That’s what the first two years of college are for most people:
Good students from good high schools, who have not taken advanced placement, know how to play the repetition game. They cut class and recycle their high school term papers.
Early in my teaching career, I had a student from one of the state’s best high schools. She was bright, but hardly exceptional. I found she was taking more than a full class load and holding down a full-time job. I was amazed. She told me that her classes at a suburban high school were more demanding than their repetition at the university. She chose classes where attendance wasn’t mandatory. Was she recycling her high school term papers? Of course; so was everyone else from her class.
A student in the sciences or engineering could not remotely do this, but the liberal arts have become intellectual wastelands, with an emphasis on persuading a captive audience as to the eternal verities of professors’ beliefs about racism, sexism, and homophobia.
A colleague in engineering used to remind me that in his college “PC” stood for personal computer, not political correctness. His dean was reprimanded for not sending his graduate students to diversity training during orientation week. The dean stated that engineering was a serious subject and his students had important assignments during that week. Told that he would have to answer to an administrative hearing, he said that he would be pleased to show up along with several of his alumni, successful businessmen and big contributors to the university. He then said to the diversity apparatchik, “This is a career decision you are about to make.” The hearing never took place. An engineering dean could get away with this. A liberal arts dean could not.
Higher education is the next overvalued and overpriced bubble to pop, I think.
At good schools the first two years is used to weed out the poor performers in engineering and the sciences.
Well, liberal arts higher education may be the next bubble to pop.
Would that the politics of public pensions would, too.
In engineering college at the university I had to take liberal arts electives. Did liberal arts majors have to take engineering electives? No, possibly because if they had their brains would jell and run out their ears.
My modest proposal — a serious one — is for the Department of Education (an otherwise useless department) should develop an accreditation program, a battery of tests that would determine what level of expertise a person has in a wide variety of fields of knowledge, corresponding to major fields of study in higher education, with the goal that employers and schools would begin to use this accreditation as an alternative to a diploma.
When that takes hold, the higher ed bubble will pop. Just learn what you need to know however you can, then get your accreditation.
It won’t happen under this president, obviously.
The chairman of the UC Irvine physics department, many years ago, told me that he saw the purpose of the UC system as simply keeping an enormous number of people on the government pay check. It’s secondary purpose was the keep lots of people out of the work force for four years, thereby reducing unemployment. That was it’s true function, the education part was the protective camouflage to fool the taxpaying rubes.
I would add that it doesn’t hurt that it also acts as an indoctrination center for the advocates of government as well.
If high school students are recycling term papers that is purely the result of laziness among faculty members. I always ensured that undergrad writing assignments were directly tied to course materials and concepts…not that difficult to do. It is easy to make an assignment that requires a student to do original work.
I’d also say that you cannot categorize all liberal arts in the same manner. Fields which have resisted post-modernism–economics and political science, for example–can retain intellectual rigor.
If I were queen for a day, I would require all liberal arts degrees require a statistics and probability class. The lack of analytical thinking in problem-solving in everyday society is annoying as hell.
I agree completely with this post (and in particular with commenter ‘K’) – Higher Education is essentially a massive waste of resources and a government indoctrination centre, and I speak as someone employed in HE in the UK.
Why do people need 3 or 4 year degrees to be ‘qualified’ to do a job?
Why can’t people join the course at more than one entry point in the year?
Why is the academic year split into three semesters (based on dates in the religious calendar)?
Why are so many universities so inefficient?
Why is there such a poor culture of true reward in universities?
In the 80’s Mrs Thatcher gave our economy a major shake up, and limited the power of the unions. However, she left one major edifice of the leftist power-base in place, the Education system (and the NHS, but that’s another story). When our manufacturing base was going to the wall, Universities were almost left alone (ok, not too much funding increase, but I’m pretty certain no university shut down).
It’s probably not entirely the universities fault – successive governments have messed up the education system so many times (mainly in the name of ‘fairness’ – hah!) that planning is difficult, and the amount of funding received from government (at least in the UK) is so high that they really do call all the shots.
But certainly universities haven’t helped themselves – restrictive practices, denial of free speech, ‘dubious’ alliances and policies, almost total bias to leftist politics, the list goes on and on.
