College is not for everyone. There are many ways tó learn.
35
I used to believe in a 4 year liberal education, no longer at $100,000. You need a trade plain and simple. Now to further your curiosity and to add to your trade the next 2 years are perfect.
19
This is an extremely valuable focus on how we can begin to heal part of the damage from dominant culture and the academic hierarchy.
However, I suggest that to continue in this kind of work we need to upgrade our language and remove "navel-gazing" from what we are actually trying to conceptualize...one or more descriptive phrases are needed, instead.
Our culture, language, and minds too often suffer under a kind of enslavement where it seems necessary to plug every idea, concept, and need into some "one word": we are enslaved by the limitations of one word ideas.
10
In the effort to 'recover the moral component' of the university, perhaps greater attention should be paid to the rules governing personal relationships between faculty & students or administrators & staff or between those with a superior position & those who have to report to them.
Perhaps as much attention should be paid to testing the aptitude of a faculty to teach as is paid to the aptitude of a student to study under a faculty that can teach.
Is it illogical to presume that a moral life, a life with meaning begins with examples of moral behavior? One lesson we learn from pedophiles is that their early experiences of abuse by those in superior positions led them to believe the moral life includes the personal use, even abuse, of those over whom one has power.
....
Nawh. Let professors dole out grades in exchange for sexual & other favors. Keep applicants to programs at institutions of higher learning begging for admission without revealing whether the schools' faculties even have the aptitude to teach. Somehow, like this article suggests, changing the content of the program, not structural amorality & immorality, will 'recover the moral component'. ... Yeah. ... Right.
6
I think that philosophy is not a waste of time. I think that character building is the true aim of education (fortune cookie).
17
I applaud these programs for providing an alternative to the young people and teachers who are dissatisfied with more traditional colleges and universities.
As someone who is decades post-college, I would love to take a retreat of up to 2 weeks that would provide a taste of a similar experience.
One money-making venture for these programs: retreats/vacation programs?
12
I have a PhD in English, but I'm a moderate. I was an adjunct professor who taught English, but I'm a moderate. This article seems to imply that college exists to make students liberal or more liberal. I feel like one can study Kant or Edmund Spenser, without developing a liberal worldview. I'm all for studying the Humanities, but I don't view the Humanities as a device for making people more radical. Is analytic philosophy part of the Humanities? I'm not sure that studying Husserl, Heidegger, or even William James will make more o a lefty. My point is that the version of the Humanities discussed here is very specific: It's a 1960's Antioch College/New School version with the Frankfurt School and Hannah Arendt at its core. It's NOT the St. John's great books version.
12
I think the commenter is misunderstanding the sense in which “liberal” was used in this article. It’s used to describe the political philosophy, not leftism in electoral politics today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
39
After high school education has two functions: to develop citizens and develop skills for a profession. They are both necessary. Comments here point out the value of skills based education (“the trades”)...so true that we have neglected their value. Comments have also pointed out the value of “gap year” jobs that cultivate interactive skills. (I always say my best education came from restaurant work). But, also, the hope of these start-up colleges is to create citizens! Ones who think about their role in the world, the way they want to live and treat people...with the fragmenting of our value system, we desperately need this!
11
In 1979, I met a man from a prominent Ecuadorian family who was attending UCLA for naval architecture studies. Besides speaking multiple languages, he could expound on multiple topics at a high level. I was learning about human physiology and I remember asking him about the anatomical limbic system and he recited a wiki-like knowledge about it. At that point, I mentally declared I would attempt obtaining a "Royal " education, which I felt he had. That meaning, the education necessary for one who wants to be a leader in a country . I had 4 years of USA university schooling at that point and was able to add 4 years more before my funding ran out (thanks to Reagan era austerity Proposition 13 cuts) upon which I had to leave academia to get a 9 to 5 job.
I didn't reach my goal, but I am appalled by the idea that university education should preferentially be a job training experience.
Philosophers, writers, playwrights, history majors, etc. need to be given breathing room to flourish if our society is to not be doomed to robotic job seeking graduates.
I can only hope avenues such as Outer Coast and Wayfinding Academy continue to thrive.
34
I’m guessing that commenters here who complain about bureaucratic administrations have never worked in higher education. For thirty years, I was in marketing and communications in higher education. I had three jobs in one, a lean budget and little in the way of staff. As higher ed pursues big donors to close the funding gap created by the abdication of the federal government, administrations have become more corporate in how they function, how they treat their staffs, and how they measure success. Oh, and if your child’s university does have a bloated staff, it’s only because today’s family and student demand much more in the way of services than previous generations. I suspect that’s a reflection of income inequality. Today’s wealthy parents have an expectation that their children will be pampered.
25
The quality and academic standards of our higher education is going downhill during the past 50 years. Our higher education became so much interested in making profits. I witnessed the change and really felt helpless and hopeless. It is bad for the future generations of American young people. As a part-time student at a state university it took me six years to complete my BS degree and I felt proud and happy. I learned both my academic interests and also learned how to be a part of a productive citizen to my country. Later it took another ten years to complete my graduate studies and received my graduate degrees. I had the opportunities to teach part time in many universities nearby my home. I felt proud but I also felt the quality of our high school education and college education is continued to decline. All universities become more interested in making profits and not the quality of education. Sad for our younger people. The new social media and online education only make things worse. Our lawmakers and president Trump are not interested in education but attacking each other. In another 20 years we will be a second class world power.
14
Put quite simply, my Bard education cost 6000 dollars a year for room and board. In the mid 70s, Bard was the second most expensive college in the US. Now, my daughter is off to college next year. She received a Provost Scholarship worth 40K a year to a noted liberal arts college. My "discounted cost" per year is about 27K. I saved 70K while I was working full time before I knew the actual cost. I thought that would be enough. My daughter plans to major in drama. Is this crazy or what? The private college alternative is no longer affordable to most middle class people. Period. Student loan system is predatory and the interest rates for subsidized loans are not 400% higher than when I went to college and graduate school. This is not a sustainable model. Educational system in the US is broken, and now as a result of Trump's efforts, they won't be able to bring in rich foreign students to pay full tuition and support their bloated, ridiculous bureaucratic organizations.
15
Lots of all or nothing comments. You can either major in STEM and get a great job while your self centered soul shrivels like the Grinch’s heart or you can major in the humanities and spend an enlightened life living in a cardboard box.
Reality is people with open minds will get well rounded educations regardless of major. I was an engineering major and the engineering accreditation board required us to take at least 6 humanities courses on top of required courses like English. I took a philosophy class that still guides me today. But you have to walk in open to learning or it really won’t matter.
348
So, KHahn, how do we perfect 'open' minds?
5
The "curriculum" here sounds a lot like what most arts and humanities courses at liberal arts institutions still offer. "Wayfinding Academy," with its silly name, sounds as bogus as a charter school to me.
18
I am surprised that no one mentioned Goddard College, which has been doing innovative self-directed learning in meaningful ways for decades.
9
It's laudable that "anti-college" programs are rising, but the sad fact is that education, particularly higher education, long ago lost it's moral compass on the meaning of "education."
Some would argue the rot began in the 1960's when many colleges began substituting "university" for "college" without much regard for the responsibilities of that name change.
Higher education is the new poster child for mission creep, particularly among the administrators, where VPs of really important stuff like "diversity" and "student life" chew up hundreds of thousand dollars in costs, at the expense of academic programs.
Unfortunately, there is no critical mass of reforms such as those Ms. Worthen notes to rededicate higher education to the ideals of "education."
9
Science and math are not part of this model. Marcuse over Newton -- this should leave these students well prepared to tackle the problems of the future.
4
My impossible dream: a college that believes enough in its mission and its students that it would be the primary lender for its student loans. If the students do well, they do well. If the students end up working at KMart, neither the college not the students can run to taxpayers and ask for a bailout. It would encourage the college to provide a good education and cut back on administrative bloat.
13
In my last 2 yrs undergrad, I was accepted into Humanities Honors program. 30 students took classes together in literature, history, etc, w/ great electives--I twas so enthralled w/Greek drama in translation that I studied ancient (Attic) Greek.
We all were friends, & our professors threw wonderful parties. Same in grad school, where I T.A.'ed from 1977-84.
Taught at Univ of IL at Chicago Circle (at that time) new, commuter, working class. A great time, but no parties, as a single woman, I had to be more careful. Didn't get tenure, tried/failed other things that flopped, & realized that college teaching was the only thing I loved.
In 2003 started as part-time instructor at very good local community college. But appalled at the pay & hierarchy. Tenured profs taught 5 courses with full benefits, but instructors (non-unionized) couldn't teach more than 4, & some (younger than me) worked at 3 different community colleges to support young families.
Sadly, students were different, too. Less respect for me, for education, for reading in general, more discipline probs that I'd associate w/high school.
Every year emphasis was more numerical, esp. student evaluations. They were always pushing STEM. After lines around the block for my most popular humanities courses, enrollment for American survey (elective) dropped off--by fall 2013 it was 1, & I retired.
I've spoken to software execs who told me that the STEM majors are useless, and they want critical thinkers. This essay proves it.
34
@Rocky Mtn girl The whole world and all sentients are being quantified and digitized, allowing consciousness to transcend the limitations of time and space. Plato's story about "Shadows on a Cave Wall" is the founding concept in the current hypothesis that we are living in a holographic universe. The more I Iearn about the ancient Greeks and the ancient Hindus, the Zoroastrians and others, the more I begin to realize that the answers to the question "What is reality" has always been answerable. I believe that we are in the process of creating reality this very second.
2
I teach a college course and while most students make a good faith effort, most don’t have the discipline, the habits or the drive to excel in college. Our culture has dumbed down significantly since the 1960s, and a lot of it has to do with the repudiation of a classic liberal arts education that the counterculture believed at the time produced individuals capable of engaging in an amoral Vietnam War. Today, with the retreat of federal government support, higher education has become more corporate and more focused on credentialism. I understand the impulse to seeking alternatives, but it really always has been up to individual students to get the most out of their education. New curricula and new pedagogical approaches are a dime a dozen, and they come and go. My advice is free: Put down the phone, and I mean put it down, and read classic literature, contemporary literature, magazines, newspapers, and journals, and take on assignments with an unequaled seriousness of purpose if you want to maximize your potential. That means you have to be insatiably curious, determined and able to resist those who would remind you that being smart is unfashionable. You have one life. Give it all you got.
52
Many of the liberal arts tenured faculty that I came to know, both as a student and as a teacher, were either lazy or stunted single-issue partisans who pompously critiqued society according to their social and linguistic "research."
When I left academia to work in business, I found that the general level of competence was much higher in my new field.
12
There’s a difference between ‘quanta’ and ‘qualia’? Who knew? Other than my elementary school gym teacher, who never stopped yapping about “quality over quantity.”
“Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man,”
I still can’t believe that I was asked to read Jane Austen, but I lived through the experience, and Plato is actually worth the time.
As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, rather ominously, “A nation cannot be educated by grammar school teachers.”
We sure showed him.
9
I might concede that Plato is dead. However, the notion that he was "white" does not hold up well under critical examination. His concept of masculinity was assuredly also very different from a contemporary American one.
13
i have been arguing against college for all almost my whole adult life. i did go, i got an AA degree and it enabled me to have a good, lasting career into retirement but i didn't go to college until i was 24 when most of my peers were graduating with bachelors. for the years prior, i worked many different jobs and it gave me great experience in working with people, learning work ethic, learning retail, office, bar tending (!) and many other people oriented skills you don't learn from going to high school to college to work. i sincerely believe in a gap year(s) so kids can learn life skills necessary to grow into an adult including the responsibility of having to go to work, work hard in order to keep a job, politics of your work space etc. we have also put way too much emphasis on college instead of trades. not every kid is made for college. when i went to school, there was college prep and non-college prep. too many students dropping out these days and still owing big loans. lots of $ and pride to be made in construction, plumbing, electrical and other areas of trade
120
I applaud these schools for the willingness to try a different approach. It's unfortunate that so many people think college should be focused only on learning a specific job skill. A lot of people tell students to study STEM fields, which is fine. However, STEM doesn't exist in a vacuum. STEM creates tools that can be used for good and for nefarious purposes. It requires perspective to understand how to apply these tools in a way that is most beneficial and least harmful to society. One of our biggest problems right now is that too many leaders in business and in technology lack the judgement to understand their larger responsibility to society. We should applaud young people who recognize the need to explore these questions.
107
@Julie W.
"Understanding responsibility to society" - whatever that means - doesn't pay anyone's grocery bills or rent.
The reality is that the vast majority of well-paying jobs are in STEM because those fields teach people how to create, and yes how to think critically about what to create to solve people's problems.
Far too often humanities lovers slam STEM and implicitly claim they have no "critical thinking" skills. This is absurd if you know anything about scientific method or math.
These alternative college people are nothing but hucksters seeking to make themselves rich by misguided teenagers.
Why doesn't Facebook hold recruiting events for college drop outs? Why doesn't Microsoft? Or Apple?
Because they know that the overwhelming majority of people who voluntarily refuse to go to college do not have the commitment or discipline to function at an advanced level in a consistent way. No one is "brilliant" on command, 24/7. It takes grit, discipline and commitment.
The real problem of college is that their quality is wrongly measured by their acceptance rate. Once you pass that hurdle, you're practically guaranteed graduation.
This is in stark opposition to the European model, where acceptance to college is very easy, but graduation is difficult. It levels the playing field by giving everyone a chance to see what college is like, and only those who thrive in that college environment graduate.
13
@Viv
What it means is that you have to understand the implications of what you create. We see time again that people can create things that they don't know how to handle. Mark Zuckerberg can create a nifty software platform but is totally over his head when it comes to figuring out how to manage its use. Municipalities can deploy technology to support "smart cities" without having any framework as to how to manage the multitude of personal data they are collecting. Companies can utilize machine learning to develop predictive algorithms without any plan as to how to keep the technology from being used to target and discriminate against particular groups. Technological development must always go hand in hand with judgement and historical perspective. And by the way, I have three STEM degrees myself and have spent a career in technology. I speak from first-hand experience. STEM does not exist in a vacuum and it never will.
45
@Viv
I am a computer programmer with gray hair. It is more likely that I will find income of $65 and over, maybe in the area of $125K if I learn and get licensed to drive a truck. I am considering it.
12
Essentially, what these students are finding in these "anti-colleges" are what I found in university whan I started it in 1964. I began in pre-med, aiming at a well-paying job that would raise me out of the working class (I was the first person in my family to go to university). However, I had to take all kinds of requirements in multiple fields and, once I found university English was quite different from high school English, I changed majors and never looked back.
Part of today's problem, especially with state-funded universities, is a constant media campaign for the last few decades telling students and their parents and their legislatures and their universities' administrators and boards of governors that the only reason to go to university is to get a well-paying job. The students, parents, legislators, administrators, and boards of govenors have been listening and demanding the universities teach nothing but subjects that will lead to well-paying jobs. Except there aren't enough of those well-paying jobs.
Meanwhile, the universities have been obediently starving (and, along with parents and the media, steering students away from) the Humanities and Social Sciences that might give students exposure to ideas about what to do with their lives other than make lots of money at jobs that don't exist. So now we need "anti-colleges" to teach what universities were designed to teach but have been told not to teach.
382
YES! Universities must get off the false careerism selling and educate to produce students who will be Life Long AUTODIDACTS!
25
@Maureen Hawkins That's what legislatures want to hear. The survival of public universities depends on keeping them at arms length.
2
I went to Deep Springs, and then transferred to Yale, and Deep Springs was by far the more transformative experience.
This article skims over something essential to Deep Springs--the combination of rigorous academics, student self-government, and twenty hours of manual labor per week. That combination pushes students to be both practical and thoughtful in everything they do.
Kudos to the founders of Outer Coast and the Arete Project, for offering students this kind of down-to-earth liberal education.
131
It should be beyond doubt that these efforts are not just aimed at discussing values - but instilling them. My guess is they attract the woke and make 'em even "woker" through a specific, long-term program with very specific ends applied to a captive audience. Some might call it liberal education, other, brainwashing. Think about this what you will, but let's contrast it with another story in the Times about YouTube and the alt-right. There an unorganized effort by large numbers of YouTubers who don't agree on much and who can be turned on and off with the click of a mouse, are cast as a monolithic force for evil brainwashing their fellow Americans.
2
Coursera, Udacity, EdX -- FREE online courses... or a small charge for a certificate of completion. Why isn't there a mention of these at least monthly in the TIMES. (Too Socialist!!??) Wikipedia -- thank heavens for Jimmy Wales -- Britannica would never have done it... even if some of the articles rely heavily on the 1911 classic Britannica.
Actually, given the tenor of society - one really needs law school.
Retired and sitting in on undergrad courses at my alma mater, sometimes I feel really sorry for the students, because despite my PhD. I often do NOT know what the professors are trying to say.. or exactly how they expect the students to construct their papers. But then, I'm one of Obama's "dumb" art historians (five languages aren't enough-- and that is for real!)
Required courses such as Columbia's various humanities courses possibly should now become part of the upper level high school curriculum. Just saying.
BTW given the education and ability (experience) levels of students of different ages and education backgrounds, teaching does become a tricky business. Also given that the human brain becomes mature ONLY at age 26! (and almost immediately starts to fade: math at 29 -- but interesting vocab knowledge peaks at age 60!)
Learning in fact is lifelong. Back to Coursera, Udacity and EdX. (Did I tell you about Prof. Brian Bushee (Wharton!) on Coursera and double entry bookkeeping? Fantastic!)
4
I still believe that trying to encourage your high school senior graduate to join the Peace Corps, or between their second and third year of college, or after they get a degree, for a year or two of service, is the best way to go.
11
“Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man,” she told me.”
If this is how you think you don’t belong in any group that tries to innovate education. One should acquire knowledge regardless of where it comes from. It is okay to critically analyze the,”dead white man’s” work, disagree, poke holes etc but complaining to read proves that you don’t belong in that group.
I say this as a brown person.
16
@Bogey yogi
yes! Hire a young college student while they still 'know it all.' Remember the Alamo and the tech bubble - youngsters thought those stock valuations made sense... until their dollars turned to cents.
1
The public university system in the United States is not designed to aide companies or individuals in pursuit of their own writings or inventions. Most universities have a 'walk-on' intellectual property policy that effectively confiscates those rights from anyone who walks onto their property. This puts them into direct competition with the very people -- the knowledge workers -- they claim to serve. For this reason, I refuse to use any resource at the University of Minnesota, including facilities, staff or libraries.
According to University of Minnesota Board of Regents (June 12, 2015): "The University shall be the sole owner of all rights, titles, and interests (including intellectual property rights) in and to technology: [...] (b) created by individuals, including employees, students, or post-doctoral or other fellows, using substantial University resources."
If you are a knowledge worker, author or inventor, the only way to fully understand the public university system is to view them as a competitor.
Cite:
University of Minnesota Board of Regents. COMMERCIALIZATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. Amended: June 12, 2015
5
They represent a growing movement of students, teachers and reformers who are trying to compensate for mainstream higher education’s failure to help young people find a calling: to figure out what life is really for.
Huh?
That is each individual's obligation. Many go through life without really solving the puzzle. Education's role is to educate. Colleges and universities offer diverse courses (or some are specialized) to give students a chance to gain exposure to see what they like best or do best.
Education's failing is its expense. Too many universities want to add to their endowments. Education gives you a 'Major' a specialization. It gets you started in the world of work. And there education has failed to provide what markets want and has over-provided what markets don't want. So who or what is responsible for that? Do we blame 'education' for helping you to become a literature expert who works at McDonalds? Or is that 'your' fault, or your 'choice?'
I am an economist and I blame my profession for touting education per se as the answer. It wasn't and it isn't. As great as it is and as many 'externalities' as it generates your education must first work for you.
The problem has been the US economy and the jobs it created as much as what students studied. A poor understanding of Free Trade allowed our leaders to lose sight of what America needs. America needs to be competitive especially with developing economies with scores of low paid yet educated workers.
3
There. Molly, this is the kind of writing we need to hear about more frequently. We must challenge our paradigms of reality.
Somehow, School has become a mostly for-profit business and that very much at the expense of the business of training critical thinkers, autodidactic leaders, kinesthetic learners like me and those who learn through sound or even more evolved, those highly evolved beings that can communicate any possible information through higher emotional frequencies such as love or above.
1
Anyone who sees Plato as nothing but a "dead white man" would not be admitted to any academy I would create. Not only is it contempt prior to investigation, that posture is nothing but a modern conceit of behavior, a narrow-minded game of role playing. We are all aspects and participants in a great consciousness that may be, according to scientist Rupert Sheldrake, a manifestation of a conscious sun. Sheldrake points out that a fish, like an individual human, is an organism. A school of fish is a higher organism, as is a murmuration of starlings or a classroom of science students. "Thinking outside the box" means seeing yourself -- and Plato -- as more than an ego in a bag of skin.
11
The high cost of college is not due to building lazy rivers or the high salaries of college presidents. At public colleges, there has been an enormous decline in state funding that has been shifted to the individual students. Moreover, there has been an enormous increase in the number of students who can't pay any tuition and need a stipend to be able to attend college. The third major cost is in the use of expensive faculty time, which is largely devoted to learning about the world or delving into esoterica, depending on your point of view. Probably 90% of faculty time is spent on scholarly work and 10%% on teaching. A fourth source of expense is the need to accommodate more kinds of students with different needs. For example, there are now about 20% of undergraduates at University of California campuses from China, and significant number struggle to speak or understand English. They do pay a very high tuition that pays for many of the students who can't pay anything. On the other hand, they require special expenditures such as special counselors and videotaping and subtitling lectures in English.
3
Sounds nice, but mushy.
6
I hear about these proposals of varying sorts for "free college for all" with frequent nods to Europe (often, Germany). What seems to never be mentioned is that it really isn't true. In Germany (Switzerland, and others), the sorting of students by ability and inclination begins heading into high school. The "college prep" high schools really have about the top fifth or sixth of the students. And of those who do well, university may be free. It certainly doesn't mean that students who can pay are kept from university. But it does say that college is not everyone.
