Maggie's Farm

More Decline in the U. of Chicago Core.

I have come to think that it's not so much about ideology and abandoning the canon of mankind's works over the past 10,000 years, but it's more about marketing to the kids. It's disgusting, and it saddens me.

If the U of C were in Big Ten football, they could and probably would keep their core and their soul. They are selling their soul for a bowl of lentils. It's greed.

The competition for full-tuition foreign students.

Higher Ed follows the money. Greedy non-profits, are they not?

We recently linked this: Should the U.S. Adopt the German Model of Apprenticeships?

The otherwise-useful article concludes with the notion that "government could do more." 

I have no idea what government has to do with it. After the basics, most lines of work are learned by apprenticeships and "practice" of various sorts. Just consider auto mechanics, cooking, gunsmithing, machine-tooling, law, medicine, bond sales, garden design, preaching, playing music, carpentry,  jewelry design, flower arranging, cattle-raising, horse-grooming, dog training, leather-working, road-paving, politics and sales in general, fashion, etc., etc., etc. The list is endless.

I am very much in favor of the term and concept "apprentice," but I don't know what the heck government has to do with it. Why do so many people have this reflex that "government ought to do something"? As if it could.

People can figure these things out on their own.

Just one quote from an excellent piece from Walter Russell Mead: The Coming Reformation of Higher Ed:

One important shift we need to make, in K12 as well as in higher ed, is from the time-served model of education to a stuff-learned model. The time-served model asks how many credits, how many years? As a method of qualification it is characteristic of guilds where you have to serve so many years as an apprentice, so many years as a journeyman--you have to walk through all the steps.  And it also is a revenue enhancer for colleges because the bright kid is going to have to take just as many courses as the dumb kid. Here's another aspect of the stuff-learned model.

Suppose we actually had an exam, a national baccalaureate exam of some kind, and if you passed that exam then you would be deemed to have graduated from college with an equivalent of a BA. Not only would this make it possible for a lot of people to get that degree with less time in class and less money spent, it would also allow the kid that went to the University of Illinois and learned a lot to be able to compete with the kid who went to Harvard and stayed drunk. It gives the kid from the no-name or lesser-name school an honest-to-God credential. To me, this is a matter of elementary social justice. It would help to reduce the immense prestige premium that a handful of schools have--a form of privilege that those of us who care about a more open and democratic society should oppose.  And I think it would be healthy to put less pressure on middle-class kids to get into name schools and put more pressure on them to learn stuff that would be interesting and useful. And offering certificates equivalent to a BA to students passing an exam would address a lot of the needs that are now fulfilled through very cumbersome and expensive programs often leading to a lot of student debt.

And if a family's kids are able to graduate from high school two or three years early, the taxpayers save money.  Why shouldn't some of those savings go to the family that managed the savings, so they could use the money for the next stage in their childrens' education?   

But who would design that exam, Prof. Mead? I'd be willing to do it, but then higher ed would "teach to the test."

My BA test would include things like (for examples) Calculus, Physics and Physical Chemistry, Plato, Econ, the Ming Dynasty, John Locke, molecular Bio, Michelangelo, one or two languages, basic Law and Civics, basics of Engineering, Geography and Geology, Roman history, Sophocles, Bach's music, the Bible, and Augustine. Plus an essay on a random topic during the exam.

The degree would mean something, if done my way, and separate the slackers from the scholars. Could kids pass it? Well, how about just a score on it, then? But who would care? It doesn't take a fancy degree to sell software or bonds, to write code, or to make Chai Latte.

It will come as no surprise to observers of graduate education that the
report documents the fact that foreign students make up the majority of
enrollments in U.S. graduate programs in many STEM fields...:

 At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the proportion of international students in graduate electrical engineering programs is 52.5 percent and, in computer science, 35.3 percent. At Stanford, 56 percent of graduate electrical engineering students and 43.7 percent of graduate computer science students are international.

I'll always listen to what Scruton has to say.

A Letter to the Class of 2013:

It is true that students can get a great education from almost any school in the country. The bad news is that the quality of their education is, in many cases, up to them, and many schools will provide little guidance. Students who want a solid foundational education don’t have to go to one of the 22 colleges that earn an “A” rating. They can build their own education—and I hope our study serves as a guide for the type of education that employers want, our country needs, and will serve students long after graduation.  But at many colleges and universities, the burden will be on them to make these informed choices.

Even The New York Times has recognized that the US has oversold college as a financial investment.

It fatigues me to need to be constantly deploring nonsense like this: Look What Freshman Composition Has Become.

The kids and their dutiful parents are getting ripped off royally. What new can I say about this sort of sickening thing?

I have a reason for re-linking Driscoll's ‘The Prussian System Was Much More Appealing’

MacDonald:

This year’s conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”

Ahh, the wonders of the Liberal Arts and those darn complex temporalities.

