The Decline of College
For the last 70 years,
American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upward mobility and
a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common
core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the
concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.
The result was a more
skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be
true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar
world rankings. Yet most everywhere else, something went terribly wrong with
that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or
antithetical to their original mission.
Tenure — virtual lifelong
job security for full-time faculty after six years — was supposed to protect
free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous
than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded?
Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the
incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.
The university is often a
critic of private enterprise for its supposed absence of fairness and equality.
The contemporary campus, however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time
faculty far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully
tenured professors with the same degrees.
The four-year campus
experience is simply vanishing. At the California State University system, the
largest university complex in the world, well under 20 percent of students
graduate in four years despite massive student aid. Fewer than half graduate in
six years.
Administrators used to come
from among the top faculty, who rotated a few years from teaching and
scholarship to do the unenviable nuts-and-bolts work of running the university.
Now, administrators rarely, if ever, teach. Instead, they became part of a
high-paid, careerist professional caste — one that has grown exponentially. In
the CSU system, their numbers have exploded in recent years — a 221 percent
increase from 1975 to 2008. There are now more administrators in that system
than full-time faculty.
College acceptance was
supposed to be a reward for hard work and proven excellence in high school, not
a guaranteed entitlement of open admission. Yet more than half of incoming
first-year students require remediation in math and English during, rather than
before attending, college. That may explain why six years and hundreds of
millions of dollars later, about the same number never graduate.
The idea of deeply indebted
college students in their 20s without degrees or even traditional reading and writing
skills is something relatively new in America. Yet aggregate student debt has
reached a staggering $1 trillion. More than half of recent college graduates —
who ultimately support the huge college industry — are either unemployed or
working in jobs that don’t require bachelor’s degrees. About a quarter of those
under 25 are jobless and still seeking employment.
Apart from our elite
private schools, the picture of our postmodern campus that emerges is one of
increasing failure — a perception hotly denied on campus but matter-of-factly
accepted off campus, where most of the reforms will have to originate.
What might we expect in the
future? Even more online courses will entice students away from campuses
through taped lectures from top teachers, together with interactive follow-ups
from teaching assistants — all at a fraction of current tuition costs.
Technical schools that dispense with therapeutic, hyphenated “studies” courses
will offer students marketable skills far more cheaply and efficiently. Periodic
teaching contracts, predicated on meeting teaching and research obligations,
will probably replace lifelong tenure.
Public attitudes will also
probably change. The indebted social-science major in his mid-20s with or
without a diploma will not enjoy the old cachet accorded a college-educated
elite — at least in comparison with the debt-free, fully employed, and
higher-paid electrician, plumber, or skilled computer programmer without a
college degree.
Real skills will matter
more than mere college attendance or a brand. New competency in national tests
in math, science, and English will be considered by employers to be a far
better barometer of past achievement and future potential than the mere
possession of a now-suspect university transcript.
As in any revolution, much
good will be lost along with the bad. The traditional university used to offer
a holistic four-year experience for motivated and qualified students in a
landscape of shared inquiry and tolerance. The Internet and for-profit trade
schools can never replace that unique intellectual and social landscape.
Yet because professors of
the traditional arts and sciences could or would not effectively defend their
disciplines or the classical university system, agenda-driven politicians,
partisan ideologues, and careerist technocrats absorbed them.
The college experience
morphed into a costly sort of prolonged adolescence, a political arena and a
social laboratory — something quite different from a serious place to acquire
both practical and humanistic knowledge.
No wonder that it is now
financially unsustainable and going the way of the dinosaurs.
No comments:
Post a Comment