Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 1: What’s Wrong with College

1 1 What’s Wrong with College American colleges enjoy a remarkable reputation. In the public mind, compared with such institutions as Congress or corporate America, higher education is near the top. A 2003 poll by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that private colleges were second only to the U.S. military in the trust of the people, and twoyear public colleges were only slightly lower, just below local police forces. The public has some reservations about affirmative action, about academic tenure and big-time athletics, but 89 percent of parents of college students report being “satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with their children’s education, and the students themselves apparently think that they are doing fine. Many of us are aware that colleges are growing short of funds, and public financial support shows few signs of improvement. And most parents know that college costs too much. Tuition, going up each year, has become a big burden for middle-class families and made it impossible for many students of low income to attend at all. Squeezed by financial pressures and by press ratings , many of our colleges, especially the private ones, have recently entered into an unlovely competition—using market techniques and manipulating enrollment percentages—to attract the “best” students. Since students in poor communities with poorly supported high schools get poorer preparation for college, that has meant, by and large, the wealthier students. College admissions in America are becoming more and more a FIXING COLLEGE EDUCATION 2 matter of social class, rather than an opening of opportunity to all. These weaknesses of support and access seriously threaten the capacity of our colleges to promote a free, educated, and democratic society. But there is terrible irony in the fact that these are not the only or even the most serious defects in the system. Even if our students had open access and full support, everything would depend on what happened once they arrived; and the truth is that the teaching and learning that go on in our colleges are actually not very good at all. The main problem of our colleges is poor education. We cannot blame the public for not knowing. Students themselves, partly influenced by their colleges’ almost universal claim to “excellence,” are rarely in a position to realize what the true possibilities of their education might be. They assume that this is the way it is and has always been. Parents who have not been to college are reluctant to judge, and those who have refer at best to experience that is thirty years old. Some of the defects of college education have been researched . For instance, studies have found that barely 11 percent of college seniors are reasonably proficient in writing, only 8 percent in mathematics, and only 6 percent in critical thinking. But there is a lot that cannot be demonstrated objectively because college education is one of the few major activities in our culture that has not yet adopted reliable ways of measuring its own performance . In the parlance of business—all too fitting in the academy these days—college education has no bottom line. Nevertheless, our failure is clear. Look around and ask yourself whether our nation looks or feels “college educated.” I submit that even though a quarter of adult Americans have received bachelor’s degrees or higher, and half of high-school graduates now enter some sort of college, our culture does not look as if it is populated or being shaped by individuals “educated” in the best sense. I hardly need point to our prevailing traits: our indiscriminate consumerism and the media WHAT’S WRONG WITH COLLEGE 3 entertainment that promotes it, the steady slide of our journalism under commercial monopoly ownership into the same entertainment , our neglect of government in favor of the buying and selling of political influence, our preference for gossip in place of political thought, our worship of celebrity over accomplishment . The list could be much longer. It is enough to contemplate the situation that most of the business leaders who see us only as consumers, most of the members of the advertising industry, most of our journalists and politicians, most of the people who promote, design, and pay for our mass entertainment , are college graduates, so-called educated people whose judgment seems to be that our society is mostly stupid and should be kept that way. Whatever...