Posted on 02/27/2019 5:38:58 AM PST by reaganaut1
Often, the strongest criticisms of higher education come from insiders. One insider is Daniel Johnson, who retired as president of the University of Toledo in 2006 after an academic career that included several senior leadership positions. He has recently published a book, The Uncertain Future of American Public Higher Education, that illuminates many of the worst problems besetting higher ed.
Much of Johnsons analysis is excellent, but he misfires on some. I will start with the books best sections.
While some of our higher education traditions are sound, many others, Johnson argues, are outmoded. They lead to unaffordable costs for students, ineffective and inefficient delivery of instruction, and failure to adapt to advanced, lower cost, and more effective technologies and methods.
Foremost among those outmoded traditions is the way colleges award credit for seat time rather than for learning. The truth, Johnson says, is that the credit hour system measures neither education nor learning. Thus, we compel students who pursue college degrees to spend huge amounts of money on courses when what they really want is knowledgeknowledge that could be more expeditiously delivered.
Johnson points to three alternatives to the traditional credit hour systemThe Bologna Process (widely accepted in Europe), the Lumina Foundations Degree Qualifications Profile, and the Turning USA Initiativeeach of which, he writes, stress active learning, knowledge, and competencies, not seat time credit, as the path to a degree. Unfortunately, the inertia of the higher education system, combined with the fact that most faculty members like the status quo, prevents us from making much progress in replacing the seat time tradition.
Tenure is another of our academic traditions that Johnson sees as accomplishing little except to increase the cost of college education.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
I’m reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar”, an address to the Harvard Divinity School.
I expected it give praise. It didn’t. Nice read
And that's why the government took over student loans, in order to facilitate legions of students getting degrees that leave them unqualified to do anything except being an "activist" or "community organizer".
Retail politicians must pay homage to the teachers union to even get started.
Ding dong ding ding
Winner
Correct answer
Which points out that accreditation reform is the most immediate problem. The existing accreditors have absolutely no intention of upholding academic standards or doing anything else the public thinks is important (graduation rates, employability, starting salaries, cost, innovative programs and formats, etc). We must recognize new accreditors to get around them. I am tempted to think that more regulations on the existing ones would help (requiring them to compete with each other for example) but it is probably too little, too late.
U of Michigan has a Diversity programs annual budget of $79 million.
“The real problem is that over the last forty years universities have been forced to expand their academic programs to include non scholarly political nonsense such as womens studies, ethnic studies and LBGT programs.,,,”
Not to mention psychology which, over time, has engendered the “oh, that’s why I/you/they feel/act/respond/think that way” mode of personality over character. This requires very little intellectual vigor and places emotional maturity over ... maturity. Very useful if over a long period of time one/one’s ideology wishes to manipulate a large demographic.
It’s all about the feelz
!!Chaos to the enemy!!
KYPD
If tenure was such a great idea every industry would have it.
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