F*k College!

I have emailed the newspaper editor the following ...

In a presidential campaign season that has mostly been a farcical political theatre at best, and one that seems to be on track for a terribly tragic ending on November 8th, serious discussions of policies have been sorely lacking. Every once in a while, policy statements are uttered, but they are never engagingly discussed and debated by the wannabes nor their surrogates.

One of those statements was this: “College is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job.”

If only we had at least talked about that!

Over the past few years, the country’s political leaders and educators alike have been manically promoting—practically mandating—four years of college, for free, for everybody. But why this college conscription?

For productive employment, a four-year college is certainly not the only pathway. As my neighbors often like to remind me, their successful small business is not a product of any four-year degree. Among the owners and the employees, only one has a four-year degree. And, most employees earn more than what many recent college diploma holders can only dream of.

Perhaps the spectacular entertainment provided by NCAA football and basketball is what draws most to college. If the taxpayer-subsidized NCAA sports did not exist, most teens would flee from college, and from courses like the ones I teach, and towards the trades.

Even the very notion of a four-year college is an anachronism. More than ever before, the young will have to be lifelong learners if they want to succeed in the world of employment. They might have to regularly reinvent themselves in new careers, some of which are yet to be created. They will have to keep up with new ideas and technology—if they cannot do it on their own, then they will need formal training. This is applicable to those going to the trades as well.

The unhealthy fixation on four years of college triggers even more unhealthy policy approaches. We actively encourage high school students to begin to earn college credits even as they are worrying about their first pimples. We convey to students a horribly distorted idea that they need to be done with education at the earliest so that they can move on to the “real world.” We develop measures on how successful colleges are in moving students along in the pipeline—we critically examine the rates at which students graduate within four, five, or six years and longer.

I would rather have colleges and universities emphasizing to students the importance of lifelong learning. Taking six or seven years should be lauded, as long as students are simultaneously gaining valuable real world experiences. Perhaps we ought to even encourage the less interested students to take a break after a year or two in college, in order to experience the world—whether it is as baristas or as legal-aides or as farm workers—and then return to learn more, which will be an example of the continuous lifelong education that will characterize their lives.

We need to talk about this, instead of merely keeping up with the latest dramatic act in the political theatre.

Of course college guarantees jobs ... for academics and administrators!

In its editorial, the Editorial Board of the NY Times has a powerful sentence, which is consistent with what I have been writing here (and in op-eds) for years:

the familiar assumption — graduate from college and prosperity will follow — has been disproved in this century.

I have been warning students about that broken relationship ... for years.  The American Dream is not a guarantee, when all over the world people are working hard to achieve their own versions of the American Dream.  But, hey, nobody listens to me :(

The editorial continues with this:

The problem is that the economy does not produce enough jobs that require college degrees. Private-sector white-collar jobs can increasingly be moved offshore and automated, while public-sector jobs that require degrees, notably teaching, have been decimated by deep layoffs and feeble hiring. Business investment and consumer spending have suffered in the busts of recent decades, and government spending has not picked up the slack, leading to chronic shortfalls in demand for goods, services and employees. One sign of the downshift is that much of the recent job growth has been in lower-paying occupations. Worse, there is little evidence of a turnaround. In the past five years, postings for jobs that do not require a college degree have steadily outpaced postings for those that do.
The result is lower-quality jobs and lower pay for college graduates. Take, for example, the roughly one-third of college graduates who spend their work lives in jobs that do not require a degree. 

I have been worrying about this forever, it seems like.  As I noted recently, quoting from my op-ed from four years ago, "I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated."  But, who listens to me,  right?

In fact,  in the summer of 2007, I attacked the college hype itself--the first of my op-eds along these lines was published, and the title says it all: "Does U.S. oversell college?"  To which an academic in town authored in the same paper a knee-jerk response filled with cliches about the virtues of a college degree and while attacking me.  Oh well ...  Apparently he listened to me!

Reading those sentences in the NY Times convinces that me all the more that if I, a nobody at a podunk university, have been correctly reading the tea leaves for years, then certainly the truth was right there, staring at all of us.  Either we chose to ignore it--denial--or it was one heck of a conspiracy to hide the truth that is finally coming out into the open.  "I told you so" is of no use at this point!

I do a full-disclosure of sorts in classes and when talking with students.  I tell them that earning an A in my class would not even get them a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  It will not directly lead to a job, I tell them.  But, if they paid attention to my approach, which might seem like Mr. Miyagi's "wax on, wax off" instructions to the kid who wanted to learn karate, then it will all work out, I assure them.  But then--you know what is coming now--nobody listens to me!

Source

The purpose of college education is ...

Remember those "fill in the blanks" part of the tests from elementary school years?  What I didn't know was that life is all about filling in the blanks.  Not only my own life but our collective lives as well.

So, yes, go ahead and collect your thoughts on how you would will fill in the blanks that would complete the following:

The purpose of college education is ___________________

Now that you have filled out the blank, because you are a good student (otherwise you won't be reading this in the first place!) do you think your response will be the same as everybody else's?

Do not merely shake your head to signify a no, especially if you are doing that strange Indian head bobbing move;, this American can't anymore figure out whether it is a yes or a no, dammit! ;)  Ah, yes, it is such a sense of humor (huh!) that helps me navigate such issues where our views--yours, mine, and everybody else's--differ, and boy do they widely differ.

