Discussion on:

Q&A: Why higher education is getting left behind

JS: The authors...gave 2500 students a collegiate learning assessment which is a national test of critical thinking skills. They found that a third of the students had no gains on this test between their freshman year and senior year. They also found that students who took courses that didnt require a lot of reading or writing did worse on these tests. Students in certain majors, particularly education, business and social work did more poorly on these tests than other students did."

I don't think that this is more true now than it was in the past. We make a mistake when we position young people to believe that the real objective of college is a job or career. Most young people don't know enough about the world to make a lifetime commitment to a career at the age of 18. The purpose of college is to provide a strong foundation from which the young person can build after graduation. If a student takes courses that are too career-oriented, she might discover some years after graduation that the career path she has taken is not really what she wants to do for the rest of her work life. What happens, then, to all of that education that was geared only toward one goal?

I was pleased to see that students who took courses that required reading and writing did better on the exam. Learning to read for comprehension is a great way to engage one's critical thinking skills, as knowledge is processed through reading and understanding (and possibly disagreeing with) what one reads. Writing demands an engagement of a student's critical thinking skills, as students must learn to organize their thoughts and present a coherent and cohesive argument when they write.

The deadliest aspect of higher education is its cost, and I really do fail to see why higher education must be so expensive. My college education cost me very little 40 years ago, but I watched the costs sky-rocket in the '80s (and I have some very cynical opinions as to why that happened). If higher education (in whatever form it is presented) is to survive, thrive, and attract young people, there must be realistic expectations as to what students invest in it when compared with the rewards it brings throughout the rest of their lives.

Sissy Sue (above) noted a particularly important point regarding higher education: it's not about a career, per se, (unless one opts for medical school or a law degree) but an education that one can build on for the rest of one's life. Career specific degrees are trade schools which are also valuable; however, the trade school is not a mind-broadening experience, but a narrowing one. Online university degrees are about purchasing tickets, not about the university experience.

First there is the financial bubble that has fueled the cost of a college education many times the rate of inflation. Easy-to-get student loans are the primary fuel of for this bubble; practically identical to the phenomenon behind the housing bubble. Universities are then free to continually raise the price of admission as the subsidies available keep pace in lock-step. There's no pressure to contain costs when you can so easily raise your selling price.

Second phenomenon fueling the bubble is the fact that a bachelor's degree is now a standard requirement for practically all white-collar jobs, and even many blue-collar jobs. High school diplomas have been meaningless for generations now. Also, since "intelligence tests" by employers were universally outlawed by the early '70s, employers now rely upon colleges to do this filtering for them.

My unpopular but ultimately successful solution for both problems is to stop subsidizing student loans. The same politicians that go on rampages against opportunistic "payday" type loans that exploit and entrap people desperate and poor at math celebrate and wish to expand student loans which do the very same thing, only for longer and are literally inescapable. (since unlike a payday loan, you can't bankrupt out of a student loan) Listen to an hour of any financial advice show, and you will eventually hear a call from some poor soul who brainlessly spent 6-figures to get a job that pays in the low 5-figures. Permanent poverty, and slavery.

Once we stop the subsidies, universities will be forced to lower costs and implement more efficient and effective means to deliver their product. Until then, little will change. And why should it?

The problem is the truth of the old adage... 'went in dumb, came out dumb too'. And simply enough; our society.
Once was a time all children were working at 13. Helping on farms, in family businesses, etc. Now a child has to apply to be allowed to work. I did when I was 13. I'm 38 now.
Once was a time when there were single-classroom schools that taught everyone. And the kids helped each other. Now, we have everything regimented and divided, no one looks out for one another (mostly) , and there are almost more rewards for doing badly than there are for doing well.
Once was a time kids were reading Shakespeare and the like by 6th grade. Now I've heard of kids not even touching it until college.
High school was supposed to prepare kids for LIFE... And college. College/University was supposed to prepare kids for LIFE and high-level jobs. It is simply no longer true. The few exceptions might be Law School and the like.
Schools (and parents) no longer teach kids what it means to survive, nor give them the tools to do so. Common sense has been out the window for longer than I can recall.

The price for learning has gone sky-high, and the quality and simple amount that is taught is nearly negligible. Schools have gone from worrying about teaching kids, to who can make the most money and how many star athletes they can pump-out.

Teachers now have almost no incentive to teach properly anymore. Like doctors, they are too scared to do it properly. The fear of lawsuits about doing ANYTHING but letting the kids do what they want has paralyzed their ability and desire to truly teach.
Once was a time when you got your A$$ beat for speaking back to a teacher or skipping school. Now the biggest 'punishment' is to tell a kid not to come to school. Something many, if not MOST of the troublemakers don't want to do. So the punishment, is actually a reward.

THESE are the reasons why schools, and this country, is failing at higher education.

Our affluence has allowed our society to draw out adolescence from 13 all the way to 26, and beyond.