I know in my case, I was educationally ready, but my maturity was not. This is particularly true for males. I know I would have greatly benefited from some sort of required service (that many European countries require). Until I figured out that I really wanted it, did I truly appreciate college. Logically and intellectually I always did, but life experience has a way of making that more clear.
One other part of education prior to university is distinct lack of critical thinking skills being taught and a demonstrative method of teaching WHY we learn what we learn (beyond the usual tropes). But I suppose critical thinking is great for one political party, and not for a certain other political party.
7
The universities, which were corporate-oriented enough in my day to breed the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, are much more so today. They need a new, more general, catharsis, in the original Greek sense of purification. Let the corporate-oriented dominant departments form their own independent Trade School, so that Liberal Arts, the foundation of an intellectual life, can return as the reason for a college education.
But, a second revolution is needed. The domination of much of the humanities by sexist feminists with self-bestowed titles has set up quackery, nihilism, and victimology, as the truth, leaving in their dust the disfigured corpse of classical and modern knowledge.
For all their radical rhetoric, they are leading a counter-revolution.
Historic feminism sought women's equality. Logically, that is a search also for men's equality. The sexist feminists' project is to assert the superiority of women, and to establish that Men are the source of all the world's big problems. We're not the first group to play that role for an authoritarian victim-ideology.
If DWEMs (Dead White European Males) are let out of solitary by the sexist feminists who dominate much of the humanities, this could indeed be a reform.
If it privileges interrogating Post Modernist narratives, and talks like the preceding clause, it will be one more sclerotic caricature of what was once intellectual life.
Well, in any case, enjoy Sitka, Russkaya Amerika.
5
This article is on point with issues for returning students seeking to continue their education ("higher" as in college). The U.S. inchoate adult "classical" college student experiences severe financial damage. A fraudulent solution to lack of access to higher education is online education.
The content of online classes' today, though provided by education institutions, are directed by corporate conglomerates like Pearson Review. The instructors are "free" to use the publisher's "tests. Thereby, they are relieved of a duty to read the student's exams or assignments. The online tests are flawed. Imagine having to answer all questions as multiple choice or yes or no? Online exams give out false computations and are horribly ambiguous. They leave no opportunity for any student to challenge or dispute the contents of the questions. Worse, so-called unresponsive and uneducated technical support who are charged with answering students questions are not college employees nor the publisher, but under "ZenDesk".
It is actually difficult to find and secure professor individuals to teach college: they can work outside the institution for a hundred more an hour, in technical fields.
The online instruction makes for irregular, lackadasical, irritable, reluctant instructors/professors. They work somewhere 40 to 50 hours a week, without commitment to their college students. Yale offers televised college classes. They teach how to instruct to college instructors.
2
Uh, 70s redux. Think Summerhill, open classrooms, all of that skipping school, classes on the green, weed...
This is the way it goes in education; mandate standards or testing or whatnot, and a decade or so later, people run for Alaska to escape the bleakness of too much data/structure/control. But have to say, as a college educator, I am ready to head there with them. There is some joy in my classrooms on a regular basis, and the students do grow in places - but it's a daily battle against 21st digital culture and the chronic boredom this cultivates. A little bit of soul in the machine would be nice for all, perhaps. But the shift isn't really a new thing, just maybe a little late. Hope it sticks. And thanks for including Dewey, who often gets neglected over newere names.
4
Higher education meant a lot to me. It took me out of a small place and taught me how to think, how to develop my ideas and present them and confidence. Several things have degraded education. There are the working class who often see it as a waste of $ except for of course the upper classes. Are they better students. I think not. There are the business consultants who have turned education into a job w/o respect or financial reward. As a child, I thought being a professor was amazing. When my daughter entered college, it was the beginning of adjuncts...low level jobs w/o benefits. Mind you, you needed at least a masters to be an adjunct...a real estate agent could make more $. This is now unaffordable. It sucks a student into the student loan business and to debt along w their unafffordable housing so that having a normal progression in their lives is rocket science. Think about the additional cost of child care, health insurance and navigating the insanity w the DeVos Administration who is unwilling to support public anything and there you are....an untenable life.
4
As a young man I was too poor with too many family responsibilities to finish college. Since then I have been too busy trying to earn a decent living to go back to college. I have no diploma for the wisdom I have earned. I believe this Anti-College 'movement' is a disservice to students. It is true learning to develop critical thinking skills and acquire an excellent education does not necessarily require formal college training. However, getting a good job and developing a rewarding career does require a formal college degree. Currently in the U.S. there are only three career paths. The first and highest paying, is for people with degrees who can create the next big money making product or service. The second is for people who have degrees showing they are competent to do the paperwork, keep workers healthy and keep the machinery running. The third is made up of people with Humanities degrees or no degree at all serving the needs of people in the first two career paths. College credit is worthless if it doesn't lead to a applicable degree from a recognized, accredited university. Higher education, especially in light of recent scandal, is a mess in need of immediate, drastic reform. Higher education needs leaders who will step up. Politicians, faculty and students who will step in and be a force for progressive change. Not delusional whiners who fantasize dropping out will somehow encourage the status quo to evolve beyond greed culminating with pomp and circumstance.
2
@Tyler Fawkes
Tyler it sounds like you are enveloped in some kind of disappointment regarding higher education.
It may be your local environment. If you can work with other people on any project, consistently and you have something of a product to show for that, that is a piece of gold in the work world today.
These are not shots in the wind educational alternatives. Wayfinding sounds as if it was extremely well researched, and formulated. Wayfinding the word is a science term for the science of foot navigation through a set of buildings or a campus of sort.
Criticism of high tuition and student loan debt is well founded but, Every generation thinks they have invented something new.
I’m now old enough to realize most young people feel disillusioned and cheated as they enter their late teens / early 20’s. This has been going on for thousands of years.
Work for 1-2 years, join the military, coast guard or go do trail maintenance for the National Forests / Parks.
Hard work focuses the mind and gives you time to mature and learn about yourself and the world.
4
The critique of universities is right on, but I’m not so sure about the proposed alternatives. What exactly is their relation to more conventional forms of higher ed? How will the programs ensure equal representation for working class and poor students? These alternatives seem great but there a lot of specifics that they leave out. If they’re not careful I fear they will simply be a boutique/bespoke detour for a class of folks who aren’t really going to find it that hard to go back to university proper at the end of the summer.
3
@Jeremiah Crotser
Jeremiah: Back in the 1960s under the direction of a Philospophy professor named Joe Tussman, at UC Berkeley, a set of 150 students were selected to study intensively the classics without being graded for two years. There were seventy five males and seventy five females. They were essentially gifted persons, intellectually prior to entrance in the University.
People, their parents, the Regents, worried that this kind of no grading education and focus only on critical thinking and communication (non technical) would be disasterous.
It was an experiment.
I believe there is a book written by Dr. Tussman entitled "An experiment at Berekeley."
I know those students as adult friends. They are all very accomplished and solid in their profession with some exceptions. One developed cancer and died before graduation, another suffered a psychotic breakdown. But overall the experiment was a huge success.
@RR
The experiment was a "success" only because back in the 60 and 70s, you could obtain very good jobs if you graduated from Berkeley, no matter what you majored in or what your grades were. The name brand of the school was enough.
In those days, employers trained all new graduates. Now that practice has all but been eliminated.
1
Erich Fromm's To Have or to Be was not a good read for me but the title is so powerful and my short answer would be to have less and to be more.
We live complex lives and make money through complex professions where lots of knowledge has to be acquired and then life-consuming challenges are taken for granted until we retire, face a life-changing event or die. This appears to be the (winning) formula for popular professions.
But 'meaning' is often found in simplicity, when one touches his or her inner self. Some become Buddhists and I travel to small, very basic Greek islands every summer to maximize my exposure to the meaning I find so easily in sunlight, sea and some wine. It's a short term escape though..
Can we ever incorporate the life-enriching simplicity we seek on our vacations into our life-consumingly intricate professional lives?
I would say creativity is the answer to this question but who among us is open to creativity and will be willing to risk it all? No, we just want safe and mechanical lives because we want to hold on to money. That's why I live a double-tiered life of working mechanically and relaxing in the opposite sense.
My humble solution has been putting a ceiling to my luxury consumption. It had a liberating effect on me because the less slave I am to luxury, the more resources I have to spend on creativity.
5
Yes, our higher-ed system has a lot of problems, but it is hard to see how these projects are going to help anything. Get back to us if they come up with some solutions.
3
These kinds of alternative learning environments are not new. However, because higher education has become less subsidized by the "whole", it has become more selective and expensive. This, then, drives the motivation to make college a new kind of "vocational" school. And with this, the lack of emphasis on the humanities. And the author is right that this shift in thinking about what "education" is for is the American tragedy.
3
Sad that the backbone of the US, education, lost it's way to the extent that the very universities that tout their MBA programs are administratively bloated and wasteful, in need of an overhaul. Another example of boomers benefiting themselves with university compensation and perks at the expense of our youth.
6
Cultivating curiosity and observation, reading widely and deeply, using maps and brains to find one's way instead of GPS, growing plants and saving seeds, making drawings can do much the same for the independent thinker. Schools are helpful for some personalities--for others, even the rich and specialized programs outlined here, they just don't work.
1
Colleges in America long ago dropped the moral aspect of learning as a central purpose but I pose this question: is there any true learning that isn't grounded in morality? Colleges have left this question hanging and, if it is considered at all, it is up to students on their own to find an answer, or partial answers, by which they can try to live.
Colleges have lost a sense of central purpose and, in its place, the acquisition of a degree as the essential key to opening the door to jobs has replaced it. This can, and does, turn the four year experience into bland careerism from which students might never recover even if they live to be 80.
The late David Carr who wrote for the Times, a man of many varied and often unfortunate life experiences, said the graduates he encountered working their way in journalism knew nothing "but what they learned in hot house colleges". What he meant at base is they were ignorant of the world save what had been crammed into them for grades. This should not be. Someone who graduates should have a broad, integrated knowledge and have done some actual hands on work, labor.
The brilliant writer Walter Kirn said his true education began AFTER he graduated from Princeton when he started reading not to impress a professor but for the depth of knowledge available. Is there any more damning indictment of traditional college programs than his words? A Harvard grad wrote in a book he finished with a jumble of courses with no unifying theme.
7
@Doug Terry
High school and college are supposed to lay the foundations for intellectual curiosity. It is supposed to teach you how educate (and learn) for yourself. It is absurd to expect them to provide a "true' education - crammed into four years of high school and four years of college.
The world is continually changing and developing. If you are not intellectually curious to continue learning on your own - and thereby acquire true education - that is nobody fault but your own.
By the way, despite Carr's displeasure, how many journalists and researchers does NYT have on staff, and didn't graduate from elite/hot colleges? It exclusively employs graduates from those schools in part because of inherent favoritism/nepotism, but also because those graduates have the qualities they value.
2
Parents, take care of your children.
2
"They aim to prove that it is possible to cultivate moral and existential self-confidence, without the Christian foundation that grounded Western universities until the mid-20th century."
Well that pretty much sums it up right there, doesn't it?
1
@Timothy Teeter
And "... if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?"
No surprise that the author, who is a professor, derides parents' and students' desire to come out of college with practical skills, words that she even puts in quotation marks to highlight the mockery that she makes of them. And yet it is a reality that practical skills are what employers want and that these students eventually need to get jobs. And by the way, working at a job and taking on adult responsibilities has a way of showing people what their role in life is and can be in a way that no book-learning ever will. Except if you're a professor in an ivory tower.
6
@Roberta
Thinking is a practical skill; so is math; so is science; so is the ability to spell and write a coherent essay. College doesn't have to each you be be an Ad executive, or a plumber, or business manager or a consultant. But it should teach you skills that you can string together to do SOMETHING. What you do with your education is up to you. Of course you should be taught skills maybe even some impractical ones.
1
"Help students figure out their place in the universe and their moral obligations to fellow humans". That sounds great until you consider that all of that is made up. What was our only purpose in life as per nature? To survive through eating and reproducing. Yep, that's it. Just like the mosquitos or any other life form that evolved on this planet. School? Cubicles? Houses with 4 walls? We made it all up when we emerged from the jungle. But to hear it told by some, there IS a place you fit into the universe, but like some mystical quest, you just have to FIND it... as if this unrevealed slot for you to occupy has always been waiting for you to find and then become. Nope. Nature did not create any such thing for us "out there" in the Universe. Everything beyond biological imperatives is manmade and thus made up. Which makes the very idea of "discovering" your place "in the universe" made up as well.
101
@No big deal
Sure. So reduce the poetry of transcendentalism and change the word “discover” to “invent”. Otherwise its cubicle time in the service of someone else with a more emergent purpose.
13
@No big deal
Excellent comment on a topic of blah blah! Our meaningless endeavor of finding meaning to life never ends. We already waste a significant amount of money in teaching useless staff. Why people cannot read books and learn on their own these philosophical parts of life which apparently have no practical benefits to a student apart from becoming an activist or teacher on the same nonsense?
3
@No big deal That sure is a reductive comment, and it doesn't make much sense.
"But to hear it from some" -- hmm, OK, but who are those "some"? Not anyone mentioned or quoted in this article, so what's your point? It sounds a lot like people who love to say "Some people are saying" -- all in order to inject what they want to say, which quite possibly nobody else has been saying or asking at all, by pretending to innocently raise a question. It's a way to slip by the actual topic and say whatever you want, rather than respond to actual statements made or ideas raised in the article.
17
One of my favorite educational venues today in the USA is the community college where education is a life long experience. In some communities, high school students now spend their senior year in community college and get credit for freshman year in college. This makes sense. Obviously, college needs to be three years as practiced in Europe instead of four.
1
@David Michael
Community College is for adults, not kids. Please. Minors do not behave.
Most Community Colleges have abandoned in person classes for "hybrid" classes.
...Just as long as the "anti-college" doesn't result in an anti-education. We're producing enough of those as is.
4
Please tell me more. Some of us are trying to start a similar movement in Canada. Specifically, a university based course for public education that focuses on the urgency of addressing climate change.
[email protected]
2
the humanities are self destructing. If nothing has meaning, there is no point to your program, and then no program.
As a liberal arts major, I find this sad. But liberal arts is committing suicide.
5
If you’re not finding any meaning in your humanities courses then you need to file a complaint with the university or transfer to a better one. Or perhaps actually do the assigned readings and attend class.
3
This is absurd. How about we teach students proper calculus, differential equations, physics and programming?
These are the same students who go on to take 100k in debt to study some silly major and then want that debt erased because they can't get a job. This is infuriating.
7
COULD THE PLAN OF DOONG AN INTERNSHIP IN ANY FIELD BE A USEFUL EXPERIENCE AND MAYBE NOT AS FAR OUT AS PEACE CORPS USED TO BE FOR MY GENERATION? I am thinking, one could have a better sense of what to major in as well as skip 1 yr of college and re focus enthusiasms as well as resources towards new goals? In Israel they do not talk higher education because after HS they serve in Israel’s compulsory military branches. But some of the women learn about drone/computer as well as many other new fields at the end of basic training... it occurs to me our educational system/as well as life style is due an UOGRADE!
2
I work in an IB school abroad. I work in the elementary and my husband in the Upper school. In the elementary there is a push towards more “find yourself,” building, passion projects, etc. Homework is minimal. But as soon as the students enter Middle school (a shift in buildings and philosophy,) they are following a more rigorous college prep program. The International Bacaloreate is intense. Some freshman college students have come back for a visit and say they worked harder in high school than college. I see my son go through it and I wonder why it has to be so rigorous at 14. I find it sad that the students lose interest due to homework burnout. They are scored and compared, and it is tough.
I love the idea of a better connection with physical labor, and a chance to be more communal with each other. Rigorous university and college prep systems often leave kids feel isolated and at it alone.
We all want our kids to LOVE their future lives, to feel they can go with their passions. I desperately want that for my son, but the American University system just feels to straight jacket.
Why do we create systems that punish our children?
3
"Deep Springs — a tuition-free, highly selective two-year liberal arts college and working ranch near Death Valley in California — combines intense study, manual labor and intimate community to give students “a sense of the purpose of education not just being for oneself but for something larger than one’s self"
You know what also gives people a sense of purpose and being part of something larger than one's self? The United States Marine Corps. Perhaps these students should consider service to country instead of hanging out in the wilderness for two years.
10
@Jon Tolins
What makes getting a humanities education less servile than joining the US Marines?
Could it be that they might think a bit harder before joining often futile (and deadly) battles in the name of protecting US corporate interests abroad, and keeping the military-industrial complex profitable?
Maybe they want the choice to serve their country in different, more productive ways.
5
Perhaps something analogous to the paradox of hedonism applies here. Trying "to figure out what life is really for," focusing on the "question of the value and purpose of living, of the sources of fulfillment available to us as mortal creatures," may not be the best way of discovering value and purpose.
4
The return of good ideas -- I'm thinking of Goddard College (1938) and Warren Wilson College (1894 as Asheville Farm School) and Berea College (1855). And John Ruskin taking Oxford undergraduates out to work on the roads.
The administrators of our tax-payer funded universities who believe education is a business can't even imagine anyone who believes that education is an end in itself.
5
The students who would do well in this sort of program would do well at any university. They crave experience and enlightenment and actually want to learn. The failure with the modern university system is that there are too many students who go with no desire to do anything other than have fun and get a diploma. Higher education should be restructured to provide apprenticeships, practical training, and hands-on education to students who really don’t want an education, just preparation for a job. Too many of these students are wasting time and money, and raising the cost of higher education for everyone.
404
@Grover "there are too many students who go with no desire to do anything"
It gets worse. I can relate the experience of an emeritus faculty member friend retired from ivy to a local state school. He found some students not doing the work, and were primarily intent on political recruiting in classes.
I am a fan of the German educational system, in high school US equivalent, coupled with an industrial policy.
24
@Grover
It’s not necessarily the kids’ fault. A lot of them go to college because it’s what is expected of nice middle class kids with nice upstanding (white married white collar) parents.
Where I live if the child of a doctor and a teacher wanted to be a pastry chef or a mechanic, the high school and probably the parents would pitch a fit.
So they go with no plan and no motivation other than it’s what they are supposed to do. That’s why so many drop out of the big four year universities.
92
@Grover
They may only want a job for themselves, but they will also be citizens whose votes and other choices affect the lives of those around them.
15
In Democracy and Education, John Dewey stresses the importance of education in a society’s self-renewal. All education is vocational, with vocation defined as “any form of continuous activity which renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the accomplishment of results.”
I am not surprised that many young people of college age feel dissatisfied with what they are being offered. They expect, at some level of their thinking, and reasonably enough, that the institutions charged with society’s self-renewal will prepare them for their vocations in life. Yet many of our modern society’s most obvious vocations seem deeply dissatisfying. Our “eminent jurists” offer little more than logic-chopping rationales for entrenched privilege. Our “best and brightest” in the life sciences are kept by pharmaceutical companies, whose products seem to hurt more people than they help, just to mention a few.
The alternative institutions therefore have great value. They arise from the dissatisfaction of their founders, and gather, in their inevitably brief existences, the energies of young people whose hopes for change have yet to be focused on a practical vocation.
The alternatives are necessary not because American colleges are “too vocational” and focused on the graduate’s paycheck, but because they are not vocational enough.
2
@Global Charm in winner-take-all in the ‘flawed free-market based capitalism’ system this furthers the gaps developing in society. These schools appear to cater to those who already ‘have’. To get society back on track EVERYONE must do community work, [real work, not the kind to fluff up profiles], and military training + service when required.
The FAILURE is more in k-12 education, and much of what goes as ‘college’ today is the remediation of that k12 failure.
2
Move to Denmark. Determining the path to a 'happy life' is the goal of all education and life itself. And it has nothing to do with money.
4
@Cody McCall Look up eudaimonia. It is the third term in the founders ‘life liberty and xxx’. A life well lived > happiness derived from being good and doing good.
1
I don’t remember any of my professors in engineering expounding upon happiness.
It was get the work done or else.
Happiness was irrelevant and you didn’t want to find out what “else” meant.
1
@Patrick Campbell
the great professor cares about what is in your mind. I had professors rave about my essays (I failed to sign my papers so they did not know who wrote it). It wasn't that I wrote English well, it was the content and meaning.
I had a great mathematics professor who gave me my love of number theory and set theory that I work in daily. I never expected it. But it was because he found the best way to explain the Unit Circle and its connection to trigonometry which led to the number theory and set theory. He had a PhD in abstract mathematics.
1
In 1989, Mary Midgley an English philosopher wrote a prescient book relevant to this discussion, “Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowlege For.” Everything old is new again—of course, not exactly—but it’s good to read books even if they are as long as the Mueller Report.
3
Come on - everyone knows you go to college only to get a good job. Humanities and the like are relegated to the back of the bus, if allowed to get on at all. High principles are for the high-minded - of which this country seems a tad lacking these days. The meaning of life? In the Trump age? Gimme a break!
8
It seems to me that what is missing in our economy today is not so much educational choice, but a realistic view of what education should and does provide. When you need a master's degree to work retail in a bookstore (true story in the town I live in), you know something's dreadfully wrong.
I had low grades throughout junior high and high school, and was never able to make myself sit through any class long enough to even really pursue a college degree. I dropped out of high school when I was 16 and then stumbled my way through dead end jobs for ten years, eventually finding my way to technology. Over the ensuing 20 years I worked my way to the top ranks of my profession, switching roles along the way to maintain job security (and my own interest) as I went.
I have worked with peers who have achieved the highest levels of education in virtually every field related to technology, and yet I have never found a situation where I know less or am less prepared than a peer because of of the disparity in our educational background.
We all learn, every day, from every interaction and especially from every experience. And while a select number of professions will always require a specific type of educational and/or apprentice experience, the vast majority of the work in our world does not.
