The Dumbing Down of Jehovah’s Witnesses by Misrepresenting Truth

Former and current Jehovah’s Witnesses are well aware of the Society’s view on higher education, which has fluctuated during the past few decades from downright prohibition to tacit approval for trade-specific vocational training. We have all known someone or heard stories of exceptionally bright Jehovah’s Witness youths who have turned down scholarships to colleges in order to pursue the full-time preaching work. Since Jehovah’s Witnesses are less likely to attending college, they are vastly under-represented in many fields such as medical, science, research, law and the arts.

More disturbing than the resistance to higher education that emanates from talks at conventions and congregation meetings, are the gross misrepresentations of the value of higher education in their literature. For example, an article in the October 1, 2005 issue of the Watchtower, entitled “Parents-What Future Do you Want for Your Children?” features an inset that asks, “What is the Value of Higher Education?” The inset begins, “Most people who enroll in a university look forward to earning a degree that will open doors for them to well-paying and secure jobs. Government reports show, however, that only about one quarter of those who go to college earn a degree within six years-a dismal success rate.” Considering that a bachelors degree requires four-years of full-time attendance, I am confused as to why this is considered “dismal?” Nevertheless, the article does not cite the “government reports” it’s referring to, so we are left to take their word for it.

Instead, the inset provides quotes from various non-Jehovah’s Witness “current research and studies,” to support the claim that higher education is not a worthwhile endeavor. Oddly, “current research and studies,” are nowhere to be found in the article, unless you consider pop-culture news magazines such as Newsweek and Time as venerable and rigorous institutions specializing in research on education. Woops, well never mind, we’ll assume the source articles provide results from reputable studies to support the notion that higher education is really a “waste of time and money,” as the article points out. Since I found the actual articles for myself, this is not entirely so.

The inset quotes Newsweek (November 1, 1999), “’Going to Harvard or Duke [universities] won’t automatically produce a better job and higher pay….Companies don’t know much about young employment candidates. A shiny credential (an Ivy League degree) may impress. But after that, what people can or can’t do counts for more.’” The Newsweek article entitled “The Worthless Ivy League,” by Newsweek and Washington Post columnist and economist, Robert J. Samuelson - who himself is a Harvard graduate (and published a book entitled Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong) - questions whether an Ivy League education guarantees higher salaries in comparison to lower ranked public and private colleges, not that higher education in itself is valueless. The article points out that while Ivy League universities generally attract more “talented” and ambitious students, students who are “talented” and ambitious at any lower-ranked universities can do as well in terms of professional success and salaries. While the article does quote from a study, the study tested salaries between over-achieving graduates from Ivy League and non-Ivy League universities. Not exactly the message that the quote found in the Watchtower inset implies.

The inset then quotes from a magazine called American Educator, which is published by the American Federation of Teachers, a journal for educators from grade school to college. I hardly believe that their publication or any schoolteacher or college professor would pooh-pooh the value of higher education, but let’s examine what the article really says. The Watchtower inset quotes the publication, “’While today’s typical job requires higher skills than in the past…,the skills required for these jobs are strong high school-level skills-math, reading, and writing at a ninth-grade level….,not college-level skills.…Students do not need to go to college to get a good job, but they do need to master high school-level skills.’”

Personally, I find it disturbing that any publication would value “ninth-grade level” skills in reading, writing and math over a twelfth-grade level, considering that students in the United States are vastly inferior in these skills (especially in math) than students in other developed nations and even developing nations such as India and China. The article admits that in the United States, “Unfortunately, over 40 percent of high-school seniors lack ninth-grade math skills and 60 percent lack ninth-grade reading skills.” The American Educator article actually addressed “low-achieving” middle and high school students who average grades that are "C" or lower and said that encouraging them to pursue college may not be a reasonable option considering their difficulties in performing in an academic environment. In addition, the article suggests that these under-performing students could work in service or manual related jobs that can eventually lead to competitive salaries, as long as they are encouraged by school faculty and administration and have mastered “basic high school” skills (preferably at a twelfth-grade level). The article concludes by saying, “employers argue that they cannot trust that the high school diploma certifies knowledge of these high school-level skills. As a result, employers report using college degrees to signal that applicants possess high school skills,” again, not exactly what the Watchtower citation implies.

