Home School Online

I’ve posted before on my view that higher education is largely ready for a major redo. Whereas the elite academic school and the community colleges seem to work, I’ve argued that the large volume of schools in the middle are badly off track. They devastate many state and family budgets as well as the lives of some of the kids who go through serious alcoholic and other ‘badness” when there. here’s a relevant study. And I quote from: Academically Adrift, Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

Henry Cate’s homeschool blog just reminded me of one of my pet peeves, the totally messed up status of higher ed in this country.  I’ve talked before about how parents really don’t seem to care or understand much about education, it’s the accreditation that they focus on.  Colleges get more and more expensive and I feel, less and less academic. The LA Times Article says:

At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year’s sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980.This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm….

The article goes on to point out that the money goes to tenured professors, administration, and sports. Currently, 629 schools have football teams — 132 more than in 1980. And all but 14 of them lose money, including some with national names.

The travesty of high tuition is that most of the extra charges aren’t going for education. Administrators, athletics and amenities get funded, while history departments are denied new assistant professors. A whole generation of young Americans is being shortchanged, largely by adults who have carved out good careers in places we call colleges.

Reading to do….Andrew Hacker  & Claudia Dreifus, “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It.”

How about some innovation so we design a first rate college experience for under $20K?

What is college supposed to be? I thought, for those who had an intellectual bent and were not under enormous short-term pressure financially, it was the time to develop and experiment intellectually.  In my case, this was true. I went to school not for the contacts, not for the credentials, but for the education.

 I’m in good company. I was just reading Steve Jobs speech given at the Stanford graduation. And I quote:

 But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Steve’s speech is well worth reading and considering. It makes the point that I wanted to make: the primary purpose of college can be achieved without necessarily earning the degree or spending the money.  Of course, it means forgoing the credential and you can see how much this has handicapped Steve Jobs & Jez San & Bill Gates.

  I ran across the info on Steve Jobs while reading this blog about learning Karate in a post called: Three Stories by Steve, a poem by Shel