'Lower Education': Getting Wise to College
James DuganIt is that time of year again when the caps and gowns get pulled out of the plastic bags, the credits are all added up, the Spring break tans have been replaced by salon tans, and the university president's hand is dyed black and cramped from the signing of thousands of diplomas. It is the great commencement. It is a time, if I can paraphrase Dickens, of being another year older and thousands and thousands of dollars in debt without a job to show for it. It is the time of hopeful speeches by eager undergraduates, condescending smirks from graduate students, proud grins from bankrupt parents, and hidden yawns by the graying faculty. It is a time to sit back and zone out from the billion dollar industry of the college phenomenon and offer a bit of lunchbreakblog analysis always bordering between realism and the absurd.
My wife will be sitting in the black drapes this year getting her graduate degree handed off to her while she dodges the dean and moves swiftly to the end of the stage in an act that is vaguely familiar of the running back and quarterback that has become synonymous with a college education. Commencement is the football of the Spring but we wonder who is the real winner. In a great article "What has happened to 'higher' education" , an Oxford professor traces the roots of college education from the abbeys of Northern Europe that focused on the promotion of Latin and Greek cultures to the Universities of today that offer and promote themselves as laboratories of science and new technology. He traces the path of how the race to be the most dominant culture rests in who gets the most inventions out of emerging science while paring down the importance of literature, art and philosophy that originally created the urge to improve ourselves by critical thinking and questioning. This abandonment of Greek learning, you know the old Plato dialogues, is par for the course because money has become the sole proprietor of what runs and promotes a university. That money is brought in by the hottest industries of medicine and engineering creating more federal research funds, richer alumni and better job statistics. This source of income leads the university to expand those schools while shrinking or at least plateauing the liberal arts programs because they seemingly lack any real world connection. In this line of thought, universities have become trade schools in business and engineering as well as incubators of burgeoning medical school contestants instead of promoting the well rounded intellectual versed in the history of western thought while capable of adapting and coping to a ever mutable society.
What are the consequences of this direction?
While the university should be a place of exploration and learning from the past, it has become a place of teaching the newest techniques and programs. It pigeon holes its students into categories that if abandoned, will often cause economic crisis. It makes the students think of themselves in a one dimensional perspective with very little idea of how the development of an industry stems from history much older than their father, or the current nation, or even before the Renaissance. I know that gen eds are still part of the schools, but they are often survey courses of large classes that have their notes printed and packaged for study at the local book store. They are seen as petty ways universities steal from the students who only view themselves as there to learn one field. Perhaps the industrialization is not finished with America yet, for the assembly line is up and running in one of our last striving industries, colleges. The new idea of college is ruining the ideal of Jefferson who saw the enlightenment as a path to understanding all aspects of life, not to view life through one aspect. The democracy of the nation is in danger because money again has ruined the sacred halls of learning. The greed for expansion has entered and is dominating our college system while breaking down the dream of an educated populace needed for a true democracy.
So what do we do? Leave it me.
1) Parents and students must start using their local colleges. The room and board for colleges as well as off campus housing is throwing unneeded money away. The average cost to house and feed a college student is between 8-12 thousand dollars. That is almost a whole year of study at a state university and thus a 25% discount. The idea of the college life is passe and we must see college for what it is: a trade school or a path into a trade school.
2) Parents and students should make the university pay for the books. The books should be covered in the cost of a class. The idea that professors assign books that are seldom used or needed to pass the course is a disgrace. Perhaps then new editions won't be needed if it is the school forking out between 4-8 hundred dollars per student per semester. This will be a savings of 3,200 to 6,400 hundred dollars in four years. It looks like you just paid for another semester. At the very least, parents and students should require all the material to be web based, thus insuring the access to all students, even the tight fisted. Some school, including LaSalle University in Philadelphia, were offering this very deal last Fall to entice students.
3) Schools should be held more accountable for finding a job for the student or if they remain unemployed, the university should train them at no extra cost. If universities want the money and the thousands of dollars associated with big time and big expense schools, then they should be held accountable. If you sell yourself for preparing a student for the new economy, I think more development of post graduation connections and career development should be included in the university price. The idea of universities as brands that people buy instead of their quality should be broken. If the student graduates from a college and does not find a job within three years in the chosen field, then they should be able to sue the university of fraud or malpractice.
The ideas may seem unrealistic, but college has become the birthplace of new industry. President Obama and Captial Hill are calling for more college graduates to compete in a global economy. Pell Grants minimums are being increased and soldiers are leaving to cash in their GI Bill. When colleges decided to start teaching the future instead of the past, they entered into the dangerous realm of job preparation. Instead of teaching knowledge, they teach skills. The belief of the college degree as an intellectual endeavor needs to change, as well as how we see college graduates. This is the cost the American university system chose when they decided science was their future instead of arts.
Reader Comments (4)
Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark and read more often. I love the Blog template … if you need any assistance customizing it let me know!
<p>I especially love your solution to the "University problem." Suing the college when you aren't able to get a job in due time after graduation is a great idea! I would also like to point out that if your novel notion was to be put into action, it may also encourage those ever-so-reluctant high school students to actually consider going to college. I am often too disappointed to discover that a huge percentage of my classes of tenth grade students are not planning to get a higher education.</p>
<p>Being waist deep in debt myself, I will be among to first to hop on board with your new system of holding colleges accountable for the futures of their graduates. However, in truth, I feel as though college has now become the latest den of "passing the buck." Our society has a serious infection that prevents blame from falling on to any one person. Instead of blaming the bad worker, are we now to blame the college they attended for giving them a shoddy education? If so, where does this stop? Are we not all products of our environment? Following that logic to its absurd end, I can therefore never be held accountable for ANYTHING I do. If I decide to go rob a bank and get pinched, I'll simply claim that "my environment made me do it!" To a certain degree there needs to be accountability on the side of education facilities, however it certainly should not be one-sided.</p>
<p>Exactly. We are all products of our society. The notion that education costs, and the perceived "better education" should cost more, is ridiculous. The emphasis on making people capable of working in an economy then charging all the people to be capable of being part of the new economy is wrong. If the so called education that is needed to succeed or at least be part of the new economy is dependent on everyone learning the ambiguous technical skills, then they should be provided by the state or nation. College was once a temendous opportunity to explore ideals and become leaders in thinking, but now it is a turnstyle of prescribed courses for a career.
Universities just counting heads and their money without any plausible connection to the real world is wrong. This is the result of the new scientific based colleges that trains instead of educates. We can education a million doctors, will all those doctors find jobs? No. The demand is not there. If Harvard was the best University and their graduates had 100% success in their placement, then shouldn't they open their doors for more people. Start branches in every state and take over poorer rated colleges because no one would want to go to a place where they weren't sure they would find a job and be successful. So we are faced with betting a cool 80,000 for public and 160,000 for private schools in the hope that we may find a job.
The University needs to be more proactive in searching for jobs for their candidates. This wouldn't be too hard if they were confident in their products. They must be responsible also.
Thanks for the replies.</p>