Colleges ignore growing skepticism of higher ed at their peril
pressherald.com
pressherald.com
People are skeptical, I think, because many degree programs have opened up for which there is little use for their output, and little employment opportunities afterwards. Not only that, but many existing and useful programs have pivoted away from useful work and building on other knowledge, and have begun futilely re-creating the same experiments with minute differences without really trying to identify anything worthwhile. It's hard and probably wrong to say that people that run these things should hold themselves and their students to higher standards, but clearly somewhere somehow there is a culture mismatch between what people hope to find when they enter vs what they actually get.
The former is supposed to facilitate the latter, but it does not necessarily function as such. And when it does, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is doing it well.
Colleges and universities are more gatekeepers than they are the arbiters of knowledge. From my own experience basically all the learning (in my case) is done independently, at best the system sets up an incentive complex: study for the exam or you will fail. What these exams measure is not clear. What the classes are intended to teach, and how they are structured to accomplish that is nebulous. What the student will retain is likewise unclear.
What this then says, to me, anyways, is that I am paying thousands of dollars a year to have someone read slides from the textbook publisher to me, and have arbitrary tests proctored so I can get a piece of paper that certifies to a prospective employer that... I have the piece of paper. 'Cause you just know the Gen Chem I and II classes I took my freshman year have been entirely vacated from memory.
And a great deal of the information we're given is contextually irrelevant in so many cases, and it amounts to huge sums of wasted time and energy, not to mention stress only for it to be forgotten. And it lacks the modularity that the market should really be demanding, and thus the market had ought to be serving.
Does that mean it was worthless? No, because computer science and physics are often intertwined and slowly I have been gravitating towards a career that will involve that knowledge. But if you narrowly educate people on hyperspecialized topics, then they will be more likely to fail in their post-graduate career because life and your job isn't hyperspecialized. People enter into this wrong attitude regarding the important of education.
The problem is American higher ed is increasingly not enabling that sort of exploration of knowledge. When I went to college, I had foreign languages I wanted to learn, history of cultures that weren't covered in high school that I wanted to study, and plenty of courses from their catalog all of which looked interesting to me. But since none of the items I was interested in were in the already pre-approved list of "electives" I was allowed to take as part of my major, the only way to take those courses was to add them to the already 4 years maxed out full time credits + summer school schedule required to graduate in 4 years. Many of my younger colleagues have expressed similar frustrations about their times in school.
But I should also note that if students are going to college with the expectation that they will be able to hyper specialize it's at least in part because as a society we keep telling them that lie. I can't even count the number of times I've heard students who express frustration with schooling and especially with learning subjects they have no interest in being told "when you get to college, you get to pick the stuff you want to learn." And we support this lie by encouraging them to apply to and attend expensive larger 4 year schooling when we know damn well that the first 2 years are almost entirely gen-ed and for most students would be better spent taking those classes as cheaper, local community colleges.
This is even further compounded by the fact that companies are increasingly using higher education degrees as barriers to employment regardless of the actual need for higher education for the job in question. So for many students are being forced into getting an "education" when what they're really after is a job. Here again, promoting more community college systems with degrees in applied sciences would help, but in general a recognition that not everyone needs or has the time/maturity/focus or financial backing to obtain an "education" at that age is badly missing.
I mean this attitude is ultimately the problem and almost uniquely an American thing. College is always couched in the concept of necessity for work. But the intention of college is education, which is tied to work but not 1:1. In order to compete on the global stage we need artists, writers, people willing to specialize in cultural affairs. Having educated workers and cutting edge solutions requires the effort of a diversely educated workforce.
That pivot towards college being purely for work is why we're in this place to begin with. Rather than having be a public good, we use it as a barrier for the middle and upper classes to have better paying jobs. The exorbitant price follows because colleges know the people they want to admit can pay it. And then they further spend that money on things unrelated to educational pursuits to attract wealthier students.
I agree with you, but the students still need to pay for that college education. Americans especially end up with a lot of (undischargeable) student loans because of higher education. It's a luxury to get a degree as an artist, writer, or something in the arts, without having to worry about how you will repay those loans.
As long as they can get a proportional increase per student, there's no fundamental reason to care.
Obviously, there's no moral or ethical consideration. But most people need to be reminded that as long as there _are_ consumers capable of paying, the absolute number of consumers isn't a evidentiary variable (ie, if a single consumer will pay all the costs, the product will be profitable)
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...
You would hope people would feel guilty living under such conditions, and therefore not consider them as "desirable", but personal experience and observation would say otherwise.