Posted on 09/24/2014 8:15:37 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Apparently the only jobs college accreditation reviewers are interested in are their own, not those of recent college graduates.
“Accreditation has become a roadblock to reform,” Hank Brown, the former president of the University of Colorado, said at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, “a system that leads to majors that go nowhere.”
I asked him whether college accreditation boards even considered the post-graduation employment of graduates as an afterthought in their reviews. “I’ve seen very few accreditation ratings that focus on that,” he said. “I think that would be of great value.”
Brown is also the former president of the University of North Colorado. “When it comes to federal funding of higher education, the government’s approach to quality assurance and consumer protection is a public policy and regulatory failure by almost any measure,” Brown wrote in a paper which the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a year ago. “For nearly half a century, the federal government has largely outsourced the determination of which colleges and universities are eligible to receive federal taxpayer money—in the form of student grants and loans—to member-based, geographically oriented accrediting agencies.”
“The rationale was to ensure that students attended quality institutions from which they were likely to graduate and be employable, thereby safeguarding students and ensuring taxpayer dollars were well spent.” Brown has also served with distinction in the United States House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Currently, in addition to his law practice, Brown heads the Accreditation Reform Initiative of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Anne Neal, the founder of ACTA, was on the panel with Brown at Heritage.
“Today, nearly 7,000 colleges, universities, and professional schools in the United States are accredited (sometimes by more than one accrediting body),” Neal noted in testimony before Congress last year. “And institutions rarely lose accreditation.”
“Parents and the public mistakenly believe accreditation is a good housekeeping seal of approval, proof that an institution has passed rigorous tests and is capable of ensuring students will graduate with a quality education.” Neal testified before the U. S. House Education and Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training.
Interestingly, in her testimony last year, Neal observed that “Nearly 15% of U.S. college students study without ever setting foot on campus. The lecture as the primary means of delivering learning is rapidly being replaced by new teaching methods that blend technology and classroom experiences in ways that boost student outcomes. America’s leading universities and faculty are creating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in which hundreds and thousands of students from all parts of the world enroll in a single course.”
I remember Senator Brown; like his CO compatriots he was and presumably is strongly pro-abort.
Dogma is more important. Colleges are modeling themselves as a Liberal Madrassa’s.
So many things are becoming obsolete, including traditional “teaching”.
Absolutely true, except that I think tuition is way cheaper at a madrassa.
Right.
However, there are lots of vocational training facilities around and if what kids want is a vocation, then THAT is the best choice.
The problem IS, Liberals have made everyone think that a ‘college education’ is essential to success.
I don’t believe that.
I work at a university and I have never seen such abjectly wasteful crap passing for ‘education’! AS IF there are any jobs waiting for kids in ‘women’s studies’, etc.
If I had children, I’d say: ‘I will foot the bill for training at a vocational school of your choice. THEN you will always have employment... If you want instead, an ‘Education’, then you are in a position to enroll in college and pay your own way.’
College as it is now, amounts to a prolonged incubation period for immature and irresponsible idiots who want a 4 year party on mom and dad or else on the taxpayer. It’s time to disabuse them of that nonsense.
a system that leads to majors that go nowhere.
Does this mean my degree in Lesbian Dance Theory isn’t going to get me a High Paying Job?? What about the $50,000 in Student Loan Debt to get that degree?? Do I still have to pay it?
Better add: “any resemblance to actual people, places and things is purely coincidental.”
The value of a recent bachelor degree is now well below what the value of a public high school diploma was in the 1960s job market and falling.
Young boys are graduating from universities at an age when their grandfathers were married homeowners with one or two children and they are taking jobs, IF THEY CAN FIND ONE, that their grandfathers would have turned down at eighteen with only a high school diploma. Instead of the home and family that grandpa had at 22 they are looking at a big student loan debt with no way to pay it. Some great progress we are making.
University studies are NOT necessarily related to employment, indeed many major areas of study do not lead to any significant employment at all. Students presumably select such majors because they wish to learn about things for the sake of learning. This is why many majors are called the “liberal arts” (liberals don’t do productive work?)
or the “humanities”
This has been a tradition for centuries. Indeed, MOST university majors were understood to be unrelated to any employment opportunities ... if you wanted job training, you’d go to a technical or trade or business school, not a university)
just saying. the confusion some people seem to have between university studies and “job training” is harmful...
