I’m good at asking questions that I don’t know the answer to. Does this mean the four universities, two graduate schools, and three community colleges I attended did a good job of teaching me how to think? (Another question I don’t know the answer to!). I do know that colleges have to bring in more students so they get more money off the government. They try to attract as many students as they can with open days and a fancy Prospectus Design. This means they’ll have more money to fund the college.
Colleges are in the news this week, partly because of President Obama’s State Of The Union speech, and partly because of state budget deliberations underway in the Legislature in Olympia that will impact the funding of our public higher education systems and student tuition rates. Everyone knows that going to college pretty much anywhere in the world is going to set you back financially. Fortunately, the likes of “Centrala studiestodsnamnden” – CSN in Sweden help provide student aid.
President Obama suggested America needs more college graduates. Rep. Marko Liias (D-Edmonds), in an opinion piece reproduced in this blog, argues the same thing. But if we consider this to be the conventional wisdom, it’s being challenged — in some cases by academics themselves.
For example, Prof. Matthew Biberman, who teaches literature at the University of Louisville, says “college isn’t for everybody, and college doesn’t offer the training necessary to do everything.” He suggests making students decide what they want to do before taking the college plunge and saddling themselves with education debt.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/26/opinion-do-we-really-need-more-college-graduates/
Another part of the conventional wisdom, that college education benefits those who receive it, also is being challenged. The book “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Rosika, cites research showing that nearly half of 2,300 students surveyed at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing after two years of college.
A book reviewer on Amazon.com calling himself “Flounder,” who says he has taught at the college level for 15 years, agreed with these findings but blames this result on “budget cuts, classroom down-sizing” and what he calls the “McDonaldized” consumerism of contemporary higher education.
Now let me speak anecdotally from my own experience. But first, let me tell you a little bit about my own background. As an undergraduate, I double-majored in political science and journalism, with a minor in economics. I took half a dozen courses toward, but did not complete, a master’s degree in public administration. And I have a law degree.
I spent my first year in college at a big-city commuter school in the midwest, where most of the 10,000 students went to classes during the day, worked factory jobs at night, and slept on weekends. Many of them were married and had families. These students were blue-collar guys who were damned serious about getting a college degree so they could get ahead in life. They knew how to WORK for something. This school did not have any sports teams or social life, none whatsoever, but it had plenty of professors who didn’t believe in grading on a curve. You either met their standards, or you didn’t pass.
Freshman English was a required first-semester course at this school. It weeded out approximately half of the entering class every year. If you didn’t pass it, you didn’t re-enroll, period. You could, however, escape this course if you scored in the top 1% on the entrance exam that all entering students had to take.
Well, I didn’t, I think I was in like the top 3% or something like that, so in September 1964, I found myself sitting in the front row of Assistant Professor Tight-Ass’s classroom. (Being both lazy and clever, I immediately dropped the “Assistant” and got in the habit of addressing her as “Professor,” which, as someone pointed out to me later, has never in recorded history ever offended an Assistant Professor — but the converse, I’ve been assured, doesn’t hold.)
On the first day of class, Professor Tight-Ass informed us that (a) she had just acquired a literary agent, and (b) she had been teaching this course for 10 years and had never given anyone an A on a paper, let alone for the course, because “if you were A students you would have been in the top 1% and gotten the waiver, and you wouldn’t be here in my classroom.” She wasn’ kidding. No one in our cycle got an A from her. We had to write 10 papers. There were 30 students in our class, and Prof. T.A. flunked half of them. The competition for the top grade came down to me and another guy. I won. I got Bs on all 10 papers. He had only 9 Bs and 1 C.
I had other tough professors during my long student career, but never another one as anal as that one. She probably got that way from getting too many rejection letters from book publishers. I don’t remember ever seeing her smile. Not once.
In retrospect, I was lucky to have tough teachers who made me work and forced me to learn to do things right. Professor Tight-Ass would deduct points from your grade for every misspelling or misuse of a punctuation mark or violation of a grammatical rule. How many English professors do that today?
