The Incomplete Cynic
Fact: College graduates of all majors earn more money throughout their lifetimes than those who do not possess a degree.
Fact: There is a correlation between education and happiness.
Question: Does graduating college make you smarter and better prepared to enter and succeed in the workforce, or are smart and prepared people more likely to graduate college, and therefore more likely to succeed?
It’s probably way more likely that because the people entering college are generally smarter and more capable than the general population - and those who graduate smarter and more capable still - that what you see is selection bias. Is it really a useful comparison? Not really. In one group you have 90% of the country’s smartest and most able people. In the other is the remaining 10%, plus everyone who wasn’t smart enough or a good enough student to get into (or get through) college, and most 1st generation immigrants. You seriously think we should compare the incomes of these two groups and attribute the difference only to a college degree?
(Source: iosepos)
This is what I’m saying…
But what about the [insert field here] mission of [same field here] departments? They’re not vocational schools! It shouldn’t be their job to train people to work in industry. That’s for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They’re supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right?
Universities ought not be concerned with giving students ‘real world skills’ or ‘job competence’…that’s someone else’s job. They ought to be concerned with identifying bright and capable students, and pushing them to expand their minds, become intellectually flexible, and (God help me for using this phrase…) think outside the box.
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
The graduation rate in New York (state) is 64%, and it seems a lot of people are concerned and deeply upset that only 36% of those graduates are “college ready”, and they’re very anxious about solving this dire problem.
Should they increase graduation standards? Probably. Should they make promotion more challenging starting in earlier grades? Absolutely. Should they give students more choice in their high school coursework, as well as the opportunity to earn dual-credit with local colleges? Yes and Yes. Are any of these likely to satisfy the problem? Not really.
As long as there have been public high schools, there have been plenty of students who were just not capable of doing college-level work, even though they were qualified to graduate. College is supposed to be harder than high school, and, as a result, not everybody who could do high school level work is able to keep up.
In my opinion, if every high school graduate in a large sample (like New York) is capable of college work, college is too easy.
The only realistic way to make sure every graduate is college-ready is to make high school so difficult that only the college-ready will graduate. Of course, that will only make it needlessly hard to graduate, and depress grad rates. Not exactly a win-win. You could make college easier, but that’s just a waste of everyone’s time and money, and won’t provide the end result: work-ready college grads.
The real solution is something we heard a lot about after Pres. Obama’s election: manage expectations. Not every kid needs to go to college, and not every graduate should be able to get in to one. We should respect higher education enough to restrict admission to students who’ve proven they’re academic ability.
A statistic quoted in the article is that 75% of NYC grads need remedial college coursework. The most likely problem is that 50% of NYC grads should never have been admitted to college. When we deal with that reality, these numbers won’t seem so bad.
First, Pawlenty’s idea is…less than good. Who would pay $199 to download classes from iTunes when Yale and MIT offer them for free?
Here are the comments of the unnamed blogger (Transatlantischer Austausch):
Firstly, Pawlenty embraces the long running trend towards commodification of higher education, in which astronomical tuition and student fees certainly play a role. Note that Pawlenty talks about “consumers” of education, and speaks of “services” provided. Pawlenty employs a market logic when it comes to both the means and ends of driving down the prices of higher education, a more affordable university is a more competitive university that can offer services to a greater customer base. Sounds almost like a Wal-Mart business model for higher education.
…Of course, it could well be that Pawlenty would be more than satisfied with an educational system that isolates, enforces particular hierarchies and power dynamics, and reduces learning to a quantifiable product that is easily sold and consumed.
He’d do well to recognize that most of society already holds that same view. Education, particularly college, is something you need to get so that you can get a good job. It is a commodity. And in truth, it’s not even the education that is commoditized, it’s the degree. A B.A. in any subject at any university opens a whole world of economic opportunity, whether or not you remember any of it, and that’s what people care about.
We should let it happen. Those students who care about the education as much as the paper are being crowded out as more and more resources get diverted to deal with remedial education and support for students who probably shouldn’t have even been admitted. The “best and the brightest” are reduced to being simply good and bright, as their institutions and faculty don’t have the time to push them to their potential.
The students who want to get a degree in finance so they can be bankers or book keepers, or who want to be engineers or business managers are forced to spend time and money taking courses that are either so far from their planned career path as to be a waste of time, or are things they’ll be trained for when they get a job.
A change that removes the untangles the value of the paper from the residential B.A. will be a win for both groups. The academically-minded students who value learning, faculty and collegial interaction, and self-discovery (or who want to go on to further study) will be able to attend colleges with like-minded students, and the faculty will have time for them. Education wouldn’t be seen as a commodity in this environment.
The economically-minded student who couldn’t care less about the liberal arts and just wants to get some training to start a stable job will be able to go onilne, or on campus at a for-profit college, and get just the training necessary. They’d save perhaps 18 months and $30,000, and still be able to pass the CPA or the Series 7. And it would still allow for those who want to go deep but aren’t able to pursue a residential degree.
More from Transatlantischer:
Secondly, Pawlenty’s iCollege is a pedagogical dystopia. Instead of learning taking place through any sort of exchange, education becomes instead a one way street in which someone who has a skill imparts that skill to another who does not, now mediated by some sort of technological apparatus, such as an iPhone. In other words, knowledge emanates from a faceless authority, or, at best, a talking head on a screen, makes its way through a network, and reaches the student, who may be one of hundreds or thousands of faceless individuals receiving that information. It establishes a very specific power hierarchy, and precludes chances for discovery of the material on one’s own part, or for the teacher to learn anything from the student.
The unstated assumptions here are threefold:
The first is that students who would be passive receivers of online education would actively interact with their professors on campus. I don’t believe that’s true. I think those who choose to passively receive online would passively receive on campus. They would not be interested in self-discovery (though, what environment would be better for self-discovery than one with a Google search bar permanently planted in the top right corner?), and they wouldn’t be sharing much with their profs other than excuses for not getting work done.
The second is that students who value that interaction would opt-out of a residential education. I don’t believe that’s true either. For anyone who cares about their education (for education’s sake), online classes are miserable. I personally hate them, but I take a few because it’s necessary. My wife has refused to take any more if at all possible—especially through Blackboard. If given the choice between $150 per hour online classes and $300 per hour on campus classes, we (and many others like us) will choose campus every time. And when online classes are unavoidable we interact with our professors and graders by email. It’s not as natural but that will change generationally.
The third assumption is that there’s something wrong with “a very specific power hierarchy” in the classroom. Haven’t professors earned positions of authority in their disciplines? What does a classroom look like with no hierarchy? I’m sure that professors learn quite a bit from their students, but there is still a position of authority in the classroom, which is not—and should not be—held by the student.
On most points I agree with the Transatlantischer. I agree that education should be more than job training or a quest for a piece of paper. I agree that a market-driven model would not be good for education. And I agree that “technology will probably never completely replace education as we have known it thus far, for the simple reason that in order to do so, it has to offer a decisive advantage over the old thing,” which it does not have. But I think moving the majority of students away from liberal arts and toward the job training that they are looking for can revitalize liberal arts programs and once again allow a Bachelor of Arts degree to mean something significant.