87
@txpacotaco
PS it's not just about "learning." It's about meeting people who will be friends for life!! and finding a mate hopefully. The elite colleges are elite because their alums are often in positions where they can perpetuate the elite (jobs, grants, etc.) It's kind of an imprimatur. Where I carry the bag from my reunion -- or wear the T-shirt with my cousin's college's name on it -- K'zoo -- often I end up in conversation with an alum of said institution.
And being pestered to donate for life as well!!
In the end education is only part of why this experience.
6
@txpacotaco
learning by doing. advancement by self motivation instead of from the privilege of an honored degree. I still 'like' education. But self motivation rumps all. Some people are late starters. Other are adept at conforming from a young age. Congrats to you.
6
It’s time for everyone to admit what college actually is: advanced job training.
Oh, colleges have the prestigious ultra-academic research programs, but those are just job creation efforts for individuals who want to be college professors. It is a quaint but antiquated notion that going to college is mainly about immersing oneself into learning for learning’s sake. That is an elitist fiction that is true only for a small sliver of the population.
No, colleges exist to prepare people for a career, and the amazing thing is that they often do it well, but in a roundabout way. What exactly are the job prospects out there for, say, a philosophy major? The ones actually related to philosophy are mainly to remain in academia by becoming a college professor.
The career preparation experienced in many, maybe most, college programs is indirect. It is the regimen that matters, the organizing of one’s efforts toward meeting the degree requirements and actually attending the classes needed to complete it. It is the jumping over of those hurdles that is the point, and often not the material one is actually studying. Employers recognize that an individual who has completed a degree program has demonstrated possession of a set of relatively high level intellectual and organizational skills that indicate a capacity to succeed in a job for which an employer is willing to pay a significant amount of money.
That’s no small thing, but it isn’t mostly about learning the specific material.
66
@Marshall Doris
You seem to be beating the victim. For 30 years or more state legislatures have been telling universities that they must be preparing students for a career, while universities continue to point out that the liberal arts helps to prepare students for life.
As for research, the US made a choice after WW2 whether to set up large federal research laboratories or to site the research at universities. Doing the research at universities was favored because of the synergies--primarily that students can be involved with state of the art study and learn how research works.
9
@Marshall Doris
disagree. Education and vocational training are different. Both have a role. But education is NOT advanced job training... nor should it be.
13
@Marshall Doris
It is time to admit what college REALLY has become...a way to extract a substantial (and always rising) entrance tax on the way to a hopefully better life. And to help nourish the already obese debt maw on behalf of our partner-banks.
Knowledge gained in the process is a byproduct and is strictly optional. That is, until we figure out how to establish college ownership rights and create a royalty scheme.
11
As someone on the cusp of finishing a PhD and with six years as a college instructor under their belt, I can say with confidence: the university system is broken. A huge portion of instructional faculty lives in poverty, while admins are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to chase after expensive, non-educational amenities and come up with empty slogans to put on brochures. Students are too tired and overworked due to ballooning costs to do any real learning, and instructors tacitly know that they're job is to pass them anyway to keep enrollment and retention rates up. Forget these bourgeois gap-year programs, too. Until we address administrative bloat, over-reliance on contingent faculty, and tuition costs within the university system, teach your kids to love reading and encourage them to pursue skilled or semi-skilled trade. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they'll be just as well or better off.
640
@LM I went to a public high school for gifted girls, then spent two years upstate in a small private college in the "college belt" around the Finger Lakes region. College wasn't my idea, really, but it got a whole bunch of people out of my hair and probably prevented a murder (my own). I eventually took off running out of college when I had an opportunity to go into the unionized skilled trade I'd always wanted to enter, and never looked back. My classmates thought I was nuts.
Forty to forty-five years later, my classmates and their four-year degrees and their postgraduate degrees are five kinds of worried and stressed-out over whether or not they can afford to retire, much less when. I'm already happily retired six years, with no cash-flow worries, thanks to a unionized skilled-trade job.
154
@LM
All true. The colleges are not only amoral, but immoral: rising tuition for ever worse education; clueless boards of trustees; mediocre and useless, bloated administration; shameless exploitation of adjuncts and graduate students; useless offices of diversity and inclusion while the marginalized students need better teaching and teachers to succeed not "officers"; grade inflation etc. etc.
60
@Maggie Dee
But you are fortunate that your company didn't close up shop a decade or so ago, prior to your retirement, and leave you hanging as has happened to millions of others who had "unionized skilled trade jobs."
155
Indeed, education at all levels needs to change. I went through a classical Jesuit education in Washington, D.C. for three years but fortunately spent one year in Athens, Greece in an International High School. It changed my whole life on every level with small classes (15 students) in a school of about 60 students, field trips accompanied by teachers on weekends, and commitment to participating in all of the programs from drama to soccor and basketball. Participation was the key.
I went on to college and several advanced degrees but my favorite year was school abroad. It was a life changer experience. If I could change schools in this country I would make them in one way or another small (15-20 students per class max) with an umbrella of the large school if necessary. In high school, every class would have to build a small home as part of graduation requirements. The Trades would be an active part of every student's experience. And...every student would be required to speak a foreign language to graduate and take a course in finances. For many of our high school students unfortunately, high school is a colossal waste of time. Most of all, I would put money into education instead of the Pentagon, wars and guns.
75
@David Michael
I'd settle for an ability to speak English well and a knowledge of American history and how government really works - plus some math and science skills.
11
I'm a proponent of a liberal arts program.
These programs began to be phased out in the late 1960's partly in response to students increasingly determining curriculum and students and parents wanting "practical" and useful education which is often nothing more than vocational training by another name.
Listening to students and parents is important. but having most of the educational syllabus being determined by them is not prudent. And it seems to have migrated into middle school and even elementary school.
58
@Jon_NY And yet, every time there's an article about student loan burden, the comments section fills with angry diatribes against students who dare major in things like liberal arts. *Sigh*
5
There are colleges that have strong philosophy of personal development and individualized self-actualization. Three I know of were founded in the same late 60s period.
Anyone reading this who wants to go to a four year school with degrees, but where the college gets it, should look into these three accredited colleges that are a lot like Evergreen in Portland, Oregon:
New College of Florida (in Sarasota, on the grounds of the Ringling Art Museum), Hampshire College (in Western Massachusetts), and St. John's College (in both Santa Fe NM and Annapolis MD).
All would probably still take students for next Fall.
3
@priceofcivilization
... And Sarah Lawrence College! ( yes, it's co-ed).
The vast majority of college students do not give a toss about the liberal arts (which includes unapplied math and physical/mathematical sciences). The idea that it is only a failure of mainstream education to provide a more substantive liberal education or courses in which one considers the competing principles that give shape to an entire way of life, well, that's a joke. Most students do not want a liberal education and resent being required to take liberal courses. A lot of faculty outside of the humanities do not themselves have a liberal education and think very little of the humanities and do not hide this from their students and majors. Administrators at universities and colleges are simply following market demands. If there is a failure to provide a non-vocational, liberal education, it is because most students do not want it.
Do not kid yourself: we could cut college tuition prices in half. Voluntary enrollment in courses featuring Plato, Newton and Shakespeare would barely rise.
I say all this without joy and with much lamentation.
Academia is broke from top to bottom. But our secondary education is also broken—the kind of student it produces is also part of the problem.
4
I know so many philosophy/history/art/poly sci/psych majors that reel in so much debt and then go back for that tech/health care/engineering degree, so I guess the author is right, go to one of these bridge programs (that cost a lot less than trad colleges), find yourself, then get on with it.
Hard to think of organizations as corrupt of universities. Run by senior faculty for the benefit of themselves. All courses are just on a treadmill to grad school. Never any courses titled "What an educated person needs to learn about literature (or math or psychology)". And there's no one to steer the faculty straight.
2
@Ben "Run by senior faculty for the benefit of themselves."
It's true most professional administrators find some way to claim faculty status too.
Education has lost its way when EVERYONE should go to college no matter if they have an interest in something or not. Keep in mind a 4 year degree has now been stretched into 6 years at outrageous cost. And all the while colleges and universities smile all the way to the bank and graduates learn too late that there is not pot of gold at the end of the rainbow after being saddled with debt that will follow them into old age. Gone is the deep thinking on subjects that were of interest to you where you might later develop something to change the field. No, all there is now is a higher education treadmill that in many cases leads to nowhere.
7
This debates dates back to Booker T Washington and DuBois Our education institutions needs to do both and most actually still do, even if the current moment seems vocationally focused. Remember it's an anxious time both for first generation striving college students as well as for the upper middle class ones given all theses changes in the labor market. We need to be sensitive to those needs as well. I would say, however, that we really do need to address cost and debt. And the factors are complicated. Yes, there are some overpaid administrators but if you look at the data you will see that it's not that simple of a story. At my large RI health care costs for faculty/staff (along with the reduction in state subsidies) is the major factor driving up cost.
1
The problem with higher education is how they have bent over backward to serve business interests at the expense of incoming students. Many colleges shamelessly plug training programs for jobs that have few available openings and which few students have a realistic chance of obtaining.
For the students, it is an economic disaster, because the cost comes directly out of their pocket, which they must now spend the greater portion of their working lives paying off.
But for the companies, it's an enormous boon, because now they have a glut of recruits and can drive down wages because of the large labor pool.
4
Maybe the message is that higher education does not necessarily lead to higher salary but it does lead to higher self and higher society.
4
There are liberal arts institutions that emphasize this type of interdisciplinary, non-career oriented education. Places like Wesleyan, Vassar, Oberlin, Kenyon, and more already do this. The problem is that they're horribly expensive. People who don't have the wealth to access these institutions don't get the privilege of that education. And the low income students who do attend are economically pressured to focus on career-oriented majors. The pursuit of education for education's sake is now reserved for the wealthy.
6
@Connor And on top of expense, these are also the most intellectually homogenous schools in the country.
A very important piece missing from this report and column is working class and first generation Latino, African-American students, and other minority students to whom higher education is their ticket for a better future. They are not allowed to search for themselves because they need to work, they don't have the money to spare and they cannot have a break. Working in a traditional university, we faculty are doing all we can to address both profession and personal knowledge, particularly to follow a career that will bring them joy, a good living and stability. From the outside, many see faculty as this people just researching and creating in solitude. From the inside, inside a liberal arts college, I always see people trying to bring the best to the classroom to students and to teach them many of the skills our K-12 system do not have time for so they can be prepare when going to the job market or wherever they wish to go. More than looking for shortcuts, I strongly believe all this personal reflection must start with opportunities in K-12 education, a holistic experience in which all students from all communities can do academic work and field trips, thrive in STEM but also in the liberal arts, create a scientific project and also a play. All combine and leaving specializations behind will bring a better sense of self in all students going to college.
7
@DAT
Yes!!!
1
For most people, the self improvement and soul searching through academic teaching is a luxury they can't afford from both time and money aspect if this is the only thing they get out of it.
All of the higher education programs should offer some psychology, sociology and philosophy (may be economics, game theory and theology too) courses as an introduction and let the students self study or build communities to develop a sense of self and purpose independently.
Developing practical skills and broadening the knowledge of each student should be the main endeavor of higher education so they can become teacher, lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants, AI specialist, innovators of all kind with some subject matter mastery in hard science.
My daughter is studying a STEM major at a University of California campus and she has plenty of opportunity to take humanities classes to satisfy her curiosity and desire to expend her general understanding of how society and people "work". She had great professors that fall short of living by what they are teaching as humans, she says, but that also a good lesson in itself.
We are shaped by the sum of our experience, by the time someone goes to college you would hope they would already have been exposed to many role models and be somewhat grounded.
Higher education can help further their self discovery but expecting they would be like fundamentally transformed would worry me.
2
A college degree now is what a high school degree used to be, four years of jumping through hoops and nothing but a huge debt to show for it. Getting an education should first be about instilling a deep and abiding curiosity. Give a person a very solid foundation and a love of learning fueled by curiosity and an education will occur. Give them endless materials to memorize for tests, and a dearth of imagination as well, and a sub-standard education will very likely be the result. We need to completely rethink and overhaul education. Some students would be much better served by specific training. Most students nowadays aren't readers, don't study Latin, the classics, economics, or logic. They have no firm grasp of history, can't speak a second language, and, to boot, they have no job skill-set when they finish. Having a tiny bit of information about a lot of disparate subjects does not an education make. Education is now just another money-making enterprise preying on people who must have the product to obtain work, but who don't want it, or in many cases, even qualify for it. Mass upper-education is a hoax perpetrated for profit. Degrees have become almost meaningless, bought and completed by tutors and professional paper-writers. Like everything else lately, it is a sad state of affairs, and seems to be motivated by nothing more than l'argent.
7
"'Practical skills,'" while not the strength of faculty at many higher education institutions, for many good reasons, are a preoccupation for every student from a challenged and/or low-income background. Diminishing them as a necessary part of an advanced degree is a mark of privilege. It speaks of a context in which certain kinds of things - like financial stability - are much more taken for granted than they are for many, many people. Why such skills must be distinguished from critical thinking or development of an advanced political self is, again, illustration of cultural, economic divides. There are many educators capable of drawing Dickens, Shakespeare and Whitman into conversation with the pragmatics of life - and perhaps this is something that graduate institutions should be bearing in mind when evaluating applications and designing the curricula they employ in preparing future professors. Ms. Worthen obliquely makes an important point, that the vast majority of professors in higher education today - adjunct and otherwise - are prepared fully to teach their subjects, but not nearly so well prepared to teach their students. Undergraduate students are not fledged. They cannot make informed decisions because they lack information, which is why they are in school. The abnegation of this part of their education by the academic side of most institutions is why there are "associate vice provosts of student life." Class is 10 hrs/wk. Life is 24 hrs/day. Both are important.
6
Higher education is very consumer based now, and universities now work hard to figure out how to appeal to students to enroll in their degree programs. I still think the focus needs to be on creating more affordable education for more students and helping them graduate with a degree. The curricula in universities changes all the time. Universities try to be adaptive, but they are big institutions. A lot of learning should be up to the student to take advantage of their educational opportunity and not just "get a grade in a course."
2
Even on a full scholarship, this is an elite experience. I doubt the job market is that good and airfare to Alaska is expensive.
Frankly, the problems with higher education are not solved by a program that is designed for the well-off to find themselves.
8
The well off are usually the ones to start things like franchise, abolition, feminism..... even if it does not always work out, It is a start of something.
"... to help young people find a calling: to figure out what life is really for."
Gee, I thought that was what k-12 schools, families, friends, communities, synagogues, churches, mosques, bookstores, libraries, music, art, sports, work, newspapers, movies, chat rooms, beer, etc. were for.
6
@Andy Yes, exactly. I am terribly confused about what we are assuming higher education is about. How can a school help you find purpose? If you are not brought up with purpose, then it stands to reason you won't be looking for it, much the less finding it in college. Parents who live lives of quiet desperation, consumerism and careerism bring up children prepared to do the same.
2
We came to believe that attending college is a sure way to learn how to think about anything. A disaster.
2
I am in the process of leaving a top public university as a non-tenured (NTT), full-time faculty. My friends think I'm nuts - only my NTT colleagues understand. Universities and colleges are run by tenured faculty, 99% of whom have zero practical experience in running anything. HR policies, financial management, team-building, customer relationships, product (e.g. degree, class) design & marketing, etc. are foreign, abstract concepts to them.
I'm also a mom of three teens soon heading to college, and they will attend a traditional university but knowing that their faculty (particularly tenured) have little professional experience but lots of deep academic and research knowledge/experience. If you know what you're getting, then college becomes a different experience. It isn't about a piece of paper and a byline on your resume. It's about starting a journey to lifelong learning, learning to ask questions, read critically, and absorb a variety of information including - yes! - Plato.
My students expected everything that I taught them would be in the book, on the HW, on the quiz, on the exam, and then in their job. Life doesn't work that way. If anything was not as expected, they were quick to dismiss, ignore, or be angry.
My children will study, as I did, a liberal arts education. They will take classes that interest them, and classes that don't. It is a journey as these programs note, but it is an expensive one worth the cost. I have zero regrets, but cautions to share.
7
It may come as a surprise to Ms Worthen and, indeed to many born after 1980, but not all of us desperately want "to submit to a community and an ideal larger than ourselves, without losing ourselves entirely." That's so far removed from the realities of a life outside the cosseted world of academe that it would be laughable if it weren't so frightening and sad.
6
For several years I taught and further developed a course originally conceived by Dr. James McClaughlin: Global Perspectives of Curriculum. Despite the word “curriculum” the course involved a lot more. We studied as a class - I being part of the researching class, NOT the “instructor” but as a member, the philosophies and structures of education used by the other 95% of the worldʻs population. We always had at least 8 speakers from different countries. Some of those speakers were present or past students of the course, foreign faculty members, representatives from foreign consulates or local foreign school teachers. As such, we here in the US do not have to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of different models in the world, ranging from town elders who teach younger generations in a forest clearing or on a wind swept beach to similated “real life” curricula a la Thomas Dewey or Paulo Freire, that are being implement in the far reaches of our planet.
2
In college, I was a mathematics major and philosophy minor, and although I was doing very well in both, when I was a junior I began to feel that mathematics was content-free and essentially meaningless and that attempting to understand the basic problems of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics would be a better path for me. So, I went to see the chairman of the philosophy department, a world-famous scholar, about switching my major to philosophy. After briefly reviewing my academic record and asking me a few questions, he said that he recommends that I continue as a mathematics major and take some additional philosophy courses when I can fit them into my schedule; He said that his recommendation was based on the fact that it is almost impossible to obtain decent employment with a degree in philosophy. I took his advice and eventually earned a doctorate in mathematics and became a college professor.
It is now 60 years later, and three weeks ago I took my first trip to Greece. As I walked up the Acropolis to the Parthenon and then descended to the Agoura where Socrates questioned the citizens of Athens, tears came to my eyes. Did I really make the right decision 60 years ago?
10
@Mathman314 Yes. Bottom-line, you made the decision that you made, taught and likely, inspired many college students and made your pilgrimage to Greece. Right on! You are alive, sir, and every sunrise is a gift. Life is in front of us. A few proverbs from the Marine infantry: "Life is in front of us. Don't waste any time looking in the rear view mirror or you'll miss what's right in front of you--life, wine, women and song." Another: "Easy to be hard; hard to be smart," that's a meditation on humility, of course. The Greeks focused on "the good life," and if you're happy to be alive, there is nothing better than that. Gratitude is the root of all joy. Being grateful for being alive, real life right now, is where it's at. As Jackson Pollock said, "It's a good time to be alive." Cheers.
7
@Mathman314
Remember that Plato wrote on the entrance to his academy: " Let no one enter here who is not a mathematician".
Or remember Galileo (paraphrasing loosely): the universe is described in the language of mathematics.
Or think of Prof. Tsao, neurobiologist at Caltech: "deep in the visual part of the brain, neutrons are computing inner products".
Mathematics is not empty: it is the intersection of the human mind with the description of the universe.
6
All but the Ivy Leagues and state schools are now fighting for students. The education industry is hurting along with many other industries. There are demographically less American-born young people to feed these desperately hungry colleges. Foreign born students are not as welcome in the political climate we have today. Prices are high and consumers are afraid. So, a promise of a college education that offers a bright financial future is enticing Young people and their parents are scared. Scared that they won't have a job, won't have health insurance, won't have a house, won't have a car, won't be able to afford a family and children. Education as enlightening and self-fulfilling is seen as something only the elite can indulge in. Does anyone in the education industry really believe these small colleges, many without accreditation, can really survive when most people really do need to find a way to make a living? Even if these small institutions try to offer something different, these programs will never be more then a hopeful blip that will cater to a very small group of young people looking to exit our commercial and capitalistic education industry and society. Remember all those hopeful and idealistic hippies from the 60's. They eventually became the lawyers/doctors/financial advisors of today. And, last I checked, they voted Republican. And, Republicans have been attacking education for decades.
13
@SB Winston Churchill's observation on maturity and life seems to be right on. Experience tends to make people conservative as they become older and have experienced life as it is.
1
I can see one course title now: Alternative Headwear, Footwear and Facial Hair 101: The Importance of Coordination. Imagine showing up to one of these places clean shaven and in a suit and tie. Hey, look at the patriarchal weirdo. Get your toxic masculinity off of me.
5
Problem, still:
To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/to-professoruniversityedu-subject-why-its-all-about-me.html
Oh, yeah, sure, whateves.
Nobody never done thought of this prior.
Emerson, Thoreau, Oberlin, Deep Springs, CCNY, Naropa, a thousand others...never heard of them.
Did you vote?
3
What a croc.Learn the three Rs. You and society will be better off.
8
I think the first thing I would tell one of these students on the first day they arrive is this, "If you came here seeking truth, you will eventually become disappointed. Our job is to provide you with the resources that will help you choose an illusion that will make you a happy and productive contributor to humankind." To live without absolutes is a lifetime of work. The joy is in the passion. I think I might start with The Commedia. Yes! Lost, Virgil, Beatrice, Hell, the Godhead, it's all there. The journey begins.
7
We live in a country in which the loudest mouths, and biggest bigots, proclaim endlessly government sucks, not like business - always good, always right.
We elect people who talk like that.
And we get colleges and universities that have been made in their image: top-heavy with vice presidents who contribute basically nothing to the educational mission, although they add a lot to "student life" and scrounging for grants.
"The professoriate", as some here have it, suffer every bit as much as the students.
As to the search for purpose, its lucky you dom't live, for example, in Florida, where an erstwhile governor suggested humanities students don't deserve to live.
Every budget decision, every investigation of waste or "value" proclaims trade school the model of choice. Get trained, get a job, get outta here.
Now, we have a DeVos running the place, fighting for the rights of entrepreneurial schools-for-profit to bilk students, to shun standards, to repeat the party line.
In America today, there is no value in poetry, art, music, history, and any who slip through that crack and aim for such a career are, by definition, losers.
You can't blame colleges for what they have become, except maybe for a dunderheaded lack of vision and commitment. You have to blame the "winners" who insist today's college is just the ticket.
