Higher Education

is in decline. It has been for many years, but only now are more people finally noticing:

The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has summed up the consensus among faculty: “The sad truth is that US higher education is in decline.” A poll in 2012 showed that 89 percent of American adults and 96 percent of senior academic administrators agree that American higher education is “in crisis.” When a recent dean of Harvard College writes a book subtitled How a Great University Forgot Education and laments “the loss of purpose in America’s great colleges”—meaning Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other elite universities that follow their lead—the presumption must be that something has gone very wrong. These are the opinions of academics, most of whom are by no means conservative.

Some authorities still insist that colleges, even if they teach no specific knowledge, at least improve “critical thinking.” But this contention is not borne out by a test designed to measure such thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since the 1980s the improvement in students’ CLA scores during their four years of college has dropped by about 50 percent, and such improvement now averages just 7 percent over the first three semesters.

Along with government-recommended nutrition, this is one of the biggest public-policy disasters of our time. And it doesn’t even mention the degree to which the student-loan debt for these worthless degrees blights the lives of young people, while lining the pockets of banks and colleges at no risk to them.

[Update late morning]

I think it says something about the state of higher education, and particularly BU, that economics major Alexandria O-C is so fundamentally ignorant about not just the federal budget, but basic arithmetic.

4 thoughts on “Higher Education”

  1. They haven’t lost their purpose. They’ve just changed their purpose: now it’s to spew out mindless SJWs who’ll take over American business and turn it into an SJW attack factory.

    Trump’s government should make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy. It would end that pretty much overnight, and gain them millions of Millennial votes.

    Beyond that, though, there’s very little need for ‘higher education’ when you can learn pretty much anything you want to know on the Internet. A degree has become little more than a checkbox for HR, and even there it’s not of much use when everyone has a degree.

  2. Isn’t in interesting that in the “equality & diverse culture” the progressive academic elites struggle towards, the defining virtue of a truly “egalitarian culture” is to vitiate an authoritarian higher degree. Its natural antonymic meme.

  3. Part of the problem is the take over by the marxists but another issue is that colleges don’t expect enough out of their students. From my personal experience, it was always more rewarding to get a B in a class that was challenging and demanded a high level of work than getting an A in a class that required no effort. And usually in the classes that required no effort, I wouldn’t put any in.

    Too much emphasis is put on grades. Students shouldn’t feel that getting a 4.0 is normal or required. They should be challenged so that even when they fall short, they perform well and learn a lot. A perfect score should be exceedingly rare.

    1. Again, grading is just an appeal to authority, which is inimical to equality and inhibits diversity by adversely effecting the scholarships of the dissentient students.

      No, clearly we need to replace grading altogether. In a progressive academe, I’d expect a participatory percentile.

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