It’s a simple transaction: If you, high school graduate, get passing grades in about 40 classes*, we, the university, give you a fancy certificate attesting to that fact.

The certificate is valuable in two tangible ways: It can get you in the door at many workplaces, or, if you’re a real glutton for punishment, it can boost you onto the next rung of the educational ladder.

On this we can all agree. But then there’s that asterisk. It means that you can’t just take whichever 40 classes you like. We want you to take certain kinds of classes. Specifically, we want more than a third of your classes to reflect “Penn State’s deep conviction that successful, satisfying lives require a wide range of skills and knowledge.”

Implicit in this requirement is the belief that there is more to undergraduate education than job training. The General Education requirement -- Gen Eds on the street -- “augments and rounds out the specialized training students receive in their majors and aims to cultivate a knowledgeable, informed, literate human being.”

So what do we mean by a knowledgeable, informed, literate human being?

When I was growing up, my big sisters used to talk about their Cit-Ed classes. I heard it as Sid-Ed. I had no idea what it was. Eventually I learned it was short for Citizenship Education, aka Civics. By the time I got to the grades where the curriculum went beyond the three R’s, it was called social studies, which was mostly history.

Cit-Ed was where you were supposed to learn things like how a bill becomes a law, the differences between criminal and civil trials, the checks and balances among the three branches of government and whether the Electoral College is a good party school.

Cit-Ed was also where you learned that in a democracy, public officials work for the people and not the other way around. This means that like any employer, we have a right -- nay, a responsibility -- to keep tabs on whether the folks whose salaries we’re paying (through our taxes) are doing a good job. This is where journalism enters the picture.

If you don’t know how government is supposed to work (via Cit-Ed) and you don’t pay attention to how government is actually working (via the news media), you cannot be counted upon to vote intelligently or to separate lies and rumors (President Obama is a foreign-born Muslim-socialist-communist-fascist who wants to establish death panels that will decide whether Granny lives or dies) from fact. So the practical value of Cit-Ed makes it a no-brainer.

The humanities are a tougher sell. The university’s explanation of the Gen Ed requirements touts the importance of “a familiarity with the cultural movements that have shaped societies and their values; an appreciation for the enduring arts that express, inspire, and continually change these values.”

I completely agree, but then, I was an English major, which meant that I liked to read and write. Most students, in my experience, do not. So what do we do? Ram the humanities courses down their throats because like ’em or not, they’re good for you, like cruciferous vegetables? Or figure ramming stuff down people’s throats is no way for them to acquire a taste for it?

As an educator, I’m torn. On one hand, I want to say, hey, if all you want is vocational training, you’ve come to the wrong place. Find yourself a vocational school and quit moping your way through our classes. On the other hand, the public university is a lovely idea. It’s predicated on the belief that higher education is so valuable and important that everyone, not just rich kids, should get in on the action.

But students (and parents) need to take that asterisk more seriously. Here, we educators could use a little help from the pundits and politicians. A column in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, for example, asks, “How much does higher education matter?” -- and answers the question solely in terms of the degree holder’s earning potential.

“Earnings,” writer Dave Leonhardt concedes, “may be a flawed measure of an education’s value, but they’re about the only tangible measure we have.”

Granted, Leonhardt is an economics columnist, but this is the quantitative fallacy par excellence – the idea that if you can’t measure it, you probably can’t even have an intelligent conversation about it.

As long as the dominant view of higher education defines its value solely in terms of the education-jobs link or in global terms, the education-competitiveness link, we will continue to see a mutually frustrating disconnect between what the students want to get out of college and what we, the faculty, are trying to give them.

Sure, we want them to get good jobs and make heaps of dough and contribute to American competitiveness in the global economy. Above all, though, we want them to begin to acquire wisdom. They need it and the world needs it.

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While we’re on the subject of last Sunday’s NYT Magazine, I’m tickled to tell you about a local angle. Photographer Samantha Contis, who grew up in State College (and was my family’s first babysitter when we moved here in the mid-’90s), has no less than 10 lovely photos in the magazine, not to mention a front-cover credit. To see the pix and read the accompanying story about a college with a “green” dormitory, Click Here.

Tears came to Russell Frank’s eyes when he heard his son practicing his recitation of “Fern Hill” for his high school English class. Write to him at rfrank@psu.edu.