In I, Robot, Alfred Lanning’s hologram has information for Detective Spooner, and is prepared to give it. The only catch: “My responses are limited. You must ask the right question.”

If you’re not asking the right question, you’re not going to get the right answer. You’ll get an answer, sure, but it’s not likely to be helpful. Neil Postman discusses political polling in Technopoly, pointing out that the responses are only as reliable as the questions that produced them.

We’re all aware of the fallacy in questions like, “When did you stop beating your wife?” But what we’re not aware of is the fallacies in the questions we ask every day. Like the standards about education: “How can we get make college more available?”; and “How can we make college more affordable?”

These, I think, are the wrong questions. The right question is this: “Is college a necessity?” If the answer is yes, the next question should be, “Why?”

The reflex answer is that the world is getting more complicated, technology is more complex, and people need more school to prepare for the workforce. But I don’t think that’s true.

Plenty of research has shown that, even as students are spending more hours and more years in school, they’re coming out less technically capable, less socially prepared, and less able to immediately perform on the job than previous (less-educated) generations.

What’s true is that college is long, expensive, and something which, for many people, is nothing more than an obstacle in their path to adulthood.

I think we should jettison the assumption that a four-year, liberal arts education is a necessity for future success, and start to ask questions about what training is necessary for those who want to enter the workforce quickly, what training is beneficial for those willing to make the financial and temporal commitments, and whether it is productive to maintain the idea that a B.A. represents the most basic requirements for a white collar worker.

In the end, we have to ask, “How can we make college less necessary.”