Posted on 05/29/2012 4:08:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it's now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education's expansion also ranks as one of America's great postwar triumphs.
Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was "a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent" high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, "The Troubled Crusade." No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor's degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.
Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools - offering heavily subsidized tuitions - represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected "the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work," noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.
College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn't go to college, you'd failed. Improving "access" - having more students go to college - drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.
For starters, we've dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen graduate within six years. Many others aren't learning much.
In a recent book, "Academically Adrift," sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that 45 percent of college students hadn't significantly improved their critical thinking and writing skills after two years; after four years, the proportion was still 36 percent. Their study was based on a test taken by 2,400 students at 24 schools requiring them to synthesize and evaluate a block of facts. The authors blame the poor results on lax academic standards. Surveyed, one-third of the same students said that they studied alone five or fewer hours a week; half said they had no course the prior semester requiring 20 pages of writing.
Still, most of these students finished college, though many are debt-ridden. Persistence counts. The larger - and overlooked - consequence of the college obsession is to undermine high schools. The primacy of the college-prep track marginalizes millions of students for whom it's disconnected from "real life" and unrelated to their needs. School bores and bothers them. Teaching them is hard, because they're not motivated. But they also make teaching the rest harder. Their disaffection and periodic disruptions drain teachers' time and energy. The climate for learning is poisoned.
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Colleges need to be fewer, farther between, and privately funded.
If anything, we need more trade schools and apprenticeship programs. College should be for those who can pay or can get the grades to win privately funded scholarships.
“In a recent book, “Academically Adrift,” sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that 45 percent of college students hadn’t significantly improved their critical thinking and writing skills after two years; “
Learning to think critically hasn’t been taught in years. Just suspended so the progressive claptrap could be forced down students’ throats
The last thing todays colleges want is critical thinking.
They want Socialism ,and kids who think the way their Socialist Professors do.
Agree 100%
Yep, college is overrated.
From a classic country song,: ‘Gotta Sell Them Chickens”
“Well, my pappy told me as I was sittin’ on his knee About the birds and the bees and such
You can do right proud in a college crowd But you ain’t gonna learn that much
Get your degree in the ABC’s Then dig out the cold hard facts
You’ve got to sell them chickens before they die And the eggs before they hatch”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbDy1IhZXJw
And from another country classic,”She’s a T-Bone Talkin Woman But She Gots a Hot Dog Heart”
“Now, I aint an educated feller, I didn’t go too far in school, but I can tell the difference between a horse and a mule”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29I4VRf5E-g
You can’t teach common sense nor can you teach intellect.
Today, college is only about money. Money from the people attending and money from the government...nothing else.
Our future requires the upper educational resources to teach the technical trades rather than the “heavy thinking and pencil pushing” agendas.
I would guess that about 10% of all college degrees are really necessary and that would be mainly in the engineering and medical disciplines.
I agree. When I returned to college, there is nothing more aggravating in the government required class, than a critically thinking conservative who knows more about the government than the professor. Actually, it might be fun and instructional for the students, if a few conservative adults enrolled as an ‘audit’ of the government 101, 102 classes.
The problem is you cannot make people equally smart so your only option is to make them equally dumb.
IMO educational degrees that do not lead to some profession should be paid for totally by the student. If the courses you are taking do not lead to some profession or worse takes a job away from someone without a college degree then why am I, through my taxes, investing in you?
Unfortunately, most employers now use a four-year degree as a hiring filter. No matter how relevant to the position and no matter how much experience an applicant has.
Basically, we have a government agency, the Department of Education, that has jacked up the price of college, diminished the value of a college degree, decreased the percentage of low-income student enrollment, and created a generation of debt slaves. And all of that at a cost of only $70 billion dollars a year to the taxpayers. As the congress is struggling to find even a billion dollars to cut out of our enormous budget, here’s $70 billion on a silver platter.
The real problem is that, by definition, 50% of the population has an IQ of <100. Even those in the mid to high 90s will struggle with college-level work. Those farther down the scale just can’t cut it.
The Bell Curve, that horrible racist book of the 90s (/s), was actually not about race at all, except incidentally.
It was about what do do as a society with regard to those of less than average intelligence. Our economy has no real use for them any more and what little there is diminishes daily.
So what DO we do with them? These people have done nothing wrong. They just aren’t adapted to a modern economy.
Wish I owned a couple of residence halls, they are cashing in on those . . . 4 bedroom type set-up @ 3400.00 semester so almost 30K for JUST ONE dorm room. Not even counting any summer session residents. This doesn’t include food either.
We’ve got tuition covered with scholarships and will spend college savings on the rest and hopefully have a little left over IF the market doesn’t tank anytime soon . . . lost a lot in ‘08.
They do not teach kids in the lower grades but they want them all to go to College?
Thank the Supreme Court for that. It outlawed the use of aptitude tests and intelligence tests for employment qualification, while allowing the use of college degrees. Since at the time of this decision, a BA or BS degree indicated an IQ of at least 110 (otherwise you would not graduate), businesses use a baccalaureate as a substitute for an IQ test.
My son is 18 and he is enlisting in the Army, he has already made Sergent in his JROTC.
I agree college is a socialists wet dream, a farm to breed future socialists and a place to harvest them.
Beware, “critical thinking” is now being (mis)used by Big Ed to mean “rejecting what you’ve been taught by your parents”.
It’s one of several Ed-Newspeak terms - along with...
Mastery Learning
Outcome-Based Education
Back-To-Basics
Lifelong Learning
Higher-Order Skills
IF Gov’t is to be involved at all, “college” should simply be locally-funded technical schools, for technical training. The land-grant and A&M universities of the mid-west were established to train, simply, farmers and mechanics. Train people for actual jobs, and actual things that help private industry.
The Federal Gov’t is doing to education what it did to housing.
I agree!
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