The Ponzi scheme called higher education is "Academically Adrift"

Today is one of those days that I am wearing dress-shirt and a tie.  Oh, yes, am wearing pants too :)  Students are bound to be surprised.  Some faculty colleagues, the ones who talk to me (editor: there are a few, still? awshutup!) might wisecrack that perhaps somebody died, more so because of the color of the tie--black.  If such a remark comes up, my response is ready: yes, I am mourning--the death of higher education.

Here is one more reason to add to the list--this one resulting from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) study:

Forty-five percent of students made no gains on the CLA during their first two years in college. Thirty-six percent made no gains over the entire four years. They learned nothing. On average, students improved by less than half a standard deviation in four years. "American higher education," the researchers found, "is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."

Apparently the worst culprits include some of the fastest growing majors across the US--"business"

Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

Makes sense, give that it is the world of business that taught us about Ponzi schemes :)

So, who gets messed up the most in this scheme?

Students saddled with thousands of dollars in debt and no valuable skills, certainly. Even worse, workers who never went to college in the first place, languishing in their careers for lack of a college credential. To them, the higher-education system must seem like a gigantic confidence game, with students and colleges conspiring to produce hollow degrees that nonetheless define the boundaries of opportunity.

Terrible.  Any way out?

Federal and state lawmakers should stop providing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies based purely on enrollment, and should start holding colleges accountable for learning. Lawmakers also need to shore up crumbling budgets, restrain college prices, and mitigate higher education's growing dependence on debt.
Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.
It has been a conspiracy of convenience. This study should bring the "trust us" era of American higher education to a close.

I like his polite phrasing--"conspiracy of convenience" .... Ponzi scheme is straightforward ;)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lot more to say on this--all related to the latest addition to research and books critiquing the state of higher education.  Check them out here and click here for an excerpt from the book