By Professor Doom
A college degree,
at least in theory, takes 4 years to complete, no matter the major. It’s
puzzling how there are few questions about why it takes exactly as long to
train a hotel manager as an accountant as a kindergarten teacher…it’s one of
many questions about higher education that needs asking, but today I want to
talk about what all these varied degree programs have in common: general
education requirements.
Written into
accreditation is a mandate that all college degree programs must contain
coursework in certain general education fields. So, all students must take a
couple English courses, a couple Math courses, “and so on.” I put that last
part in quotes because much of what used to be general education courses that
anyone could concede have academic merit and contain knowledge that an educated
person should know have been removed, to be replaced with ideological courses
that contain very little at all.
Student:
“All I learned in my last 2 years of Education courses was how not to get sued
by the parents.”
These fake
courses needed to replace the more legitimate courses in, say, psychology or
science, because of the general structure of most degree programs: 2 years of
general education, and 2 years of actual training. While, granted, the “actual
training” that goes into some degree programs (hi Education!) is so minimal
that getting rid of it and replacing it with (different) fake courses would be
harmless enough, legitimate subjects simply cannot remove courses
to make way for the latest political fad.
So, students
really only have 2 years, no more, to waste on general education coursework.
Admin could have kept the legitimate coursework and not used the fake courses,
but once they saw the kind of money they could save by getting rid of academics
and using the cheap labor force of the fake subject teachers, it was a no
brainer.
These fake
courses were somewhat justified as an attempt to placate the rowdier students
on campus, demanding “social justice” coursework. Insidiously, the fake courses
started to warp the few remaining legitimate courses. The fake courses had no
coursework in them, all that was demanded was the students agree to the
ideology, or watch a few Powerpoints. The fake courses naturally were loved by
the students, and entire classes were given perfect scores of “A” (when there
are no tests or assignments, this is easy to get).
Admin looked at
the “success” rate of the fake courses, and brought the hammer down on the
legitimate courses: “If Gender Studies can have 100% retention and 4.0 GPAs
awarded, you need to do the same thing in Calculus, or we’ll cut your pay!”
It wasn’t just
Mathematics that received this treatment, to be sure, and all faculty
eventually received the memo to stop challenging the students, that the fake
courses were now setting the standards for academics. Sure, some faculty
complained that the fake courses weren’t legitimate academics…but admin knows
nothing of education, and thus didn’t care at all.
Poo Bah:
“[Fake state school] is pleased to announce that any of our graduates not
qualified to perform their jobs are granted 2 free full year’s tuition to come
here and take more courses.”
--I’m
serious, this actually happened. Which part of this is more ridiculous, the
fact that the school was graduating incompetents, or the fact that the Poo Bah
knew the graduates were so foolish that they’d actually come back for more fake
training?
The end result is
we’re now commonly producing college graduates that know very little of
anything. There’s been some backlash (not enough) against the schools for it
but, no, the response won’t be to actually restore standards and remove the
fake classes.
Institutions across the country have been
considering carefully scripted general-education courses in lieu of traditional
distribution requirements (see “No Math Required,” “Rethinking Gen Ed” and “Gen Ed Redesigns”). Some
months ago, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report
pointing out the efficiencies that would be realized by sequenced
general-education courses with prescribed curricula, little student choice and
lots of requirements.
Note that the “prescribed curricula” and
“carefully scripted” mentioned above will annihilate faculty choice in the
courses. Instead, admin will mandate what this new sequence of courses would
have in them. I’ve dealt with this many times, and always, admin-designed
courses consistently have any material which challenges students
removed…standards will be defined down until we get those 100% “A” grades.
I’m not a jerk, of course I want students
to do well, and I’ve even had a (small) class or two where all the students
received an “A.” But if everyone is to get a college degree, and if everyone is
to have a 4.0 GPA…how can we justify charging more for a degree than a glass of
water?
I’m quoting a Poo Bah’s post here, and
it’s funny how insouciant he is about what’s going on in higher ed:
“…deploring the fact that most college students
could not identify James Madison as the father of the U.S. Constitution (most
chose Thomas Jefferson) and that 40 percent did not know that Congress has
the power to declare war. Their solution: a course on civic literacy required
of every college student…”
“…Other groups decry college students’ lack of
mathematical and quantitative literacy, of historical knowledge, of basic
financial knowledge, and of writing skills. Common to all is the proposed
solution: new required courses…”
He uses the administrative destruction of
legitimate courses as justification for the bold plan of giving admin more
control, but the gentle reader needs to understand that college graduates used
to learn things like the above in legitimate courses that covered quantitative
literacy, historical knowledge, and so on…but administrative control forced the
teachers of the relevant courses to remove more and more material.
And the admin thinks the solution to the
failure of administrative control is to have more administrative control…
Seriously, anyone with half a brain can
guess what will happen here:
The push to require courses
even comes from student groups. Last semester, I talked with a group of student
activists concerned about their classmates’ use of phrases that had been used
historically to demean others and the chilling effect of such discourse. Their
solution: a course on cultural competence required of every college student.
Does “cultural competence” really have the
academic gravitas of “Early American History,” “Accounting,” or “Calculus”? Our
campuses have riots because of all the culturally competent ideological garbage
on them. The Poo Bah should have explained to the students that higher
education’s mission isn’t cultural competence, but knowledge. Oh, wait, that
would require the admin to know higher education’s mission.
I grant I’m being a bit hard on the guy,
as he clearly suspects something might go wrong with making higher education
even more like high school:
I’m not suggesting that
colleges and universities should have no requirements. Just as unregulated free
markets concentrate capital, unregulated curricula concentrate enrollments.
Think massive, entertaining, undemanding lecture courses. But the opposite --
centrally planned, highly sequenced curricula with lots of top-down
requirements -- are precise analogues of Marxist economies. And we all know how
those work.
The above said to his credit, it’s still
funny that he can’t connect the dot (sic) regarding where the laughable idea of
“new college courses to address the topics no longer being addressed in current
college courses where such topics used to be addressed” came from, or figure
out that the new idea will just put more power over education into admin’s demonstrably
unworthy hands.
Still, it’s clear that the public is
slowly figuring out just how desolate much of college education is. There’s a
hunger for education, but a great deal of what’s going on in college is just
empty courses, filled with ideology but little knowledge, and thus unsatisfying
in addition to being ridiculously expensive.
Too bad administrators can come up with
but one laughable idea to fix the problem. If educators were allowed to help,
we’d simply ask to allow us to have standards and cover legitimate material in
our classes.
We’d also say to get rid of the fake
courses, too.
Trouble is, both such ideas would cut
into those sweet, sweet, student loan checks, so admin won’t consider either of
them…but if we could shut down the student loan scam, maybe then integrity would
be considered?
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