Consider this, for instance, in which a technology entrepreneur gripes about computer science students and the university curriculum:

The thing I don’t look for in a developer is a degree in computer science. University computer science departments are in miserable shape: 10 years behind in a field that changes every 10 minutes. Computer science departments prepare their students for academic or research careers and spurn jobs that actually pay money. They teach students how to design an operating system, but not how to work with a real, live development team.
There isn’t a single course in iPhone or Android development in the computer science departments of Yale or Princeton. Harvard has one, but you can’t make a good developer in one term.

It is almost like a Rorschach test; if you agreed with that excerpt, then that says a lot about your views of college education.  If you disagreed, then it means something very different.  So, did you agree or disagree with that?  You thought you would scan through this post and I am making you work, eh!

The writer is the son of a computer scientist at, ahem, Yale!  The son continues with his gripe in the Wall Street Journal:

Today we insist on higher-education for everything—where a high-school diploma for a teacher or a reporter was once adequate, a specialized degree in education or journalism is now required.

Did you catch that?  He believes that a high school diploma would be enough to be a teacher?  Hmmm, along those lines, I suppose my daughter's years of schooling and training to be a neurosurgeon is a waste of time and a high school GED can do that lobotomy? ;)

Anyway, you were saying, Mr. Entrepreneur?

A serious alternative to the $100,000 four-year college degree wouldn’t even need to be accredited—it would merely need to teach students the skills that startups are desperate for, and that universities couldn’t care less about.

Education that increasingly wants to serve only the interests of commerce is what William Deresiewicz takes on in his essay on how college sold its soul to the market.  Deresiewicz writes:

Only the commercial purpose now survives as a recognized value. Even the cognitive purpose, which one would think should be the center of a college education, is tolerated only insofar as it contributes to the commercial.

And the tech entrepreneur questions even that commercial purpose that colleges aim for!

Deresiewicz continues:

All this explains a new kind of unhappiness I sense among professors. There are a lot of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. That kind of contact is becoming unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else. Students will come to your office — rushing in from one activity, rushing off to the next — to find out what they need to do to get a better grade. Very few will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way. 

I find it disturbingly strange that we are so intent on reducing higher education to nothing but serving the commercial and technological interests, which these days are pretty much the same.  The net result?

If college is seldom about thinking and learning anymore, that’s because very few people are interested in thinking and learning, students least of all.

So, how do all these compare with how you had filled those blanks?  ;)

Source

The end of liberal education. Has it already happened?

First this news update from the state, er, Republic of Texas, where Governor Rick Perry led the charge on making higher education more efficient and cost-effective:

Almost half of undergraduate programs at public colleges and universities in Texas are in danger of being eliminated because they do not meet a new state requirement of graduating at least 25 students every five years, UPI reported. ... Raymund Paredes, the Texas commissioner of higher education, said he would not back exceptions to the rule. "In this budgetary environment, we can't afford the luxury of programs not producing graduates," he told UPI. "It's up to academic departments faced with closure of programs to salvage them."

So, if physics is one of those programs that students are not gravitating towards, then where are the enrollments?  In professional and vocational programs--from nursing to criminal justice. And that generic "business" major.

This is the trend all across, and the university where I teach is no exception--business, criminal justice, teaching, nursing are the kind of programs that churn out graduates.

Yet, my employer describes the university as "a steadily emerging as a leading comprehensive public liberal arts institution," making me wonder, and worry, where exactly we champion the liberal arts!

The traditional liberal arts colleges are dying, and it is one hell of a rapid decline in their intellectual health and well being:

Students who major in liberal arts subjects are becoming fewer and fewer. Fifty-one of the 225 colleges had more than 50 percent vocational majors. Do we count those as those liberal arts colleges?

Truth in advertising might require universities, including mine, not to market themselves as "liberal arts" institutions when a majority of their graduates are not students who graduated in what would be considered the traditional liberal arts.  But then the notion of colleges and universities being truthful might be asking for too much anymore, eh :)

I, with my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, am not opposed to professional and vocation education at all. There is a place for that, and I resonate with this:

I’m not against vocational education; I’m suspicious of how good it is. I know for a certainty that one does not learn how to be a lawyer in law school. Do you learn how to be a parks and recreation person by taking parks and recreation courses? It is better to work at place as an unpaid volunteer even if you make nothing. You’ll still be better off than if you paid tuition. The problem is everyone says, “But you need the credential to get in the door.” Credentials are getting more important as the number of people looking for jobs is getting larger.

I have written in the past that "higher education" has now been downgraded into some kind of a job credentialing service.  I would way prefer that it is not viewed and treated that way, and I hope that external forces would actually take this credentialing aspect away from the mission of education and knowing.  That moment might be much closer than one would imagine:

The day when other organizations besides colleges provide a nondegree credential to signify learning might not be as far off as we think. One interesting project on this front is an effort to create “digital badges,” which would allow people to demonstrate their skills and knowledge to prospective employers without necessarily having a degree.
Badges could recognize, for example, informal learning that happens outside the classroom; “soft skills,” such as critical thinking and communication; and new literacies, such as aggregating information from various sources and judging its quality. And in a digital age, the badge could include links back to documents and other artifacts demonstrating the work that led to earning the stamp of approval.
...
At the announcement in Washington, the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, called badges a “game-changing strategy” and said his agency would join with the Department of Veterans Affairs to award $25,000 for the best badge prototype that serves veterans looking for well-paying jobs.
Under a badge system, colleges would no longer be the sole providers of a credential. While badges could be awarded by traditional colleges, they could also be given out by professional organizations, online and open-courseware providers, companies, or community groups.

Welcome to a brave new world of higher education!