More on this topic: University Administrative Glut Worse Than We Thought:

 Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors.

Why? Who are these people and what do they do all day?

From the NYP: Save Kids from Fuzzy Math

If kids don't absorb the fundamentals, they will have difficulty going further. "New Math" set me back by years. The piece begins:

We need “new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test,” President Obama told the nation during his State of the Union last week. To which a clever tweeter responded, “There’s a high correlation between filling in bubbles on a test and knowing the right answer.”

Too Late to Save English Departments? The discipline of English is already in trouble, but there is more to come.

She begins:

Thankfully, much is being made of Heather Mac Donald’s recent piece, “The Humanities and Us,” in the City Journal. She illustrates the decline of college English departments, where “gender, sexuality, race, and class” have taken over Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. The radicals of the 60s and 70s are firmly in charge; their diktats have attacked the hallmarks of literary study; and Mac Donald rightly calls for a return to standards at colleges. But standards won’t do any good if incoming freshmen are incapable of reading, thinking independently, and using logic. That has already begun to be the case, and it is going to get worse thanks to new “standards” known as Common Core.

Isn't everybody sick and tired of the latest progressive educational fads?

From Sol Stern, Mayor De Blasio’s new schools chancellor is a longtime champion of failed progressive pedagogy:

  If she really is committed to changing the tale of two cities, as she and the new mayor claim to be, one way to start would be to cast aside ideology and judge whether those Core Knowledge classrooms, drenched in “mere facts,” are actually the key to narrowing the devastating knowledge gap between middle-class kids and poor children, who begin school with little knowledge of the world and with a stunted vocabulary. She might also find that there is at least as much “joy” in classrooms in which children get taught explicitly about the world around them as there is in classrooms in which children “construct” their own knowledge.

"Mere facts"?

I was pretty good college material because I have always been curious about everything, have always read up on anything I did not know about, and have always had adequate verbal and mathematical abilities.

Feeling ignorant was a blessing for me because I always wanted to fight it, and learning new things has always been one of my joys.

Still, I liked this from Matt Walsh: Thank God I wasn’t college material.

As a parent, would you pay for this? College Offers Full-Credit Course on Beyoncé

Who is Beyonce, anyway?

Bracing for Demographic Shifts, Colleges Face Tough Trade-Offs.

The old bumper sticker said "When all else fails, lower your standards."

Via Jacobson re home schooling:

In his December ruling against the Wunderlich family, (German) judge Marcus Malkmus called homeschooling a “concrete endangerment to the well-being of the child,” comparing it to a “straitjacket” that he said binds children to “years of isolation.”

“The request of the parents to reinstate their right to determine the location of the children, the right to make educational decisions for the children, as well as the right to file legal applications for their children is being refused,” the judge stated.

The "right" to make educational decisions for your children?

He begins:

 A colleague who teaches in the humanities at the state college where I work also teaches at a nearby private college.  In the colleague’s description, the private college is perpetually in the grip of a panic over the prospect of a drop in enrollment.  The college’s administration has therefore instituted an unwritten but implacable policy the upshot of which is that the student is always right, no matter how absurd his complaint, and the consequence of which is that instructors must never tax students beyond an infantile minimum of scholarly exertion.  Among the consequences of the consequence are that students refuse to undertake out-of-class reading assignments, fail quizzes related to those assignments, and then lodge complaints with chairs and deans against the instructor.

Prof. Myers tells his tale of woe:

As Cardinal Newman warned, knowledge really is an end in itself. I fill no gap in the department, because there is no shimmering and comprehensive surface of knowledge in which any gaps might appear. Like everyone else in English, I am an extra, and the offloading of an extra is never reported or experienced as a loss.

I feel the loss, keenly, of my self-image. For 24 years I have been an English professor. Come the spring, what will I be?

My colleagues will barely notice that I am gone, but what they have yet to grasp is that the rest of the university will barely notice when they too are gone, or at least severely reduced in numbers — within the decade, I’d say.

I have seen their math instruction and think that they are excellent - better than anything I ever had in school. Khan Academy.

It's free, too.

Via Driscoll:

 Homeschooling terrifies the Left because the Left is at its core totalitarian, seeking to bring political discipline to every aspect of life — and control of education is essential to that project. The public school is in miniature what the Left believes the world should look like: Everybody arranged in orderly rows and moving about on an orderly schedule punctuated by bells, being taught about diversity and climate change by nice union ladies who also lead them to their federally subsidized lunches. If you can say “no” to that, you can say no to any part of the Left’s vision. Homeschooling is an existential threat to the privileged position of the institutional Left. The schools are the factory in which it manufactures its future clients. [See also Kyle Smith in Saturday's New York Post: "US education model creates assembly-line workers" -- Ed]