Higher Education's Marketing Army Launches Counterattack

I knew it couldn't be long before the higher education marketing army started to counterattack the media's recent, powerful excoriations of colleges for the horrendously low value they provide.

Higher education's first major salvo is a study reported in the New York Times, authored by Anthony Carnevale (pictured right,) one of higher education's long-standing insiders and apologists. He argues, deceptively, for higher education's value while skirting inconvenient truths about the hundreds of thousands of weak students admitted to so-called four-year colleges.

As I've reported previously (probably ad nauseam at this point--here's a link to an NPR interview and article,) most such students don't graduate even if they're given eight years. And because of the elitist, real-world-irrelevant arcana so heavily taught in higher education, even many students who graduate grow nearly not at all in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc., nor become employed in a job they wouldn't be qualified for without college. And of course, there's the opportunity costs: what the students could have been doing if they hadn't been spending the enormous sums of money, time, and assaults to their self-esteem in college, for example, in an apprenticeship program or learning entrepreneurship at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur.

As I've also written previously, the federal government should mandate that all colleges prominently post an externally audited report card on themselves disclosing key information that prospective students can use to decide whether a college, indeed any college, is--given their high school record--the wisest post-high-school choice. And of course, colleges' being forced to report their shockingly bad product would pressure them to improve and perhaps become the national treasure that the higher education marketing machine has led us to believe it is.

My Ten Worries About America and How I'd Address Each

Here is the latest iteration of my plan to reinvigorate America. It addresses job creation, health care,k-16 education, U.S. involvement in the Middle East, our electoral system, the national debt, taxation, ethnocentrism, ethics, political correctness, even an ethical approach to improving the gene pool.

Regular readers of this blog will find most of the ideas familiar. Indeed, it is a revision of an earlier post but hopefully it's better thought-through and presented. And this is video; the previous version was audio.

The video below is 12 minutes long. To read the transcript, click HERE.

Simplism: A New Alternative to Capitalism and Socialism

Both the capitalist and socialist systems are deeply flawed:

Capitalism results in too great a gap between a small wealthy class and a large and ever growing poor. Also, capitalism thrives on ever growing materialism, which promotes shallow values and environmental degradation.

Socialism doesn't work because it rewards the lazy and incompetent while punishing the hard-working and capable.

Of course, many countries use a hybrid of the two but I believe there's a need for a new approach. Here's my proposal for one. I call it simplism. It requires educating the public about three things:

1. the wisdom of our buying personal services rather than non-essential products. Our lives benefit more from such services as a tutor for our kids, assistant for ourselves, or a companion for our elders than from buying jewelry, new cars every few years, expensive vacations, big houses, etc.

Of course, if the public were to be less materialistic, many jobs creating and distributing those material goods would be lost, disproportionately to low-skill/low motivation workers. So for Simplism to work, I believe the government would need to create taxpayer-funded jobs for those unable to hold a private sector job. These jobs might include, under supervision, building housing, assisting in classrooms, cleaning up blighted neighborhoods, etc.

2. by reducing our spending to the truly important, we'd gain greater benefits than what our purchases would generate: we'd gain the freedom to do the sorts of work we want, the time to pursue our desired non-remunerative pursuits, and the peace of mind that comes from the absence of big unpaid bills.

3. the importance of learning to be an entrepreneur, to run your own business. That:

• avoids your needing to be a wage slave, paid as little as the employer can get away with.
• provides greater job security than if employed by others.
  
• brings to the public better, faster, or less expensive products and services, thereby improving all of our lives.
  
• creates new jobs.
  

The skill of entrepreneurship may be as important as the 3 Rs. Therefore, I believe it should be taught k-16 as well as through entrepreneurship bootcamps that are available to all.

I welcome your reactions.

Reinventions: K-12 Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education.

The six points, without the helpful explanation in the video, are listed below.

My six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education:

1. Naturally gifted teachers could get a teaching license merely by teaching a demo lesson before a master teacher---no boring teaching education program required. Other candidates would complete a teacher training program provided by a school district's master teachers, not by university professors who have never been master K-12 teachers.

2. Classes should be grouped by ability. Efforts should be made to ensure that racism is not a factor in selection, and that students are moved up and down as appropriate.

3. The fact-larded curriculum should be delarded, replaced with big projects--for example, developing a model city, building a rocket, creating an online student newspaper, etc.

4. The teacher's unions must be reined in. They've insisted that the best and worst teachers are paid the same--there's no better formula for ensuring that quality people don't enter the profession. In addition, they have forced school districts to, after just two or three years, give teachers tenure for life. To get rid of a teacher after getting tenure requires a long, expensive, painful undue process. Most principals decide it's just not worth the massive documentation and a dog fight with the union lawyers.

5. Use dream-team-taught courses, especially for difficult-to-teach courses such as algebra. These would be developed by a team of nation's best instructors under the U.S. Office of Education's auspices and distributed free on the Net to all school districts. A local teaching assistant would be in the actual classroom to provide the human touch. Using dream-team-taught classes would enable all students, rich and poor, to receive world-class instruction. Nothing would more improve the quality of education, but again, the unions would balk.