Sadly, I don’t think America is going to get the wake-up call its education system needs, not with the current administration in office, but it does need it – as indeed does the UK – we’re just a bit luckier in that we will be getting rid of the shower we’ve had in power (not office, power) here for 12 years very shortly. And it’s at least plausible that our lot (NuLabour) are going to do so badly that they’ll be wiped out as an electoral force.
Then we can start to sort out our education system.
When I went to Penn State in the late 1980’s, it was actually the liberal arts college that was professional and well organized. The engineering people, on the other hand, were the sorriest bunch of incompetents imaginable. FWIW, I started in Engineering, and wound up as an English major (and have done pretty well as a technical writer since: I use my degree).
There is some truth to the stereotype of the lazy English major who is just taking classes to keep Daddy and Mommy happy, but they were a minority. In the first year courses, you also got a lot of people who were only there to fulfill a requirement, and didn’t participate at all in class. This made it easier for those of us where there to learn to stand out. Most of the people in my English classes were actually Education majors, FWIW.
The real tragedy in most colleges, though, is math education. My high school had a much better match department than Penn State, in that they could actually teach the subjects. Really, you are better off going outside the university system altogether, and taking math classes at a community college staffed by teachers, at least for the first two years. Maybe in the Penn State system you could find some real teachers at the branch campuses, but Main Campus was a wasteland.
I attended Indiana Institute of Technology, in Ft. Wayne, Ind. in the late 60s, Arizona State University in the early 70s. At Tech (at the time, I understand it’s not the same institution any more) the English was HARD, because engineers were notoriously poor at communication. Much more fun to build than write about it. Tech would not allow you to graduate without a solid background in English.
But Tech was created to make good engineers and scientists. ASU was not.
At ASU the engineering dept was fine, but the liberal arts department was openly hostile to anyone in a technical field. I have a couple of undeserved low grades in art (because I was a ME major) and in English (because I admitted to having personal heroes). Every engineering major I knew at ASU worked hard. Every liberal arts major I knew at ASU didn’t.
In the 80s I audited a few history classes at University of Arizona. I was appalled at the students’ apathy and the professors’ casual attitudes, almost as if they didn’t care that the classes existed.
Haven’t had much use for “higher” learning since.
I have to agree with you on this one. “Liberal arts education” is neither liberal, arts, nor education. I graduated from a school in 2002 that liked to think of itself as the next Ivy League (sorry, you’re just NESCAC). Thankfully, this school had a large science and engineering contingent and graduate schools in medicine and engineering that injected some reality into the situation.
A number of my friends got their degrees in things like English, Political Science, and similar useless drek. They average about 30k per year salary. My friends who graduated with science and engineering degrees are in the range of double that. But the most annoying thing is not the financial success; I’m currently poor despite my EE thanks to paying cash for grad school. It’s the utter ignorance of economics that the philo students exhibit. They spent all this money on an education in political science or policy or American studies, and they don’t even have the skills to call “bullshit” on politicians. I took 3 basic econ classes in my time there – micro, macro, and environmental econ. For micro, I went to the first class, the midterm, and the final, studied the night before the exams, and ended up with a B+. Watching my colleagues, some of whom would go on to fancy fellowships in Europe, struggle with basic linear equations was amusing at the time. Now, with those people clawing for their own positions of power, it’s just hypocritical and dishonest.
On the second hand, the sticker price for university in America is way overstated. The sticker price for the four years was over 100k; thanks to my parents being on the lower end of middle class I got away with 20k up front and about the same in fixed interest loans which are about to start *earning* money in real terms. I know very few students who paid full price. And my engineering degree definitely paid off when I was working full time. I was even able to sell my parents on a personal loan for my masters degree. How? Because I have the basic math and economic skills to do a cost-benefit analysis.
I agree…..I have 2 children in small LAC s lucky for them they received excellent merit$. They both attend top 50 LAC but both were admitted for full sticker price to a top 10 LAC. My husband and I said “sorry that is not a good investment and we can’t afford to help you with that tuition”. I am an engineer, my husband is an accountant, my father was a pharmacist and mother a nurse. We all got educated to get a job and profession as our goal. Highschools today are encouraging students to fine themselves. Ridiculous! That should only be encouraged to the rich. There are lots of middle class kids graduating from Williams and Bowdoin with huge student loans and no professional employment even in a good economy. My children will graduate with no debt but also without a career and I find this to be a waste of 4 years!