The Meaning of Value
On Thursday, October 17th, Georgia State University hosted a panel on the ethics of student loan forgiveness. There were three people who spoke on the panel: Deron Boyles, a professor of the Department of Educational Policy Studies; Jennifer Lee, a higher education policy analyst at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute; and Richard Lorenc, the executive VP of a libertarian organization called the Foundation for Economic Education. What does any of this have to do with “The Meaning of Value”? At one point during the conversation, Mr. Lorenc said that one of the problems with higher education policy is that student loans artificially lower costs associated with obtaining a degree and make it possible for people to over-consume education; the way that people do this is by pursuing degrees (such as Early Childhood Education) that, as Mr. Lorenc put it, have little value.
The overwhelming majority of people in the audience, at this point during the presentation, were up in arms at the audacity that somebody like Mr. Lorenc had in asserting that a profession as noble as teaching has little value. I contend, however, that this frustration and indignation was largely misplaced. In what follows, I’m going to delineate different ways that people often talk about “value.” Then, I will defend Mr. Lorenc’s assertion that a degree in Early Childhood Education has little value, using the appropriate construal of “value.” Despite this fact, I argue that people may have good reason to pursue degrees of this sort. (This is especially the case since I am a philosophy masters student, pursuing a degree that I believe, also, has little value).
There are two senses in which somebody can describe value. Value is a term that can be used as a term that instantiates and recognizes worth that is intrinsic to something. In this way, human life can be considered “valuable.” Even if the particular subject of a human life is incapable of producing anything that is of use to others (take, for instance, a human infant), they are regarded as important and bearers of a certain kind of value that is inherent to the beings they are. The second way that value can be described is in terms of the utility that something produces.
This latter kind of value can be cached out in terms of the utility something produces for oneself or in terms of the utility something produces for others. I, personally, enjoy chocolate almond milk. Because of this, I can say that I value chocolate almond milk. In other words, chocolate almond milk is valuable to me. If, however, somebody were to charge me $400 for a glass, I would not even think to dish out that amount of cash, as I clearly (and thankfully) do not value a glass of chocolate almond milk more than I value $400. Depending on how strong my hankering, I think I would be willing to pay $9 for a glass of chocolate almond milk. Luckily for me, however, others value chocolate almond milk far less, so I get to pay $4.95 every time I buy a quart at the store.
The value of chocolate almond milk as determined by others, and therefore the value of chocolate almond milk that matters in all practical considerations involving chocolate almond milk, is $4.95. Though I personally value chocolate almond milk far more than that, the actual value (that is, the value determined by others which effectively changes my demonstration of value) of chocolate almond does not.
Similarly, one’s personal valuation of a degree in Early Childhood Education does not change the actual value (that is, the value determined by others which effectively fixes the way that value is demonstrated) of the degree, which is approximately $30,000/year. This does not mean that the value of such a degree changes to the person who pursues it, much like the value of chocolate almond milk is much higher to me than a mere $4.95 per quart. But something does not gain value when an individual increasingly values the thing from their own perspective. Value accrues in an object or service when others collectively express that they value the good in question.
Members of society clearly have a valuation problem when Kylie Jenner is worth almost a billion dollars while the primary school teacher is valued at $30,000/year. But Mr. Lorenc is not wrong to say that this degree is not valuable. Because, in fact, it is not. Perhaps it ought to be valued more, but the degree is valued at no more than $30,000/year, which is relatively little. Surely, we should be critical about the ways that people value things when things clearly deserving of value are not valued properly. Doing this, however, means that we must admit of the actual value of things.
As somebody who is pursuing a relatively valueless profession as an academic, I accept that my goals are not valuable. The reason one pursues goals for oneself, however, has little to do with the value that these goals have in the sense that Mr. Lorenc was talking about. The reason one pursues goals for oneself is because of the meaning they have to the pursuer of the goal. If the individuals in the audience believed that pursuing a degree in Early Childhood Education was in their best interest and that it was a meaningful pursuit, it wouldn’t have mattered to them that Mr. Lorenc (rightly) acknowledged that the degree has little value. It, in fact, does not have very much value in the way he is discussing it. But it does have value to them in very many other ways.