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Friday, June 24. 2011

Is college a racket?

A Trojan Horse in “Higher” Education. He begins:



In 1932 Yale accepted seventy-two per cent of its applicants. In 1940 Harvard accepted eighty-five per cent. Of the four hundred and five boys from Groton who applied to Harvard between the years 1906 and 1932 only three were turned down.



He concludes:



When my kids get “literature” in the mail from a college claiming that it will help them enter into the fullness of their humanity and teach them to insure in perpetuity the life and health of the world, I will stop using the word “racket” to describe “higher” education. But until that time I’m afraid I will be an accomplice to something I cannot wholly admire—if also, I hope, an enemy within it, a kind of Trojan horse.



Only the prosperous could afford fancy private higher education before WW 2. It is getting so that few can afford it now. At $50,000+ per year, they are back to looking for the rich kids again whose parents can pay full freight.

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:04 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thank you for pointing that one out. Red meat for me. I particularly enjoyed the comments, there was a nice discussion. One were people disagreed and yet were civil. Kind of like around here.

The more I work in higher education the more I dislike the whole regulatory framework. Higher education is a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. No operational or policy change may be considered that may offend the apparatchiks of the DOE.

For example: I am in Texas and my school offers online courses. We are no longer accepting students from Wisconsin or Minnesota as those states have very high licensing fees for online education and we would, at best, only have a few students located there. The DOE has mandated that all colleges and universities will comply with all state laws regarding online education. If we are found in violation of a state regulation, the feds will take away the schools access to Title IV money (Pell Grants, and more importantly, student loans).

Regulatory decisions like this do nothing to help the student. If we have a student here in Texas working on her degree and she moves to Minnesota for a job change, we can not allow her to finish her degree online. To do so would jeopardize the entire school’s financial condition.

The author of the piece laments the state of education. I mostly concur. I really think the internet will save education. Education that is cheap enough to be delivered and purchased without the use of federal money is the future. That is the only way to avoid all the nonsense that is the DOE.

The separation of education and credentialing will be possible with the internet. Separating credentialing from education will improve education too.

Students then would be free to get educated at their own pace. They will then also be able to improve their job prospects by purchasing season tickets to Big State U’s football games and attending those games without the baggage of worrying about their grades.

Oh, and those for profit schools that no one likes? The are set up to milk the federal financial aid system. Without access to that system, they would not exist in their current manifestation.

I should post this at my own place, but I got carried away…
#1 Mike (Link) on 2011-06-24 17:47 (Reply)

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