Overall, only around 60% of the students who enter public universities graduate in six years. This observation is usually followed by lots of numbers on the effects of race and class and whether students live on or off campus and the like. But neither they NY Times piece nor, so far as any review I can find tells me, the university presidents' new book says anything about why we want students to go to college and what they are supposed to be learning there. What good does it do to have a debate about how to get kids to go to college when we have no idea what college is for? When I was at the University of Minnesota in the late 1980s they commissioned their own study of why students dropped out, and the overwhelming explanation given by the students they interviewed was that the education they were being offered seemed boring and pointless to them. They just didn't see the value of what they were learning.At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.
Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as "failure factories," and they are the norm.
Maybe instead of tweaking the financial aid system we should take a serious look at how we structure higher education and what we teach students in four-year colleges.
If it were up to me, I would turn half the four-year colleges in the country into community colleges focused on technical and business training. Then I would make the remaining four-year colleges much tougher and more intellectual, forcing the students through rigorous programs in math, science, literature and thinking.
But that's just my suggestion, and I would be willing to entertain others. What makes me crazy is the continued insistence that there is nothing wrong with higher education that can't be fixed by more financial aid and a little counseling of freshman. The problem is that universities don't know what it is they want to teach or how to go about teaching it. The problem is that we don't know what it means to be educated. As things stand now, students finish college mostly because it is a sort of habit of the middle class, so sticking it out shows your commitment to middle class life and its values. No wonder poor and minority students can't be bothered.
7 comments:
My responses:
1. Why is it bad if only 60% graduate? 40% went, and decided college wasn’t for them.
2. We’ve been over this ground before and made some suggestions about what purpose college as it is currently constructed serves. Yet, with all due respect, you raise the question here as though it’s new to your fora. I wonder if the issue is not that you don’t understand what college as it is currently constituted is for, as that you don’t like the answer.
3. I’m not sure what purpose would be served by a rigorous national discussion on this topic. I presume such a discussion would go nowhere, bogged down in predictable ideological debates and extremist nonsense. My impression is that much human activity positively benefits from NOT having its purposes closely examined.
4. I’m puzzled by your proposed solution of technical colleges for the majority plus rigorous nastiness for the minority. It sounds like your instinct is that what’s wrong with college is that people aren’t unhappy enough. It reminds 1980s-era commentary that suggested if only we were as miserable as the Japanese, we could beat ‘em.
1. Is a fair question, but I suspect that many dropouts feel very bad about their experiences and resent the time they wasted. They also wasted that time at great public expense. Wouldn't it have been better for them to go to two-year schools and leave having accomplished a degree and learned things that will help them make money?
2. I simply find myself baffled by political debates that seem to assume we know what college is and why it is valuable, when so far as I can tell we do not. Doesn't this problem occur to anyone else who participates in these debates?
3. Probably so; right now college is many different things to different people, and the best way to let it continue to be so is not to talk about it.
4. Rigorous intellectual education is unhappy? I can't imagine anything more fun! But, seriously, by far the number one reason students offer for going to college is to get good jobs, so why not give that group exactly what they want? And give those who want to be educated what they want?
Rethinking: I would say that what colleges do now is to give middle and upper class kids a chance to grow up in a stimulating environment before they enter the job market. We try to teach them a few things along the way, both practical and high-minded, but the main thing academics do is watch the maturation process happen. Employers like college graduates because they have demonstrated that they belong to the middle class and share its values and experiences. To that core function we have attached a vast array of other stuff, from football rivalries to physics labs, much of which, so far as I can see, mostly serves the interests of professors and college administrators, not the students or our society. At great public expense. And the more I contemplate the academic edifice, the stranger I find it, and the more puzzling I find our society's dedication to sending everyone to college.
I'd say your second comment is right on the money. But I don't find the image you present troubling, apart from the ever-growing expense, which IS troubling. In fact, the increase in education costs seems to me rather like that in health care, in the sense that I haven't yet seen a convincing, disinterested explanation of what is causing the increase, or where the money goes. But in principle, I do not find the description of college that you give disturbing. My feeling is that, like democracy, it's the worst of all worlds, except for all the others. And I will add that a lot of students actually do find interest, curiosity, and challenge in their studies, and some of them actually change their whole perspective and their idea about their future. Unless one wants to promote some giant revolution, political cultural or otherwise--and I do not--then I don't see why one would want to change the system in a radical way.
I think our university system does some things very well: identify and promote academic talent, for example. And college does seem to benefit most students. The things that bother me about it are, 1) the cost; 2) the tendency of college to reinforce class boundaries, since kids from working class or poor backgrounds have trouble fitting in, and then have trouble getting good jobs without college degrees (there used to be a quarterly publication called The Insurgent Sociologist where left-wing professors moaned on and on about their role in maintaining the class system) and 3) the bizarre, ever-growing apparatus of scholarship. Because all professors have to publish, there have to be uncountable journals where their publications can appear, and innumerable professional associations where they can present papers and get elected to offices, and so on. I truly believe in the mission of humanistic scholarship, but I sometimes feel that the vast production of academic work does little but dilute our understanding of the world and distract us from real learning.
If you're concerned about kids from working class or poor backgrounds not fitting in with the middle class kids, and having trouble getting middle class jobs, then we should definitely not have the sort of two-tier, vocational vs. academic training system proposed in your original post. Romney proposed something similar in Mass., with UMASS Amherst becoming a public Ivy complete with journals, conferences, doctoral programs galore, leading scholars hired with 1/2 teaching loads, and the rest. The other state schools would have become vocational schools. I found this tragic, having taught at one of the other schools. Plenty of working class and immigrant kids went there. Many, many were really interesting students, with a real interest in history, insightful and/or witty things to say, reading they did on their own, and so forth. I don't know how many went on to become doctors or whatever. But going to that school gave them a chance to learn something about the wider world, to have a teacher who took them seriously, etc., etc.
Yes, the problem with any scheme to limit higher education is that it will end up excluding many who would benefit from it. The question is whether the benefit we give to those students is worth the cost and craziness of the whole system. One of my fantasies is that if college were no longer a rite of passage for all middle class 18-year-olds, but only one possible path to a middle-class adulthood, then we would have more resources available for those who would really benefit from it. But I can't actually think of how that might work.
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