higher education has always been seen as the doorway to economic opportunity. Why, then, are underrepresented groups still underrepresented? And why would anyone feel that America’s universities face death if students dare to ask these questions?

It is our collective shame that the college graduation rates of students from the lowest economic quintile remain seven times lower than the rates of students from the top quintile – a figure that hasn’t changed in 40 years. Because students of color are disproportionately represented in the lowest economic quintile, whether one measures it by race or by income, there is a very significant “achievement gap” between those on the margins of society and those in the mainstream.

But let’s not confuse the legitimate concerns of students and families that continue to find themselves denied equity of access and support at America’s colleges with political correctness, or with the recent controversy about “trigger warnings” (wherein students demand to be “warned” when a potentially disturbing topic is about to be raised in class).

What students from traditionally underrepresented groups are protesting is not the absence of trigger warnings, or a failure by higher education institutions to be politically correct. Rather, their complaints range from instances of thoughtless insensitivity to blatant racism, sexism and overt discrimination, all of which are too often tolerated or ignored by administrators of our nation’s college campuses. It is the lack of commitment by many colleges and universities to address fairness and equity issues that we should be decrying, not the temerity of students who complain about what they continue to face almost half a century after the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A final point: trying to develop a campus culture that is free from bias is obviously the right thing to do; elemental fairness would say that students from underrepresented groups should not have to face the additional burden of a hostile educational environment. But it’s easy to miss another very important point: white, middle-class students are not being prepared for the increasingly multicultural world they will enter after graduation if colleges and universities do not work much harder than most have done to date to create a more inclusive campus, one that celebrates, not merely tolerates, diversity.

America’s universities aren’t dead. But if they remain complacent and indifferent to the concerns that students are now raising on campuses across the country, they are in real danger of losing any claim of being society’s moral and ethical leaders.

I can’t guarantee that Roger Williams University will be successful in creating a welcoming and supportive environment for every student – but, working together, the members of our campus family are certainly going to try.

Last week, I provided an overview on a topic of vital importance: the highly uneven nature of America’s economic recovery since the Great Recession of 2008. Corporate America and its shareholders are doing very well – but the great majority of wage earners are not. What accounts for this unevenness? Noted Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw is quoted as saying, “The best way to address rising inequality is to focus on increasing educational attainment,” (The New York Times, “Income Inequality and the Ills Behind It,” July 30, 2014). Is this statement true? Or does the real answer lie elsewhere?

Let’s begin by noting that the nature of the job market in America has changed dramatically in recent years, owing to both globalization (the export of jobs to countries with lower labor costs) and technology (the elimination of jobs by substituting robots and software for human employees). We should also note that a changing job market is nothing new: at the beginning of the 20th century, 30 percent of America’s jobs were on farms. Now just two percent of Americans work on farms (The New York Times, “Fear Not the Coming of the Robots,” June 22, 2014). But the pace of job loss has escalated, and the new jobs either pay less or require more specialized skills.

To be specific, more than 1.5 million jobs have been eliminated in America since 2000, involving such varied positions as typists, telephone operators, computer operators, telemarketers, travel agents and carpenters. But 2.5 million jobs have been added this century in fields such as computer software engineering, nursing, finance and physical therapy – all requiring a college education and all paying relatively well (“Fear Not the Coming of the Robots,” cited above). So college graduates, at least, should be doing well, right? Clearly, our economy will be fixed once we have more educated people.

Except that more than half of those who graduated from college in the past three years are working in jobs that did not traditionally call for a college degree – and these jobs tend not to pay well (Bloomberg, “College Graduates Struggle to Find Employment Worth a Degree,” June 5, 2014).

And this change in the nature of the workforce is by no means an exclusively American issue. A survey of 42 countries conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that “the demand for skilled workers is still rising faster than the supply,” yet “the people who really paid the price for the financial crisis are those without baseline qualifications,” (The New York Times, “Financial Crisis Amplifies Education’s Value,” June 30, 2013).

How do we reconcile “rising demand for skilled workers” with underemployed college graduates? An economist at George Mason University “posits that technology and globalization have essentially split the labor market in two: high and low earners. Far fewer stable jobs are left over in the middle to support what through much of the 20^th century we called the middle class,” (“Income Inequality and the Ills Behind It,” cited above).

