From Indoctrination to Education: Salvaging the University

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | May 10, 2019 | Ted McCallister and Bruce Frohnen

[reaganaut1]

The promise of higher education has become a trap for tens of millions of Americans. The promise: Every one of us and our children could go to college, earn a degree, and set off on a good career, secure in the knowledge that we had gained the tools necessary for a productive life.

The trap: Years (usually more than the advertised four) of indoctrination in the classroom and, more harshly, the dormitories, followed by decades of crushing debt, all made far worse by the realization that our degrees have qualified us for very little.

It wasn’t always like this. Supporters of the current system may argue that early colleges were mere playgrounds for the rich, but they were in fact set up for a variety of reasons—most of them having to do with training ministers and teachers. Few could afford college, and few needed to attend college to pursue a useful profession.

Still, many men of talent (Alexander Hamilton, for example) were helped by generous friends and neighbors to pursue higher education. For much of American history, college was an opportunity for privileged young people to gain an understanding of their traditions and of the great works of their civilization, as well as for significant numbers of talented but not privileged young people to gain that same understanding as they worked their way into the learned professions.

Historically, higher education was an extremely costly enterprise. As a frame of reference, worldwide GDP per capita remained remarkably constant at about $500 (in 1990 dollars) for well over two thousand years. Scarcity was the rule everywhere. Thus higher education in any society before the nineteenth century had to focus primarily on its most essential purpose: preserving knowledge, art, and, in sum, inherited culture.

[MrEdd]

There is no more reason to salvage the obsolete University system than there is to salvage the film development industry or the typewriter industry.

The function can best be performed another way in every case.

[SMARTY]

For sure-f the ‘University’… they aren’t doing anything that can’t be done cheaper and better by community colleges, trade schools or etc.

[cnsmom]

Many high school graduates are taking a gap year and learning that a college degree and debt isn’t desirable.Other then supporting cute small towns, what use is a university?