Hunter Rawlings (president of the Association of American
Universities and a former president of Cornell University and the University of
Iowa):
“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."
There’s More to College Than Getting into College
David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, notes:
“In the Gallup-Purdue study, the type of college that
students attended affected their sense of well-being after graduation more than
what they experienced at whichever institution they chose. The 3 percent of
students whose lives changed for the better—who, according to Gallup, had the
types of experiences that “strongly relate to great jobs and great lives
afterward”—had three features in common: a great teacher and mentor, intensive
engagement in activities outside class, and in-depth study and application of
ideas.
These three shared features are all about
intensity—not just participation in college life, but active engagement. They
require students to move beyond merely doing something and toward becoming
devoted to something. They require a depth of commitment that will serve
students well throughout their lives. And yet nearly nothing in the admissions
process tells students that these are the keys to their success.”
“Finding great teachers and insisting on learning from them is a form of resistance. You must push the rules and the system. One of the most misleading things we say in education is that a good school will “give you an excellent education.” A great education is never given—it is taken. The ancient myth of Prometheus is more honest; the gods do not give Prometheus the flame—he steals it”.
“Finding great teachers and insisting on learning from them is a form of resistance. You must push the rules and the system. One of the most misleading things we say in education is that a good school will “give you an excellent education.” A great education is never given—it is taken. The ancient myth of Prometheus is more honest; the gods do not give Prometheus the flame—he steals it”.
Make School Hard Again: Grade inflation needs to stop.
“This nonsense should cease. Schools are not here to certify the life achievements of the 1 percent, nor does it disparage the value of either sports or more vocationally oriented jobs that universities are not meant to serve those who excel at those activities. They are places for learning and scholarship.
Those who are less academically qualified should not, because of some essay they wrote for a specialized pool of admissions officers, buoyed by a donation from their parents, be granted admission to a top school over a middle- or lower-class child so naive as to think that strong test scores and grades would be enough. Outside the United States, such a system would be rightly filed under corruption and malfeasance—with or without the addition of phony claims to athletic prowess.”
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/06/do-the-mathor-not/
The Quantity versus Quality Debate –
https://www.chronicle.com/article/some-students-are-smarter-than-others-and-thats-ok
Fredrik DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, notes:
“To say that everyone should go to college presumes that everyone has the aptitude and desire to go to college. We have every reason to suspect that isn’t true. Already today, the national college-graduation rate tends to hover around 60 percent. And that’s among students who start college; the many millions who don’t attempt college are surely among those least likely to succeed in higher education. What would happen to the graduation rate if millions of people who previously did not attempt college were to flood our campuses? I have no doubt that some of them would flourish, but on balance we can certainly expect more dropouts, more remediation costs, more debt, and more stress on colleges that already struggle to graduate an adequate percentage of enrollees …It also strikes me that if the inevitable outcome of significantly greater college participation rates is lower standards, then our national response to hordes of new college students would be to make college significantly easier to get through.”
The great university con: how the British degree
lost its value
“According to Professor Fenton of Goldsmiths,
“Students come to us now with an entirely different mindset. They want to know
what you want to hear in order to get a First.” Students, she says, turn up
expecting to find “bite-sized chunks of knowledge that you put in certain
boxes. It’s that learnt process of gaming an A* [at A-level]. That’s the
complete opposite to what a university education is.” Or rather, was. “That’s
what changed,” she says. “Students have been shackled in the way they
learn.” …
“Ideas that students readily understood ten to 15
years ago, they struggle to understand today,” Peter Dorey, professor of
British politics at the University of Cardiff, told the Commons inquiry in
2009. “Many of them are semi-literate.” Dorey described seminars in which
students sat listlessly, waiting to be told how to “pass our exams”. “They will
brazenly admit to having read nothing,” he told the hearing.”
My Take:
Long-term labor market challenges cannot be addressed by temporarily
overheating the economy. We need to rethink our basic approach to worker training
and provide direct support to those willing to undertake skill
retraining/upgrading (there is currently a large-scale shortage of skilled
tradespeople in the U.S. that is not being addressed). Policies aimed at
encouraging every high school graduate to attend four-year colleges, regardless
of their personal preferences/interests or academic preparedness, will prove to
be counterproductive and lead to both grade and degree inflation. Creating
German-style apprenticeship programs may offer a valuable alternative track for
high school graduates.
---
Famous Quotes on the Need for Well-Rounded Individuals:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/opinion/nicholas-kristof-starving-for-wisdom.html
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together
the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make
important choices wisely”.
- E.
O. Wilson
“The master-economist must possess a rare combination
of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in
some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate
the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the
same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for
the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be
entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a
simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as
near to earth as a politician.”
- John
Maynard Keynes
COST OF HIGHER EDUCATION
The ‘Public’ in Public College Could Be Endangered
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