How to Fix Our System of Higher Education

For Catholic parents with intelligent high school children, this can be a trying time. A good many ostensibly Catholic universities have simply become indistinguishable from the mass of U.S. colleges. Take Georgetown, for example, which the New York Times gleefully reports has become a gay-friendly campus.

During the month of “OUTober,” described by the Times as “a month jam-packed with celebrations related to all things L.G.B.T.Q., or lesbian, gay,” Georgetown students are invited to same-sex smooching parties in a campus “kiss-in.” The dominant culture is like a great tidal wave that sweeps almost everything before it. We fought the Times—and the Times won.

Any attempt to resist the intense pressure to conform to lifestyle liberalism is treated as heresy by the left. Think of Sandra Fluke, who didn’t mind paying $40,000 a year for tuition at Georgetown Law, but who made a national issue out of a university health plan that didn’t cover the pill. Without insurance, that would have come to about $100 a year at a local Target store, which didn’t make it look like the social justice cause of our time. Unless, of course, one knew who the enemy was.

Then there’s the sheer expense of it all. There are good schools out there, to be sure. The problem is that it will often take a second mortgage to pay for them.

Clearly, it’s time to rethink the college experience. Right now, two models dominate American higher education, and both are broken. The first is the hugely expensive bricks-and-mortar university, which typically don’t teach anything much of value and indoctrinate students in a sloppy anti-religious, leftism. The second are the conventional, asynchronous (not real-time) online programs being adopted by many of these same institutions as a means of reducing costs.

Georgetown students are invited to same-sex smooching parties in a campus “kiss-in.”

If homosexuality is not a 'choice' and it is 'natural,' why are so many indoctrination efforts afoot?

We have our national politicians, our media, Hollywood & its stars, entertainment media, our teachers, etc. are all out there supposedly educating the public when it is simply nothing more than indoctrination.

The way a child sees homosexuality on TV or from any of these sources for that matter, is that "being Gay" is cool. Being gay means 'liking another person.' Being gay is 'hugging' and 'kissing,' and GLEE.

The truth is that being gay is a nasty, nasty unnatural act. Crudely, it is buggering in the most unhealthy of manners and it isn't a sight they'll likely show a child until all the other "being gays" have been stamped in their little brains.

Perversion in thought, even these supposedly innocent indoctrination attempts, leads to perversion in action. The more of it that occurs, the worse and even more perverted it gets [see San Francisco]. That's the pitfall of perversion; it never stops and it always escalates.

I think the way to fix it is to remove post-secondary’s role in credentialing its students. They can teach, but cannot provide the diplomas.

Credentialing should be done by the associations that are responsible for ensuring that their occupations are up to snuff.

Colleges don't provide licenses for professions. It's another step to enter most professions. They provide a degree, and for fields that don't requure licensing, employers can test applicants before hiring them.

A real problem is that way too many HS graduates go to college. It would be far better if high schools went back to offering courses in trades, in running a business, in jobs that are available locally.

If a student had to be in the top 20% (or so) of graduates to go to a state college or university, and those schools were downsized and made very inexpensive (like they used to be), there'd be an immediate improvement in quality students coming out of HS. Besides that, if public higher education were made inexpensive for the truly qualified students, private colleges would have to compete for them and offer scholarships instead of loans. That's how it was up through the 1980s, and no well qualified student had to go into debt in order to get an education.

Loans from the government were and still are a dumb idea. Even back when those Pell Grants first started, colleges pretty much raised their tuitions by the amounts the grants covered....and everyone else got stuck with higher costs.

He makes a good case.

Certainly an interesting one.
This “synchronisity” issue is interesting. Note what happens on FR: if you come late tot he party, your comment is buried under hundreds of others, which is why I personally scan the “latest threads” and pick an interesting one to comment on, as I’m doing now. Often enough, I take long enough to compose my (ahem) "eloquent, tightly reasoned response" that I still end up posting later than quite a few other FReepers.
And note also that we have highly knowledgable, even distinguished, FReepers. LS comes to mind. And controversial ones who have a following and also a coherent opposition. Swordmaker, for instance.