It is important to recognize that “skilled workers” and “college graduates” are not synonymous. If what corporate America requires are people who have the skill set necessary to do a particular job – and these people must be job-ready when they apply for work – then engineers, accountants and nurses, along with pipefitters, electricians and technology assistants, will be hired preferentially over those without job-ready skills.

And that means college graduates without the specific skills that business and industry need will find themselves on the margins of the job market, often forced to accept a low-skill and low-paid position just to have a job.

This point is graphically underscored in a number of states that chart the starting salaries of recent college graduates by major. “To make the most money coming out of a North Carolina university, study nuclear engineering and you’ll earn almost $90,000 a year. To make the least, study dramatic theater and earn $10,400,” (Diverse Education, “Big Data Measuring Dollar Value of College Degrees,” August 13, 2014).

I have no data to prove this point, but I very much doubt if, at any time in the past few decades, we have seen an eight-fold difference in starting salaries, based on choice of majors from the same institution.

So is more education the answer? It should be clear that a general call for more people with more education is too simple a response. A college degree without specific skills valued by the marketplace no longer guarantees a well-compensated position.

There are actually several problems with the idea that more and better education will cure an ailing economy. Let me summarize:

1. Quality of Education 1. Nationally, only about 80 percent of children starting the first grade subsequently graduate from high school. The percentage of dropouts has changed very little in recent decades, but the economic consequences of not finishing high school have never been greater. Few high school dropouts will find jobs that pay even moderately well. There is, at present, no agreement on how to solve the dropout problem, nor is there any evidence that society is ready and/or willing to implement a solution, should one be found.

2. Quality of Education 2. College completion rates are far worse than are the high school completion rates. Across all sectors, less than 60 percent of all college students receive a bachelor’s degree within six years of starting as freshmen. This percentage has actually declined somewhat in recent years. There is very little economic value in a partial college degree, and too many college dropouts face the added burden of having taken out student loans that they will have difficulty repaying. No concerted effort exists to address the non-completion problem.

   A recent OECD report that surveyed the work skills of adult Americans found that 36 million have low skills, resulting in “a highly educated super class at the top and a highly undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle…which is exactly what Third World countries look like,” (Salon, “America’s Rotting Empire: Billionaires Galore and a Crumbling Infrastructure,” May 8, 2014).

3. Quantity of Education. As I have just noted, both high school and college completion rates have been stalled for several decades. If our goal is to have an increasing percentage of adult Americans with higher levels of education, we are falling painfully short of our objective – and there is nothing to suggest that this situation will improve in the near to mid-term.

4. Access to Higher Education. Students from the top quintile of family income are seven times more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree than are students from the bottom quintile of family income. The strongest predictor of a young person’s level of economic success is the level of education of his or her parents. Moreover, the students from more affluent families tend to go to the most selective colleges and universities; students from less affluent families often must make do with community colleges and nonselective four-year institutions.

   What, then, should we tell those from working class families who aspire to climb the socioeconomic ladder? “Instead of being a great equalizer…the American way of college rewards those who come not just academically but socially prepared, while treating working-class students more cruelly, and often leaving them adrift,” (The New York Times, “College, the Great Unequalizer,” May 3, 2014).

5. The Role of Higher Education. Well into the 20th century, the primary purpose of a college education was to permit a higher quality of life for both the possessor and society at large. People learned how to do their job on the job (The Herbert H. Lehman Memorial Lecture, “The U.S. Workforce and Higher Education: A New Deal,” April 2, 2014). Over time, and dramatically over the last decade, employers have minimized or eliminated their role in teaching bright college graduates how to do their specific job in favor of expecting colleges to do most of that work for them: to prepare students to be job-ready when they graduate.

   This expectation has led to the situation we find ourselves in today, where college students must too often choose between a major in a field they love, and a major that promises to pay them a decent salary. The consequence has been a dramatic shift from the liberal arts to the professional programs, and higher education finds itself in serious risk of being reduced to a smorgasbord of training programs – the antithesis of the role it has played since the Middle Ages.

   The danger is creating a nation full of doers but devoid of thinkers – people with skills and some knowledge, but without wisdom.

To conclude, the idea that more and better education is the silver bullet that will repair a seriously damaged economy is fanciful, in large measure because there is no strategy or mechanism to get us there, but also because, even if we knew how to do it, the price we would have to pay – using higher education for the primary purpose of turning huge numbers of Americans into foot soldiers for corporate America – is too high.

We will come back to this point in Part 4 of our series. Next week, Part 3: The role of income inequality in our ailing economy.