In the June/July 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, researchers Norman Nie and Saar Golde frame their findings in a way that finds education to be nothing more than a system of filtering, more a means of demonstrating one’s inborn talents rather than developing them. In “Does Education Really Make You Smarter?” researchers Nie and Golde found that, counter to the popular belief that there is a positive correlation between verbal ability and the level of a person’s educational attainment, when vocabulary scores over the past century were actually charted alongside levels of educational attainment the latter rose significantly while the former stayed in a plateu. This observation, say Nie and Golde, demonstrates that there is now less reason to support the popular assumption that more education is causally responsible for better scores. On the contrary, more education does not improve our verbal abilities. For the authors, it follows that particular instances of public funding dedicated to increasing educational outcomes may actually be better spent somewhere else.

As they only provide data about verbal scores, their argument is significantly limited to conjectures about verbal skills. So, in order to make their results more compelling, the authors declare verbal skills to be one of the strongest determinants of both intelligence and employability: “Verbal ability serves as the foundation for interpersonal communication and the transmission of ideas, both of which are necessary for success in the job market, and for other positive outcomes we mentioned […] There is also substantial literature asserting that verbal ability is the single most important indicator of general intelligence.” If verbal scores qua intelligence are equal to employability, it follows that class is also a function of intelligence and therefore people may be unemployed or unemployable because they are immutably stupid. The researchers, however, have not themselves produced any evidence to support this idea that verbal scores are markers of intelligence, or perhaps more concerning, that employment is a function of verbal scores.

As someone who studied English in college, I must say that I would have been much better off had I undertaken a course of computer studies and science rather than the literature and writing classes that, in the end, must only have increased the clarity and eloquence of my communications. My peers in English most often use their communication skills in the service industry, or, ironically, in education where, if we take seriously the reasoning of Nie and Golde, they teach mean things to no useful end and probably should be fired for producing low verbal scores. I often think upon my self-indulgent choice to major in the subject of English as the cause of my indelibly maimed salary. I am just as often led to dream of a better life in finance. I think about law school, a lot. What I mean to say is that vocabulary has not been a marker of competence or employability, for employers at least, for quite a while.

Nie and Golde have reported that, for a good portion of the century, verbal scores have been in a plateau while education attainment scores have increased phenomenally. It is important to note that Nie and Golde, “to avoid complications caused by changing demographics and questions about the validity of such tests with minority and immigrant populations, […] included only the native-born, white American population 30 to 65 years of age, using information collected over the last 35 years of parallel surveys.” From data collected from a sample of white Americans over 35 years, they conclude that education has no effect on verbal ability/intelligence. They fail, however, to notice that government money and attention has never been as dedicated to the purpose of raising our nation’s verbal scores as it has been to the project of our nation’s defense and that the effects of this attention have influenced the incentives for educational attainment for white Americans, minority Americans and immigrants alike. Government subsidies have been applied to education both from within, as direct departmental funding, and without, as employment opportunities in the public and private sectors. They have not noticed that the greatest increases in education were increases in government subsidy leading up to and spanning the Cold War era. For instance, in 1944 the G.I. Bill increased college enrollment exponentially and most likely fed into the growth in military and technological interests, rather than verbal scores, in various ancillary ways. Also, 14 years later, the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958—widely assumed to be the direct result of the launch of Russia’s Sputnik, an unprecedented technological feat—forced English/verbal related departments to play second fiddle to math and science. This move in American policy to science and technology has led to astounding technological advancement, the birth of private industries that were inconceivable only 60 years ago and significant distinction among American researchers in fields related to science and math. Since 1951, Americans have won over 50% of Nobel Prizes in math and science related fields—a significant achievement.

English verbal ability cannot compete with math and science in the realm of American education funding, however, it is interesting to see how many have used the American education system to become fluent in Russian or Arabic languages since the presidencies of FDR and Eisenhower. FYI: enrollment in Arabic language courses has gained 126% between 2002 and 2006; Chinese, 50%.

American industry has not actually prohibited the study of English but, due to a dearth of employment opportunities, it has produced generations of fairly literate gas attendants and Olive Garden waiters—all the while funding and incentivizing the fields most important to national defense and to a specific definition of progress. Said differently, little has been done to support fields which develop verbal ability.

The inequality between educational attainment and verbal scores can therefore be accounted for without the wholesale and rudimentary rejection of the link between funding education and educational outcomes. Public and private subsidy and attention have not been wholly applied, either directly as education funding or indirectly as employment opportunity, to the growth of fields for which verbal skills are important. It follows that in an environment where college has become a mere means to economic stability and national defense and where English verbal ability can provide neither of these things, there are simply no economic incentives and therefore no compelling reasons for students to develop their verbal skills. We are more than a century removed from the time when higher learning was considered an end in itself.

The most important point I wish to make is not that the authors underestimate the value of education subsidy in educational outcomes, but that they drastically overestimate the importance of verbal skills in the job market. According to The College Majors Handbook, although there have been recent increases, the average English graduate still earns 10% below the national average. Payscale.com reports that the median American salary for less than 1 year of experience in the field of Communications is $32-33,000; in Journalism, $33-34,000; in English, $34-35,000. In contrast, a Science major will begin at $40-41,000; Science/Computer Information Systems, $43-44,000; Computer Science, $48-49,000. Salary caps are understandably lower for English than for science or math-related fields.

Rather than simply assuming that verbal ability is essential to communication in the workplace, which is a correct assumption, the authors might have added the verbal scores of college graduates who make the median American salary to their data. This might have caused us to examine the true causes of the plateau in verbal ability.

If we are to assume that progress is generally dependent upon verbal ability, then we might look for a solution that enables job seekers from English/verbal backgrounds to compete with those employed based upon their backgrounds in math and science. A positive solution might be to increase the incentives for job seekers with developed verbal skills in the job market. These new incentives would add competition to this field that might help to raise mean verbal scores, more so than direct funding to English or communication departments. If these kinds of incentives existed in both public and private sectors, demand might cause better education funding to flow into these areas.

A negative solution might be to cut down the numbers employed in the science and technology related industries by somehow mandating that employees be held to a more rigorous and holistic assessment of both math and verbal abilities. This would root out people with poor verbal skills, ensure clear communication in the workplace, and indirectly raise mean verbal scores. This absurd negative solution, apart from its obvious problems, has a less apparent downside; it is not very representative of our American democracy.

Although verbal aptitude is great for communication in the workplace, it may not actually be an essential component of our modern American definition of progress. In fact, assigning it too much weight may actually have political and economic side effects. By suggesting that verbal skills have played or ought to play such a significant role in the hiring process, as Nie and Golde have suggested, we are led to absurd negative solutions like that above. Also, historically speaking, if verbal skills had been as important to employment as the authors suggest, then American industry would not have enjoyed the labor of so many highly competent first and second-generation immigrants. In turn, these immigrants would not have had a place or chance to succeed. Historically, our science and technology related industries could not afford to lose the human capital that has fueled our phenomenal success to this point. Perhaps then, verbal ability is not essential to our American definition of progress and perhaps real progress is not something that requires definition.