A good many ostensibly Catholic universities have simply become indistinguishable from the mass of U.S. colleges. Take Georgetown, for example, which the New York Times gleefully reports has become a gay-friendly campus.
The great problem of contemporary American intellectual life is, IMHO, the dominance and homogeneity of journalism. IMHO the homogeneity of journalism is the natural result of the wire services. Journalists write to the sheeple, and they write for each other. And they are not a highly distinguished lot; look at a college graduating class and tell me if the journalists are any better credentialed than the teachers are. And the teachers are notorious for being the least academically gifted.
So we have the phenomenon of teachers and journalists who aren’t fonts of wisdom but who are in the commanding heights of propaganda. The perfect situation for a Sophist. No wonder we like FR so much, as an opportunity to write to and for other people who, like the Philosophers, eschew claims of wisdom (or “objectivity”) but demand facts and logical arguments.
I’m not sure “synchronistic” discussion is perfect, and I’m not sure that the related “first posted, most seen” system of FR is perfect either. But I am not clear what would be better.

The great problem of contemporary American intellectual life is, IMHO, the dominance and homogeneity of journalism. IMHO the homogeneity of journalism is the natural result of the wire services. Journalists write to the sheeple, and they write for each other. And they are not a highly distinguished lot; look at a college graduating class and tell me if the journalists are any better credentialed than the teachers are. And the teachers are notorious for being the least academically gifted.

So we have the phenomenon of teachers and journalists who aren’t fonts of wisdom but who are in the commanding heights of propaganda. The perfect situation for a Sophist.

Astute analysis.

The stories covered are the message, as much or more than what is said about them. Anything else isn't fit for discussion. So conservative initiatives never make any headway. That's one reason why Republicans are always reacting to Dem proposals.

The Republican leadership can circumvent this by putting forth bold proposals systematically, and representatives of the party should stick to addressing these Republican proposals. "That's an interesting question, and it reminds me of our initiative to..."

The construction of Wikipedia would seem to be. There the objective is not to organize the discussion by time at all, but to gradually optimize discussions of many topics, exploiting hypertext capability. I have in mind not merely the finished product but the process involved as a collaborative intellectual discipline. After all, the objective the author of this article discusses in promoting synchronicity is precisely collaboration.

I disagree. You don’t need to limit any number of students from entering any discipline they wish. Let the market determine everything in that regard.

However, what does need to be done is that schools need to stop putting lipstick on pigs by creating graduates who really weren’t ready to graduate.

However, our education system needs to be honest. If a student needs 95% in a pre-requisite course because that would be the average needed to have a reasonable chance at passing the next course level, then that needs to be the grade the student needs to take the next course and everything below that is a non-pass.

A student should not be getting points for being in a favoured ethnic-racial-economic class or because they volunteer or whatever other qualities schools give points for that allows students to attend who may not otherwise be qualified to attend.

It needs to be based on whether a student has a reasonable chance of being able to graduate from the discipline he/she is majoring in.

When first I read about hypertext linking, in the dark ages before the WWW, my immediate reaction was to speculate on the effect it could have on education. I theorized that the teacher would present his notes and the textbook to the class in the form of a file, and the students’ role would be to document linkages between the various aspects of those notes - such that each class the teacher taught would build better text/notes from what the preceding classes left to them.
Then there is the khanacademy.org model of education, in which lectures are available on demand. And exercises for the student are, at least for mathematics, automatically generated in software. But of course the interesting issue of higher education is that a discussion of literature doesn’t result in a closed form solution but a controversy, and the point becomes in large part the ability to articulate an opinion coherently.

The construction of Wikipedia would seem to be a valid paradigm for the study of a discipline. There the objective is not to organize the discussion by time but to gradually optimize discussions of many topics within a discipline, exploiting hypertext capability. I have in mind not merely that the finished product could be a valid text in itself, but that the process involved is a collaborative intellectual discipline.
And after all, the objective the author of this article discusses in promoting synchronicity is precisely collaboration.

Interesting article. The current system is outmoded. This "synchronous on-line" formal education delivery mode makes sense.

There would be much more diversity in schooling if government funding and influence ended. At the college level, government subsidization of tuition results in course and overhead bloat, as true profit is hidden in salaries and unnecessary overhead.

In order to delivery greater quality education at lower costs, in a competitive environment, experimentation would flourish.

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