13
@oogada I agree - except with one part of your statement. True, the VPs (and presidents, deans, associate deans, department chairs) add little to the university. Schools would be better off hiring professionals than letting academics run a not-for-profit business. For one, professionals would likely be a bit cheaper, and faculty could be paid a wage based on their contributions to academe and student learning, rather than on their title.
The people who offer the most value at universities are those who are the least paid - the staff. Registrar, Bursar, Financial Aid, Admissions, program admins, department admins, deans' assistants, IT.
2
@Julia Scott
Are you sure your figures are accurate? Rwegistrar, Bursar, Financial aid, admissions, program admins. You think they are underpaid, as compared to faculty?
I am not so sure. At my university, the fairly administrators are paid as much as faculty, often more. I'm not saying that their services aren't worth it, but much of what the faculty does could not be done by ANYONE else.
4
@BarbaraAnn
You and Julia seem both to be right, in part.
First, be honest, if you want something done, done fast and well and to the benefit of students, you need to get yourself a good secretary, assistant, IT person. Then stand back and let the blessings flow.
These people know what matters; how to get it done without all the political, philosophical hoo-hah that besets the great minds at the top.
Second, sure Julia, lets get some professionals, the cheaper the better. Their know-how and management ability will exceed those of most professors. But they will lack the empathy, the devotion to the educational mission that should be Reason One on every campus, but almost never is anymore.
I can give you your professionals, if your professionals will be put in a position to answer and respond to faculty on issues of education and vision.
Barbara Ann is right: If there's an administrative pro anywhere in the machine (and there always is) that person is paid more and, far too often, has responsibility for or authority over faculty. An administrator responds to campus life as if he or she is sitting in a mid-level office in some corporation, always threatened from above, always afraid of minute evaluation, always more concerned with 'the message'; than with the people he or she nominally works for.
This 'business is better than everything about government (or academia)' is nonsense and destructive in the extreme, as our current condition amply demonstrates.
I "earned" three master's and a b.s. from "top ten" U.S. schools in the sciences, with highest honors gpas, and if I were honest I'd say it was a worthless exercise. The main roadblocks to learning were the costs incurred, the bureaucracy and the mind-numbing administration of paper-homework-grading. Almost all feedback I received was fake or minimal to non-existent. In almost every class cheating was rampant. The only real learning I had that was college-related was through self-directed reading and one-on-one direction from a research mentor, which is rare. The rest can readily be had online.
I would not recommend a U.S. college today, even free of charge. If you want to learn then read, follow online lectures from well-regarded experts while building a portfolio of self-motivated, self-directed projects.
One day someone's going to have an AI rummage through tens of thousands of term papers and exams. My bet is it will learn little of value.
6
@Yasser Taima
So, what fields were these useless degrees in. Math, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy?
In those fields, the degrees are NOT meaningless, though of course they are worth much more to someone who is self-motivated and hard working.
Where do I apply?
1
Sorry, but anti-science bias, anti-intellectualism, and post-factualism is just as abhorrent from the left as from the right.
19
Boy, those students who don't want to read Plato because he's a dead white man sound so open-minded.
14
The AI-MBA-tech-acronym world has never understood that a liberal arts education teaches you to teach yourself anything. With that capability under your belt, you can explore, experiment, enjoy (and, likely, excel) at all the things that resonate with your Being, your soul, your spirit, your integrity, your conscience, your consciousness.
5
The University Experience
Big bucks we’ll pay to get into college
Pay to consume a smidgen of knowledge,
Our maters and paters are up for the bill -
We’ll draw as we do till we empty their till
To pick up or hook up, expand to diverse
Partners not found in our home universe;
Study, a little, for tests on the fly
And when poorly we do, say, goodness, oh my! –
Next semester a scholar, all day and all night
Or maybe just party with dimwits, half bright;
Launch me in four years or five or six -
With a sheepskin well earned, I’ve got last licks.
Oboes, Guatemala, and university acceptance scandals: How are these things connected? What is this situation, and where, if anywhere, can we go from here? See http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2019/04/admissions-at-top-colleges-oboes.html.
Not sure why reading stuff by “dead white men” is harmful. Is the author saying that this group has had zero useful insights to offer? Makes no sense to me unless the author is simply out for revenge. Makes more sense to me to read writings of people from a variety of backgrounds.
Also, I don’t see why our current liberal arts curriculum and entering a career in service to others are mutually exclusive. Who says today’s English major (or even comp sci major) can’t go off after college and work for a nonprofit trying to benefit the common good? Why do we need whole new schools to train for this?
6
There's more to life than a paycheck.
5
USA universities are what used to be called "Trade Schools" when I was young. They have become little more than privileged businesses, and their products are ignorant and illiterate because the only thing that counts is money. The rest is carp.
2
@Sang Ze:"USA universities are what used to be called "Trade Schools" when I was young. "
Not sure which "USA universities" offer certification for plumbers, carpenters, electricians or painters.
Electronics technicians, maybe.
The educational system in the United States is a disaster mostly due to so-called education specialists who are people who have degrees in education. The last people that these education specialists concern themselves with are students. With that being said, college isn't for everyone but anyone and everyone can be a life-long learner and become educated with or without college. There are many excellent trades (plumbing, electronics for example) that provide a good living and are in dire need of people who are interested in pursuing them. So-called leaders in education are generally people who look for an easy paycheck and know nothing about teaching or learning.
10
Total widespread assumption about education.
BTW— Over the past few years, I’ve had medical appointments with so-called “medical experts” or physicians. They can’t diagnose and they can’t treat.
3
I recently went back to college for a masters after 25 years, and found the academic milieu to be dominated by grievance studies and identitarian tribalism. Critical thinking and intellectual freedom is not possible in such an environment where you can be cry-bullied on social media for expressing any thought that offends the far-left dogma. Welcome to the new campus Inquisition.
94
The administration-led vandalism at excellent, largely public universities began so many decades ago...and it is instructive it takes a half-century for it to be noticed. The University of Wisconsin is a good illustration: in or around 1970, an undergraduate degree cost 800 hours of minimum wage work per year--the income covered university fees, the cost of living in the dorm during term time and food. So you could work full time in the summer and part time during holidays and pay your way through without much borrowing, if any.
Today it takes about 2500 hours which means it cannot be done since that is roughly the hours worked for full-time, full year job.
In 1970 or so, 100% of the teaching of a student in years 2, 3 and 4 was done by full time full year PhD faculty on a tenure track or with tenure.
Today, most students in most classes are taught by individuals who are 'adjuncts' who have little time to prepare and to counsel individual students in the subject matter. Nearly 60% of all teaching is done by adjuncts, even in the STEM subjects.
The hollowing out of the education part of higher education was done to accommodate the 'higher' part--the administrative bloat, the endless administrative expansion and the very few, not seen very often, mainly terribly mediocre full professors who may publish a lot but whose work is so forgettable that five years after they retire, they cease to cited by anyone...at all.
182
@Penny Look to your legislatures for the changes in public universities--
* Micromanagement requires institutional responses never before required.
* Under-funding makes universities seek out-of-state students who pay higher tuition, causes competition among them with more amenities for students, requires higher tuition just to keep roofs from leaking, and necessitates hiring of teaching-track faculty.
* The codgers in legislatures remember college as a four-year experience in which everyone lived in Greek houses and went to all the football games. Today's student has other responsibilities, holds down one or more jobs to keep a family going, and cannot be expected to graduate in four years.
Your view of public universities today makes you sound like a state legislator.
23
@Penny Full of opinionated inaccuracies and statistics. I agree that administrations are bloated and overpaid, but much of what you say is quite simply false. Who are you to make such generalizations about the entire U.S. system of highter education in all fields of inquiry?
5
You might consider whether the difference lies partly in the failure of the minimum wage to keep pace since the 1970s.
14
Our community college full-time instructors start at $36,400, whether they teach biology or cosmetology. We do have really good benefits, and it's a ten-month contract. Just offering perspective. And while I don't have my students read Plato, we do read some Homer, some Sophocles, and some 20th century writers. Oddly, since the welders have to take an English course if they get an associates degree instead of just a certificate, they end up liking being treated like intelligent people and not just another brick in the wall.
4
Indeed, I taught in community college for nearly 20 years. Loved it. And, the pay was good, over $100,000 a year towards the end. The problem now, is to find a job with tenure and life career. Way too many adjunct professors.
1
The problem as I see it is that we have forgotten the difference between education and training.
Education make one a civilized person, capable of thinking beyond oneself.
Training is skill acquisition usually related to employment and money.
4
This reads like an extended info-mercial. As one commenter here rightly points out, we have some extremely pressing, existential issues that we, and especially near-future generations, must grapple with: climate change, over-population, the ressurection of authoritarianism in Western societies, tribalism, globalization, and the threat of accelerating technological advancements. For all the selfless liberalism espoused by this anti-college movement, I see a great deal of inward looking self-exploration. For all its open-minded anti-establishment, I see a lot of indoctrination and a self-congratulatory sense of paternalism in relation to the world.
5
Instead try this method, get your first two years at a community college while you are in high school, the go to the cheapest state college that has a degree in something paying fairly well that you can endure. Get a job. Then spend the rest of your life reading Plato.
7
"Until we address administrative bloat, over-reliance on contingent faculty, and tuition costs within the university system..."
Over-reliance on contingent faculty saves money. Eliminate them, and tuition costs increase.
And everyone complains about administrative bloat. Yet time and again the NYT writes articles about American universities not "doing enough" to stop various forms of bad behaviour. Guess what? Doing something requires administrators, and if universities aren't doing enough now, when they're already bloated, they're going to need even more administrators to satisfy the NYT.
Solutions to the problems of American university education do not consist of writing out a wish list. Like most things in life it means figuring out what to choose, and then making do with one's choices.
5
This is great sign me up! When can I expect to see my ticket to Alaska. What kind of meals will you be providing me? I don't eat much but I will need to eat. How about housing? Tents and a sleeping bag or is there a building? Oh wait! You mean I have to pay for this? You mean you are going to charge me to sit around a campfire and discuss Plato? You see in all seriousness these programs, though well intended, become the play ground for the wealthy kid who is trying to "Find him or herself". Who don't have the pressure of finding a job straight out of college. Or can go work in Mommy or Daddy's firm the day after graduation. I do support this program. But this is a direct result of the out of control cost of college. I could never afford to belong to a gym as nice as the one on some of the smallest universities in this country. The food is outrageous. We have sushi chefs on most campuses these days. There are seven layers of affirmative action staffs on campus and our wonderful professors many of whom blast capitalism are paid a lot of money with very healthy benifits. Just to close. This program is great. But as our kids find themselves. The rest of the world is just studying math and science and passing us by.
6
"Can't believe they have to read dead white men". Like Shakespeare, Hemingway, Jefferson, Melville. Outstanding NYT's. you put down the forces of evolution an evil again. The white man. Gloria Steinem has said her movement failed. You cannot alter survival of the species.
2
A lternatives to mainstream educational institutions exist. Avoid
B ureaucracy
C urricula that may not serve the student. Too many colleges are
D isappointments in that respect
F ocus on the future
INC rease coverage of these alternatives!
Higher ed not for everyone.
Doesn’t mean it is bad.
3
I have one question for all proponents of forgiving students debt, they all say forgive students debt but I have not heard one ask the question why has the cost of higher education gone up at this ridiculous rate. The Administrators of Universities have given themselves enormous raises great perks and we treat them as if they are gods. Nobody holds them accountable while our young adults and parents are on the hook for billons of dollars.
4
As an adjunct instructor at a community college, I am frequently disheartened by the lack of curiosity exhibited by my students. This applies to the subject matter (chemistry), and "liberal arts" topics that impinge on its development and exercise: history, philosophy, ethics. "Please tell us what we need to know to get an A on the exam. Then shut up."
I suspect that the success of the "counter-cultural" college experience lies with the students themselves: this is a self-selected group that is motivated to intellectual exploration.
29
35,000 is not a living wage for anyone on the "crew." You cannot claim innovation if you're doing it on the backs of faculty and staff. If they want to make a real difference, they need to take that into account and pay accordingly across the board.
10
@Stephanie Vanderslice
Publish or perish. At one time, only wealthy landed gentry could afford to teach at elite schools.
Your passions and knowledge start at home. School is a means to an end that sometimes bestows accidents of friendship, enlightenment, opportunity, and direction. Graduating with debt imposes a career trajectory handicap that is difficult to heal.
7
"There is more than one way to skin the cat."
An old idiom, but applicable. Every child is different. Situations can change rapidly.
I raised two children. One is 42. The other is close to 36. Both are very successful but had greatly different paths. The older girl was a fast learner and a driver-driver from early on. The boy had learning issues, but by the time he was five years old he was asking questions, I couldn't answer.
My wife and I threw everything, and the kitchen sink at him including auto-mechanics. I would have sent him to plumbing school, electricians school, any trade school. He chose college. He had an insatiable desire to learn. Today he is a physician in residency.
9
I'm struck by the lack of consideration, by author or commenters, of the responsibility higher education holds in these deeply challenging and unprecedented times. The destabilization of the Earth's climate (alongside the undermining of democracy worldwide) means that young people are living into a world in which many of the questions raised here are unlikely to be priorities. Higher education, despite its professional deformations, is still one of the best arenas in which to cultivate a larger cultural shift of mind and action. We've been grappling with this at Clark University, aiming to re-envision our role for these times:
Newearthconversation.org
11
Seems a bit too much like philanthropists buying every 50th person a private helicopter as a substitute for fixing the roads. The big problem with "traditional" public ed isn't that we're ideologically bankrupt, as exciting as that would no doubt be for journalists to contemplate. It's just that we're broke.
9
@Mark Silcox Yes sir! That is the elephant in the room. We won't solve any of our numerous problems until we figure out how to redistribute wealth in a way that favors the most people, other than the least. No article is complete without pointing this out in bold.
8
@Mark Silcox Yes this. Thank you!
1
Today's college degree is the equivalent of a high school diploma from the 1950's. Most colleges had a core curriculum. Indeed, courses that required objective analysis were not "electives." At the end of my sophomore year I was required to take comprehensive exams in chemistry, biology, mathematics, art history, philosophy, and literature. If you didn't pass all of these exams, you had to do them over or you couldn't graduate two years later. Practically everyone graduated in 4 years, not 6.
I was required to take a foreign language from the 7th to 12th grades. I was required to take a calculus course in the 7th grade.
I'm sorry, I was not an exception to the rule. But back then colleges weren't a business primarily concerned with "selling seats."
In a country that equates intelligence with financial gain, this is what you get.
18
@george eliot "Today's college degree is the equivalent of a high school diploma from the 1950's."
False. The very conservative, educational pessimism-obsessed National Association of Scholars had to acknowledge this after doing a study: "When given a test covering four areas of general knowledge, American college seniors score at about the same overall level as did high school graduates of fifty years ago."
https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/todays_college_students_and_yesteryears_high_school_grads_a_comparison
4
@george eliot: Calculus in the 7th grade? Really? And it was required? I'd be curious to know what middle school that was.
6
@dporpentine: You say "false," but aren't you agreeing with george eliot?
@george eliot: If you took calculus in 7th grade, you were an outlier, and if your school required anybody to take calculus in 7th grade, it was an outlier.
3
Amen. The smartest thing that Hemingway did was begin working as a writer, right out of high school. He learned how to craft lean, insightful dialogue that both drives the narrative and deepens character development from detectives in Kansas City, which is what happens when you're working the crime beat as a cub reporter. Like any writer who survives war, he learned lessons on survival that served him for a lifetime as a writer. And in Paris, he read deeply for free, when he wasn't getting paid to be one of the best foreign correspondents of his time. Before he was 26, he was already making a living as a writer, out in the world like these young people, and living his dreams. He never lost his love for literature and his travels defined his work--had he never left Paris, he never would've written THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a book that continues to be the most popular book by any American writer in Europe, China, Africa and Asia. Great good luck to these young people and I hope they, like Hemingway, get their dreams. And the best education I got as a writer was not in the classroom but in the field, especially with the Paukinyaun (aka the Karen) hill tribes of Northern Thailand.
6
@Mike Tucker: Hemingway is probably not a good role model for most young Americans. He was an alcoholic, had four wives (and countless affairs), and committed suicide at age 61.
3
Here we go again.
A school like Deep Springs that teaches students “a sense of the purpose of education not just being for oneself but for something larger than one’s self" but whose graduates fight admitting women on the grounds that the original founder did not "want to educate women" have obviously learned nothing.
I laughed at the hypocrisy and blindness in their argument, and then I stopped.
Really, this is not funny at all.
10
I believe the best thing we can do for our children is to require all seventh graders to take a class called "self exploration". In this class they would take personality tests, including Myers-Briggs. Also discussion on topics such as compassion, anger, love, discrimination, tolerance, bullying, spirituality/religion, you name it. Not only would it give them insight about themselves and others, but direction as to what they would most likely enjoy doing as a career.
I'm convinced it would give them a new sense of motivation during their next five years by providing them a better sense of direction and confidence within themselves. I can remember just wandering through it all pretty clueless about myself and what I wanted to do, which in turn made me an unproductive student.
12
The wealthy/powerful people were frightened by the 1960's critical thinking that doubted the human value of the then accepted way of life. Our Universities promoted this questioning and has been the subject of dumbing down by the wealthy/powerful ever since. Today higher education is there to produce profit margin enhancing widget makers. Case in point, Wisconsin. Ah yes; capitalism!
7
@tbs
Wisconsin? Resentment stirred the unwashed to follow deconstruction of public education.
Meanwhile, check out Benoit. Beria? St. John's MD and NM?
Even back in the days when I was teaching on the college level, many students had the attitude of merely tolerating courses that were not directly related to their career goals.
"How are history and literature going to help me get a job?"
I taught a foreign language, and these kinds of students were focused not on learning about another way of thinking and another culture but on how having a language on their transcripts would impress employers. They wanted A's for poor performance, and I had to tell them that if I did gave them an A for barely being able to construct a simple grammatical sentence, someone would eventually reveal them to be fakers.
I realize that higher education in other countries is even more focused on jobs than U.S. higher education is. Students start a six-to-eight-year medical school or law school or business school curriculum at age eighteen. However, the secondary education systems of those countries are more focused on the humanities and social sciences than American schools are. By the age of eighteen, university-bound students have a thorough grounding in the history of their country and of the world and of their country's literature.
I wonder if people would be so gullible with respect to internet memes if they were well-versed in history.
12
Participation in such programs seems useful in principle, but how many students and their families can afford to participate? Consider the costs associated with going to college. As everyone knows, the annual cost of college has increased faster than the cost of living for the past fifty years. More and more students have to work fifteen or twenty hours a week during the academic year, and full time in the summer, to be able to afford the costs of college. And, of course, many students are stuck with thousands of dollars in student loan debt after they graduate.
Moreover, the "gap year", especially right after high school, seems to me to be worthless for the large majority of students. The utopian concept of a gap year suggest that 18-year-olds can spend a year building irrigation systems in Malawi, or conducting archeological research in Peru, or immersing themselves in Asian philosophy in India or Myanmar, or whatever. But most 18-year-olds and especially young men do not have nearly enough maturity to do such things. I say this having taught freshman-level classes at universities for over 30 years. (I am a retired academic geographer.) Moreover, with social media and cell phones students become more and more dependent on and tied to their parents. It is routine for freshmen to call their parents as many as ten or twenty times a day.
The bottom line to me is that this is a nice idea in theory, but impossible for most students and especially those not from rich families.
2
Like the military-industrial complex, America’s system of higher education sustains itself by reinventing its own justification for existence.
Without wars, what would happen to defense contractors that enable their employees to support their children at the nation’s most expensive private colleges? Skyrocketing costs and the emergence of the Internet economy have compromised the traditional justification for a liberal arts education.
America witnessed a proliferation of alternative colleges during the countercultural fervor of the ‘60s, but many—including Hampshire—encountered financial difficulties and the specter of insolvency. To survive, liberal arts colleges—like Bennington—renovated their curriculum to include business and STEM subjects. Schools proudly boast of their enrollments in STEM courses, robotics, and coding, as if this were the solution to all social ills.
The resurgence of alternative schools reflects the corrosion of academic culture and the gross divide between highly compensated administrators and struggling students.
Universities need to divert administrative compensation into student job placement programs and learn from the model of the German gymnasium and vocational training.
Selective reading programs, with the guidance of a good tutor and mentor, is more effective than traditional courses.
Higher education is currently constituted as a money-making operation transacted by influential administrators, faculty, and donors.
3
Who wrote the rule that everyone who can finish high school must immediately go to college? And why immediately? Employers seem to be the only ones who endorse this rule, such that no matter what the content of a job, no one without a bachelors from Somewhere U. need apply. So great numbers of young people approach college as an admission-ticket to be punched, preferably with the least amount possible of intellectual work and the most amount of socializing and maybe even a little trade training -- most notably an undergrad business degree. And lenders gleefully put our nation's future into heavy debt.
Universities, especially those with heavy, partnered research activity and/or TV-worthy sports programs, come close to being holding companies for fat endowments, with academics just the store-front branding activity.
What if absolutely no one could go to college for at least 1 or 2 years of work? Work, not bellybutton scrutiny or travel to see the world, but time to see how workplaces work and test out their own ambitions, talents, and habits in that context.
_Then_ choose your college and your major, or even realize that specialized training in your own field is what's needed and choose training accordingly. And go into debt for what will actually pay you back.
10
Higher education can't "figure out what life is for" for young people because the same hand that approves curriculum is the same hand that takes money from Monsanto. That is a bad seed there.
5
Some of this is warmed over self indulgence, but there's a point to even that. Critics of higher education seem to me correct about the limits of the modern institution in helping people "find themselves." As an academic historian and geographer, however, my pushback is that's not really my job description. If a student is feeling rootless, then walking away for a time or forever might be the right call. College ain't for everyone, and not every question can be answered inside the "ivory tower" (a term I despise for its snippy dismissiveness and full-on ignorance of what the academy is). I doubt the wisdom of gap years--one is usually not enough--but I also doubt the value of forsaking college altogether. What college does, and does far better than any other institution in modern life, is provide students with disciplined training in how to think through the problems of life. Nowhere else, including church, will a mind be so challenged to think broadly and to master the art and science of evidence-based reasoning and expression. There is no one silver bullet. Having taught for three decades, students have to find their own ways through this experience, but nowhere else in life can they find more able and willing guides on how to develop their minds.