I went to college before grade inflation really took off. My freshman Introduction to Sociology class was a 300-student lecture section. Nobody in that class got a higher grade than a C. In those days, getting an A in a class was possible, but As were rare, and you had to work really hard for them. Most of them just needed a passing grade in college. I got straight As in all my classes only once, and that proud moment only came in my senior year, after 4 years of practice at studying and writing essay-type exams. By then, I was good at it.
Prof. Biberman pointed to Bureau of Labor statistics showing that 17 million college graduates work in jobs not requiring a degree, including 100,000 college-educated janitors.
This raises the question, of course, about what a college education is for. If you ask most academics, they’ll respond that going to college shouldn’t just be about getting a better-paying job, it’s important to the individual in terms of giving him/her critical thinking and effective communication skills, and it’s important to society to have educated citizens and voters. (Although, given the results of some recent elections, you have to wonder how much good it really does in that respect.)
I have a friend who makes his living as a plumber. He learned plumbing in a trade school and was constantly learning things like ‘how to price a plumbing job‘, which helped him excel in his career. He earned a college degree in jazz piano. He has never worked professionally as a musician. That wasn’t the point of his degree, anyway. He went to college to escape the draft during the Vietnam War. His music degree possibly saved his life. What could be more important than that?
Over the last few years, I’ve seen newspaper articles that say it’s hard to get young people interested in apprenticeship programs these days because they all think they must go to college. I know a couple of retired union guys who don’t have degrees and worked all their lives in the trades. They made more money than I did as a state lawyer, have better pensions, and better retiree health plans. You can make a darn good living as a boilermaker, operating engineer, plumber, electrician, longshoreman, or what-have-you. And those jobs aren’t for stupid people. They require brains as much as brawn and dexterity and a willingness to work outdoors in bad weather or down in the dirt and grime.
I once met a farmer in eastern Washington who lived in a shack made of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting. He actually slept outdoors because there wasn’t room to lay down inside his makeshift shack. It was full of books. Over 10,000 of them. He said he had read most of them. We had some interesting conversations around the campfire about government, economics, foreign policy, Russian literature, and whatnot. This guy never went to college. He didn’t make it past ninth grade. He was self-educated, and from what I could tell, there was nothing wrong with his education. He knew as much as any Ph.D. I’ve ever met. He didn’t need a billion dollars of bricks and mortar to get his education. All he needed was a love of learning.
Some people have it, many don’t, and we all know who they are. I never went on a single date during my entire college career. (I didn’t get married until I was in my 30s.) All I did in college was study and work. It had to be that way, because I was poor, and there was no other way for me to attend a real university, even a public one, except by holding down jobs while going to school. I carried extra-heavy course loads, too, and finished my first four years in just three years. I was what they call a “serious” student. I came away from it with a love of learning that has lasted all my life. I still read 50 to 100 books a year, plus countless magazine and blog articles.
As the Legislature grapples with the state budget, and legislators cut ever deeper into state support for our public institutions of higher education, I find it tempting to ask myself whether we shouldn’t solve the funding problem by kicking out the students who spend all their time partying, and don’t study and don’t learn, and downsizing the schools so they’re just big enough to accomodate the “serious” students — the ones who do study, do learn, and do have the talent (or whatever you want to call it) to acquire critical thinking and effective communication skills. It does seem to me that turning our colleges into diploma mills, allowing grade inflation to cheapen the grades earned by those of us who went to school back in the days when you had to work for grades, and all the other things that have turned higher education into factories is not really doing anyone much of a favor. In the course of my work as a judge and lawyer, I’ve met too many people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees who can’t spell or use basic grammar or express a simple idea to believe that a college degree actually signifies anything anymore. For that matter, I’ve met some lawyers who not only can’t write or frame a coherent argument but are just plain stupid. My respect for universities has eroded over the years as I meet more of their work product in society at large.
I’m not an academic, and I’m not presuming to tell academics how to run their shop, even though it may sound like it. I’m just suggesting it may be time for some self-examination, that’s all. The fact that other people, better known and more credentialed than me, are saying this gives me the guts to say it. So here it is: In an era of scarce resources, maybe we should at least think about a different model of higher education, one that uses its limited resources to give a world class education to those who are in school for that purpose, and to kick out those who aren’t serious in order to conserve those resources for those who are.
Provocative piece! Nice work.