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So can anyone surmise as to whether darrins is an opponent or proponent of higher education?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...+Commentary%29
By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
June 2, 2011
As this year's crop of college graduates leaves school, burdened with high levels of debt and entering a severely depressed job market, they may be asking themselves a fundamental question: Was college worth it?
And it's no wonder they're asking. Large numbers of the new graduates will face sustained periods of underemployment and low wages for years. Worse still, many of them were poorly prepared for the future, having spent four (or more) years of college with only modest academic demands that produced only limited improvement in the skills necessary to be successful in today's knowledge-based economy.
We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.
Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college. (What's up, Manny?)
The students themselves must bear some of the blame for this, of course. Improvement in thinking and writing skills requires academic engagement; simply hanging out on a college campus for multiple years isn't enough. Yet at many ins utions, that seems to be sufficient to earn a degree. At many schools, students can choose from a menu of easy programs and classes that allow them to graduate without having received a rigorous college education. Colleges are complicit, in that they reward students with high grades for little effort. Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average ulative GPA of 3.16.
To be sure, there were many exceptions to this dismal portrait of the state of undergraduate learning. Some academic programs and colleges are quite rigorous, and some students we followed pushed themselves and excelled. In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains. So too did students attending more selective colleges. In addition, at every college and university examined, we found some students who were applying themselves and learning at impressive levels.
These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality education.
In much of higher education, the problem is in part that undergraduate education is no longer a top priority. Instead of focusing on undergraduates and what they are learning, schools have come to care more about such things as admission yields, graduation rates, faculty research productivity, pharmaceutical patents, deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers and state-of-the-art athletic facilities complete with luxury boxes. Many ins utions favor priorities that can be boasted about in alumni magazines and admission brochures or that can help boost their scores in college rankings. Colleges have abandoned responsibility for shaping students' academic development and instead have come to embrace a service model that caters to satisfying students' expressed desires.
These trends have all added up to less rigor. California labor economists Philip Bab and Mindy Marks, for example, have do ented that full-time college students' time spent studying dropped in half between 1960 and today. Moreover, from 1970 to 2000, as colleges increasingly hired additional staff to attend to student social and personal needs, the percentage of professional employees in higher education who were faculty decreased from about two-thirds to around one-half. At the same time, through their professional advancement and tenure policies, schools encouraged faculty to focus more on research rather than teaching. When teaching was considered as part of the equation, student course assessments tended to be the method used to evaluate teaching, which tends to incentivize lenient grading and entertaining forms of instruction.
So how should this academic drift of our colleges and universities be addressed? Some have proposed introducing a federal accountability system. We are against such a move, as federal regulation would probably be counterproductive and include a large set of detrimental, unintended consequences.
Accountability in higher education rightly resides at lower levels of the system. College trustees have at the ins utional level the fiduciary responsibility to begin holding administrators accountable by asking: How are student learning outcomes and program quality being measured, and what is being done to address areas of concern that have been identified? Faculty must also take responsibility individually and collectively to define and ensure program quality and academic standards. Finally, student undergraduate cultures will have to change, with students themselves recognizing that they need more from college than a paper diploma and an expanded roster of Facebook friends.
So can anyone surmise as to whether darrins is an opponent or proponent of higher education?
The Next Bubble Is About to Burst: College Grads Face Dwindling Jobs and Mounting Loans
Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 face an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the rest of the population, according to data from the Economic Policy Ins ute. 2010's 18.4 percent rate for youth was the worst in the 60 years that economists have collected such data. ColorLines notes that in 2010, 8.4 percent of white college graduates were unemployed, 13.8 percent of Latino graduates, and a dismal 19 percent of black graduates.
Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren't worth the paper they're printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven't increased by anything close to that number -- not for the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.
mall wonder that many are calling the student loan crisis a bubble possibly worse than the credit card or housing bubbles. Small wonder that when polled by the Pew Research Center and the Chronicle of Higher Education, 57 percent of Americans said higher education doesn't provide a good value, and 75 percent said it is too expensive for most to afford. Yet the lucky graduates who do have jobs still make, on average, $20,000 a year more than those without degrees. It seems that higher education, as with so much else in this society, is turning into a way to keep those who already have money making more of it.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151149
I graduated a LONG time ago.
