Have you heard? Higher education in the United States is in serious decline; our colleges and universities are headed down the tubes. The problems, we're told, are manifold. Universities are self-serving bastions of managerial privilege, where multiple layers of deans feather their nests. Colleges are wasting money on nonsense, failing to educate students for the 21st century's demands. Kids themselves are co-conspirators, taking easy or trivial courses, avoiding study, and partying all the time. Graduates incur intolerable debt to secure a future filled with underemployment. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? And those are just a few of the prominent strands of argument on the topic.
You don't need to navigate away from TheAtlantic.com to come across fresh examples of the hand-wringing. Recently, Scott Gerber instructed readers here on "How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America." This sort of thing is everywhere. Megan McArdle, recently of The Atlantic, now at Newsweek and the Daily Beast, wrote the September 9th Newsweek cover article, "Is College a Lousy Investment?" Her short answer: yes, it is.
There's much more, of course, and if you want to bone up on this literature, you might start with a couple of review essays that appeared within the last eighteen months in the New York Review of Books -- the first by Peter Brooks, the second by Anthony Grafton.
Full Article.
He makes a good case that conflict over the purpose of a college education, and connected debates over the proper curriculum, is an ongoing/recurring phenomenon. And I agree with this, too: "much of the writing about the current 'crisis' in American higher education is meant to scare, not to inform; to back agendas, not to enlighten or improve."
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, I do think there's a real crisis (or at least a set of genuinely debilitating pressures) around funding, both in terms of what students and their parents are able to pay without mortgaging their futures and/or committing themselves to so much paid work that it undermines the educations for which the're paying, and in terms of the increasingly low wages being paid to the majority of teaching faculty.
Or maybe the latter part of that equation simply represents my own agenda.
Also, of the 4 articles in the sidebar, three are about professors who are either dead or recently suffered a breakdown, and the fourth is calling Obama "professorial" again (and not in a good way). It's a small sample, and maybe it just proves the point that there's a media bandwagon heading in the "higher ed is going down the tubes" direction (and admittedly people die on a regular basis whatever the current status of their profession), but I'm still not encouraged.
ReplyDeleteIf this article were submitted as a research paper in my general-ed science class, here's what I'd write on it:
ReplyDeleteC. Although well written, this paper needed to have been researched and thought about more carefully: remember that scientific writing needs to be fair. This paper gives a clearly incomplete treatment of this topic, since it omits an obvious problem, namely, how college costs have increased faster than the rate of inflation for decades. This has made college unaffordable for many students, which has caused many to incur unaffordable levels of debt, which can negate the economic benefit of college since this debt is not dischargeable, even in bankruptcy, and can be difficult for students to pay off given the limited employment opportunities afforded by today's economy. More should also have been discussed about how many students don't learn much in college, which also negates the benefits of college.
This article strikes me as crossing the street in an attempt to evade muggers, who are looking straight at you.
DeleteWhat a stupid piece of crap article. If you refuse to look at economics, no, there is no crisis. But ask an adjunct teaching 15 classes a year for $25K if there is a crisis. Or a student carrying $60K of debt with no job prospects. Or parents taking out a second mortgage to pay tuition.
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