Posted on 11/25/2016 4:22:16 AM PST by Kaslin
Donald Trump’s election brings with it both an opportunity and an imperative to straighten out the mess that modern higher education has become. The level of disconnection of the academy from the rest of America is most recently evidenced by the fact that the Ivory Tower -- for all its huffy pretenses of superior knowledge and insight -- was utterly blindsided by this presidential election’s result (along with the equally deluded media), even though the writing was on the wall for all who could read it.
Unmoored, confused and adrift, students and faculty alike are now struggling to come to terms with reality, wondering where they collectively went so very wrong. They’re resorting to calling in the therapy dogs and emotional support counselors to talk them off the ledge and back into the classrooms, where, clearly, some wholesale changes are desperately needed if higher education is going to remain a viable, relevant enterprise.
There are three main problems the Trump administration must address to begin to restore academia to a semblance of its former glory: the culture, the cost and the credibility of today’s colleges. If higher education sincerely wants to understand where they’ve gone wrong, and how they can go right again, here’s what has to be faced:
Culture
The culture on college campuses has descended to the point that some now refer to them as institutions of lower learning. Hook-up culture, rape, STDs, drugs, and alcohol abuse are just the tip of this disastrous iceberg. Below that lies a rejection of widely accepted moral values, dismissal of the noble traditions of Western Civilization and regular, unrepentant violation of the standard rules of human discourse, logic, and reasonable disagreement. Wreckage is the result.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Dear President Trump
1. Return education to local communities
2. Encourage education from the bully pulpit to go back to 3R’s, rote memory work, tracked classes, IQ scoring, and standardized testing.
3. Quit fighting teachers and fight Teacher Union BOSSES who live large on people forced to pay dues in most states. Far more teachers in my area voted FOR Trump.
4. Support job training and certification as alternative to traditional education once a child is high school age.
We’re so used to being the whipping boy that it’s difficult to imagine having the power of the whip.
So, very simple: Legitimate complaints regarding censorship or abuse of conservative viewpoints will be dealt with via the appropriate punishment, which includes cutting off money for student loans (or at least no longer insuring them), killing Pell Grants, and killing research money.
And if the schools squelch liberal viewpoints, then we give them extra money, as they will be making up for past discrimination (you know, Affirmative Action rationale).
As a corporate executive who has spent the past 7 years as a business school professor, I offer some additional (I think better) insights. We must understand that the degradation of higher education (as well as K-12) is not a result of incompetence, it is the execution of a plan which has been in process for at least 100 years. Virtually every college and university president in the US is a cultural marxist operative, not a leader of legitimate scholars and teachers.
The most important tools of this planned destruction are: 1) The expansion of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. A law intended to assure equal educational opportunity for women has, by bureaucratic fiat, been expanded to promoting the imposition of 60 gender identities on students, faculty and the culture. Trump can by fiat, bring Title IX back to the boundaries defined by Congress when the law was passed. 2) Fake religious neutrality. Universities vigorously promote three favored religions: Secular Humanism, Atheism and Islam. A new administration will be within its authority to require strict religious neutrality and a halt to harassment of those who express biblical Christian ideas on campuses. 3) The proliferation of “fake degrees” which multiplies the ranks of cultural marxist warriors on campus and in society at large.
If Trump really hopes to “drain the swamp”, the educational establishment is at least as poisonous a swamp as is Washington. While conservatives try to elect politicians and get laws passed, our educational system is engaged in mass production of good little commies who will not tolerate wholesome laws, healthy culture and serious intellectual activity. In other words, our educational system destroys conservative achievements faster than they can be produced.
Partner with tech/cloud companies to provide free VR college degrees.
Executive Order #1 to Public Education: Protect freedom of speech and actions or lose federal funds. Simple enough.
If college loans will be part of the future, I might suggest that they only be available to students in engineering or hard science fields. If a person from a poor family wants to be a physicist, and can do the work, I see a benefit in helping them. If a kid from a middle class family wants to major in gender studies, I hope the family has a lot of cash on hand.
Just saw this one new on the scene.
