A Particularly Devastating Critique of Colleges

The spate of indictments of higher education continues, indeed accelerates. This article by a professor is one of the more devastating.

Will the Everyone-to-College Fad Finally Fade?

I've long argued that, for many people, a degree is not worth the time and money: too little of value is learned, for example, in improved thinking skills. And the long-advertised income advantage of getting a degree is withering in our global economy.

As former Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Alan Blinder says, soon, any job whose work product can be shipped over the Internet, will be. That means that mainly jobs such as plumber, electrician, and chef will be offshore-proof. The good news is that those careers don't require the time and cost of a college degree.

I've long written that we send too many students to college, and now, my position is gaining support, for example, the just published book, Real Education and an op-ed in today's Christian Science Monitor

I believe it's worth pursuing a bachelor's degree only if you meet these requirements:
1. You love academic learning or want to pursue a career that definitely requires a college degree, for example, nursing.
2. Without the structure of school, you'd be too undisciplined to do a thorough job search or start a business.
3. Are rich enough to afford a four-year college's sticker price or poor enough to get a lot of CASH financial aid. (Community colleges are often the smartest choice--the best teaching for the lowest price.)

One of these alternatives may, for you or someone you love, be a wiser choice:

• An apprenticeship. This site will help you find the right one.
• Learn how to run your own small business by taking a job, any job, at the elbow of a successful small business owner who is willing to mentor you. You'll also learn a lot about starting a small business at www.sba.gov.
  
• A short NON-degree career-prep program at a community college.
• The military, which offers quality training for a surprisingly large number of careers.
  

Should Colleges be More Accountable?

A few weeks ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education published my article, America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.

One of that article’s contentions is that each college’s student recruitment materials be required to include a report card containing such information as graduation rates and average student growth in thinking skills, writing, etc. disaggregated by SAT score bands.

I’ve been pleased that the article has generated national interest: It has been republished in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, and I was interviewed about it on a number of shows including National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I’ve received so many supportive emails from professors, administrators, students, and former students.

The article has also generated many responses in the Chronicle’s Forum, not all positive. In this blog post, I list the major criticisms of my call for a required college report card and my response to each criticism:

Criticism #1: “Surely teaching isn’t poor at teaching-oriented institutions, of which there are thousands. In my R1 department, the quality of teaching by top-notch research profs is amazingly (emphasis mine) good, with a few glaring exceptions.”

My Response
Here are my criteria for “amazing” teaching. How many faculty members could honestly describe themselves as “amazing?”

— Providing instruction that will cause significant growth in the critical competencies:

— thinking skills

— writing skills

— responsible citizenship

— information literacy (for example, competent use of libraries, Google, etc)

— an understanding of the scientific method

— the ability to think probabilistically

— the ability to estimate accurately

— an appreciation of iconic music and art through the ages

— an appreciation of the universal themes in literature and the major definitions and tensions within, for example, love, jealousy, ambition, greed, alienation, the meaning of life, fear, prejudice, death, etc.

— Often using immersive activities such as simulations, role plays, and debates, which increase the likelihood of growth in those competencies.

— The willingness to be truly available, one-on-one, to students as intellectual and emotional mentors. That means the clichéd but invaluable long talks, walks, coffees, and dinners with students, asking them questions, for example, about their search for meaning, career, responsible citizenship, wisdom, etc.

From where I sit, that is the standard to which we should aspire. And if teaching faculty members don’t have the time or ability to be “amazing,” colleges need to change the bases on which teaching faculty are hired, provided tutelage, and promoted.

Criticism #2: “Is it colleges’ fault if students are bored? Shouldn’t they be taking more responsibility for their educations?” (My article cited the Higher Education Research Institute national study that found that 44.6% of freshmen at four-year colleges were frequently bored in class.)

My response
It is the admissions committee’s fault for admitting severely underprepared students, who are far more likely to be bored. (Wouldn’t you be bored as a student in a class for which you were severely underprepared?)

And faculty must take responsibility for not boring the fully qualified. Faculty has an obligation to choose content that reasonably qualified undergraduate students would find valuable, presented in interactive, engaging ways to ensure that they, at least, retain the critical learnings listed above.

Criticism #3: Requiring colleges to administer a test of value-added is a bad idea: It wouldn’t measure the important things and/or would cost too much to administer.

My Response
The Collegiate Learning Assessment, a non-multiple-choice, computer-administered test of reasoning, problem solving, and writing, has been widely recommended by higher education reform commissions and cogently defended in “Collegiate Learning Assessment: Facts and Fantasy,” Evaluation Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2007, pp 415-439.

Of course, no test measures everything, but each institution’s administering an exam such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment to a random sample of freshmen and then again to those students as seniors would provide a cost-effective index of a college’s value-added. Of course, the sample quality would be diminished by the fact that colleges will vary in the percentage and characteristics of the tested freshmen who left the college before their senior year. Nonetheless, it would be a most useful tool for comparing colleges and for helping a college to evaluate its effectiveness.

Another Feeble Defense of College

I have serious problems with David Leonhardt's article in today's New York Times: "A Diploma's Worth: Ask Her."

1, He paints with a too-broad brush: He fails to acknowledge that the hundreds of thousands of college freshmen at four-year colleges who graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class, drop out at enormous rates: According to the U.S. Dept. of Education, only 1/3 graduate even if given 8 1/2 years,

2. He defined success only in economic terms. College students learn frighteningly little. According to a 2006 Pew study, half of all college seniors score below the "proficient" level, which means they can't understand a newspaper editorial!

The value-added learning of college is so small relative to the opportunity cost--what they could have been doing with the time and money had they not been sitting through arcane classes, getting drunk in student housing, etc. For example, one could be apprenticing an the elbow of a successful entrepreneur or tradesperson while avocationally becoming an activist citizen by blogging and joining meetup groups.

3. He calls for more funding of colleges. Colleges are extraordinarily well funded. What they need --as he does mention--is more accountability. That is the central thrust of my just-published article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: America's Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor's Degree.

4. He accepts uncritically the horrifically misleading statistic that women earn 77 cents on the dollar. FOR THE SAME WORK, as documented in the book Why Men Earn More, women and men are paid essentially equally.

5. He celebrates the increase in the percentage of women obtaining college degrees without even acknowledging, let alone being concerned about the fact that in the class of 2008, only 1/3 of the college graduates are men, which will devastate them in the job market. If women or minorities were to have the deficit, the article would likely call for a massive increase in effort to help them. But when men suffer the deficit, we merely celebrate women's accomplishments.