Description:

The Social Costs of a College Education
Anthony Simon Laden
 
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. 

Bio
Professor Anthony Laden received his PhD from Harvard University in 1996 and has been teaching at the University of Illinois ever since.  Since 2015, he has also been the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His work spans ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of education with a little bit of social epistemology thrown in.  He was written on democracy, civility, the activity of reasoning together, liberalism, game theory, the politics of identity, the role trust plays in higher education, and probably too many articles on the philosophy of John Rawls.  He is the author of three books, most recently Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We can Do About Them (Chicago, 2024).