Maggie's Farm

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]

Peter Schiff, from a few years ago (h/t Moonbattery).

His points are well-taken, but most of them would apply to housing costs and car costs, too. Easy credit raises prices.

From Phi Beta Cons:

 If you go back more than 40 years, you find that few occupations were closed to people who did not have college degrees to their names. What changed? In short, I think it was a combination of these factors: the erosion of high-school standards (which used to bring about at least respectable basic competence in young people but began to slide in the ’70s), the subsidization of college, which led to more and more people earning degrees and thus casting doubt on the capabilities of those who did not, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), which turned testing of job applicants into a legal hazard for employers and thus encouraging them to look at a safe alternative means of identifying individuals who might have the right characteristics.

As an employer, I have to agree with all of the above.

From McArdle's post:

 The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.

Unfortunately, I’m essentially arguing that professors ought to, out of the goodness of their heart, get rid of their graduate programs and go back to teaching introductory classes to distracted freshman. Maybe they should do this. But they’re not going to.

Labor markets, even in academia. Life is tough.

An excellent review of the state of higher ed in the US from VDH: The Outlaw Campus.  He begins:

Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

In short, the university has abjectly defaulted on its side of the social contract by no longer providing an affordable and valuable degree. Accordingly, society can no longer grant it an exemption from scrutiny.

"Pre-school" is just a fancy term for Day Care, aka Babysitting. Even the US government says it serves no educational purpose.

So why the push for it?

Does having a college degree guarantee that you can write a coherent, well-developed, logical and grammatical ten-page essay? Certainly not. Isn't that a high school skill, anyway (see No One Wants to Teach Writing - At Brooklyn College, professors pass the buck rather than take responsibility for students' writing)?

In the WSJ, We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn - At colleges today, all parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. (paywall)

Is he exaggerating? Or are they mostly diploma mills, rent-seekers, needing the income? Remember the bumpersticker: "If all else fails, lower your standards" ?

There's only one way to find out: Post-College Exams:

"Right now a student graduating from, say, California State University at Fresno, Kansas State University, or the State University of New York at Brockport with a 3.3 average has a tough time getting considered for a good job. These schools, while by no means considered academic disasters or diploma mills, accept kids that were mostly above average but not exceptionally good high school students. A 3.3 average once denoted "a well above average student" but does not anymore in this era of grade inflation. In short, absent more information, this hypothetical student would be considered "a so-so student from a so-so university," perhaps not worth employers investing human resource department dollars to carefully assess and interview.

Enter the CLA + and the new Gallup-Purdue Index. Our hypothetical student can take the CLA+ and employers can see quickly and inexpensively how he or she fares relative to, say, a 3.1 student graduating from the University of Virginia, UCLA, or Swarthmore College, far more selective institutions.  On the basis of those test results, some of the students at the less selective universities will manage to get interviews and serious consideration by employers."

I think much of this is related to my post of a few months ago: "Unprepared" for college study

We love The Teaching Company (aka Great Courses), but you can't get "credit" for them. Just learning.

This guy tried online education:  An Online Education Odyssey - The author tries to bring some clarity to the online higher education debate by relating his own experiences.