Public lower education today has been watered down to near irrelevance. We've converted it into little more than state-mandated day care in order to keep unruly children off the streets. In order to keep the miscreants in class, they aren't expelled for being disruptive to the kids who actually are interested in learning. As a result, few do.

So instead, the kids who are actually interested in learning now have to wait until college, which (for the most part) filters out the disruptive class of occupant (can't bring myself to call them "students" since they weren't there to study) that had no interest in education and was only there because the law or their parents said they had to be.

So now colleges have the burden of having to bring kids up to speed on what they should have learned in lower, middle & high schools. The result is that academically, a bachelor's degree means about the same as a high school degree of 40+ years ago.

But I will dispute money as being responsible. Remember, education is primarily funded by head count. The public school establishment is not paid by results, but by how many kids are in attendance on a daily basis. So they are incentivized towards keeping the disruptive kids in class at the expense of resources devoted to those who wish to learn. There's no way they're gonna keep the most kids possible interested in staying with Shakespeare, so instead they teach with 50-Cent. It's all about the lowest common denominator. The price we pay for "no child left behind" is that they're all left behind.

My solution? Eliminate the Soviet-style public system where public students are told where they must go and there is no competition. Make schools compete for students. Let failing schools fail like a business would if it was not delivering.

Yes, the educational establishment cries bloody murder at this notion. But they've been murdering our kids minds for generations.

Online learning? Sure if your swapping out a hard drive.
Online learning as a method for education? Poppycock.
Let's open up the books to see why college is so expensive. Californina had no tution until Governor (I have alzheimers) Regan came in and did the neo-liberal thang. What a disaster.

There is no better example of the problems with our higher education system than the current democrat candidate for the US Senate in Massachusetts. Elizabeth Warren.

She makes over $380,000 per year teaching 1 class a semester at Harvard. When she shows up for it. She rants about how over worked teachers like her are yet she has not showed up to teach a single class since running for office. But she still gets paid by Harvard and all its debt ridden students.

She has the nerve to talk about being a humble teacher who IS NOT RICH while pulling in $380,000 a year. From a job she only got by claiming to be an ethnic minority, which she is not, to fill an affirmative action quota Harvard was catching bad PR for not meeting.

She blames the banks making the student loans for the students massive debt while being a pivitol part of why higher education is so expensive.

She rails about the evils of the top 1 percent while being a selfish one herself. Her charitable donations make Scrooge look like a saint as she sits on a $10 million + personal wealth portfolio. All while crying about being a modest over worked under paid teacher like everyone else in her profession.

If my kid went to Harvard and was helping to pay for this I would demand a refund.

And the liberal sheep in Massachusetts will likely elect her.

At my university, the hierarchy was solidly packed with people who made 6-figure salaries (which was a boatload of money at the time) and yet it was never clear what most of these people actually did. From my observation, all I could tell was that they occasionally sat in offices, wrote pointless double-spaced memos to each other that few actually read, attended meetings and junkets, and organized rallies for more funding.

Each week I would collect a what was literally a ream of memos from the inbox of a student organization I was involved with. Most of these memos were from these underemployed people; single-sided-double-spaced nonsense that nobody ever read; usually verbose yet brainless politically correct nonsense like "it's wrong to discriminate against people". Duh. Meanwhile, at the beginning of most semesters, professors would apologize as we'd have to hand-copy the semester syllabus off a chalk board because their department didn't have enough money to make copies. Clearly, they did not have access to the vast array of freely running copiers in the administration wing.

At one point, a provost (to this day I still can't figure out what a "provost" actually does) took a position as an interim president of a neighboring university while keeping his position at mine. This caused a bit of a stir, but this individual assured all that his responsibilities at this other troubled institution would not interfere with his duties at ours.

Now, I do not have a problem with people making large sums of money (even in the "public" sector) if they are doing large sums of important work at a free-market-set level. If this guy was working 40+ hours a week doing important and complex things, then perhaps he did deserve his 6-figure salary. But since this individual had so much free time that he was able to accept the position as president of another institution, (a "troubled" one at that) then that suggests to me that we were not getting our money's worth out of this individual and he should have been fired, and perhaps even his position eliminated. Neither happened.

It is episodes like this that confirm what you suggest about academia being a scam. The only way to solve this problem is to de-fund it.

What I don't get is why anybody takes a Harvard degree seriously anymore.

Elizabeth Warren is just another poster child of someone who actually exemplifies the President's notion that If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, 'Well, it must be 'cause I was just so smart.' There are a lot of smart people out there. 'It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.' Let me tell you something: If you've got a business, that--you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Our President wishes to confuse the real world with his insular academic experience and that of Elizabeth Warren. That is why he and people like Ms Warren are truly resentful of honestly successful people; because the honestly successful actually did earn what they have whereas the President and Ms Warren know that they did not. This is the damage that "Affirmative Action" does to the souls of the people it's supposed to help. It literally cheats them of owning their own success.

Awaiting the usual onslaught of negative votes by those who this offends, and yet will be unable to defend those votes...

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