Did The Lobbyists Win? Education Dept. Issues Significantly Watered-Down Regulations For Subprime Schools
for-profit colleges — schools like the University of Phoenix or Kaplan University — have been collecting 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government while leaving their students buried in debt and with bleak job prospects.
The new regulations are intended to cut off higher education programs from federal money if too many of their students can’t find good jobs and default on their loans. However, after months of intense lobbying by the for-profit schools, their front groups, and conservative lawmakers, the new rules are significantly weaker than draft rules first proposed by the Education Department last year.
The for-profit industry is currently facing a probe by attorneys general in 10 states, and one of the industry’s biggest actors, the Education Management Corporation, is under investigation for allegedly illegal recruiting practices.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...-watered-down/
The answer will probably end up being an aftermarket testing company to put together something similar to the SAT to gauge what graduates do and don't know, and employers will make submission of the test results mandatory with their job application. Each employer would obviously have their own criteria fro what they were looking for and could evaluate the test results accordingly. Just too many college graduates that skated through and didn't learn .
Ah... It's a profit deal. Takes the pressure off. Get your weight guessed right here! Only a buck! Actual live weight guessing! Take a chance and win some crap!
The game changer is going to be distance learning (i.e. online course offerings), and I'm not talking about U. of Phoenix and their ilk. Right now over 90% of all four-year higher ed. ins utions offer some sort of distance learning courses. The cost savings to the school and the convenience for students are too big for both sides to resist.
That's a nice, dodgy answer you provided there.
It's easy, just check the latest GOP talking points. Teachers = overpaid. Schools = overfunded. Higher education: Mostly unnecessary, something that could be cut from the budget easily enough.
On what planet is that a GOP talking point?
Also, how are "for-profit", private universities part of any state budget?
Darrin, do you consider your critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability to be at a high level?
What's the average university of phoenix gpa? It seems like everyone who graduated from that diploma mill has like a 3.9 gpa.
If students find college too easy, God bless em. It ain't the university's fault they found nothing in it besides professional credentials, easy access to drugs and alcohol, and hook up opportunities.
(What is college for, etc....)
"private universities part of any state budget"
state? dunno,
but for-profit "universities" get nearly all their revenue from Pell Grants and other federal funds. The students mostly don't finish with a diploma, but with a lot of debt, and, if they get a diploma, find employers don't recognize the diploma as being credible indicator of an education or employability for a "college educated" position.
Absolutely true; credentials do not guarantee ap ude or skill.
The map is not the territory.
(Your comment echoes CC's remark about the need for professional post-collegiate evaluation of job applicants.)
The ins utions themselves recognize there is a huge disparity in learning in undergraduates, thus the need for NCAT's, LSAT's, GMAT's, etc.
I'm actually going to agree with the OP here. I do think that many degree plans - and especially those in the humanities - have a real lack of difficulty. I can't tell you how many of my fellow students' papers I've read and felt that their quality was extremely low. I mainly feel this is because many courses have relaxed the writing requirements and lowered the bar.
That being said, I don't think you can say the same for most courses in mathematics, computer sciences, engineering, and physical and life sciences. To date, the hardest course I've ever taken was a biology course taught at San Antonio College. The professor set the bar very high and if you didn't actually study and come to class prepared you were not going to do well. I was extremely impressed and I was glad to see someone putting the effort into make the class worthwhile.
I think thats somewhat true but I think the reason for those tests is that not every college graduate has the ability to go on to post graduate studies and this is another way of weeding them out just as the SAT/ACT is supposed to do the same regarding undrgraduate studies for high school graduates.
Oh, and Darrin directing the comment about critical thinking to me is about as laughable as things get. Darrin displays about as much critical thinking as my cat and my cat is about the dumbest animal I've ever owned.
"many courses have relaxed the writing requirements"
This starts in HS. English composition should be a required course, two years, 10th, 11th grades.
Yes, it definitely starts in HS. Its not just writing either. The vast majority of kids entering college at SAC have to take remedial courses in reading, writing, and math. I can't fathom how these people are getting diplomas if they can't do the flat out basics.
Having to catch so many kids up is a serious drain on public resources. This should be accomplished in HS.
There's a reason our country is where it is in the education rankings.
Agreed. Composition is an excellent tool with which to whittle critical thinking. Having to stop, think, and parse a sentence appears to be a lost art.
reminds me of the old saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink"
Teysha agreeing with Butons is like a sign of the apocalypse. Good thing that post didn't happen on May 20th.
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