Hunter Rawlings (president of the Association of American
Universities and a former president of Cornell University and the University of
Iowa) has written a fantastic op-ed:
“A college
education, then, if it is a commodity, is no car. The courses the student
decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the
intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his
focus and determination — all contribute far more to her educational “outcome”
than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life.
Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply
receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy
with a television."