I don't know if anyone is interested but here is a link to an IHE article from last week. The article has a pretty robust discussion about Donald Trump's vision of college access under his administration. Here are a couple of paragraphs of flava:
"Some of the ideas under consideration could be "revolutionary," Clovis said. Proposals currently being prepared would upend the current system of student loans, force all colleges to share the risk of such loans and make it harder for those wanting to major in the liberal arts at nonelite institutions to obtain loans. And even if some of the proposals would face a skeptical Congress, these ideas could gain considerable attention if Trump uses them to parry with his Democratic opponent."
"And Clovis said this does not mean the Trump campaign is against the liberal arts. "The liberal arts education is the absolute foundation to success in life," Clovis said, adding that he hoped business and engineering and health professions and education students would include liberal arts courses in their college educations. But it is a different thing altogether, Clovis said, to focus on such fields. "If you choose to major in the liberal arts, there are issues associated with that."
I prefer Clovis Sangrail.
ReplyDeleteBut at the very least, thoughts of a President Trump do provide something of an unrest cure.
Liberal arts?
ReplyDeleteYou mean the three years of German that got me a job in a town where there were few jobs to be had?
The twelve years of French that sustained my family and me when my husband's peripatetic career took us to Montreal for six years?
The linguistics course that indirectly showed me how to improve my French accent?
The year of intensive Latin that lets me translate texts for the several choral conductors in my life?
The language-acquisition unit in that psychology course that reassured me years later that yes, my children were learning to talk just fine?
The history-of-religion courses that showed me new ways of looking at the Bible?
Those endless hours of writing essays for literature courses that made me into the halfway competent professional editor that I am today?
The music class where I met the guy to whom I've now been married for 38 years?
Godalmighty, what a waste of time those four years as a French major were.
Sounds like you had learned the skills somewhere (college perhaps) to USE those years of language education.
DeleteYou had a plan. Many folk who "go to college" to "get a degree" so they can "get a job" think that each of these things guarantees the next in the list. THAT was their plan, and it was a shitty one because they had no skills to apply their knowledge and they felt the employment was an entitlement for attending (some) classes.
You had a plan. And you did not feel the world owed you a living. That is what made your non-hard science degree useful.
I see folk in the hard sciences and engineering who also fall on their faces because they did not have the ability to apply their knowledge or adapt when the market in their field shifted.
That's just it—I didn't really have a plan, except to take advantage of the opportunity to study as many languages as I could, just because I loved it. The moral of the story is that the subsequent twists and turns of my life, which I couldn't possibly have foreseen as a college student, turned out to be remarkably well served by my "impractical" undergraduate career.
DeleteI'll be the first to confess that I've sometimes wished I'd studied something more immediately useful, like accounting. However, an American accounting degree would have been useless in Canada, and also in the Middle Eastern country where we live now. I've had many occasions to be grateful for the broad (and demanding) education I was so privileged to have.
You and I both got "liberal" arts degrees. Liberal in the sense that our minds were "liberated" and free to survive this harsh world.
DeleteAmen, brother (or sister, as the case may be)! That's it exactly. A person has to earn a living, of course, but the "liberated" mind is equipped to do it in more than one narrow way.
DeleteWorrying about Trump's education policies is a bit like worrying about how the iceberg influenced the deck chairs on the Titanic.
ReplyDelete