6. The school year should be lengthened. Currently it consists only of five hours a day for 175 days.

Reinventions: Undergraduate Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing undergraduate education.

For those who'd rather just read the transcript of the video, it appears below.

REINVENTIONS
Undergraduate Education
by Marty Nemko
(transcript of the above video)

In this video, I present my proposal for how to reinvent higher education. From Time to the New York Times, higher education is finally being called to task for its ever worsening value added. Students and families spend fortunes and so many don't graduate. A major study out of the University of Chicago, Academically Adrift, found that almost half of those who graduate grow so little in writing, reading, critical thinking and so on. So many of those students are able to only find a job they could have gotten without college. But these criticisms of higher ed ar e usually accompanied by only the vaguest or palliative of suggestions for improvement. Here, I present a six-point plan for higher education's reinvention:

1. Colleges should be required to post a Report Card on itself. If each car tire is required to mold its treadline, temperature, and traction rates into its sidewall, should not colleges, one of our largest and most important purchases be required to post their graduation rates and learning growth amounts, broken down by student high school record? Shouldn't colleges be required to report the percentage of graduates within each major who are professionallly employed within a year of graduation? A substantive college report card prominent posted would enable students, counselors and families not only to pick the right college but to decide, if for that student, a wiser path might be a community college, an apprenticeship, a military, or on-the-job training, for example, learning how to run your own business at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur. After all, according to the U.S. Dept of Education, of the 200,000 students that so-called four year colleges admit each year, fewer than 1 in four graduate even if given 8 1/2 years. And of those who graduate, most do so with a very low GPA in a major unlikely to excite many employers, for example, sociology, physical education, or art rather than computer science, accounting, or engineering. A College Report Card is the least we can do--ensure informed consent for the consumer.

2. There should be two categories of professors: teaching professors and research professors. Universities find it more economical to have their professors do both, but the skills and interests required to teach the typical undergraduate are orthogonal to, the opposite of what's required to do publishable research. Teaching faculty should be selected and promoted on how well they can be transformative, inspirational instructors of undergraduates , not how well they can write a research proposal on the arcana that gets funded, of interest mainly to a few dozen other theoretically oriented PhDs.

3. All existing teaching faculty should be required to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp, consisting in part of master instructors videoing each participant teaching and providing individualized feedback. Any teaching faculty member who subsequently has a year of average student evaluations below a 4 on a 5 point scale should be required to successfully complete a remedial teaching bootcamp.

4 General education courses are the 10 to 15 courses that most colleges require to help ensure a well-rounded education, but which most students view as "courses to get out of the way." While it's true that life should be informed by the wisdom embeddeed in typical general educartion courses such as philosophy and literature, in fact, most young people simply cannot be convinced of that, so poor attendance, cheating, inattention, and minimal learning is more the norm than the exception. Rather than going through the motions, realism dictates that we revise the general education curriculum to focus more on issues of more immediate concern to the vast majority of undergraduates: public speaking, financial literacy, practical problem solving, entrepreneurship, practical ethics, interpersonal communication, career-finding and job-landing, etc.

5. Use Dream-Team-Taught courses. Especially for widely taught and difficult courses such as calculus and organic chemstry, the U.S. Dept of Education should fund development of highly-interactive, immersive courses team-taught on video, disseminated online by a dream team of the nation's finest instructors. The courses would be made available free to all colleges. This would save the colleges money, enabling them, hopefully, to lower tuition, and more important would ensure that all students from the most poorly funded college to Harvard would receive world-class instructor. A university could elect to provide a professor or teaching assistant on site to provide the personal touch or allow students to complete the dream-team-taught courses at home, thereby saving the need for classroom buildings and/or allowing colleges to serve more students with minimal additional expense.

6. the notion of the traditional country-club-like campus is obsolte. Not only does it contribute to enormous cost, it is to the green values espoused on most universities. I believe that most campuses could be shrunk by 80% with little or no loss in quality of experience, perhaps even a gain. In addition to the aforementioned dream-team-taught courses, which students could complete at home, in-person classes could be taught in professors' homes that sit vacant while professors trek to campus, try to find parking spots on campus, etc. Instead of building expensive swimming pools, big, expensive shrub-filled campuses, utlize pools at with local community centers, hotels, and so on. Campuses could be quite compact, consisting of just a streamlined administration building to accommodate a streamlined administration, a student activities building for student club meetings, concerts, and so on, and a reduced number of classroom buildings.

To summarize, the six points in my plan to reinvent higher education are: 1. Require all colleges to prominently post a College Report Card. 2. Have separate faculty for teaching and for research. 3. Require all faculty to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp. 4. Revise general education courses to reflect the content that most undergraduates are open to learning. 5. Use Dream-team-taught courses: Courses taught on interactive video, disseminated online by a dream-team of the nation's finest instructors, with an in-person teaching assistant locally to provide the human touch. 5. Streamline the enormously costly country-club campuses, which would enable colleges to cut student costs of attending dramatically. That's my reinvention of higher education. Thanks for watching. I'm Marty Nemko.

The Case that We're Headed for Economic Collapse

The scariest case I've yet read for why we're headed for economic collapse.

Reinventions: Political Campaign Reform

Here's a video of my proposed reinvention of our political campaign system.