At 20 years old, Anastaysia Thomas has dreams of traveling to new places and working as a world-class massage therapist. Her plan is as foolproof as anyone’s: get into a good school and work like crazy until things fall into place.
She juggles a full-time load of college classes and more than 30 hours a week waitressing at a local pub in Hampton, Va., working hard toward reaching her goals. But next fall, she will graduate with 80 percent of her tuition left to pay and no guarantee of a job.
This year – when the cost of attending a public college can top $20k a year, $50k for private universities – two out of three students graduated with college debt averaging $25,250. The total outstanding student loan debt in the country exceeds $1 trillion – more than Americans owe in credit card or car loan debt.
Colleges and universities have lost sight of their basic purpose in undergraduate education. Which is to produce, in a four year period of time, a person who is competent at the baccalaureate level in his field of study.
The proper function of colleges and universities is not to maintain a rating status that competitvely makes them the ‘best’ in accordance with some sort of ‘societally accepted’ and elitist measure of achievement.
The elitist schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Priceton, MIT, RPI, Columbia, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. publicly and without shame cheat in maintaining their “status.”
First, with some exceptions that are driven by political correctness, they accept only the ‘creme la creme’ of high school and prep school graduates as entering freshmen. This immediately gives them an edge when they are compared to other schools. Its hard to fail as a school when you accept only those students who are proven to have exceptional talent and self-discipline. Then they stuff them, for the most part, into oversized undergraduate classes where they only see ‘real’ professors in large lecture halls and are actually taught by graduate students (i.e. ‘classroom attendants’), with no formal teaching skills and no proven teaching skill. And the professors and ‘classroom attendants’ have other priorities. Teaching is just something that they ‘have to do.’ It is not their professional focus.
So in the ‘best’ schools, you have a ‘frothing sea’ of undergraduates who manage to survive and acquire knowledge and graduate. And the grade point average spread among this ‘creme la creme’ is the grade point spread of relatively not yet mature students placed in an academic pressure cooker.
A ‘shame’ of the ‘best’ schools is that of those of the ‘creme la creme’ that they accept, a certain percentage of their students will graduate by ‘just scraping by’ and a number of these highly capable students will ‘flunk out.’ However, the ‘best’ schools ‘come away clean’ with no stigma being attached to them for having FAILED TO MEET THE NEEDS of their ‘just scraped by’ and ‘flunked out students.’
And the real shame is that the ‘best schools’ charge and accepted ‘gobs of money’ from these students that they failed to educate.
The ‘non-elitist’ schools provide the most honest opportunity for a baccalaureate student to obtain an education with the skill needed for his professional field. Yes, these schools do vary in the quality of their teaching staff and the levels of proficiency expected of their students. But ‘the word gets out’ regarding the pluses and minuses of the non-elitist schools and the students do have a chance to ‘pick and choose’ their schools. And yes, many of them are guilty of the class size sins and teaching incomptence sins of the ‘best’ schools.
But one must keep in mind that the academic performance of an undergraduate student in terms of knowledge gained and subject proficiency is also a responsibility of the student and that the student must realize that he will never be immersed in a perfect teaching-learning situation. Much is required of the student and that is a measure of the student’s chances of success and professional achievement throughout the rest of his life.
But a great benefit of attending a non-elitist school is lower cost of education, in most cases. Often a significant reduction in cost. And five to ten years after graduation, its the qualities of the individaul that count the most and not his undergraduate school. As the old Texas joke goes, “What does a University of Texas graduate call an Aggie graduate ten years after graduation? The answer: ‘BOSS.’ ”
Finally, professors are paid waaaay too much.
And textbooks are rewritten waaaaay too often and they cost waaaay too much. And the ‘best’ schools have huge endowments and they use waaaay too little of those endowments for the immediate duty/obligation of educating their current undergraduate students and reducing their tuition costs.
And finally, again, these ‘best’ schools could give ‘a leg up’ to the other schools in their vicinities. For instance, Harvard and MIT (with their huge endowments) could become the mentors of junior colleges and other colleges in the New England area within a 150 mile radius of Boston and enrich their academic programs. They could even set up a feeder-college system whereby students could transfer their credits to Harvard or MIT or receive degrees that acknowledge the Harvard or MIT equivalent education that the students have received. Those students would have the right to have the words Harvard or MIT attached to their academic credentials.
P.S.
My personal background for these opinions includes my formal education at RPI and two years as a teaching instructor at Brown University.
Also, I have used the term “elitist.” I am not against the recognition of people as being at ‘the top of their field of endeavor,’ and giving those people considerably more responsibility and compensation. But I see the ‘elitist’ schools as ’empty suits’ when it comes to the business of the education of undergraduates and not worthy of the adjective ‘elite.’
All of which make me glad that I earned my AAS degree at an SUNY community college and my BS through the armed services……saving me thousands of dollars.
AnglicanFirst…as much as I respect your intentions, I think you are off basis here on some of what you said. The issue of college tuition has nothing to do with either the “high” pay of faculty or the race for reputation. On the former point, as a Ph.D. student looking at my salary potential after 13 years of higher education, I would strongly disagree with an entry level salary of 40-50K being high. Moreover, the 80-120K salary of full professor, and most faculty do not spend the majority of their career at that level, is necessary to keeping good faculty from seeking better opportunities in the private sector. On the later point, the race for reputation is a symptom not the cause of the problem.
The primary cause is that Universities are run by “administrators†with very little input from the faculty. Over the past 40 years the size of university administration has increased at a rate double that of the federal bureaucracy. The college administration has become an entity of its own doing everything it can to increase its own size and power. This means adding more administrators whenever it can as well as new majors. The total salary of all administrators rivals, if not exceeds that of faculty at many colleges and universities. If the primary purpose of the institution is carried out by faculty, which it is, how is this justifiable. The proliferation of new majors is likewise to blame. Consider the girl from the article who wanted a career as a massage therapist. Do you really need a college education for this? I could list dozens of major and minors added to the college catalog in recent years that hitherto, perhaps required some technical training, but not a college degree. So why do they now? Money! The advent of for-profit school placed a greater emphasis on higher education as a money making enterprise. These schools have dual purposes, education and profit! So they add majors in new field to provide training for professionals in them in order to make more money. After a few years, once a threshold of professional in the field begin to have this extra education, it becomes a requirement by employers, regardless of whether its necessary or could be accomplished with limited and inexpensive on the job training. In order to remain at the cutting edge of education and not to lose students and money to the for-profits, non-for-profit schools then add these programs as well and the cycle continues.
The oppressive “school loan” quango exists to feed the greedy educational machine. Yes, BIG EDUCATION. The quality of post-secondary education in never considered and the product of such shortsightedness is academic and cultural atrophy.