Grand Canyon University https://www.gcu.edu/
One of the first I have seen with online engineering degrees. Mot of them are focused on business MBA, liberal arts, Nursing, etc.
Getting a handle on K-12 and putting it back into the States’ hands is a huge first step - if colleges start getting kids with a education instead of a brainwashing, the current curriculum will not sell.
The organization of the left with regard to education and media is truly phenomenal. If only they used those same skills to help America.
I don’t know how they managed to get their operatives in so many places of leadership. I suspect with the media they just had a coordinated effort to have people acquire individual firms.
But they’ve managed to do it with colleges and too many businesses as well. Somehow they have managed to infiltrate boards. And they reached critical mass where they control the boards and the leadership. We somehow need to reconquer the board rooms of both colleges and business. But how?
The organization of the left with regard to education and media is truly phenomenal. If only they used those same skills to help America.
I don’t know how they managed to get their operatives in so many places of leadership. I suspect with the media they just had a coordinated effort to have people acquire individual firms.
But they’ve managed to do it with colleges and too many businesses as well. Somehow they have managed to infiltrate boards. And they reached critical mass where they control the boards and the leadership. We somehow need to reconquer the board rooms of both colleges and business. But how?
What is the interest rate on student loans? I think these should be reduced to the minimum. Why is it that the interest on cars is much less than the interest on education? That tells us what we value in our society: purchasing new things instead of investing in education.
I don’t think we should restrict free choice at any point. Students need to be advised of what the final loan payments will be and exactly what job prospects there are. But it is up to them to make the choices of their careers.
What we need are high school classes that cover things like mortgages, interest rates, loans, micro and macro economics, free market ideas, etc. Too many students are ignorant of all of this.
At the K-12 levels, we need much more challenge in all classes. Students are bored; standards need to be raised substantially.
You seem to assume that lack of student loans will result in a “lack of education”.
I would argue that the sheer ubiquity of student loans has caused a blossoming of paid coursework, but that is not equal to actually educating people, and based on observation, having the opposite effect. . .
So very well put. I taught at various levels of college and graduate school a total of 15 years or so. The degeneration even within that short a time was impressive.
What got my goa was the pressing charge of politically correct speech I was to adhere to every moment of every contact I had with any student. I often taught “weed out” courses and as time went on the students would bring increasing numbers of complaints to the Dean, “She is making the course too hard. We are not prepared!” “She is standing in front of us asking us questions directly and expecting us to answer from homework material. We want videos so we don’t have to go to class.” “She said if we were drunk we should not come to class!”.
Disgusting. And not a thing I could do about it as my race was different from theirs...or so they thought. Little did they seem to understand there are only three races.
Good grief.
The interest rate on ANY loan is going to be based on the risk of lending.
In the case of a car loan, the car can be re-possessed, and sold to someone else. Likewise, with a mortgage: fail to pay, get foreclosed on, and the house is sold to someone else.
Education, on the other hand, cannot be repossessed. Hence, the risk of loss is higher, as you cannot re-sell that education.
And a one-size-fits-all approach to loans, with unmarketable skills programs paying the same interest rates as programs that produce marketable, in-demand skills. Way back when, when **I** applied for a student loan, I had to provide my local bank my current grade transcript, plan of study, and major. They would use that to determine whether to grant the loan, or not. . .
Are you saying that by stopping the paid coursework, people are going to become more educated? By what means? School of hard knocks?
I’m saying that paid coursework does not always equal actual education.
For example, what is actually learned in Gender Studies coursework, other than Marxist polemic ?
The point of education is to provide actual knowledge applicable to the real world, not to populate ideological fantasy universes. . .
I guess I must be an extremist.
1. Stop using tax dollars on any type of school funding including grants.
2. Get the government out of the student loan business and turn it over to the free markets.
3. End entry quotas and accept students based solely on their academic qualifications.
Presto! Competition will drive tuition costs down. Schools will focus on curricula that creates success for the student in the job market to ensure loan repayment.
Milton Friedman said it best: if you must subsidize a transaction, subsidize the buyer, not the seller. That way you still get competition.
Bfl
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