11
I have never "used" my college education in my working life, yet there is not a day that I don't appreciate my two UC degrees in history and political science. They are among my most valuable "possessions." They have enriched me beyond measure. Commenter: that is largely due to teachers like you. Thank for your service.
2
Parents tend to believe that uni is a serious endeavor, but for too many young people college is a five- or six-year vacation from parents. The high cost of this education exists to prevent the spring sit-ins and strikes that were common in the sixties when the price of grad schools was less than $2000 a semester. Universities claimed that the expense of new high priced equipment was the cause, but new technology had always been expensive and met by endowments. Parents should question whether their child is being taught by tenured professors or poorly paid adjuncts.
2
@Alton As far as I know, one goes "to uni" in Canada, not the US, and anyway no one willingly goes into debt for a day longer than 4 years of American tuition. As far as the 60s sit-ins and strikes, they weren't by any means universal to all US universities, but they did reflect a spirit to reform and improve the world -- one which vanished in the conservative reversions in the late 70s and thereafter. It's in fact heartening to see that it's future and current students who now have had enough of the insanity of recent decades and demand we (including universities) embrace essential change.
3
A good overview of the flaws of the higher education scene. One of our sons went to the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME, a very small liberal arts place with a program quite similar to some of the schools described by Ms Worthen -- he thrived!
The young people, and the founders, who are looking for a deeper and more complete kind of learning for themselves and others are to be applauded.
Despite my total agreement about the 'brokenness' of education -- at ALL levels -- in the U.S., I do have one concern: I wonder if an already-existent anti-intellectualism will grow in the country. Or at least a non-intellectualism. One doesn't have to read a lot of dead white men to be well-educated or intellectually astute -- but is there value in knowledge of history, of the progression of the humanities and arts and sciences through the ages, as well as familiarity with current issues and authors?
At 71, I'm keenly aware of how much I don't know, and there's a risk in that. Is there an obligation of any kind to pass on any cultural knowledge to the next generation, or is pursuing one's passion sufficient? I am very excited about the growing number of exploratory learning paradigms being established -- I just hope we grow deep learning, energetic curiosity, and dynamic problem-solving.
9
Great ideas. What kind of job does your son have?
Ivan Illich would be glad to see that his ideas about deschooling society are finally getting some traction. It is too bad that it took decades of "rankings" based on "hard data" assembled by US News and World Report and the US government's obsession with equating the quality of colleges with post-graduate earnings to get students to see the pointlessness of getting into a rat race that ultimately leads to high debt and little purpose.
1
Traditional college is not for everyone, but that does not mean that it is a failure. It is still the single biggest thing you can do to increase your chances of a decent financial future. The problem is that dropping out and not graduating does not increase your chances, so programs that help students who aren't succeeding at traditional colleges should obviously be encouraged.
But my real question is, how can a program take place in Sitka, Alaska and not read Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union".
2
Don’t look now, but the author of this article has an undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from Yale.
And Michelle Jones, founder and president of Wayfinding Academy, has a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from respectable universities.
Both have gainful employment in well paid jobs.
Do as they say, not as they do.
8
There is no purpose in life. So perhaps one required book should be Darwin’s Origin of Species. Another should be John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. Both will teach you to think critically and write well and help free you from solipsistic lyricism.
There’s no question that a liberal arts education of too expensive. One solution: charge true tuition per course (including advising) and make everything else an add-on.
2
What struck me most is: "The curriculum has been a source of contention. “Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man...”.
This is the problem with today's liberal/progressive education process. Learn nothing from the past. That said, students should not be asked to read anything written by a dead black man. So much for African-American Studies.
2
He who is, does.
Enjoy.
1
I suspect some of this comes from the religious right. They don’t want intellectual thought in their midst. That’s how you keep the people in your grasp.
6
Here are two schools that are doing things differently - both degree granting: up in Canada that is breaking new (old) ground: Quest University https://questu.ca/
and St. John's College https://www.sjc.edu/
There are better ways! Glad to read of these upstarts.
"To find out what life is really for." Really?
"Music, like life, is useless." - George Santyana.
2
Of some relevance to this interesting article is a brief opinion I wrote in the New York Times, "Tips for Reaping the Benefits of College," 25 August 2018. In short, college may be precisely the wrong place for young adults. Here's why: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/letters/benefits-college.html
Perfect. Much of academe is bureaucracy
1
Hippie education has never left us and it probably never will. But this combination of word salad and non sequiturs isn't much of an advertisement for it. Sure real education is hard. Sometimes it isn't much fun and you have to both pay attention and think for yourself. That's why graduates get the big bucks. Get over it.
6
The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan and The Adjunct Underclass by Herb Childress are two recent books that describe in great detail the three primary failings of higher education: First, higher education curriculum is designed around the academic proclivities (and career advancement) of professors, not the knowledge and skills demanded in the real world. Second, the goals of higher education are not designed to prepare young people for the real world, but, merely to signal to a future employer that the job applicant has a piece of paper certifying that they persevered through four years of fragmented and irrelevant course offerings. Thirdly, the final nail in the higher education coffin is that the vast majority of faculty teaching in these institutions are minimum wage part-time adjuncts---All three failings are recognized by higher education administrators, however, rather than address these failings they cover them up with market driven bread and circuses campuses. So, I applaud the efforts of these higher education rebels, hoping, that my grandchildren, now in elementary school, might take advantage of pioneering ventures into schools design to educate.
3
Why the need to spend $11K per year to attend an "anti-college" to find out about hard work? Let that begin at home.
At the top of my suggested list is lawn care. Here in my upper middle class suburb of acre size lots, I have never seen a high school age kid mowing a lawn. The guys in the big trucks come it to do it. Why not spend a few hundred bucks on a lawn mower and let your kid learn about working out in the hot sun, while putting those savings toward helping your kid avoid a bit of eventual college debt?
13
@Jim S.
Hope that kid mowing also finds a way to learn that each lawn is a mini environmental disaster. That cropped grass is not doing much photosynthesis, which means no soil microbes converting carbon to humus so it stays in the ground where it belongs. Not to mention the gas-guzzling lawn care equipment.
If you and your neighbors all have acre-size lawns, maybe you haven't learned some of the things everyone should know about climate change - assuming you do feel that maintaining the planet for human survival is a good thing.
2
Why should someone who is figuring out their goals get into debt and waste time in studies they won't use? Why would anyone give a loan to someone who has no idea what they want to do with their lives?
And more importantly, does everyone need to go to college to have a successful career? The American educational system is not geared towards maximizing the tools that people need to thrive but to churn out graduates without skills that are actually applicable in the labor market.
1
The success of the American higher education system was to focus on the essentials - students and teachers. Everyone else was support staff. The slow takeover of this by 'administrators' with lavish pays and grand titles has taken its toll. Except for the few highest ranking institutions, the remainder simply provide young adults a playground before they reach full adulthood. The public institutions have become profit-raking businesses which distract the students with semi-professional sports teams that instill tribalism. There is a requirement to lower teaching standards. Freedoms of speech and even thought are curtailed, with the pretense of being non-offensive. Mostly, however this is done to decrease the legal liability that the institution may face. There are top-of-the-line student centers that cater to the finest pallets and dormitories that cater to the highest comforts. The student fees go higher. Donors are generous to a fault, in fact to a very great fault. Faculty salaries are mostly stagnant and sometimes below subsistence levels. Yet, the administration has grown at exponential levels (for example, from 5 vice-presidents to 18 vice presidents at the University of Tennessee in less than 10 years). And the administrators make out like bandits.
10
The purpose of college is to make you competitive in the job market in your 40s when the economy has tanked and jobs are hard to get.
When employers get to be very picky about new hires because the supply is much greater than the demand, having a degree or two or three will be a great advantage. People with degrees will go to the top of the interview list.
4
Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and construction workers can be assured their jobs will NEVER be offshored.
And, yet, few women apply.
9
Based on my own observations of family members, a large problem is parents, the current culture that keeps kids kids longer, and the pervasive party culture -- too many drugs, too much alcohol. Parents hand out $60k a year for this, no questions asked. "Students" look at college as a big party -- which is one reason it's ridiculous to make it free. It's not valued NOW, what would happen if it were free? The whole erudition thing is already secondary. If it were actually valued I think students would approach it differently. College was not a given when I was approaching college age. I knew I got lucky and I tackled it with a vengeance. Parents risk their retirement, students pile up loans but still, they come out unprepared and uneducated.
8
The pressure on students to find a well-paying career doesn’t begin in college or even in high school. My middle school-age children have been subject to interest and skills inventories and career days, and they are told they need to be thinking about what college they will attend. They come home stressed because they don’t yet have a career path, at 13. My very artistically talented daughter decided she didn’t want to focus on art anymore because she had been convinced she couldn’t make a living at it. This in 8th grade.
I understand that in their public school some kids have no idea that college could be an option for themselves and they should be encouraged to investigate. But there is such thing as swinging the pendulum too far in one direction.
Add to that the fact that colleges have ceased to be a place of learning (to think, to challenge oneself, to develop into a well rounded adult) and has instead become a form of vocational training for the high-skilled professions. The emphasis on STEM fields has crowded out the humanities, with students ignorant of history, basic communication skills, and critical thinking and reasoning that come from studying the humanities.
27
@EWood
In my high school it was the opposite. School counselors made judgements about you without even knowing you. They made decisions as to your “career” path. “ you shouldn’t think about college. Just get a job. “
2
A good half of most college students ought not be in higher eduction, cannot do the academic or intellectually challenging work, cannot afford it, do not complete college and if they do it is no longer in 4 years. Thus, this expensive game of pretending all offspring are smart and curious has for 30 years burdened the anti-intellectual students and their families. The U.S. needs a hub and spoke approach to education-work, with alternatives to earning living. We also need to stop ballooning our population to the 3rd most numerous in the world, behind only China and India.
When I took a career sabbatical in the 1990s to adjunct teach at a major state university, it was heartbreaking to have only a few students out of 20 or so who could actually do the work and wanted to learn. There were several each semester who were functionally illiterate, barely able to read and write. Most of my students were graduating seniors in college. There is not a snowball' chance they, their parents, lower education teachers and other college instructors did not know these students were semi-literate or did not belong in college. Instead, my dept. made excuses for them and or the broken assembly line system that begins in 1st grade. Compounding the problem were parents who coddled their adult hothouse flower semi-literate offspring who'd long ago figured out how to game the system and expected an A or B merely for breathing and showing up to doze in class - er, the factory floor.
11
This malaise is a natural outgrowth of the 1% controlling the workings of government and society.
The 1% need more people to just run the machines, and pipe the national myths while they strip us of our individuality. In particular, the 1% doesn't want us to question the distribution of wealth. God forbid we should figure out what is in our own interest.
7
In many, if not most instances, college should be postponed until the potential student has gained some life/work experience. You can't expect an 18 year old fresh out of an under-performing high school to choose a major in college. They don't know what is available. They know nothing about the world and can't even recognize countries on a map. I once had a travel agent ask me what country Madrid was in. My friend's college freshman daughter could not answer that question, and she had been educated in private schools. Before 1970 students had more general knowledge, knowledge of issues beyond their neighborhood, more extensive vocabulary, read a newspaper. No more. Kids knowledge has diminished further since the invention of the cell phone. College run in the corporate model mode does no one any good, except the administrators whose salaries and numbers keep growing.
17
These programs are designed to help students find themselves and understand the world around them.
There is another way to do this.
Just get a job after high school. It may lead one to find a true, lifetime vocation.
More likely, it will convince most people that working hard for low wages is a very tough way to go through life. And that a formal college education, however corporatized it is, might be a worthwhile option.
In any case, it’s better to find oneself while earning minimum wage than while incurring $20K per year in debt.
10
The purpose of life? If you are able to reason independently, with unprejudiced clarity, I offer this advice:
It’s better not to think about it.
7
Don’t think...(?!)
There are more things in heaven and earth than in that philosophy.
@Tristan Dolciano
Some of those things are best kept out of mind.
When colleges and universities start hiring professors in humanities on a full-time basis, rather than as slave-labor adjuncts, maybe higher education will once again become excellent, I doubt seriously whether students and their parents understand that the are taking out loans to be taught by a majority part-time, adjunct, not even subsistence-level paid “professors.” Higher education is in crisis in this country, and no one seems to care. Only very, very rich and privileged people can afford to take advantage of programs described here. Everywhere else, we are producing slaves for the slave-labor economy—and this is apparent nowhere else so flagrantly as in higher education itself.
21
I dropped out in 1970, was studding Physics. Decided I never wanted to work on Nuclear anything and the people in charge of it.
Long time tinkerer, self taught career in Tier 1 Auto Parts supply, great until 2008.
Was just discussing DIY and Punk Rock advances in just do it NOW with my 20 year old grandson and his mother.
However I did go back to college at age 46 and in 6 years gained an MFA from a top school while working nights.
The real trick is to be ready for anything and adapt, just as humans have done for 100,000 years.
We can meet any challenge,
Green is Great!
9
Check out Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA and its individually designed Program of Emphasis. Instead of "Majors" and "Minors," students create educational programs that fit each one's goals. This effort started in the early 70s and has continued and adapted since then. Juniata is one of the thriving small colleges in the competitive world of higher education.
5
@Dave
Also there is (was) Hampshire College, which sounds similar.
However it is almost belly-up due to the fact that it hasn't had enough students to pay the bills. Draw you own conclusions.
2
I am also familiar with Juniata College in PA. Design your own program of study based on your career interests—-the major underpinnings of your program are critical thinking, service, and leadership.
“Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man.”
Based on Ms. Marcus' observation, I think waiting until these young people are college aged is undoubtedly too late.
4
@redweather
Sadly, this also eliminates their knowledge base and enjoyment of Shakespeare, Chekov, Dickens.
Their anti-intellectual racist, sexist identity politics POV has no place in higher or lower eduction. Most public schools have already veered off the classical structured method into the murky waters of whichever way the wind blows.
5
@Maggie
The supreme irony is that we have some humanities professor somewhere to thank for the Dead White Male formulation.
1
The entire premise of this article is specious. The Humanities are alive and well at the University of Virginia, where I teach. the problem is not a barrier between administrators and students, or "entitled" faculty and students. The real problem, such as it is, is that fewer and fewer students want what those of us who teach in the humanities offer--a deep study of the human condition, and what it means to negotiate it.
This article blames the faculties in the liberal arts for a problem they have not created nor to which they contribute.
Public liberal arts education is serious, intellectually challenging, and morally engaged. It also is not debilitating cost-wise. (A UVa B.A. per year is about the same price as the program described here.)
One would think the present author could have plugged this program without disparaging a very large and diverse area of "traditional" higher education, the humanities. She has only given voice to those who claim--falsely, and based only in ideology and bias--that students of the humanities cannot "tie their own shoelaces" (to quote but one insipid commentary on this article).
How about something the humanities--and a morally engaged view of the world--demands? -- a bit of nuance and discrimination in making an argument.
74
But, first, we must make all the faithful into Atheists so that reconstruction can begin.
1
The idea that colleges are "too careerist" is laughable; I'm sure the young grads desperate to pay off $30k of loans, set at an astronomical 7%, would have loved their college to focus more on how to get good paying jobs
6
The purpose of education is to help students learn about life and themselves so they can figure out the best way to earn a living, find their place in society, make a worthwhile contribution and be happy in the process.
To accomplish these goals requires learning how to think. Thinking begins with seeing reality as it is and applying logic and a system of timeless proven values.
The problem today in many so called elite colleges is that the values taught are not values at all but Progressive post-modern propaganda where we are all victims of a bogey man---make that white man. This kind of thinking is not helpful. It encourages division, hate, anarchy, whatever.
Stop the nonsense and get back to basics. It shouldn't be that hard. After all, what's happening now doesn't work.
5
@Michael Dowd It sounds to me like colleges are not teaching *your* values, but rather something you disparage as "Progressive post-modern propaganda". One man's propaganda is another man's values. If you have an argument, present it. Otherwise, you are merely assuming a conclusion.
5
@Michael Dowd What's happening now is that the world is run by graduates of business schools or economics departments, neither of which ever teach anything remotely resembling "progressive post-modern" thought.
3
Can’t wait to see the method for translating narrative evaluations into a GPA.
6
"They crave a means to figure out how to do what we all desperately want: to submit to a community and an ideal larger than ourselves, without losing ourselves entirely."
They? There are always some of "them."
Most people go to school to get a job, get a girlfriend, get some money...
If you "need" to go to school to study what used to be called the "Liberal Arts" then do that and don't whine about being paid less later.
You'll get paid less because Plato never fixed a hot water heater, designed a freeway bridge, or, balanced a checkbook.
2
@Johnny Woodfin Yeah, well, I have fixed a water heater and balanced a checkbook, and didn't get paid for either of those.
2
When a person is born they are born into a particular circumstance, because of that, they receive a certain "Cultural Download" eg: East Coast intellectual, West Coast dude, Farmer, etc., etc. Most people accept that Cultural Download without question and proceed to live their life according to those expectations.
If you are the thinking sort, around 40 yrs old, you have finally experienced enough of life that you are ready to begin questioning your Cultural Download and deciding what is right for you and what is garbage. This can be a very unsettling time if you begin to question the basic assumptions that our society is built on. For instance deciding that most American business is a soul destroying mess whose goal is to amass the most toys for the fewest people. Most colleges prepare people for the technical aspects of the first part of their life. They treat the basic ideas of American Society as received wisdom.
I would recommend that those who begin to question their role in society, start a different course of study at about 40 when they are finally mature enough and experienced enough to make use of the wisdom (notice I did not say "go back to college". It may help but is not necessary.) This is very much you deciding what is right for you, and you are the only one who can make that call. It is scary, frustrating and rewarding. A good application for the middle third of your life. The final third is for teaching.
6
Aggressive expansion of the nonproductive administration layer is killing secondary education. It has already killed healthcare, with the generous help of the insurance companies.
20
I am delighted to see a piece on alternative secondary education in the Times.
Of course, the bit about some young women complaining about having to read Plato because he's a "dead white male" had me smacking my head. I am a middle-aged woman and I count myself as a feminist, but my interpretation of feminism does not include closing my mind to all past sources of wisdom and history. In my book, that is blind ignorance.
105
@Dorothy N. Gray It's true that Plato was a white male, but "dead" just doesn't do him justice
3
What tripe. This revolutionary approach sounds sort of like what every liberal arts college used to be. Back in the stone age, we lived in simple (read: un-airconditioned in Texas) cheap housing, read lots of philosophy and history (thanks to reading what friends in other classes were reading), and worked at manual labor (a.k.a. minimum wage jobs to help pay for rent and food). We read Plato and St. Augustine and Adrienne Rich and Kerouac, world history and religion, literature from England, France, Russia, Japan, India, as well as learning about chosen course subjects. We traded books and talked about them instead of staring at cell phones and tablet screens. I was financially on my own and came out with less than $5k in student loans and a great liberal education that benefits me 40 years later.
We certainly don't need to create a new kind of college - we just need to make college affordable and then focus it on education again instead of some tortured and prolonged resume building and white-collar vocational program.
9
This has its place in the mix of higher education delivery channels. It may be highly appropriate for certain individuals and for certain subject areas, especially the Humanities, broadly defined. It probably is not ideal for engineering or professional schools (except law perhaps which is an ABA regime, and an unnecessary graduate degree program) such as medicine, business or related areas such as public accounting or veterinary medicine, for example, or for technical training such as aviation. Much of the discontent, criticism and failures in higher education, isn't really about education, per se, or the academy even, or pedagogy. It is about the 'corporatization' of the modern university, and its conversion into an analogue of the modern commercial enterprise, and with that, the copying of managerial models, hierarchy and bureaucracy. Into those roles are drawn careerists who have clearly created a class structure or even "tribalism" on college campuses, that is utterly unnecessary and irrelevant to learning, teaching and research. Remove this distortion and much of the problem is solved. The federal and state government however, has profoundly interfered in education generally, and as well, the defense, security and intelligence construct that permeates nearly all US higher education institutions. Readers may appreciate a related Opinion I wrote this past week for the University of Chicago. https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/6/7/university-goes-corporate/
3
So the answer to problems in higher education is to create a bunch of programs for well-off kids—who else can afford the time off?—to think great thoughts while everything else goes to seed? Who does this benefit other than them?
2
well we do have the Peace Corps, America Corp, missionary work. don't seem to hear much about them lately. i've known a few from the above and it seems to be a life changing event for them in helping the public good.
4
Wait a minute. Mainstream higher education was supposed to help us find out what is really for? I wasn't aware that anyone or anything, much less a college or university, had definitively figured that out. I thought you went to college to get an education. Who knew?
1
These programs are different than traditional liberal arts colleges, but it is super disappointing that they are continuing to cling to ancient Greece - the name of the school - and Plato. I guess keeping the Eurocentric focus of that many college and universities have is a priority. Disappointing to read early on in the coverage "These students will read works by authors ranging from Plato and Herbert Marcuse to Tlingit writers." Two named European men....and the name of a culture....really?
The university is a welfare for graduate degree (in a useless, virtue signaling degree) holding upper middle class, white, progressive class. We gave them the keys to the bank when we poured trillions in student loans. Think about it......most universities teach with adjuncts who make a bit more than minimum wage. Do you really think they have the best interest of kids in mind....or their own wallets?
2
If a catch-all for cogent criticism of contemporary education exists, it must include many of these comments.
As these progressive students defy the hyper-bureaucratic, hyper-careerist [and, I'll add, hyper-paternalistic] educational style of 21st century U.S. colleges and universities, we hope they'll also defy that other current educational disgrace: rampant cheating.
You lost me when you said they were going to read Marcuse, and then live in some kind of communal setting where they democratically decided on their ow rules, did manual labor, (ooh, the joys and virtues of the proletariat!)etc. Been there, done that, in 1969. It even works - for a small minority. Solution to society's problems? Not close.
