Post-bubble, perhaps students -- and employers, not to mention parents and lenders -- will focus instead on education that fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more on providing useful majors. (That doesn't necessarily rule out traditional liberal-arts majors, so long as they are rigorous and require a real general education, rather than trendy and easy subjects, but the key word here is "rigorous.")
Sunday, June 06, 2010
You have been warned ...
... Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm all for rigor in learning, but the idea of turning the grand universities into technical schools is anathema. For one thing, they've always had that as an element. But overall this strikes me as yet one more subtle anti-intellectual attack on liberal (in the grand sense) education. I for one hope that the university does not become less universal. That was the whole point, after all.
ReplyDeleteArt, you're concerns are well placed. From my vantage point (as a part time instructor at a regional, state university), I can see students showing up with expectations that the university will prepare them for specific jobs; the business model in higher education panders to these expectations so much so that curricula focus on career preparation rather than individual education. This has been the trend for the last few decades, and I expect the trend will continue unabated, which means I and like-minded academics will become obsolete dinosaurs in the technical school masquerading as institutions of higher learning.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: Please change "you're" to "your." If I knew how to keyboard (and think) properly, I would avoid such bone-headed mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAs a writer, I always feel very torn when this issue comes up. On the one hand, teaching low-income college students as I do, I see that there are some perfectly bright people who just aren't cut out to jump through the usual college hoops, but are cut off from a decent income because they can't.
ReplyDeleteBut I can also tell you that those same people are absolutely wired to understand on the deepest level real poetry, real literature. I don't want them deprived of this, and I don't think Robert Frost and Robert Lowell do, either.
In 1930, in The Theory of Education in the United States, Albert Jay Nock observed that American colleges and universities were already being turned into training schools. Like Nock, I believe they should be educational institutions, education being focused on the formation of character and intellect. As someone who was providentially able to have a few drags on the butt-end of a classical education (I studied Latin, Greek, German,philosophy -- including existential phenomenology in some depth -- and theology, as well as classical rhetoric), I believe I know the difference.
ReplyDelete