Sure, online education and alternative ways of obtaining credentials will play a bigger role for students in the future, but there remains a critical role for colleges as we know them today.
Just look at the life of Michael Bloomberg. As described in a story earlier this week in The New York Times, Bloomberg was "a middling high school student from Medford, Mass., who had settled for C’s and had confined his ambitions to the math club" when he arrived at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1960s. By the time he left, “he was a social and political star” that set him on the path to eventually start the company that bears his name and made him a billionaire.
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I agree with this article for the most part with the exception of two things: top colleges do not necessarily desire to constantly admit a better class, but instead admit as many first-year students as possible; fuck Michale Bloomberg.
ReplyDeleteI made the move from a gigantic, faceless community college to a pretty SLAC in the pacific northwest last year.
ReplyDeleteTalk about a change. The SLAC experience is unbelievably nice. Students truly get a full and wonderful campus life, and there's nothing like it. The community that is established here, and which they can partake in, so far outstrips what my students faced in my old job, that I can scarcely think of them as being the same thing.
I know the movement is to MOOCs and hybrid courses, long distance learning at a convenient time.
But in my own small view, nothing is like a great campus journey.
I, too, think the author has good points, but at my second-tier state u, which is rapidly (and deliberately) transforming from a commuter to a residential campus, even (perhaps especially, given the cost of dorm life) the "residential" students spend so much time working (on or, usually, off campus) to earn money to pay tuition and expenses that they don't have time to fully benefit from the experience. I don't think that means they would be better off just taking their courses online (though some of the "residential" students do take courses online, to fit them into their already-overpacked schedules), but it does suggest that the solution to the problem is not as simple as building (many, many very fancy) new dorms. It's possible that some of our students who live at home actually have more time for the sorts of extracurricular enrichment activities the author describes.
ReplyDeleteOr, to put it another way: just because you build a campus that could serve as a set for a Hollywood movie set in the context of the "traditional college experience" (and that looks great on brochures, web pages, and tours), the students actually inhabiting said campus won't necessarily have anything approximating that experience (and, in fact, may not in part because they're helping to pay for the set). I'm not sure I'm quite to the point of advising prospective students and parents to seek out a school with grungy, outdated buildings (since that probably signals general financial desperation, not good priorities), but things like student-faculty ratios, percentage of full-time, tenure-track faculty, especially in first- and second-year classes, and financial aid numbers (even if the student in question doesn't need financial aid) might prove useful indicators.
DeleteLet me tell you about the future, my friends. To begin, I'll use an example from 50 years ago. Surely that anecdote will curb your enthusiasm for all this crazy internet stuff.
ReplyDelete".... fuck Michale [sic] Bloomberg."
ReplyDeleteThe Giant Mango hasn't had a decent mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia, and Ed Koch just died. So yeah, fuck Mike "People can't Spell my Mothafrakkin' Full First Name" Bloomberg.
LOL @ Strel
DeleteI did consider editing afterwards, but....meh....
I think that eventually the small college, campus-residential experience will be like the tour of Europe prior to coming out as a debutante. De rigueur for the fancy set, unimaginable to the rest of us.
ReplyDelete