My detractors will say “But Ed, it is Wednesday. The week is nearly over.” I say that back to them!
So this will be brief. There was kind of bigger news than the Sunday edition of The New York Times. ICYMI: bin Laden died.
However, there is one article from the Book Review I’d like to point out. It is from the now-notorious “Professor X” who allegedly teaches at an Ivy League school. In his new book he mentions (among other things) many of the same students I’ve run into–ones who frankly should not be enrolled in college. Now this is a complete appeal to authority and use of anecdotal evidence but whatever. The point I’m trying to make is that at seemingly every level of academic quality there are far too many of the wrong people in school and we’re about to face a severe education bubble.
In case you needed more evidence that it isn’t just me saying this, nor is it isolated, up in Canada, they are about to have the same problem . That’s important because our northern neighbors’ higher education model effectively mirrors ours and their educational trends do.
What’s the point? Well the point is this, politically. The appropriate question we need to start asking sooner rather than later is not how do we keep or make college affordable or accessible for everyone. We need to start finding ways of re-strengthening the value of a Bachelor’s Degree and we desperately need to cull the number of university students.
I’ve gone over some of the reasons for this but here’s a couple others… Master’s Degree programs, if they aren’t terminal, are fast turning into rackets as universities exploit the continual and cheap, T.A.-based labor they provide for swelling undergraduate classes. With more masters-level (and beyond) graduates, an undergraduate education similarly becomes less valuable.
Philosophically, universities and colleges ought, and need to be selective. Not everyone’s child is a delicate flower who needs to attain advanced education. The odds are that they are merely average. And this is where the problem arises. No politician will say that their constituents are not as good as they think and that a vocation is better for them than education so we’re going to continue propagating this myth that college is the only or best route to financial and career-based success.
N.B.: I’ve intentionally left out the problem of student loans and the willingness to saddle people with several thousand dollars worth of debt that will take decades to pay off and with increasing rates of default because well…that’s yet another problem we need to address independently of the above.
Leave a Reply