Thirdly, the Watchtower inset quotes from The Futurist, published by the World Future Society, which their websites explains, “is a nonprofit, nonpartisan scientific and educational association of people interested in how social and technological developments are shaping the future.” It doesn’t appear that they disregard the value of higher education as the Watchtower cites from The Futurist article, “In view of all this, more and more educators are seriously doubting the value of higher education today. ‘We are educating people for the wrong futures,’ laments the Futurist report.” The actual article (and not a report) entitled, “Help Wanted: Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce,” was written by Edward E. Gordon, PhD, and president of the Imperial Consulting Corporation, dedicated to educational training and advancement. Mr. Gordon argues that both high schools and colleges are not preparing their students for work in emerging fields in technology, and rather focus on traditional “high-status” jobs such as in law or medicine. And he insists that “rather than focusing on one-career preparation path, current and future workers need a higher quality of education that integrates general knowledge in both the arts and sciences with emerging technology” (italics mine). Only a liberal arts college education can provide a core curriculum based on the humanities and science along with courses focused on knowledge of contemporary technical advances. The article is not lamenting education itself, but the ability of education to encompass coursework to prepare students for a technologically changing working world.

A quick review reveals that the Watchtower misrepresented what the “current research and studies,” I mean, magazine articles were actually arguing and instead, sought narrative, that when taken out of context, supports their baffling opposition to higher education. Let’s actually look at real current research and studies to understand the true value of higher education.

Serious, peer-reviewed economic and policy scholars and research organizations have repeatedly pointed out a growing gap in wages between college and high school graduates during the past 50 years. As jobs moved from manufacturing to service and high-collar sectors since the mid-20th Century, overall wages has dropped dramatically from its highs in the early 1970s, but higher education often means higher wages.

Gordon L. Berlin, the president of MDRC a highly renowned non-profit and non-partisan research organization that focuses on poverty and low-wage population groups, explained in his 2007 testimony to Congress, that the reasons for higher poverty since the post-war 1970s resulted from a changing job market, and a gap between higher paying college educated and a lower paying non-college educated groups. “A new skills bias started to dominate the labor market, creating high-paying jobs that required a college degree or better and lots of low-paying jobs that required no more than a high school diploma and often less. As a result, economic inequality — the gap between the richest and poorest Americans — widened during the 1970s and 1980s as earnings for those with college accelerated, while wages for those at the bottom fell in step with the massive loss of high-paying blue-collar jobs as a result of industrial restructuring.”

Researchers who examine economic inequality among groups find that the growing wage gap involves more than education (such as race and the “class” or economic standing of families), but consistently find that those who have completed a bachelors degree or higher consistently obtain higher wages and higher wage growth than those who do complete college (Danziger and Gottschalk, “American Unequal," 1995; Kerbo, “Social Stratification and Inequality,” 2006; Mishel et al., “The State of Working America, 2006/2007 –Economic Policy Institute, 2007; Ryscavage, Paul, “Income Inequality in America: an analysis of trends, 1999).

Ryscavage, (1999) observed that during the last three decades of the 20th century, “a rise in the relative wage differential between college-educated and high school-educated workers (due to the increase in the wage premium for college-educated workers and lower demand for high school-educated workers)…was induced by increases in labor demand within various sectors of the economy brought about by technological changes that favored highly skilled and educated workers” (pg. 118).

Mishel et al (2007), with the Economic Policy Institute, another non-profit and non-partisan research group, found that although college-educated workers are seeing a slow-down in wage growth since 2000, during 1973-2005, the “median wage of the male high school graduate fell 13.8% compared with a median growth of 12.8% for “male college graduates” in the same period. They also found that women college graduates are faring better than their male counterparts and may be related to the fact that women are completing college and entering the workforce at higher levels than in past years.

While the rigorous and peer-reviewed research discussed here is not a comprehensive discussion and there are many variables to explain the differences in wages, the reliable facts show that college educated individuals attained higher wages than individuals who did not. Changing job markets require changing job skills and much of the journalistic (non-research) articles quoted by the Watchtower are explaining that, not that higher education shouldn’t be pursued. The Society also enjoys pointing out that making money should not be the goal of a good Christian, but if one needs to work to support a family, doesn’t it make sense to allow members an opportunity to make more money for their 40-hours a week, than not? By irresponsibly discouraging the pursuit of higher education, the Society is dumbing down its members intellectually, as well as preventing them from reaching their full economic potential.

The Watchtower has grossly misrepresented the sources in their article, and this raises serious doubts about their ability to effectively and accurately base life-altering doctrines on scripture that also may be used out of context.