By Professor Doom
It really is
amazing what college has become. The following is the number one reason
students go to college today:
“It’s where you go
after high school.”
I don’t blame the
students for this reason: they’re trained (heck, I was trained) from an early
age to believe that college was the thing to do after high school. It…was
simply inconceivable to do anything else after graduation.
After a decade or
more such indoctrination, it’s only natural for our kids to go to college like
they’ve been told. Some
70% of high school graduates eventually go on to college right after high
school, even if, quite clearly, half or more of them end up hurting themselves
by spending time and money on college. That’s just the high school graduates,
the percentage of people that go to college, eventually, is higher.
Anyway, the
“leaders” of higher education don’t care that they’re hurting kids, and so
gleefully reduced standards and relaxed entrance requirements, all in the name
of growth (more accurately, to get those sweet, sweet, student loan checks).
You’d think they’d be satisfied with the
lives they ruin but…no. Getting 70% of high school graduates to sign up just
isn’t good enough. No matter what the growth is, it’s not good enough. In a
lifetime of working in higher education, the only thing I’ve ever heard an
administrator ask for is moar.
The thing is,
pursing higher education really isn’t supposed be “something you just do.” For
it to be worthwhile goal for a person, that person has to actually care about
learning, has to want to learn something.
Me: “Hey, [math
major], do you know how to do [something from a recent course]?”1
Student A: “No.”
Me, two days later:
“Hey, do you know how to do it now?”
Student A: “No.”
The above is a
typical conversation I’ve had with many a student. These are generally students
that don’t eventually graduate. Below is a more rare conversation:
Me: “Hey, [math
major], do you know how to do [something from a recent course]?”
Student B: “No.”
Me, two days later:
“Hey, do you know how to do it now?”
Student B: “Yeah,
sure, let me show you…”
The above is a
conversation I have with students who graduate, on time. A huge part of wanting to know things is not wanting to be ignorant of things.
When a real student, a scholar, doesn’t know something, something that should
be within his grasp, he does something about it: he learns. These are the
people for whom higher education, as it’s supposed to be, is for.
Granted, it
still exists for such people, but so much of higher education today is for coddling
of students. So many people come to campus and are asked “Can you check a box
qualifying for student loans?” and it’s the only question they are asked. It’s
the wrong question, by far. The question we should ask incoming students is “Do
you want to learn?”
Instead of
emphasizing how the campus is set up for learning, our administrators show off
the climbing walls, brag about the winning sportsball teams and, bottom line,
attract way too many who come on campus for the wrong reason.
I don’t want to
come across as elitist here, everyone who honestly wants an education should be
allowed to pursue it (and, hey, our library system and internet are great ways
to get it), but the sheer greed of administration in attracting any warm bodies
possible is now bordering on the ridiculous.
How bad is it?
Consider Community College of Philadelphia’s latest attempt to suck more people
into the system:
Is this really
the way to attract students? According
to official stats, this so-called “2 year” school has a 2 year graduation
rate of 0.7%. Granted, I’ve
seen worse at other fake state schools…but
the issue I have isn’t the amazingly bad graduation, it’s the emphasis on
growth over everything else, even when it’s very, very, clear the “community”
school is harming the community. It’s disgusting that growth is the only
metric.
“I went to college so I could get a chance
at some football tickets. Woo!”
--seriously,
attracting this type of student may be a factor in the school’s 0.7% graduation
rate. Why don’t any administrators, with their Ph.D.s in Leadership and
Integrity, understand this possibility?
Our higher
education system, already grown beyond all sanity, has a problem. We’ve
squandered all the wealth from the skyrocketing tuition, and overbuilt to the
point that now most every school must grow, grow, grow, merely to just barely
stay afloat.
But there’s no
longer a pool of indoctrinated applicants, the system has already got those,
and now depends on getting more very year. Now our schools must pursue the kids
who resisted the indoctrination, and tempt then in other places.
“I went to college so I could get a
toaster!”
In olden days,
when banks had to attract customers (instead of just being handed gargantuan
sums of fiat money from the government), they offered strange things to get
people to sign up for a savings account (note for younger readers: in olden
days, it was a decent idea to save money in a bank, to get a return, as opposed
to nowadays where’s it’s pure idiocy to do so).
A checking
account isn’t a lifetime commitment, however. College, or at least education is,
and I’m not even touching on student loans here. Our institutions of higher
education are now scrape, scrape, scraping the bottom of the barrel, at the
point now where our colleges honestly believe:
“If you want a couple
of free football tickets, then, YES, you are college material!”
If people only
knew that sub-1% graduation rates are common at our community colleges, I
suspect there’d be rioting. Unfortunately, not nearly enough people know this,
and, more importantly, the "leaders" of these institutions don’t care.
1. 1.
I didn’t want to put the exact question there
because it’d be a bit of a distraction, but usually it’s technical but easy
enough for someone taking the course, for example, “How to show that the kernel
of a homomorphism is a subgroup?” or “How to calculate area of a region with a line
integral?”…the kind of thing you can look up easily enough, even if you missed
class that day.
