“Don’t Weaken Title IX Campus Sex Assault Policies” (nytimes) is an op-ed coauthored by Jon Krakauer (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)). There are hundreds of comments by Times readers.
Americans love to watch college sports. Americans apparently love to debate the appropriate post-sex litigation procedures for college students. Americans love to argue about whether applicants to college should be sorted by skin color (e.g., see Discrimination against Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions). The one thing that nobody cares about is whether colleges are effective at teaching?
The book Academically Adrift (2010) suggests that colleges are becoming increasingly ineffective at education per se. From my review:
At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation. It turns out that attending college is a very inefficient way to improve one’s performance at this kind of task. After three semesters, the average college student’s score improved by 0.18 standard deviation or seven percentile points (e.g., the sophomore if sent back into the freshman pool would have risen from the 50th to the 57th percentile). After four years, the seniors had a 0.5 standard deviation improvement over the freshman, compared to 1 standard deviation in the 1980s.
Why isn’t this trend of convergence between the abilities of high school graduates and college graduates the big story? People just assume that college teaches something useful? Or nobody cares that a lot of people going to college don’t learn anything?
Perhaps today’s freshman are better prepared than they used to be in 1981.
Oh but they get the credential, don’t they?
From grade school through college, school isn’t about gaining knowledge. It is about socialization, networking, and discipline of both authority figures and peers. There are far more efficient means of delivering knowledge than classrooms, homework and exams. If a school, at any level, builds confidence, engages people in a community, inspires curiosity, it is accomplishing its mission. i’d much rather that kids in college learn to discover their passions, debate, and voice their opinions than sit for hours in a programming class for technologies that will be out of date by the time they graduate. Of course they should learning important theories that don’t change as often, but again this is learned elsewhere far more efficiently than the majority of typical classroom scenarios.
America has a lot of good qualities but it is also a nation of philistines and puritan scolds. This is hardly a recent phenomenon.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/08/engineering-education-social-engineering-rather-actual-engineering/
Why bother learning anything before it has been transformed by social justice/diversity types.
From the article:
‘The recently appointed dean of Purdue’s school, Dr. Donna Riley, has an ambitious agenda.
In her words (italics mine): “I seek to revise engineering curricula to be relevant to a fuller range of student experiences and career destinations, integrating concerns related to public policy, professional ethics, and social responsibility; de-centering Western civilization; and uncovering contributions of women and other underrepresented groups…. We examine how technology influences and is influenced by globalization, capitalism, and colonialism…. Gender is a key…[theme]…[throughout] the course…. We…[examine]… racist and colonialist projects in science….”’
At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation.
That sounds like rather thin gruel to base on an entire book on. Professors and other instructors who teach kids how to solve differential equations or conjugate French verbs have probably never heard about that assessment.
A. Contrarian: “school isn’t about gaining knowledge”. That’s the opposite of what critics of the CLA numbers say. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment where Criticism #1 is “By focusing on general skills rather than domain knowledge and specialization, the instrument may lack the construct validity to measure the specialized knowledge that students go to college to obtain.”
In other words, when the test shows that students are unable to think and write, the colleges say “We taught them lots of specific pieces of knowledge.”
@philg
Of course the college HAS to say that. But the way they act shows they don’t really believe it.
Like Tony indicated above, most people consider college merely an accreditation program, and that’s still what it amounts to even now as the “education” part of a college education is becoming less relevant. Of course, that’s never what college was supposed to be. But that’s certainly what it was when I was in high school and planning my next move.
Bottom line is the job market is shifting because so many people have degrees. People are so scared their kids won’t get a good paying job that they’re still willing to send them to these increasingly expensive but rapidly failing institutions. Even as they reveal themselves to be places of radical, nonsensical indoctrination.
Jack: The parents of kids who might be targeted and railroaded off campus without due process over unproven accusations of sexual impropriety are motivated by higher impulses than prudishness and Puritanism. I can’t complain that parents are now paying closer attention to the “social justice” cancer that is destroying higher education in America. Even if they are still stupidly sending their kids there while the quality of the education drops through the floor.
Educational market shifted not because parents scared but because of Supreme Court decision specifying that incapable college graduate has more credentials that capable high school graduate when first was passed for promotion in favor of second and first sued. Educational boom was born, easy degrees and fake sciences followed, local beer markets rallied