Bill Gates' Continuing Education
Bill Gates is going through a rough patch. At the beginning of this year he proclaimed himself a “optimist with footnotes.” The release of the Epstein files has proliferated the footnotes, but done little to enhance his optimism. He does however look forward to “innovation by artificial intelligence.” And he touts the Gates Foundation’s spending on education” as the part of his record that he hopes people will focus on.
It is not hard to see why. He lost some old friends without gaining many new ones when he admitted that his decades of caterwauling about climate change were based on error. Then came unwonted attention to his connections with the procurement expert Jeffrey Epstein. Most recently The Wall Street Journal has weighed in with an unflattering portrait of a man who has spared no expense to ensure that he is seen by one and all as a sainted philanthropist in a V-neck sweater.
His climate climb-down or his Epstein erasures have rumpled his button-down billions image. Can his legacy in educational philanthropy iron out his problems
Gates first came into focus in the world of education when he positioned himself as one of the original champions of the Common Core State Standards, that disastrous Obama era end-run around the Constitution, which left education to the states. Calling these federal impositions “state standards”: was a neat trick. Technically they are, since the states could choose not to participate—provided they were willing to forego billions in federal aid. The Obama Education Department called that by another cute name: “The Race to the Top.” The results of that race as measured by fifteen years of plummeting test scores are record levels of educational decline among the nation’s schoolchildren. Not only is the race not to the swift, it isn’t to the dumbfounded teachers either. It is to the bureaucrats, who appear to be the only real beneficiaries of this chapter of Gates’ benevolence.
But let’s be charitable. Gates meant well. He didn’t set out to destroy the pursuit of educational excellence in the nation’s schools. He just wanted to liberate them from the destructive influence of parents. And it would be wrong to say that Gates by himself determined the way this folly propagated across K-12 education. He had lots of help.
I am more interested in what happened when he turned his attention in 2019 to higher education. In some respects, his advocacy in post-secondary education fits with the priorities of the Trump administration, which like Gates, regards “return on investment” (ROI) as the be-all and end-all of a college education.
One might say, hard to argue against that. After all, Americans don’t go to college simply to waste time and squander money. An education is an “investment” in a good old Ben Franklin sense. What’s wrong with putting ROI front and center?
What’s wrong with that is it flattens education. ROI is a good thing, but so is learning to ask good questions and learning to distinguish between better and worse answers to those questions. Some would call this critical thinking. ROI again is a good thing, but sometimes too narrow a focus on the skills-that-pay may dampen interest in the discoveries that may or may not pay but are mighty interesting. Or the rewards to society that come from some people learning to read widely, write imaginatively, or venture into untried intellectual territory.
To be sure, those who can usefully depart from the path of ROI-first are a minority. The trouble is that it is hard to tell just who they may be. American higher education has responded to that uncertainty by allowing everyone to try, and for those who find they have not much use for the impractical arts and the elusive sciences, allowing them to return to the world of more directly useful credentials.
That model, however, may have outlived its own usefulness. To focus on the ROI curriculum in higher education is to suppose that students can know in advance what skills are worth investing in. That was always something of a guess, but AI has turned it into an out-and-out gamble. Not so long ago, it was “learn to code” or major in computer science. These days those are short roads to the unemployment line. Some major employers suggest that the flexibility of a real liberal arts education offers more security. You “learn how to think” and you develop “intellectual flexibility.”
Well maybe. A genuine liberal arts education can assist the student in developing the capacity for rigorous thinking and wisely reconsidering, but the hitch is that adjective “genuine.” A couple of decades of colleges and universities calling any intellectual slop “liberal arts” makes the average liberal arts education just as dubious a preparation for the marketplace as a focus on yesteryear’s technological breakthrough.
Finding the real thing is difficult, and once found, following through on it is hard. It will become harder still when you are surrounded by the enticing shortcuts of AI that will read the books for you, prompt your comments, and write term papers more informed than you could hope to be on your own. The “why bother?” question will henceforth hover over every hard college course.
Can I blame this on Bill Gates? Well, not to poor Bill alone. He is busy struggling with the legacy of having helped to render a generation unteachable, and fending off suspicions that he sampled some of Jeffery’s wares. But let’s not forget that he created the Postsecondary Value Commission that reduced “value” to its dollar-and-cents meaning. He also gave us “Transformation Intermediaries” which aims to eliminate “race and income as predictors of student success.” Under this heading the Gates Foundation launched a slew of programs aimed at “transforming institutions” into “cohesive and inclusive learning environments.”
These sound like such worthy goals that it would be churlish to question them. So I’ll forebear. But I’ll note that “inclusive” is what DEI is all about, and a lot depends on what you give up to get there.
The Gates Foundation has easily spent billions in its efforts to “transform” education at both K-12 and “post-secondary” levels. Perhaps some of this money has been well-spent. I haven’t made a deep study of the matter. But I would say that having spent so much money on reforming education, Bill Gates owns more than a small share of the results. Is he happy with what he sees?
I’ve read through some of the reports of the Gates Foundation which exude pride and satisfaction with the results—as of course they would. But those results also have to be measured against the American public’s assessment of education. And by that standard Bill’s investment in education shows a very wobbly R.
