It’s awful. Who is to blame?
And here we arrive at a way to thread this needle of collective criticism. The one thing that Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, Haidt and McArdle all agree on, surprisingly enough, is that higher education should be a non-market institution. The point of college is not merely to cater to consumer demands, whether one defines the consumers as “college students” or “the firms that will eventually hire those college students.” A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join. But when people are ponying up vast sums of money to attend these places, it becomes more difficult for college administrations to ignore the whims of their students.
Cut off the spigot. If people were really spending their own money, and couldn’t borrow it foolishly at below-market rates, much of this problem would go away. Of course, so would many universities and university departments. But it’s not clear that would be a bad thing.
“A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join.”
But that is not mutually exclusive from preparing people to perform job related activities in specific fields. Colleges should do both.
To see an example of the “unlimited-paying-customer-is-always-right” mindset, look no further than the Mary Louise Petersen Residence Hall at the University of Iowa.
Every room has their own private WiFi node, no more shared bathrooms (as my sister-in-law said, “how do you know who needs help getting to class in the morning if the they passed out in a private shower instead of a communal one?”), and probably no more cinder block walls. Hotel lobby-like entrance and reception area, A/C in every room, etc.
$53M construction cost for housing for 500 students. I’d imagine the ongoing annual operating costs aren’t free, either. Single room housing is $9200/year, double-room housing is $7300/year, which means that it will take between 13 and 15 years just to pay off the principal on the construction costs. I would imagine “student needs” will change again between now and then.
We had cinder blocks, communal bathrooms, and no A/C. I mean, we also had dial-up internet and Lynx browsers, but we had 10Base-T by my junior year (late 90’s). Communal bathrooms, shared dorm rooms, and bunk/pull-out beds are part of the experience of learning to get along with others, meeting people, and sharing ideas. These delicate little flowers in their protected cocoons aren’t doing themselves any favors by demanding highly-personalized and separate experiences all the way through college, on someone else’s dime.
Bollocks.
The problems with college education these days are not related to
“cater(ing) to consumer demands”; far from it.
There is clearly a problem with the very large costs being heaped on
the 18 years old freshmen as 100K debts courtesy of Federal
pushed
year students don’t have a clue that a typical college degree (like
psychology) doesn’t translate into a job qualification after
graduation.
I reject blaming the largely victimize youth. (believe it or not, I’m
47 and I worked my way through college). We need to look to the
universities to downsize their staff, upgrade their curricula, reduce
their prices, DENY students that use too much credit, and start some
serious career counseling for their students. Also, the
administrations’ salaries are obscene.
Next, the Feds need to stop being an enabler for this coming disaster.
There is virtually ZERO chance this will happen. I won’t waste my
words here.
Also, companies need to work out another way to vet employees, so that
a college education is not needed to jump into the upper middle class
in America.
Lastly, the 18 year olds out there…. You need to take responsibility
for your own decisions. Don’t take the loans. Don’t spend more than
10K per year on school (and that means “No” to a lot of schools).
Don’t go to grad school. If you are an exception to these rules
(and there are a few of you) then you’ll have to really, really bust
your ass to get through school. Good luck.
That won’t happen without (at a minimum) reforming the loan program.
I said that will have to happen.
Ok, what is supposed to be wrong with the market approach here? Students don’t just want to have a fun time for four or more years.
To be entirely fair, there’s an enormous industry dedicated to telling high-school students that they will starve to death if they don’t get a college degree. The infomercials, “public service announcements,” etc., seldom discuss the importance of choosing one’s major carefully–majoring in English, philosophy, art, music, or drama pretty much guarantees unemployability for life, with or without actually getting the degree. Nor do they tend to mention that right now Ukrainian and Filipino immigrants fresh off the boat are going to truck-driving school and making $60,000+ a year after graduation.
I am a sucker for reality TV. There is always one of them that appeals to me a little bit. There are the ones about subsistence lifestyles that try to appeal to the notion that you don’t need much to live on and how pure of thought this way of living is but really show squalor and toiling away doing manual labor all day in a mad rush to have enough food to not die during the winter.
I like the woods but you can have a real job that will allow you to actually enjoy spending time in the wilderness in comfort and with such things as computers and toilets.
Last night they had on Deadliest Catch. The appeals of the show are the characters who have the character to endure not only really hard manual labor but also no sleep. They have short windows to make money and deckhands can walk away with tens of thousands for a month or two of work. There is always someone who wants to take a shot at it but few make it through the meat grinder.
This season they had a newb on who went through a lot of crap but then quit at the end. He told the camera he learned his lesson, stay in school, which contrasted with what the captain told him, stick around another month and earn an extra $8,500 and that there were millions of people who would love to make that kind of money in such a short time. It never sunk into the kid that he was making more fishing than he would in an average career.