Americans' superstitious belief in the assured blessings of a college diploma is waning. A degree by itself does not mean someone is well-educated, in the classic sense of, say, 100 years ago. If it did, there still would be an audience for philosophy, for example, and for poetry, but there is not.
A college diploma (in contrast to most doctoral degrees) also does not by itself signify that someone has acquired a vendable set of economic skills--the litmus test of most parents paying the bills these days. The current recession displays how inadequate a college degree has become, with your average espresso barista boasting a bachelor's degree in English literature theory or sociology. Slowly the frustration is growing among the young as they realize that they have not just been indulged, but cheated.
A college degree doesn't even mean that students are smarter, rather than merely older, than when they arrived as freshmen. Surveys show, for example, that some seniors know less about the U.S. Constitution and the American form of government (crucial knowledge for a responsible citizen in a republic that subsidizes these students' education) than do their first year counterparts.
But what our education system does accomplish in the college years is to provide increasingly good livings for tenured professors, largely trivial journals that publish their trivial writing on navel-gazing trivial subjects, and layers of administrators to create and manage forms.
The higher ed bubble is pricked in a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Breifus that is reviewed today in the Wall Street Journal.
Before readers complain that the article and the book (and my comments above) constitute an overly sweeping indictment, let us all acknowledge that there are some fine colleges and that even the bad ones have a some good professors. A few professors can even be called outstanding, whether on teaching or research grounds, or both.
Okay? But let the reader also acknowledge that the institution of college education is ripe for reform. If nothing else, the customers will demand it.
Leave a comment