Apparently, college is a waste of time. Who knew? A newly released study shows that college student make little to no gains in learning over the course of their first two years in college and spend more time socializing that actually studying. People are shaking their heads and claiming to be shocked, shocked I say at such news, but this guy isn't and I'm with him. We don't really have an educational system, per say in many respects- it's more like a social experience with large dollops of knowledge served up to kids like mashed potatos in the school cafeteria. The opportunity is there to learn, if you want to, but the main focus is on the 'experience' whatever that particularly fluffy concept means to you.
For some people, the experience will remain the most important thing- and some of those people will have the cash to bankroll their experience, but for a lot of people, the emphasis on experience over education will do them a disservice that they will literally spend the rest of their adult lives paying for. Something's gotta change if we want to preserve high quality university education for the future and more to the point, make it accessible for all.
Some thoughts:
1. Reduce Administrative Bloat- I know I'm not the first to say this, so it's not very original, but people are catching on: witness the proposed tuition cap that's being proposed in Des Moines right now to keep State Universities from passing on their cuts to students. Nice nod towards the student, but it needs to be followed up with a house cleaning of excessive bureaucracy at the top. Make our Universities about students first, administrators last.
2. Price By Degree: To me, the logical step to take is to tie the price of a degree into the type of earnings of a student can be reasonably expected to get by gaining said degree. Doctors, Lawyers, Engineering, anyone in the hard sciences that tend to have less fluffy standards than the humanities have to go through weedout courses and get put through the ringer to get their degrees. Obviously, they'll earn more over a lifetime, so they can afford to pay more. Conversely, because if you really want to study and get a major in Early Japanese Haiku, we shouldn't shit all over your dream, a poetry major would be, I assume, likely to earn a lot less. The length of time a degree takes could also vary as well- who says a BA in Poetry has to take 4 years? This means costs of education would no longer be based around arbitrary prices set by Universities, it would be priced around a student's future earnings and their likely ability to repay their educational debt- which would be more equitable for students, especially since student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
3. Make College Matter: If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't change much, but I would change this: my gen ed courses would have been taken at a community college and THEN I would have transferred to the U to get my degree. It would have been cheaper- but I think we can go one step further and take a leaf out of MIT's brilliant opencourseware initiative and do this: design a pool of statewide general education prerequistes that are completely free AND online completely with all the usual bells and whistles you can handle- and here's the kicker: demand excellence in return. Dangle the college experience in front of the kids for free, but make 'em work for it. If they can't get past the free gen eds, then how are they could go get into college and survive? Designed the right way, this could be an open portal to weeding out kids that simply don't belong in a college.
4. Tenure: You might have to wait awhile on this but ending bullshit tenure rules would be nice- however, I'd wait until that notion catches fire with other states before seriously pursuing it. If we end tenure too soon, then the best and brightest will bypass our universities and go elsewhere. We'd lose a competetive edge. Making profs teach more and have dodgy sabbaticals less (if they can fund it themselves, they should) and generally get faculty back in the classroom.
5. What Is Learning? A tired old chestnut I know, but it's a debate we need to have. The old classical notions of rote learning, book learning and tiresome old crap about the 'life of the mind' need to be re-examined. No doubt, we place more emphasis on socialization in our educational system than we should- but how to turn that into something useful? More project and portfolios and less papers and midterms? Group learning and collaboration? I read an interesting article a few weeks back about education reform efforts elsewhere in the country and in some places, the traditional teacher training program has been replaced by a '2 year residency' model, where trainee teachers get classroom experience while simultaneously pursuing coursework sounds incredibly sensible, in a way. Point is: there should be vigorous debate on how to educate students better while simultaneously harnassing that drive for social interaction that seems to be endemic in our education system today. At the very least, there should be a debate on how to teach the children better. And there's not and that should change.
6. Grad School: Should be fiendishly challenging and difficult. Even as colleges should be less universal than they are now, grad school should be damn hard... (witness further musings about the pointlessness of PHDs for further evidence.)
There. Six things I would do to maybe make higher education a little better and stave off the inevitable backlash that's sure to occur when universities start eating up more and more of already strained state budgets and become almost impossible to afford for more and more people. Some of these ideas are probably a little soft and maybe not even all that feasible (well they're probably all totally unfeasible- getting a reactionary institution like education to actually change is well nigh on impossible) but they're the best nuggets of thought I could manage to come up with.
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