2
I am somewhat concerned and disturbed by what seems to be a strong racial and sexist oriented agenda as it relates to this program.
3
There is more of that coming, you can be sure of it.
1
“...help students figure out their place in the universe and their moral obligations to fellow humans.”
This is interesting. The post-modern Left, having conveniently dispatched Western Civilization as an oppressive patriarchy born of lies and manipulation, is on a quest to ‘reimagine’ life’s purpose and our way forward.
That is sort of how I might feel when opening the hood of my car and refusing not only a basic instruction manual but the assistance of anyone trained as an automotive mechanic.
While working together, the group might tear every effect derivative of Judeo-Christian teaching out of history and contemplate on what remains after all the flesh has been removed from the skeletal system. And do so all the while never having broached even a cursory understanding of what they threw away, because that was just the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This will be real important.
It is no wonder Jordan Peterson sold a few million copies of his recent book and fills auditoriums 250 nights a year around the globe.
6
Noam Chomsky? Is it wayfinding or absorbing received knowledge?
The Greek word Arete means Virtue, not excellence.
3
@Alyce False. To quote the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: "The goodness or excellence of a thing." https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095423468
1
Another fad gone in ten years.
1
Mention must be made of St. John's College, a rigorous BA/MA institution with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. Established in 1696, it is a properly accredited university that Frank Bruni has written about:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/opinion/contrarian-college-stjohns.html
2
If you can't afford it like most young people today you have no other alternative than to be anti college.
3
Don’t look now, but the author of this article has an undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from Yale.
And Michelle Jones, founder and president of Wayfinding Academy, has a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from respectable universities.
Both have gainful employment (well paid jobs).
Do as they say, not as they do.
6
If these people think life is hard with an education, they are completely out of touch as to how hard it will be without one. Not just the lifetime salaries that will be significantly lower, but the opportunities and networking that takes place within college will be lost to them. As with most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Nothing is perfect, including college, but a degree can never be taken away from you and can open many doors. Interesting that those mentioned in the article are all college graduates..
3
@Imma
Imma, you conflate two words which, in reality, have different import. “Education” is what STEM students and a minority of other students acquire in college; it has lasting effects. The “degree” is a signifier of social acceptability and lack of gross personal defects - and, of course, in STEM, useful knowledge.
I am surprised there was no mention St. John’s College, in Annapolis and Santa Fe. Its entire 4-year program focuses on engaging students and tutors alike in these life questions.
4
While I applaud all moves to reform higher education, by the time most students get to these reformed schools, it's too late -- they've have already been indoctrinated in an "education" system which rewards regurgitation over original thought. Reform needs to start in pre-school, and not one of the many that pushes flash card memorization! This is why I home-schooled my kids who although I will admit re-entry into the system is challenging at best.
1
@Concerned American
Education is “regurgitation“ of the most valuable original thoughts - of others. Someday, although it is unlikely, you, yourself, may have a similarity valuable original thought, and if you are a great person, you may produce two.
My favorite class was on Bach and the Brandenburg Concertos,3 days a week at 8 am,starting in January.Lots of ice and snow to navigate.My friends thought I was nuts.The professor was inspiring.Had nothing to do with my major or minor.No it did not help me make more money,or secure any kind of career.But it did assure me a place of refuge during difficult times.
20
Both the article and the comments are very depressing.
All the Boomers in the comments speaking from a set of experiences that they prevented other generations from having because of their selfish policy choices. Gen X and Millennials creating programs that pretend to be about meaning but are obviously pure neoliberalism ("lean," "value proposition," and on and on).
I've honestly never had less hope for higher education than I do right now.
3
@dporpentine
You know, claiming all boomers made the same"selfish policy choices" is no different from saying all millennials are selfish whiners.
Maybe you should educate yourself a little. In particular, look at the difference between the economic experience and worldview of leading edge boomers vs. trailing edge boomers.
3
@pedigrees That Boomers led the economic destruction of higher education and the U.S. generally--while also pushing policies that wrecked generations of people of color through hypocritical anti-drug policies--is not something that can be credibly disputed. See Bruce Cannon Gibney's Generation of Sociopaths for a nice summary.
Of course #NotAllBoomers. But the blindness in these comments to the far different economic realities faced by the generations whose futures they undermined is really perfect Boomer.
College education is like a gym, you are paying for access and you get out of it what you put in. The article describes the personal trainer, or group of friends working out approach. It can also works but results will vary.
Student motivation is key, then someone needs to have a well thought out plan to navigate the subject, you know, a "course" of study.
Join a gym or attending college doesn't guarantee results, colleges know this, and now simple let students attend, make them feel good and let them graduate. Students also know that the degree is needed, but they will be assessed in other ways.
4
School boards are the cancer of public education. Boards don't hire good teachers they hire "good" school board employees - people who do what they're told to do. As a teacher for 39 year it was always made clear to me that I worked for the Board not the community.
The future of public education will be a teacher-led system in which the true leaders in education (great teachers) have the most power and not the least. This will happen as a great deal of education begins to move out of brick and mortar schools and into the virtual world where students and teachers choose each other when the time is right.
6
I attended the University of Costa Rica and, except for Portuguese, every course I took started with the history of philosophy behind the course of study so that you understood not only why you were studying but also why the legions who came before you asked the questions you were seeking answers to. It made you feel part of a bigger picture.
I know some of us think philosophy is for people with money and time on their hands, and I confess to sometimes thinking "how cute" when I hear young people talking about life's ultimate purpose, remembering the phase a lot of us got to go through -- philosophizing in dorms rooms our first couple of years in college. But the need to "submit to a community and an ideal larger than ourselves, without losing ourselves entirely," still seems to me extremely important -- and not just for college students, but for for every person living in a sane society.
Maybe if, starting in preschool, we encouraged kids to wonder more, to ask questions, to "philosophize" rather than to just aim for right answers, we would all come to appreciate why finding those right answers and discerning facts and truth do matter. Adding that moral component to education at all levels can lead to a more moral society.
57
@Elizabeth Fuller: Well-said! My B.A. was in History, with 44 hours in Latin American Studies, but it was a philosophy course in my last semester that set me on my journey as a writer. That was 37 years ago, 27 books ago, a journey of the heart that did lead to many lands and seas. And I got my dreams, thank God, but it all really began with that life-changing philosophy course. In 17 days, my 27th book, SONG OF THE WIND, will have its launch in Lisbon (Portuguese title, SONG OF THE WIND). The 2 life-changing questions that great philosophy prof demanded that all students answer: "What are your dreams in life, and do you have the courage to live your dreams?" No one else had asked me that. I was 22 and the world became a very different place, in every good way, because of that philosophy class. I never would have gotten my dreams as a writer if I had not answered those 2 questions, of course. And, as you say, I discovered my purpose in life.
1
@Elizabeth Fuller: Well-said! My B.A. was in History, with 44 hours in Latin American Studies, but it was a philosophy course in my last semester that set me on my journey as a writer. That was 37 years ago, 27 books ago, a journey of the heart that did lead to many lands and seas. And I got my dreams, thank God, but it all really began with that life-changing philosophy course. In 17 days, my 27th book, SONG OF THE WIND, will have its launch in Lisbon (Portuguese title, CANCAO DO VENTO, Chiado Books, novel). The 2 life-changing questions that great philosophy prof demanded that all students answer: "What are your dreams in life, and do you have the courage to live your dreams?" No one else had asked me that. I was 22 and the world became a very different place, in every good way, because of that philosophy class. I never would have gotten my dreams as a writer if I had not answered those 2 questions, of course. And, as you say, I discovered my purpose in life.
We are all in favor of a well rounded thoughtful thinking student but don't overlook developing skills. We hired two Evergreen graduates for two separate projects for field work collecting science data that needed to follow strict protocols and sampling techniques they were taught on site. Both of them were failures and incessantly questioned why we collected data in that manner. Even though it was explained to them the statistical and scientific reasons for the data collection methods, they did not follow them correctly and we had to throw out the data they collected. Second, they had no work ethic. Field work is a dawn to dusk job 14 to 16 hours a day 7 days a week and some night work as well. Navel gazing is fine, do it on your own time. Their peers from other colleges in the field crews gave up on them as well.
16
@tom "My thing is I use the scientific method to make implied generalizations about an approach to education with a wide and varied history based on my apparently illegal employment practices."
2
@dporpentine I was presenting anecdotal evidence of the quality of evergreen graduates. The employment practices are not illegal. It is field scientific research. Employees get overtime, compensatory time off and at least 5 consecutive days off once a month. Perhaps you have not done field work much. When you have 16-24 hours of daylight (depending on latitude), what do you propose as an alternative?
4
I love the values and humanness that's being taught but these programs have a cost (or they soon will once universities figure out that they can be leveraged to make money) and that means student's will incur debt, lots of debt.
Universities need to keep that in mind as they arrange for loans to students so that they can attend and pay for their anti-college experiences.
Graduating happy and enlightened but heavily in debt is not a solution to society's ills either.
3
Anything that energizes a person to seek out and 'own' their education is fine by me. Initiative and agency will amplify their options in school and work.
3
The value of attending college should not be measured only by the content of what is learned and how it leads to gainful employment. For better or worse, completing a 4 year degree is THE developmental challenge that separates the haves from the have nots in our society. It's not easy to do and it says something about those who do it. Unfortunately these days part of the challenge is figuring out how to pay for it and deciding if it's worth the high cost if the only way is to go into debt. It seems to me that this question plays a larger role than it used to as our consumer culture evolves. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
4
Whatever instills the love of learning gets to the heart of a good education, and the best education is one that continues throughout life in a self-directed program.
36
The problem of unaffordable higher education, like the problem of unaffordable health care, has already been dealt with successfully in many western countries. Simply increase government revenue by increasing taxation and provide free medical care and higher education to the entire population. By providing every citizen with a better quality of life and more financial security, you also increase the happiness of the population as a whole. The Nordic countries lead the World Happiness Index and the position of the US continues to fall, so there is some evidence to suggest that this system works. The solution is not finding alternatives to college, but free college. Let students, without significant financial constraints, get the higher education that they want, not only to prepare them for future employment but also to allow them to explore areas that interest them and allow them to expand their intellectual horizons.
7
@Len E
As a graduate of a community college and as someone who works in a community college, I am really tired of hearing about how un-affordable college is. Go to a CC for the first 2 years and save between $20,000 and $60,000. Then go to a state school. That's how I did it. And treat the whole experience seriously: as a student and working in various college I saw so many students who treated college as a really expensive summer camp.
125
@sjs I was lucky enough to go to university at a time when I could finish an undergraduate degree, medical school, and a medical residency (in Canada) and not have a debt burden when I finished. I think that every young person, regardless of their financial means, should be able to get a professional degree, or a doctorate, or a liberal arts education without worrying about money. Education is not only just preparation for employment, it is also to expand your mind and your horizons. The fact that you succeeded in the present US system does not imply that the system is not stopping other young people from reaching their full potential.
3
@Len E
Didn't say it was. Did say that you can get a college degree without paying off the cost for the rest of your life. And you can do it now without waiting for society to change or the government to act. People can't put their lives on hold while they wait for a change.
6
A good Liberal Arts education already does everything they are trying to do. If you want to reform the education system you have to rebuild from the ground up. Why is no one paying attention?
13
Perhaps re-designing High School is the key.
If it lasted six years instead of four, and included one year of "professional development" where students worked, and one year of public service, kids would graduate with knowledge of the real world, and would be eligible for national health care.
Elitism begins in high school, where we are separated into "college" and "non college", and of course, rich, poor, and the factory class. Can't do much about the elitism of college without doing something about the economic cutthroat capitalistic structure that supports it.
Hugh
29
@Hugh Massengill
Well, Hugh Massengill, at least the “cutthroat capitalistic structure” doesn’t enslave me, hammering me into “one year of public service.”
I personally feel, now that I am approaching 70, that studying the humanities when you need to put bread on the table is a waste of time. Once the basics of food, clothing and housing (not to mention healthcare, rearing a family, and many other points that make life more livable) are taken care of and, through these experiences the student has matured, will the humanities have effect.
7
Hogwash. I'm a lawyer, and an Emeritus professor from an Engineering school where I taught safety regulation and engineering ethics. I did an undergraduate history thesis on technological innovation and the Nuremburg war crimes trials. I also learned Fortran programming on an IBM 7094. In Law school I was an engineering technician developing safety test methods. I was a full Professor by 40. I've taught in the USA, the UK and Germany . I still lecture on Ethics in technology. I did all this in the framework of the supposedly reviled defective traditional university. I never gave a standardized test. I published in a wide variety of technical areas and I even got the first NSF grant my department ever had. Every university has the resources and capability of enhancing individual thinking in many ways. You just have to grab the opportunity with both hands and work at it.
24
@Vince: And how much did it cost you, back in the day, to pursue your advanced education? You don't have to share it, just do a mental calculation. It's a simple one for such as yourself.
Just juxtapose that total spend against the costs of doing it today. Get it? My undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, circa early 1970's, came in at less than $400 a semester, and that was before government assistance. Admittedly I lived off campus and worked my way thru it. What is that cost today, eh? That is what's driving all the educational angst these days.
But I understand. You don't mention family or children in all your laudable pursuits. Perhaps you lack that, and their, experience in today's world and so hold up your superb example in a regrettably ignorant fashion. Then again the wealth of your position may insulate you and yours from such concerns.
In any case you appear to have done well by your pursuits. I wish the young of today a similar success in however a fashion they choose to do it. But I would advise them that shackling yourself to an advanced educational debt, and so indenturing your future, is a less bright one than the educational industry would have you believe.
John~
American Net'Zen
7
Respectfully, this is not hogwash and it isn’t about you, despite your impressive record of accomplishment. This well-researched, well-crafted article spotlights multiple creative pathways to adult independence and maturity. Your writing style indicates that your traditional pathway was a little short on empathy, compassion, and social-emotional intelligence.
12
I am always open to alternate methods of learning, seeking and developing. The more options available to everyone creates a more diverse and fulfilled citizenship. But I am getting tired of articles that put down and blame to bolster their arguments. "mainstream higher education's failure" and "mainstream American colleges are too expensive, too bureaucratic, too careerist and too intellectually fragmented"
There is no right or wrong, just a better fit and what works perfectly for some, might be wrong for others.
Let's respect all choices. I am in favor of these programs.
12
“Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man”
This all seems antithetical to the premise of these institutions -- one should be able to find something of value (even if it is to reject it) in all thought, correct? But of course you have to first read it (and understand it) before you can make that judgment.
In higher ed, the inmates now run the asylum (or in more generous terms -- the "customer" (as students have been re-positioned) is always right).. I suppose then we should also reject physics, chemistry, astronomy etc as, for better or worse, to a large degree the foundation of this work was indeed developed by "dead white men"...
21
Higher Ed = 20M people of which 3M are graduate level, 10M are 4 year schools and 7M 2 year students, 3000 four year schools, raising prices at 2x inflation for a generation. Only 55% of people who start a 4 year program will graduate in 6 years. Further, remaining accredited and have access to government students loans has nothing to do with graduation rate, job placement rate or the quality of jobs that are ultimately achieved. We now have a system that is incredibly expensive, feeds itself by attracting unqualified students who fail out at nearly a 50% rate, fail to educate them and leave the without degree and with debt and they take no responsibility for their outcome.
There is no surprise there is backlash and a need for alternatives. What is interesting is how Elizabeth Warren (former Harvard prof) and Bernie Sanders (wife was a college president) see the solution as simply providing this system more money by using tax payer money to simply feed a glutenous beast. Instead, innovation, reformation and new models are the solution not simply to throw unlimited $ (free tuition) at them. Imagine if the banks abused their customers and put millions of people into debt ... we already know that they do not see the solution as underwriting a bad system
18
@Chris
According to Sanders, free tuition was based on merit/performance, not simply desire.
Coursera, Udacity, EdX all provide all sorts of courses free on the WEB or with a certificate for a fee and work done at a passing level.
The failure is the parents and students for taking responsibility for their actions. Borrowing too much money and not living a frugal life in college. Go to community college, live at home, work two jobs, you will get ahead and not have debt.
10
@Mark Stevens, I agree completely. After spending several years in SE Asia in the 60s, I arrived home, lived with my parents for 2 years while completing community college with an A.A. in College Transfer. I then worked the summer and attended a state university and lived a life style that was frugal to a fault. My goals were to learn as much as possible and finish as quickly as possible. Yes, my GI Bill grant of $220 a month paid for quite a bit, but I borrowed $1500 and paid that off within a year of graduating. IMHO never go into serious debt to finance a college education, seek out mentoring relationships with faculty, and finish college as quickly as possible.
@Mark Stevens
Keep dreaming. All colleges whether community or 4 year have fees that run in the thousands of dollars. Yeah work two jobs, so you can be stressed and tired in class. Sounds like a plan for someone in the 1980's.
4
@Mark Stevens
But you won't find out what life is really for! How will you be able to go on living?
2
All this talk in relation to a person gives credit to the ME - a misdirected granting of reality and control to individuality. All efforts in this direction reinforce the idea of individuality -an individual achieving some sort of total knowledge or all encompassing explanation. The idea that there is "meaning" and a "better life" and it's just ahead, right around the corner.
The presumption is that something is currently unknown and needs to be known somehow. That there is someone to be found - some meaning perhaps or answers to the big questions of life. Trying all the while to "get somewhere" or "become somebody" - the sanctification of struggle and reaching out for a result in time.
This is the message of inadequacy and tells us that somewhere we will realize the purpose that will one day fulfill us and all the while we trample over this precious flower of being. This precious "what is" rather than an imagined future of fulfillment.
Internalized marketing propaganda (a fascination with extraordinary and spectacular) cannot replace this thing that is always with us - this presence that presents itself in every moment.
We can be welcoming of what comes or we can be imprisoned by expectations. One is present now and aware of being conscious; this is self evident. We cannot "grasp ourselves" or innate being as something out there. To live passionately is to let go of everything for the timeless presence and thus awaken from all identification.
6
I pretty much agree entirely with you. I'd add though that "being somebody" is a fundamental requirement of "being with others" and that the common currency of both ways of being are our stories - of who we are, what we've done and plan/hope to do. We can suspend our storytelling through things like mindfulness but to "be" in the world we must "be" someone. The ultimate goal of higher education ought to be to provide the scaffolding for people to become not just skilled storytellers/story-enacters but good at co-authoring larger narratives that further a common good. And to your point, we do need to remember that ultimately all stories "are" just stories. "Being" remains a total mystery.
1
Yikes.
1
Many people do not need a college education. A trade school is more appropriate for many, but they get steered into college because "one cannot make a living without a college degree". How sad is that?
So kids are sent to college only to fail or take courses that will not lead to a well paying job. How many college graduates do you know that are not even working in fields that they received their degree in? Too many.
13
@esp The purpose of college is not to get a well paying job, though that would be nice at the end. It is to expand the horizons of the individual and for the student to become an intelligent and well educated human being, which, by the way, makes for a better nation of citizens, who actually make informed choices when they vote. No, not everyone needs to go to college, but I wish that the students who go to college would go for the right reasons. Too many students are in college because they think that it is a ticket to this or that job. They are obsessed with grades rather than with what they are there to learn. Yes, those students should go to a trade school or no institution of higher learning at all.
11
@esp
I know I shouldn't have gotten my Master's in Queer/Women's Studies. If only I had listened and become a plummer!!!!
2
This sounds like an attempt to cross-breed the 60's "hippy culture" with the current "mindfullness" fad.
Whatever your 'place' in the universe you cannot find it without an understanding of the processes of the four-dimensional cosmos. The problem with modern 'higher' education is that it ignores the philosophical dimension of the work of great thinkers in physics, astronomy, evolution and anthropology.
The lead photograph to this article is interesting as it deems that humans are to be "cultivated". 'Cultivated' means grown and harvested for use; which is exactly how society views its citizens. The harvest outcome is money for those who run society. It makes you wonder just how benign this movement is.
2
Indeed.
We would be well served by recognizing that education is a life long enterprise that involves discovering the best in one’s self. We mistakenly equate the process with school or schooling — which even for those of us who played the academic game well enough to wind up as professors — rarely requires more than eight years of our lives when we are young and immature. We all assume the responsibility of William Shakespeare to write, direct, rehearse and act in the stage plays of our lives. Yet we are not told this in plain English or prepared well for the task by academic exercise.
5
"Students shape their coursework with tutor-counselors called guides. They receive narrative evaluations instead of grades and design independent projects that help them learn “what it takes to do something epic”
I think I took some classes there in 1972.
3
Yet what is needed is something less ambitious and easier than this school with its special approaches to everything and efforts to be both humanist and effectively pedagogical, in ways that are unnecessarily disciplinary.
The college and university programs we most need could well be less innovative and more rigorous, but they do need to emphasize thinking, which when well done is rational and imaginative, rigorous and creative. And they need to at least include strong emphasis on the humanities subjects that are getting defunded or shunted aside.
For anyone who is paying attention, the personal connection in understanding Plato or Shakespeare goes of itself; if you don't get this, you don't get it at all.
It does not have to be demonstrated, nor suited up with pedagogical techniques of the kind teachers learn in teacher's education programs and that Americans are so good at putting in the place of critical understanding of the ideas themselves.
We need nationally to choose to spend money on education; there should not be high tuition supporting bloated management and special programs at the cost of lifetime debt peonage.
And we need to be clear that an education is for citizenship and the good life, which go together. And not only job training, subsidizing capital and the economy.
American collegians enjoy the life of the mind for four years in a refuge from a society that would not think. Ideas, learning, thinking should concern us all more.
7
Exactly!
1
Only in America.
Let’s face it, the creative search for “alternatives” like this has everything to do with the transformation of higher education into a business that has mostly taken place in the US. The funding has gone due to a successful conservative-led assault on public education and the Humanities. Europe has been less affected as there remains a recognition of the value of an education as a public good.