Bingo! The disconnect makes me think people don’t understand the history of colleges and universities. College degrees have ALWAYS been a prestige symbol. They’re not for getting jobs.
You are of course absolutely correct, people have lost sight of the distinction between education and job training. I like to think that education is about how to make a LIFE while job training is about how to make a LIVING. Unfortunately those who take the liberal arts courses in modern universities don’t seem to learn anything about what they are supposedly studying. I have spoken to recent graduates who majored in history at the university twelve miles from where I sit typing and I do not exaggerate at all when I say that none of them would stand any chance of passing MY EIGHTH GRADE history final. I don’t believe that anyone receiving a bachelor degree this year at that university has anywhere close to what used to be a public high school level education and most don’t even have what used to be an eighth grade education in history, English,literature, biology or understanding government. Most could not write a single paragraph that would have been given a passing grade by my eighth grade English teacher.
Yes, unfortunately Lesbian Dance Theory is not in great demand, you would have been better advised to major in Climate Misrepresentation and Obfuscation with a minor in LGBT Undocumented Immigration theory.
yes, you raise an excellent second issue....
not only are university educations NOT about job training....
but
the quality of learning in many universities .. sucks.
so the students get to be double-losers
no job training (by their choice of majors) and then no real learning, either, in their non-career-path study programs (by the poor quality of instruction)
We need to change what college is for.
There is a movement to reclaim the “liberal arts” as a means to build a life. Trouble is that if I am paying (or hiring) someone to be an engineer, I don’t care what liberal arts they took.
School is to teach you how to make a living. If you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to “learn how to live life well”, you have failed out of the gate.
I know that makes many professors angry, but that is the fact. As an employer, I am the end customer. I don’t get a crap if they were forced to read Plato, can they do a mass balance?
He had $80K in debt. And that was the early 1990s.
He admitted that his education wasn't worth the debt.
actually, they don’t care whether they read the Great Books either. but the odds are if they haven’t read them, they won’t even be able to construct basic e-mails.
That is syntax and having a command of the language. Reading the great books guarantees neither (I have read the Great books, and I often type to fast for my own good).
The argument being made is that by teaching the Liberal Arts (or the Great Books) you will make the student better able to communicate, understand western civilization, and be a better person. Unfortunately, even when that was part of required study, it isn't a sure thing.
Look at the average communication of a graduate of the old English public schools. They produced some great writers, and a lot of people who couldn't make a grocery list readable. If you look at the time when to be educated meant you had to study the Classics, you see the same thing. There are those who have a gift of communication. Master smith's of the language who can turn a phrase the way an artist paints a picture. And then you have the rest of the group that doesn't have the gift, and has to make do with the limited tools they have.
Now, I love some of the so called “Great Books”. I really do (some of the defined translations suck, but they were cheaper copyrights to get a hold of). I started plowing through them in high school, and they have brought me many hours of enjoyment and reflection. However, I will not pretend that they have helped me in the “real” world. Quite the contrary, they have harmed me in that I am out of touch in many ways with what the average manager cares about. No one in my career, be it a politician, manager, or engineer, has cared about Aristotle, Plato, Hume, or Howe. They think Homer is a cartoon character and Socrates a Greek restaurant.
If I was looking for a course of work to better fit in with the people making the decisions in an average company, I would have spent all those hours studying fantasy football and the various legal arguments for marijuana. That would give me a much better chance at advancement than reading The Republic or J.B. Bury’s masterpiece on the Medieval world.
Speaking in the language and style of said works will generate great resentment from your superiors and underlings. The later will think you are to high and mighty for your own good, the former will think you are to arrogant and view you as a threat. Most people do not like someone who has different tastes or interests than themselves. I have seen this with the so called “Elites” (who are a very insular and ignorant bunch of people) and the line worker on the floor of the plant. The biggest difference is that the line worker at times can be inspired to do his or her own course of study. The elite think they know it all via sound bites and will attack you if you show them up.
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