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Cognitive Enhancements and the Values of Higher Education

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Abstract

Drugs developed to treat cognitive impairments are proving popular with healthy college students seeking to boost their focus and productivity. Concerned observers have called these practices a form of cheating akin to athletes’ use of steroids, with some proposing testing students’ urine to deter “academic doping.” The ease with which critics analogize the academic enterprise to competitive sport, and the impulse to crack down on students using study drugs, reflect the same social influences and trends that spur demand for these interventions—our hyper-competitive culture, the commodification of education, and our attraction to technological quick-fixes. Rather than focusing on the technologies that are being put to troubling uses, we would be better served reforming the culture that makes these practices attractive.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g. Sample [13] (Quoting Professor Les Iversen, co-author of an Academy of Medical Sciences' report on cognitive enhancements, stating that “[s]tudents using cognitive enhancers raises exactly the same issues as athletes using drugs to improve their performance.”); Chau [2] (“Cognitive stimulants for studying are what steroids are for sports—a form of cheating, and as such, should be banned.”).

  2. See, e.g., Hull [7] (arguing that “states should implement random drug testing procedures prior to administering standardized tests.”); Pavisian [10] (offering “a rational argument for the implementation of a drug-testing procedure that will deter and punish Adderall abuse.”).

  3. At www.drugstore.com, 100 tablets of a generic Adderall substitute cost $135.

  4. Ironically, this approach seems more likely to undermine fairness than to promote it, since prohibition drives up prices and favors students with the social capital necessary to pry prescriptions from their doctors. See, e.g., Bostrom and Roache [1] (“The medicine-as-treatment-for-disease framework creates problems… for users ('patients') whose access to enhancers is often dependent on being able to find an open-minded physician who will prescribe the drug. This creates inequities in access. People with high social capital and good information get access while others are excluded.”).

  5. See http://www.law.uchicago.edu/employers/policies.

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  1. Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford Law School, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Matt Lamkin

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  1. Matt Lamkin
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Correspondence to Matt Lamkin.

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Lamkin, M. Cognitive Enhancements and the Values of Higher Education. Health Care Anal 20, 347–355 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0224-1

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