Plumbers, philosophers, and ... pundits like me ;)

I plan to send a slightly edited version of this to the editor of that other paper where I send my commentaries.  Readers outside the US, especially this impatient guy, should note that this is about the American higher education system ;)

“School teaches you only to be better at school” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment. The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

In a highly entertaining and sarcastic TED talk back in 2006—way before “TED talk” became a part of the common regular vocabulary—Sir Ken Robinson noted that “you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” The student, too, was channeling Robinson’s point. Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists out of students, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value-added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that it is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The myth persists, despite all the research, that there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others are. That is, of course, the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs—like elementary school teaching. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best—unless one wants to be a college professor.

Even the composition of the academic credits towards a college degree gives this away—for instance, while a minimum of 180 credits are required to graduate from Western Oregon University, a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it differently, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be easily wrapped up within a year and a half.

Preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important—skills like writing, thinking, researching, and more—are gained through a broad array of topics outside of one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about as well.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young—and, hence, the country’s future—the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than a geography major, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers . Instead, society—especially the faculty and administrators across Oregon’s colleges and universities—needs to carefully monitor whether students are mastering those skills that are prized by employers. Else, it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Academia is only one step away from a degree in basket-weaving!

A few years ago, when enrollment was beginning to rapidly increase at the university where I work, my fellow faculty got excited enough to begin to offer bizarre courses, and academic majors and minors.  After I realized that the "process" to review proposals was nothing more than "you scratch my back, and I will yours," and more so after learning the hard way that raising questions only made me the enemy, I started disconnecting, as much as possible, from the campus committee processes.

A tragic contrast to such an approach to crazy curriculum?  Way back, when I was still involved in the committee "process," I argued that we needed to offer courses for students to understand Islam and the Middle East.  We had practically nothing on these, even a couple of years after the events of 9/11 and the wars we had launched.  One would think that these topics are far more important than "sports management."  Yet, "sports management" sailed through, while my proposal was severely criticized and shot down even within the Social Science Division!   

If one is willing to overlook the ideological framework of the host-source, then it will be difficult to disagree with the following comments:

Degrees in sports administration and pop culture? Higher education seems to have drifted so far from its fundamental charge that, today, apparently anything can qualify for degree status.

What an injustice this is to students, who innocently believe that if a university thinks a subject important enough to make it into a degree, then they will be well-served by enrolling in it. There are those who blame such students for their bad choices. I am not one of them. I taught in universities for many years and I know the deference paid by most students to the standards articulated by their institution. After all, these are still kids, for the most part; offering them degrees in “pop culture” is perilously close to child abuse. Any academic or administrator who truly believes in both the employability and intellectual respectability of a degree in pop culture is both deceived and deceiving.

There was a time, not that long ago, when universities had a proper reverence for the life of the mind, a reverence that would have made them ashamed to offer such empty-headed degree programs to their students.

Apparently, that time has passed.

Faculty, who are in charge of the curriculum, cook up whatever fancies them, and most administrators do not care to raise tough questions as long as there is enrollment.  Nobody cares whether any of these shenanigans serves the cause of educating students.  For way too long, students have come to be treated as ATMs, and finally the public is beginning to wake up.  The unfortunate part though: as far as I can see from the inside, well, it is business as usual :(

The decline of the English department

I blogged about this a few months ago, and my reasoning was that among other things,

the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students.

And this is a deep, deep disappointment for me. Because, I have gained so much from reading, and re-reading books. This past summer, I re-read Fathers and Sons after almost 25 years. It was many, many times more profound than it was when I first read it. And then I read Kafka. Simply awesome short stories. And, how can I forget One Hundred Years of Solitude,, which I read again after quite a few years.

Anyway, Professor William Chace has a lengthy essay in the American Scholar, and is disappointed with how English, and the rest of the humanities, is more a liability now than an asset. Chace writes,

at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

Yes, sir!
By the way, where then are the college students headed, if they are bypassing the humanities?

With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

It is a similar story with geography too. We don't offer the kind of courses that many students would like to take, because we think they are all "old school" and not some cutting edge courses. Ahem, no wonder that our fate is not very different from that of the folks in English.

The two largest majors at our campus? Business and Criminal Justice. Kind of interesting that pair, eh! One set of graduates can throw the other set of graduates in jail. muahahaha!!!