Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Re: Send Fewer Students to College   [George Leef]

Very good work, Robert!

By all means, let's try to get K-12 to perform better. If students who graduate from high school today were as well educated as high-school grads (and maybe even 8th graders) of a century ago, college wouldn't seem nearly so important. For many young Americans, all that college does is to partially overcome the academic deficits of the previous twelve years.

Getting K-12 (sorry, now it's P-12, isn't it?) to work better is very hard because the education establishment likes things just as they are, especially with teacher-licensure requirements and union job protection. If the public schools could hire people who both want to teach and appear to have the necessary knowledge, and then promptly fire those who do a poor job, classrooms would improve very quickly.

For an excellent article on the inanity of the preparation many teachers get in ed school, read Heather Mac Donald's classic "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach."

One surprise in the Winters piece is that he apparently is unfamiliar with the fact that colleges are already graduating large numbers of people who can't find work other than the kinds of jobs that are learned just through some on-the-job training. Those of us in the skeptics camp have repeatedly argued that we're already far past the point of diminishing returns on higher ed with our glut of people with low-grade college credentials doing mundane work once they get into the labor force. I have never seen anyone in the education-establishment camp even acknowledge that point, much less explain why we nevertheless will benefit from processing yet more young people — overwhelmingly ones with mediocre-to-weak academic capabilities — through to their BA degrees.

Nor have I ever seen anyone from the establishment camp acknowledge that standards and expectations at many schools are so low that students often graduate without having to improve on the human capital they took from high school. Winters, as Robert notes, writes as if the typical student's college experience is one of high intellectual engagement that significantly adds to his human capital, giving him "knowledge and skills that employers prize." That's true for some, but for many others, college is mostly an extended vacation. Employers often complain that the graduates they interview and sometimes have to hire are so weak in fundamentals that they have to spend money on such matters as how to write a memo. The trouble is that colleges are more interested in keeping students content than in forcing them through the "boot camp" many badly need. For example, rigorous criticism of student writing is mostly a thing of the past because few professors want to fight the "How dare you say that my writing isn't good!" battle.

If you think about the reality of higher education rather than its lovely facade, you have to drop the belief that we need to send more students to college.

10/27 10:32 AMShare