This isn’t to say that the search for alternative and possibly better ways of educating isn’t worthwhile, but in the US the emphasis should surely be on questioning the corporatization of the system in the first place.
23
@Kim R
Sadly, you’re blinkered and biased view takes no account of abundant government-backed student loans on the inflation in tuition rates. You might find it equally enlightening to study the effect of government sponsored mortgage programs on the cost of housing.
The correlation between student borrowing, government-backed, and tuition rates is perfect: 1.0.
Our little Socialist experiments have done enough damage when they simple put a toe in the water.
1
Our local high school recently started a technical program involving an extra year of hands-on training in IT, in an environment operated like a workplace, wrapped up by a mandatory 12-week internship. After completing that year, students are called “high school engineers.”
My son chose that program over college — the first person in our extended family to skip college. (He worked hard and actually enjoyed it, unlike his first three years of high school.) Two weeks after finishing, and after about a dozen interviews, he just accepted a job offer. He starts on Monday and will earn a respectable salary.
Yes, we are in Sweden. But the program could be duplicated elsewhere and customized for other areas of expertise. Employers want new hires who will hit the ground running.
20
I just graduated from the University of Michigan. Everything that people say about people in my age group is wrong. It sound like what older people said about young people millenniums ago. The only thing scares me about my friends is that most of them are just here for a degree. It's like it's what a high school diploma used to represent. Hardly anyone seems to be curious about anything that does not have some material reward. This is what scares me.
164
@kurt
'Everything that people say about people in [your] age group is wrong?' And you just graduated from college? The certainty in your writing and lack of qualification tells me you might not be as 'educated' as you think.
9
So basically the antebellum college, with the class system (all students taking the same subject in unison), focus on the "classics", and the moral philosophy capstone course.
Great for a niche market of students, but as the post-Civil War rejection for "credentialism" (see for example Weber) shows, not one that most Americans find compelling.
4
I am not so sure that this article reflects current trends. Instead it focuses on just a single development. For instance, it omits the proliferation of for-profit institutions seeking to capitalize on Federal funding for veterans and doesn't mention how the of foreign enrollment in American universities is declining. Some of the sources seem dated and the example dubious. I have taught young people for many years. My role is to guide the learning process, to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge that may serve to make a better human being in the long run. The short term trend in education today is more oriented along the lines of competences. If college education is to continue in the future institutions should take notice of the programs described in this article.
This tension between wisdom oriented and technical oriented education is an old tension. What I don't understand is why the monastic oriented subtraditions in Christianity, Buddhism and Sufism are left out. Why is Chomsky better than Thomas Merton, for example? Also, why is the Inuit worldview better than Zen or Ghandi? By the way, in terms of pragmatic application of Chomsky's linguistics, we anthropologists have found Edward Sapir much more useful in actual fieldwork. I respect Chomsky but I don't understand why he has almost become a saint in the secular Left.
5
Let’s see if I get this right? Let’s take some classes add
hard work with little or no pay or benefits,be allowed , if you still
can pass the tests you are given a bit more status and
maybe the workload eases a bit.
Then after having worked at a hard job and not failing your studies for say 4-5 years, you are given credit that you have shown ability to think,work at a job and have the fortitude
to work hard.
Sounds like my college years? Then after that getting drafted by
Uncle Sam?
What say others?
2
Only the dead have seen the end of education.
You go to college to get a degree which acts as a credential that gets you in the door where you have a chance of getting a good job. If you learn something interesting along the way it will be accidental. You need a good job in this society to have an average life and if you don't have a job you don't have money and there are no functioning safety nets left. In this world money equals life, and a degree equals money.
The lifelong debt that you accumulate as you get the skills to do that next job represent free money given to the new employer. They do not have to pay for the skills that you have gained, they simply reap the benefit of them and pay you the least the market will bear. And the market is manipulated so that there are always unemployed driving down wages and so you work for lunch money while transferring the benefit of your skills to a company that transforms them into large profits that you do not share. In this world all money flows up the pyramid to the few at the top and you are told to feel privileged that you have the opportunity to serve the rigged system. Everyday you step over the homeless and unemployed who have already failed to get that degree and get a job. You know what happens if you make waves or try to imagine a different system. So it goes on till it breaks every few generations. That next break seems to be on the horizon. It seems we have been here before watching the rich break things. Is this the way it has to be?
100
@Bobotheclown
"The lifelong debt that you accumulate as you get the skills to do that next job represent free money given to the new employer." Exactly this. Past generations didn't invest in a public university system as job training for employers; specific job skills could be learned on the job, as they still are. They did so on the belief that educated citizens were fundamental to a free society. For this generation, the cost of training has been shifted entirely from the potential employer to future employee, with absolutely no assurance that there will be a job in the end or that it won't be cut in the interest of shareholder profits or CEO bonuses.
At the same time, vocational training conveniently takes the place of education that might empower students to defend themselves against this exploitation. The founders of our higher education system meant to create free citizens with a voice in the future of our society, not indentured drones at the mercy of corporations and their government employees.
9
@Grover. Re 'apprenticeships': in US education apprenticeships has already turned into a business, where students pay to work.
6
You know, I have plenty issues with our college system, and think that unfortunately having a degree is not in any way necessarily the same thing as being educated. But I do wish that unqualified people would stop taking higher education into their own hands.
9
Add one more element to the military industrial complex...education.
Americans have become convinced that the path to success is the Hobson’s choice of college.
Colleges, realizing that they’ve become the only gang in town and country have taken full advantage of the opportunity.
The price tag for an ‘education’ has reached usury levels.
The ensuing loans are not only handicapping the students, they’re also putting an anchor around the neck of the whole economy.
8
My education was a Great Adventure. I attended one of the world's top technical universities, yet most of my college credits were in literature. Most importantly, I believed in the future of humanity, and everything I accomplished was part of that mission.
I can't imagine what it is like to be young today. The sheer glut of humanity is depressing - we are no longer a positive force on our planet. How does one reconcile our collective failure with a positive vision for the future?
A focus on liberal arts is a great start, but we must teach our youth to abandon to abandon my generation's energy-intensive lifestyle and adopt something far more humble.
9
Don’t think for a second that these so-called alternative programs will be devoid of the bureaucratic and ideological constraints that limit and distort traditional systems. I am outlining my satirical novel already.
14
I majored in philosophy at Yale, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, went to Paris on a Fulbright and the Yale Law School for six months, did a PhD in French and English Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and then taught at The Evergreen State College for 35 years. I guess that the article's description of Evergreen applies loosely to a small piece of the history of the college, but it's a pretty misleading description of it as a whole.
6
@Thad Curtz Interesting - would you be willing to expand on what it is actually like?
@maudpowell
The catalog (and lots about the other aspects of the college) is on its website -
https://www.evergreen.edu/catalog/index?year=4&offered=All
Perhaps the most unusual and important thing about it is that the curriculum is largely built on full time, team taught, interdisciplinary programs, in which students are working intensively with a few faculty. The faculty aren't teaching anything else and the students are studying anything else.
(For example, I taught in one first year program about perception with four faculty - a psychologist, a philosopher, a molecular biologist, and a literary critic - and sixty students. We studied smell, hearing, vision, and touch for six weeks each, integrating reading from these sciences, philosophy of mind, and literature, and spending sixteen hours week of time in class on lectures, seminar discussion, lab work, a film series, writing assignments, exams, field trips, and the other things college students usually do.
I did a year long program called Teaching in the Twentieth Century that worked on Piaget, Darwin, Marx and Freud and was organized around the question of how you'd teach now if you believed each of them, with a bunch of work in actual classrooms. I did a year long program called Reflections of Nature that integrated work in field biology, informal outdoor physics about topics like clouds, art history about the visual representation of the natural world, and literature like Walden and Romantic poetry. Etc...
@Thad Curtz Sounds fabulous. Thanks for the detailed reply.
This kind of education is a low priority in a country that has a huge challenge in preparing young people for gainful employment if they're not tech savvy. Technical education and apprenticeship opportunities should be much higher priorities. A middle class is the foundation of democracy, and without it we will be facing more challenges from right-wing nationalists and other extremists who will capitalize on the dissatisfactions and economic misfortunes of people unprepared for a rapidly changing economic environment. La la Land Ideas and projects like this give liberals a bad name.
9
@ron l
I wholly disagree with your first statement. College is not intended to be very expensive vocational school. And even if it were, there isn't a vocation in the world that stands at odds with a liberal arts education. No one has ever said, "darn, I wish I knew less."
7
@Jeff Freeman Actually, a lot of people do wish that. That's why they voted for Trump.
2
EXACTLY.
This is a classic liberal arts education with some additional navel gazing built in, nothing wrong with that. But, in this metric driven society, this type of learning is on the wane. And it’s really too bad for us all. I run a more technical department (not IT, health economics) in a large pharma company and am always interviewing likely candidates. The most appealing candidates are those with nontraditional backgrounds. They typically came to the field a round about way, didn’t major in the field in undergrad and are more curious than those that did. Give me a quirky, curious, experienced person any day, they are often the best colleagues.
16
Absolutely CORRECT! My best employees were improv trained college musicians who could solved problems with smarts, Imagination and speed.
2
If you're to discover & make the most of yourself, you've got to grapple w/ the best that's been thought, made, & done through humanity's civilizational career. The skills you acquire & hone as you do should allow you to get your living & contribute at least a minuscule amt to civilization & those w/ whom you share it.
It's great to see people expand the range of educational communities in which that can be done. It's essential that we continue to widen our understanding of what is, "best," (& worst) of what global civilization has done.
As has been suggested, this drive to the deepest cultivation of ourselves & to engage as much truth as we can is fundamental to our nature, is a quest that is never finished, & while it can be suppressed by the quotidian it isn't often extinguished.
We're responsible to the young to affirm the value of their educational aspirations & to make realizing them possible. Happily, in addition to doing our duty, we'll enrich the civilization we enjoy & which enables us to continue to discover & make the most of ourselves.
2
Okay this is not hard. Take some lit, a little history, add some science, courses around a major and then some writing to help with synthesis of ideas.
It is called a liberal arts education. Of course psych, sociology, political science and the humanities need to be added and you approach a well-rounded education. It has been going on for 200 years in liberal arts colleges, whose graduates have done pretty darn well, despite the educational fads.
35
PRECISELY!
Please focus on content not presentation.
The educational system, like all big systems, has only one Prime Directive: feed the system. Whatever purpose it had in the beginning has long since been subsumed by the P.D. Forget about educating students, that's only cover for the real mission. And this applies to every level of the educational system, from pre-K to college.
The current system is built upon the philosophy of mass production developed by Henry Ford. Deliver education to the most students at the cheapest cost spawned the cookie cutter curriculum that forces students to learn by its objectives, not by what works best for the students. This approach works for only about 60% of the students, and not that well, meaning that 40% of students struggle to get a good education and learning. No wonder we have high illiteracy and drop out rates.
There is another way: experiential learning. Simply put, this is learning by doing. Instead of breaking up knowledge into artificial subjects like math, science, English, social studies, students are assigned projects that can be individual or group based, that employ all of these subjects. By working on the project the student acquires the knowledge, and they're eager to learn because they see the real life application. The "anti-colleges" reported here employ experiential education concepts, linking the student's learning with real world experience.
It's time that we offer an alternative to the 100+ year old system that works more for itself than the students.
9
@Kingfish52
We need a "Make Education Matter" movement. A lot of schools are universities today are no more than baby sitting service where little teaching or education is going on.
1
Wonderful. The push-back on the corporatized professoriate and its industrialized publication-or-perish regime of denatured humanities and spirit-stifling STEMH regimen is long overdue. Why anyone would trust science-illiterate humanities majors on the one hand and humanities-illiterate engineers of the other to make critical value judgments for societal decisions is hard to fathom. Anything to wreck today's bureaucratic education is a benefit to society.
8
While there is much to admire about these programs and the individuals in them, I am afraid that they begin from the wrong premise. Yes, universities have lost their way. But as one whose professional life has been focused on the history of universities from their origins in the Middle Ages, I can say that institutions, including universities, reflect the societies in which they exist. If modern universities have lost their way, it is because our society has become more materialistic and superficial, and less concerned with the intellectual, moral and material health of the individual. To change that, we will need to cast the net wider than the university and change the fundamental tenets of society. A year at an anti-university academy may help a few people find their ways, but it will not bring about the structural change that many of the founders and participants want.
200
@Ockham9
I would only add that once upon a time young people received valuable guidance from their parents and secondary school teachers. What happened? I know they're still out there.
4
@Ockham9,
So, what would you suggest we do to change the culture?
Should we watch it burn to the ground so that we can try to build it up from ashes?
Yes. Colleges need some sort of selection and admission process, since most schools have more people wanting in than will fit. And a price must be paid for attending. But there has to be an alternative to high-stakes competition for insanely high-priced learning, with everything that you do evaluated by quantitative ranking.
The alternatives need to come from many directions and these schools are exploring a bunch. As for other possibilities: I've sometimes thought that you ought to be able to acquire learning a la carte, from a variety of schools. Take courses in one subject area at a college that has a department you like, study in a different area at another college -- not necessarily full-time or in a continuous four-year sequence -- and eventually, if you learn enough, qualify for an "I did college" undergraduate degree.
In fact a system like this almost seems inevitable. Markets in many fields are moving toward enabling you to put together a custom "playlist" (or custom whatever) from a diverse and highly distributed platform of offerings. And if higher ed is to be market-driven, this is the way to go.
1
I think we are currently failing in K-12 as well as in higher ed. Everything is about test-scores and grades. I am a STEM professor at a state university. My "excellent" students are driven to get high scores and good grades. My average students want to pass and think their tuition should be enough to get college degree, a better job and maybe out of our depressed rust belt city. Very few students come into my classes interested in learning. I would like to instill in them how cool it is to understand processes and to figure out how things work. I would like to see them thinking critically about information quality in and out of academia, and the ethical considerations of a lot of what we can and cannot do, for a price.
Meanwhile the administration is primarily bean counters, trying to spend as little as possible while having as many tuition paying students as possible. To them we are a business, actual learning is unimportant.
I was a middle class kid from the west who went to elite schools in the east long ago. I wanted to learn. Hard classes were like mountains to climb, achievements with great views from the top if I could make it up. Being powerful and/or sexy is ordinary animal behavior. Loving to learn, creating, and understanding, is uniquely human. Why are we so about ordinary animal stuff? You shouldn't need alternative anti colleges for this. There does not need to be a "meaning" to life. Being human and life itself should be enough.
26
@Heather I teach and have taught (English) at some of the most selective and/or prestigious secondary schools, and your comment describes the vast majority of my students as well. They are not there to learn, only to "succeed". As I move into the later years of my career, I am starting to think about other paths I might take or even what I could do in retirement to help young people see that what really matters is learning how to be kind, humble, and live lightly on this earth that we have broken (and to do what we can to stop the breaking). What I am able to do in my classroom just doesn't seem to be making an impact.
12
@Heather
"I wanted too learn."
Find me two students out of a hundred at the top twenty institution at which I teach who can say that and I'll buy you an ice cream cone. They want to conform to a corporate model that offers them a future with big bucks and no mental stimulation, a future of idealizing diversity without being diverse, and an end to education that makes them a good donor as opposed to an educated individual. Higher education has been defiled by people with degrees in higher education and boards of trust that that know only about making money. It is a sorry, and perhaps even hopeless, state of affairs.
9
BRAVO!! Precisely.
I think we are currently failing in K-12 as well as in higher ed. Everything is about test-scores and grades. I am a STEM professor at a state university. My "excellent" students are driven to get high scores and good grades. My average students want to pass and think there tuition should be enough to get college degree, a better job and maybe out of our depressed rust belt city. Very few students come into my classes interested in learning. I would like to instill in them how cool it is to understand processes and to figure out how things work. I would like to see them thinking critically about information quality in and out of academia, and the ethical considerations of a lot of what we can and cannot do, for a price.
Meanwhile the administration is primarily bean counters, trying to spend as little as possible while having as many tuition paying students as possible. To them we are a business, actual learning is unimportant.
I was a middle class kid from the west who went to elite schools in the east long ago. I wanted to learn. Hard classes were like mountains to climb, achievements with great views from the top if I could make it up. Being powerful and/or sexy is ordinary animal behavior. Loving to learn, creating, and understanding, is uniquely human. Why are we so about ordinary animal stuff? You shouldn't need alternative anti colleges for this. There does not need to be a "meaning" to life. Being human and life itself should be enough.
All the comments here go on way too long. I'm a professor too. It's not that difficult. Like other crucial times in our (U.S.) history, students are looking for meaning. A college degree is still the ticket to a better life, not just the "gig economy". But you need to reach students, help them find meaning. There's no formula or format that works for all. Go trans-disciplinary, and relate every lesson to their lives, that they understand. Can't put a price tag on it.
10
@Greg
My grandmothers mother escaped displacement to a reservation and her daughter and her sister( my aunt ) later returned to this local.
My grandmother taught me to harvest crops, wash clothes and care for my brothers and sisters. Not as
punishment, rather as a reminder to be humble.
She told me not to walk too tall or talk too wise.
She died when I was a teenager, when I graduated
in 72, Little did I know she was a reader of Kipling.
5
Experimental higher education has a long and distinguished history and should be celebrated. But few can attend Quest, Antioch, Marlboro, Warren Wilson, etc. Few can run off to Alaska. The key is for what one contributor in this comment section called the Gigantic State University to enliven the undergraduate curriculum and student experience, to foster experiment and innovation where millions will be reached, and thereby produce beneficent consequences for individuals and for society. I confess to a vested interest, but see reinventioncollaborative.org for one example of what I am talking about. Gigantic State University isn't as staid as many assume.
3
The ancillary services, such as dormitory food services etc are also draining resources, though many will say that they are either cost neutral or even contributing to the overhead. Both in Germany and Finland universities aren't responsible for boarding and lodging. Student organizations own and manage these functions in Finland.
Athletic programs are also great sink for resources for most universities. except for a few colleges they divert great resources from academics. They have become business and ought be run as business like wholly owned companies.
Accreditation systems also become problematic. These organizations are run by academic administrators of large universities with token representation of smaller schools. The rules and regulations are meant to perpetuate the dominance of the elite schools. Compliance with the rules of these bodies cost a lot of money. They are meant for creating barriers to entry and thus assuring its members less competition from new entrants.
5
Tech is politically bankrupt and uncool. To bring back the humanities is the timely and hip thing to do
2
@heinrichz,
I politely disagree. I had a technical background (MIT).
I continue to ask more questions about how will this “tech” effect the society as well as the individual.
Not to mention that tech problems are fun, mind bending and cool.
5
@D MD Clearly we can do both. What I am sick of is people saying the humanities is worthless and we must all be tech entrepreneurs.
1
One of the questions I have asked is what is the most important scholastic thing I learned in college.
The answer is quite simple. I learned how to learn and I learned that I enjoy learning.
I have continued to learn, often far flung topics, in the decades since I graduated. Learning new things is not only import to me but fun and stretches my horizons.
21
Like other institutions of in our society, higher education is in deep trouble. Most state schools are struggling financially because state governments have been cutting support for higher ed even before the Great Recession. More & more students are being taught by underpaid adjuncts, some of whom are trying to make a living by teaching 6 or more lower-level classes at multiple schools; they're spread too thin to provide high quality instruction.
In addition to shrinking state support, another major source of higher ed's fiscal crisis, as others have mentioned, is the proliferation of administrators. How many vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, vice provosts, assistant vice provosts, etc. are really needed to provide a high quality education? And the pay for those upper-level administrators is equal to or surpasses the pay of most of the full-time professors that remain.
Everyone knows the value of a good education at all levels, but it requires money that ultimately comes from taxpayers, & they don't want to pay taxes necessary for a high quality college education--or an elementary and secondary education either, for that matter.
What to do? Bring back the tax code we had in the 50s & 60s that paid for the interstate highway system, the space program, the war in Vietnam, & well-funded state colleges with affordable tuition & financial aid to the poor.
And to do that, we'll need Democrats controlling federal & state governments. So vote accordingly in 2020.
9
@JediProf California is all controlled by Democrats and the Cal State, Uni of California, and Cal Poli systems are among the most underfunded in the nation. Democrats have other priorities than Higher Ed.
1
How ironic that this diatribe against traditional higher education was written by a professor at a top state university, who no doubt has or hopes for tenure, and enjoys the many privileges of such a professor. Who else in today's world gets lifetime job security, and the guarantee of full employment for as long as desired, regardless of age? Most of us, including taxpayers who fund public universities and parents who pay their children's tuition, pray to remain employed long enough to see our children educated. We will have several jobs in our "at will employee" lives, often with gaps of unemployment in between. If we lose jobs in our 50s, it is unlikely we will ever regain fulltime employment. We don't get pensions.
College and university faculty are uniquely privileged and protected. Those who have tenure should look more critically at their own advantages, often extracted at the expense of contingent instructors, low-paid adjuncts, and university staff (who work year-round and usually have no job security), who do the work, advise the students, manage the crises, and teach the courses that more "scholarly" faculty now disdain to handle.
If there are more administrators for "student life", as Prof. Worthen complains, it is because students and their families demand support outside the classroom and feel entitled to have colleges provide those services, because tuition and fees got so high when much public funding went away. Faculty don't provide those services; staff do.
8
@Dean It takes longer to create a University Professor than any other field. Few can conduct independent funded research before they are 35 and the skills are not transferrable outside of research. Academics have tenure so we can get people toput in the years to train for the jobs. Our universities are the finest in the world because we have the best faculty. But the uninformed will smash anything they don't understand.
1
My first thought on reading this interesting article is that folks are doing pretty well in our society if they can move far away from home "to figure out what life is really for". I don't recall having the financial or emotional freedom at 18 to spend much time on that subject. What is the value and purpose of life? If you can figure that out between the ages of 18 and 21 you are a superstar. I'm 62 and still working on that one.....but so far it seems that value is found in making a contribution to someone or something greater than yourself. Purpose has something to do with understanding love and acting on it. It's nice if your job or career can be fulfilling--but that's primarily attitudinal. Go out there and have some fun; take chances and don't be afraid to fail. Your purpose will change as your life unfolds.
