Higher education should be about outcomes. Not about doing time!

I sometimes semi-seriously joke with students that an 18 year old has to choose one from the following institutions as the option for at least four years:

The military institution,or
The penal institution, or
The mental institution, or
A higher education institution.

"You made the call to come here in order to avoid the other three" I joke, punctuating it with my muahaha.

We require them all to clock in and clock out somewhere, until they can be of legal drinking age (ok, drinking-age plus one!)

In higher education, we do not question why it has to be a four-year degree.  We do not question why every student has to go through the same process, even when we are fully aware that students differ in their abilities.

It is a mass production factory system--yes, that, too, is sometimes what I tell students.  How much ever things have changed in "the real world," we dare not question some of the fundamental units of higher education.

Like, why an academic year is only thirty weeks.  A century ago, the logic was that students were much needed as labor in the farms during the precious summer months of up in the latitudes here.  The old folks talk about picking one fruit variety after another throughout the months.  It is a different world now, and even the summer farm labor demand is now met by legal and illegal immigrants.  So, what do students then do in the summer months?  That is increasingly becoming a difficult blank to fill.

We require all the students to spend the same amount of time in order to develop and demonstrate competency in whatever that we require.  Even though in any class it is clear that some students can develop the competence in the subject in a few weeks less than a term, while others might need more than a term.

Could it be that we continue to engage in such practices because:

Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are a solution.

I came across that marvelous statement, cynical as it is, in this essay on literature and the publishing industry.  I suppose that quote, from the social thinker Clay Shirky who apparently has that as a rule named after him, can be applied in many, many contexts; such is the world in which we live!

Thus,

The military institution tries to preserve the problems to which it is a solution.
The penal institution tries to preserve the problems to which it is a solution.
The mental institution tries to preserve the problems to which it is a solution.

Why should we expect higher educational institutions be any different, eh!