56
@Richard Winkler
The purpose of life? If you are able to reason independently, with unprejudiced clarity, I offer this advice:
It’s better not to think about it.
2
I went to an elite liberal arts college and then received a doctoral degree in a health profession. I am discouraging my kids from going to a small liberal arts college now. It's not a financial issue....we can pay for their college whatever the choice. But why pay for an over-priced product, which is what the liberal arts colleges have become? Far more sensible is to go to the regional public campus, or even start with the community college down the road, and then move on to college and graduate school. The liberal arts model has become largely obsolete. I loved majoring in the arts and humanities, but there are many new ways to learn about the arts and humanities now, from Youtube to MOOCs to cable television, and these new methods are free. Save your money. The liberal arts colleges are a model whose time has past.
58
@Tintin Sounds like an updated version of the "I'll take vocational training and get the other stuff from the library" argument. The funny thing is that of the people I've known who went that route, none ever got around to the library. Most people I know who are self-educated on YouTube are "educated" in conspiracy theories, ancient aliens, and radical politics.
41
@Tintin
University of Texas Plan 2. Best of both worlds if you are going to forgo the opportunity of allowing your kids to grow up in a nurturing environment. Pass of the JC as there is NO community at any of them, an integal part of a positive college experience.
1
MOOCS are a bunch of crock.
9
I just finished another masters degree at 82 because I love learning. One key I suggest is to get a strong liberal arts education if you can afford to and then a technical field masters. Having attended colleges and art schools wherever the Air Force set us down, I can say it is the professor or adjunct instructor you get and your own interest that makes all the difference. The glorious amenities of sports teams, gyms, pools and fancy dorms and cafeterias are not important at all! Good up to date technical equipment for instruction and instructors CURRENTLY knowledgeable in their teaching field are the top necessities. The best instruction I ever had was at Wayne State U in Detroit and San Angelo Community College (since renamed and four year) in Texas. Not everyone is cut out for intensive studies. Our country needs to upgrade its community colleges and trade schools and use more accredited apprentice programs. Today's students have the huge advantage of being able to mix on-line learning at their own speed mixed with on campus learning and part time jobs. It's time to get rid of all the rah, rah, Greek houses and the rest.
30
@Susan S Williams
To have apprentice programs you have to have businesses that will train them. 'Most don't want to go to the time or trouble.
As for that liberal arts education, another interesting possibility is UChicago's Graham School and its non-credit Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults which is now online. Four years of the Great Conversation. You'd be a wonderful addition.
2
EXACTLY.
@Kit
Thank you. I'll check it out. I'd like to add, everyone should volunteer to teach ESL for a year or two where they will learn what is really important about education. I will never forget being part of the Hmong education project in Anchorage, AK. Everyone who was part of the project on both sides came away totally humbled by our fellow human beings and the joys of learning.
3
A short follow on: much of the format sought by or asserted in this kind of educational organization, can be also accomplished in small liberal arts colleges to some degree (e.g Reed, St Johns, Oberlin, Middlebury, Trinity or Wesleyan even), and also in the military, and by working on a commercial farm. But better yet, it can be accomplished in secondary school with a more focused, tailored regime of one-on-one and small group learning. Examples include (mostly in Connecticut) the Gunnery, Loomis, Taft, Watkinson, Choate and Kent. I would suggest a lot of the angst among young adults described here is from unfocused secondary education. Of course if you want to strike out at a very young age, there's Summerhill in the UK, started by AS Neill. Or if college, there is the "tutorial" method at Oxbridge, etc which is worth some consideration as a superior alternative to the US format. Cheers.
8
You can get a practical education, for example, a tech boot camp, an apprenticeship in a skilled trade, or a STEM degree. Or you can pick up a liberal arts degree. In that latter case, you're likely to be the person serving pumpkin spiced lattes to the folks with the practical training a few years from now. This may not have been the case 50 years ago, but it is in today's global labor market. Choose wisely, especially if large amounts of debt are involved.
9
@Robert
Or do both. Rhodes College, for example, offers a five-year engineering degree in conjunction with Washington University.
Then you're in a better position to make some ethical decisions as to whether or not the project should even be built!
6
American colleges have long been an “entitlement system for high paid profs and administrators”. Eventually students and their parents are better understanding how the “higher education system” operates. Most students secure degrees of limited qualification for good jobs upon graduation. But are burdened with huge debts. Best of all the colleges are largely indifferent to student outcomes. They offer their “product” - courses and degrees. Not responsible for outcomes.
Elsewhere colleges students typically study at modest tuition public colleges and universities often focused on securing real world opportunities upon graduation. Graduate faculty commonly reflect that int’l students are more focused and better prepared than the typically US student. That certainly was my experience over several decades.
Long past time to review why US college educations are priced so far above those available in other nations. US public school teachers are the highest paid. US college profs are the highest paid. So what’s the problem here ? Just performance and outcomes !
2
@Peter I Berman
Why? The biggest reason public colleges and universities are priced so far above those available in other nations is that the states have intentionally cut back funding, thereby the tuition rate has to compensate.
As for the average salary of an associate professor, take a look a the Chronicle of Higher Education salary charts and then explain how you hire an engineer with a Ph.D. to teach at a lower wage compared to what she can make in the field.
8
@Peter I Berman You were making some sense until you said this: " US public school teachers are the highest paid."
Not true. My niece in Canada is a public school teacher, and is paid far better than US public school teachers.
Colleges that were different for a long time now include --
- Marlboro in VT
- Unity in Unity Maine
- Sterling in VT
- Hampshire (It's considering taking a spring semester class of students)
- Bennington
- Quest in Canada
- Evergreen in Oregon
- College of the Atlantic, in Maine
- Warren Wilson
There are probably others.
5
@Alive and Well ---just a correction: Evergreen is in Washington. Perhaps you meant Reed in Oregon?
1
I am a retired professor and have worked in both private and public universities. I have also been a professor in Germany and Finland and am quite familiar with the educational systems there. In those countries students pay no tuition. So when they graduate, they aren't burdened with any debt. So average salary of forty thousand euro is quite good there. Here even at hundred thousand dollars it will not be good enough for most graduates from the elite schools.
The cost of higher education has gone up very high. First the administrative structure is bloated for several reasons. The mentality to build their little empires is ever present in the administrators. Regulatory burden on the colleges necessitate to open up many administrative positions. Students are demanding many services, some of which should be provided by parents and families. In this era of liberalism, we are delegating parental functions to the colleges.
Salaries of higher administrators have increased exponentially based on the logic of false equivalency of the corporate world. University board members can afford to be generous in giving away other people's money.
Media is also responsible in hyping up false idea of rankings , as if it is a horse race. Such horse race mentality promoting elitism has created many problems as we have recently seen in a FBI investigation.
274
FBI investigation of PARENTS who bribed to get college admissions for their kids. Yikes.
4
@Mr C Thank you for your response to Anti-College. There are big problems with higher education and our economy which do not require such radical alternatives. Germany and Finland are good models. So is vintage California 1960s, before the Republican Party began cutting taxes, public education, and redistributing wealth upwards.
18
If humanities and liberal arts education was working, we'd have a lot more citizenship, a cleaner environment, a fair justice system, and a humane society. We do not. Imagine if accounting programs were producing accountants who could not account, or comp sci programs produced graduates who could not write code. Yet humanities!
The greens are making headway in Germany; a place where education is seriously segregated with multiple streams for vocations and so on. Imagine that! Here, with half of the 120 credits in a four year program devoted to feel good and left wing propaganda, our citizenship is negligible.
I work with these people, I am amazed that they can tie their shoe laces. Yet, nearly all the senior administrators, provosts, are humanities and liberal arts majors who think spread sheets are crazy, data analysis is for the birds, and that reading Shakespeare and Donne is enough. Do you know how many dissertations are written about Jane Austen? Is anyone surprised that the cost of education is going up; how could it not when the entire ineptitude of administrators is borne gratefully by the marketplace.
I loved reading about these programs. Not because I think they will produce anything meaningful, but virtually any alternative deserves exploration. Meanwhile, I am directing my grand kids to prepare for organic chem, high level math, and full reading of Kant and Dewey. I.e., I need them to succeed despite college.
11
@Kalidan,
Thank you for your concise, comprehensive, and highly readable analysis. I agree completely with every word you wrote. What I see in this article is a neat rehash of the cultural miasma I graduated into from high school in 1968. The major problem at American colleges today is that half the students don't belong in a four-year program*. They belong in an apprenticeship or vocational training or the military or an entry-level administrative job. Your comment on the highly segregated German system talks to this point. Thanks again.
* And many of them will not graduate, but will get to keep their student debt.
10
@Charles Becker indeed, I attended such an alternative college and basically learned nothing. As a result I was forced to go on to grad school to make up for it, for which I was unprepared, and struggled mightily. Also, it is hard to blame colleges for the fact that a lot of young people who are really not interested in what college offers are going because it has become obligatory. No one blames high school education this way, and college has become just an extension of high school for many.
9
STOP pushing stupid right-wing PROPAGANDA and bunk ideas!
To me, the article's most telling point is the absence of any moral dimension to the "education" offered in mainstream colleges and universities. Mainstream higher education as we know it today is, quite literally, amoral. There is no sense that students should pursue anything other than the kinds of grades that will presumably lead to a high-paying job, or at least a decent one. Worse, nobody in mainstream academia sees this as a problem. So . . . more power to these alternative programs and three cheers for their emphasis on re-orienting education toward a higher purpose--a moral purpose, whatever it may be for each individual student-- and toward the common good.
27
Things are happening pretty fast in the world today and the challenges of the future seem pretty daunting. I would suggest studying the philosophy of the ancients after nailing down a solid career strategy that will still be viable in 20 or 30 years, especially if you want to raise a family on the grid and don't have a large trust fund.
The days of life long employment in one organization that provides predictable health care and retirement benefits are fading fast. So there is a lot to figure out on your own, how to remain useful in a rapidly changing workplace, how to manage your money through thick and thin and how to get along effectively at work, in the community and at home.
For most people, higher education of any kind is first a necessity and perhaps later a luxury item. And things happen pretty fast, both good and bad, once you are out in the world on your own and many are happy to loan you money to find yourself.
Science can be handy, so you understand why to vaccinate your kids or why environmental protection is important to future generations.
Math is also useful, especially the practical kind like statistics and financial literacy.
Physical education is important to staying healthy and mobile all of your life.
But most important is critical thinking and continuous learning.
104
@Look Ahead
Maybe everyone needs two degrees?
First, get a degree in some field in demand where you can get a job that pays the rent and allows you to survive. Survival is a goal worth pursuing.
Then, once survival is nailed down, get a second degree in philosophy, art, whatever it is that floats your boat and gives your life meaning.
It would be nice if we had a system that would supply both of these needs and in a way that did not make students debtors for life. It would be nice but it will never happen here. If you live here you must spend most of your waking hours fighting the corrupt system that you were born into and which is rigged to make you a wage slave for your entire life. America is a decadent and corrupt society and the sooner our students learn that the better. They need to have the credentials to get in doors and the contacts to get interviews. They also need to develop the criminal skills necessary to avoid being a sucker and following the law. We have set up a Darwinian experiment to develop a generation of Donald Trumps who can thrive in this broken system. America is morphing from an obsolete enlightenment ideal into a pragmatic and barbaric engine that aims to dominate the earth and exploit its resources until the very foundations for life are threatened. And then it will deny its handiwork as the oceans cover it over. There is no stopping the human virus once it is locked into a self destructive pattern.
6
@look ahead. thank you. critical thinking and continuous learning are key to a happy, successful, and nimble life.
At 18, it is good to have the opportunity to become part of an diverse intellectual community. As a science major at a large public university a generation ago, I was required to take 9 courses outside of science and math, and I learned a lot from professors and fellow students who were passionate about Homer, H.G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, and Paul Ehrlich. I have heard that this kind of public education is too expensive now... code academies and online French apps will have to do for the millennials. Sigh...
15
What a wonderful, challenging, inspiring piece. If only we could find a similar place that celebrates the power of western religion, including Christianity and its call for selfless love of the poor, to focus and transform. But so impressed with these dreamers and groundbreakers aiming to teach that life is most robust, most joyful, when it's lived well beyond the self.
2
USA's Christianity proved to be a BIG SCAM for Propaganda Politics. Ugly.
Some commenters think 18-year-olds are too young to read the humanities, so let me tell you about my high school (Fieldston, a private school in NYC).
We had a required course, one hour a week, every year, called Ethics. Our discussions ranged from the classics to the latest news. And, okay, a lot of kids sat in the back doing their chemistry homework. But I loved the class, and I wasn't the only one.
Did I fully understand Plato in high school? No; I did benefit from re-reading him later. But did I understand that "the good life" is worth thinking about? Yes. (Also, you know what? I didn't fully understand relativity or calculus at first reading, either. But the understanding I did get, at age 11, was worth my time.)
Oh, and I found time to learn some computer programming, too. I haven't become unemployable because high school encouraged me to think about what I wanted to do with my life.
My biggest regret about my education is that I /totally/ misunderstood Aristotole on first reading, and I wasn't taught to appreciate him until late in graduate school, age 35. So I had already developed some lazy moral habits before understanding that habits of mind matter.
In the present climate, in which schooling is all about grades and job preparation, I'm sure there are anti-schools here and there that err in the opposite direction. But the right synthesis would be much more like those schools than like the get-into-grad-school ones.
34
No mention of Community Colleges which give students the opportunity to find out what they really want to do with their lives. They also give older students a chance to retrain for another career. Furthermore it's far less expensive and provides remediation in necessary skills when needed. I have taught at all levels, but have rarely experienced the kind of enthusiasm for learning when teaching English and Humanities at a Community College.
256
@Marion Francoz
Thank you for your enthusiasm and your service. Sadly CC's have issues of their own. The average graduation rate is 20% -- and that's a generous estimation.
CCs need rethinking and that's happening too. Guttman Community College, begun in 2012, seems to have doubled the average grad rate. Others have been attempting to model new CCs based on Guttman, including Adler, with mixed results, partly because of NYC's unique environment. Still, there are promising changes that seem to be happening.
2
@Alive and WellGraduation rate is a poor measure of success for a community college since the students have so many reasons for being there. I went to a community college for 3 years, but graduated from UCLA. I would be counted as a failure, even though my time at the community college probably saved my life.
13
@Marion Francoz
Agree with all you say, except that remediation is being removed, or is already removed, from the course offerings at California CCs and universities. This latest fad in higher ed is purposely leaving out immigrants, the under prepared, the poor, and those students who arrive from insecure family environments. Remediation in Math was there for me as an adult re-entry student many years ago, and I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and now have a deeply satisfying career. Cutting remediation saves the institution $$ and does not consider the wide variations in students' needs.
@mary bardmess
Absolutely! Since when is graduating from a CC the measure of the institution's success?? CCs are marketed as transfer institutions that save students big bucks, and that's exactly what they do. So what if transfer students don't take the time to also earn a degree before they transfer. Since when is that even in their best interests?
3
I like to say my 6th class every semester was college administration. Gathering signatures and submitting forms. Various degrees of override this and circumvent that. The entire process was an absolute pain in the neck.
At the same time though, I learned valuable lessons about planning and execution that most students don't find important enough to learn. The way my now-wife explained it to me at the time: You have to understand the rules in order to know how to break them. Most students prefer to stay on the sidewalk rather than jump the fence.
College curricula are useful in that sense. They map out coherent paths towards graduating on time with a general set of careers in mind. An important point considering most college isn't free and you usually can't discharge the debt through enlightened thought alone. A sense of purpose doesn't typically pay the rent. Not with any buffer anyway.
That said, if you decide to jump the fence, you really don't need any help to do it. I completed all my gen-eds, two majors in unrelated fields, nearly two different minors, across three continents all in 8 semesters with no extra debt burden.
One semester had internet for one hour a day at our host's computer lab, an agricultural high school in the middle of a desert. Oddly enough, the experience taught me how to teach myself database theory years later. Oh, and the only flushing toilets in 200km only flushed once a week.
If you want that experience, go for it. Most people don't.
3
Antioch College in Ohio has always been a college where you study on campus half the year and the other half of the year you work at a job that the school helps you find. So when you graduate, you already have lots of work experience and lots of contacts in the work world.
Everyone I know who went to Antioch felt more prepared for real-life work experiences after college than people who just went to a regular full-time study school.
I recommend that people consider all possible alternative options for college. For some people, skipping college and just learning a trade as an apprentice is the best option.
19
Not everyone derives true benefit from a liberal arts education at ages 18-22. Many young people should be trained to do the jobs that we as a society need. They can always read and discuss the works of great historical thinkers, philosophers, and naturalists, especially when they are old enough to have some real perspective.
8
Most folks never achieve enlightenment and lots of them don't need it -- they never worried about their "... inability to ask, and answer, serious questions about life’s ultimate purpose." But, forgive my Philistineism, I think that few of us who do/did have such worries found our answers in Plato or Lucretius or Voltaire or Hume or Sartre or Carl Rogers or Noam Chomsky -- or, even, Phyllis Schaffly. Rather, we found the answer and then discovered that it had been in the works of those wise women and men (pace Schaffly!) We learned to speak Zen or Hume or Lucretius without knowing what we were doing. Because to be enlightened it is necessary to be confused. People in their late teens and early twenties are too inexperienced to be confused!
So, bravely go on ye seekers of something better than Gigantic State University. Your quest is the right one, even if I think you're maybe rushing it a bit.
1
I love it when people talk about how enlightened they are. There's no such thing as enlightenment, and this is coming from someone who teaches in college humanities. There's a transformative value to education that people are missing, sure. But nothing so lofty as enlightenment.
6
@Chris
And you know that, how?
I think Sterling College in Vermont deserves some recognition in this article as a work college.
6
Colleges grew costs untethered from economic reality and customer-student expectation. The idea a 4 year degree or beyond is necessary for life is doubled in the case of the schools cited. They are the charter schools of the secondary education world. I would wager their major acceptance criteria is the ability to pay.
Self-directed programs are for a specific personality type, which includes a myriad of more complex cognitive characteristics.
The current thinking in education is that communication, teamwork, and peers-teaching-peers are first among educational skills to be learned. Self-guided research is next. Creative thinking is important, but each person’s creativity is unique. Basic language, emotional maturity, math, logic, and an understanding of science are prerequisites.
It’s hard to be self-actualized without a job, with crushing debt, or with stressing family situations. Students engage in extremely self-debasing and self-actualization-robbing jobs just to pay living expenses during college.
The essence of this opinion piece is small group of educators lobbying for their economic survival.
I’m as intellectual as they come. I learned the cognitive tools I needed in high school, minimal humanities in college.That’s my personality type.
Most people expect that American secondary education will resolve over time to state colleges and well endowed major private schools.
Social-hierarchy-behaviors quoting classics do not produce solutions we need as a world.
5
A member of my family is on the staff of NYC Community College. He is coaching students on coping with academia, but also supplying them with mentor stories from his own life. He is making a difference, I hope. I didn't have a mentor but got through by luck. We need to form something like '"Mentors, International" to help studemnts wherever they are.
Bainbridge mentor
15
"“I do wonder whether or not it’s mission-critical for an educational institution to have a fully articulated metaphysics and ethics and politics that underpin it — or to what extent that is inhibitive to the broader project of liberal education,” Ms. Marcus told me."
This is a great quote, because it challenges the very impetus for these "anti-colleges." I confess reading this article with some skepticism, because of the counter-culture sort of way they are being designed.
It's impossible to study everything, hence arguments about which canon to include and which not--something taken care of nicely as time passes in traditional schools, where what was in fashion when one entered college no longer is ("The Wasteland, anyone?).
But more to the point, these schools sound like interesting adjuncts to attend before or during college, to kick start students' passion if they feel they're getting stale.
But I'm doubtful they will replace traditional college altogether--because, not everyone has the luxury of time to postpone the necessity of earning a living.
60
@ChristineMcM
When I read the article, I thought I was back in the 60s with the Beatles and the gurus and maharaji minus the drugs.
The anti-colleges sound like solutions to first world problems, that's for sure.
Thousands of people continue to graduate from traditional colleges with clear eyed plans for the future and degrees that serve them well for years.
What needs fixing is the high cost of college and the insane debt that they leave with. (And the inequity between the pay that actual teaching professors make and non-teaching administrators make.)
8
My daughter just graduated from Kenyon College. I am certain among the finer things in life, the liberal arts education she received at Kenyon will remain with her all the days of her life.
150
I love literature today but at 18 I wasn’t smart enough to read Tolstoy.
I ended up with a computer science degree and a professional career with work even at my age.
Since then, I have been able to read all the literature I want. And with the Internet there is lots of analysis to help me see what I might see on my own.
36
@Independent
I love science and STEM fields, but at 18 I wasn't smart enough to learn them.
I ended up with a degree in Russian language and literature and a professional career in international relations.
Since then, I have been able to study all the science I want. And with the internet, there is lots of instruction to help me understand what I might not grasp on my own.
45
@Jim
Great!
Two books in case you haven't seen them are "Physics for Poets" which came out in the 1970's and the last edition is in the 1990's but you can still buy it.
The other is "Quantum Mechanics for Poets".
My favorite novel is "War and Peace". I read it every ten years or so. It wasn't until my 40's that someone told me to read the epilogue. Paraphrasing, what is the force that moves people. Why would a million Frenchmen to go off to kill a million Russians.
Did you get to live in Russia? I ended up living in Brazil for 13 years and picked up Portuguese.
Another book I liked is "1493" a non-fiction book.
I also got to work with some very smart scientists doing image processing for medicine and designing integrated circuits for space based radar.
They seemed to know everything, history and economics and the world. I always said that I would only be a subset of what they knew. But it has been fun trying.
2
@Jim
PS - speaking of international relations, I also interviewed with the CIA to be a "business man" in a foreign country.
I didn't take the job but it was during Reagan years. I remember Russia throwing out American business men for being spies.
1