What is graduate school for?
Here's an interesting article in Opinion Journal about the current state of graduate schools. I don't think free market forces are the solution to every problem, but in this instance, I think the market may be able to spark a change that would otherwise be very, very gradual -- or "glacial," as this author suggests:
. . . William Strauss and Neil Howe have recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that with tuition and the resulting debt reaching surreal levels, and colleges and universities failing to reverse the post-1960s collapse of academic standards, parents and students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college education.
Parents born after 1961, Messrs. Strauss and Howe have found, experienced that collapse of standards in their own college educations and are determined not to tolerate another overpriced and underperforming disappointment for their own children. This is the generation that "propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling and the standards-and-accountability movement." These parents will be more likely to treat higher education as a market, in which smart buyers exercise discretion.
Academics tend to be contemptuous of markets, which is why the for-profit University of Phoenix is their bête noire. But markets will do a better job of sorting these things out, at least in some aspects, than the accredited professionals who, after all, merely respond to a system that rewards time spent on research and scoffs at time spent on teaching. Such incentives need to change.
. . . William Strauss and Neil Howe have recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that with tuition and the resulting debt reaching surreal levels, and colleges and universities failing to reverse the post-1960s collapse of academic standards, parents and students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college education.
Parents born after 1961, Messrs. Strauss and Howe have found, experienced that collapse of standards in their own college educations and are determined not to tolerate another overpriced and underperforming disappointment for their own children. This is the generation that "propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling and the standards-and-accountability movement." These parents will be more likely to treat higher education as a market, in which smart buyers exercise discretion.
Academics tend to be contemptuous of markets, which is why the for-profit University of Phoenix is their bête noire. But markets will do a better job of sorting these things out, at least in some aspects, than the accredited professionals who, after all, merely respond to a system that rewards time spent on research and scoffs at time spent on teaching. Such incentives need to change.
posted by Kate Marie | 3:16 PM | Permalink
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2 comments
2 Comments:
If I had to go back to school, I'd sure look into the U of Phoenix. But being an old fuddy duddy (born before 1961), I will no doubt choose a more traditional college for the offspring. And then maybe I'll turn "helicopter" and give that school some "whatfor."
I know folks who've attended the University of Phoenix, and it seemed to me that they worked pretty hard. (My sense is that a UP degree is taken pretty seriously in the business world, although I'm not sure it's earned much respect elsewhere yet.) I'm curious to know more about how UP handles students who deserve to fail, especially when the school explicitly considers them "customers," but UP certainly can't be any worse than the large universities, some of them Ivies, that give away A's like candy.
CIV, if you do decide to return to college, don't be put off by all the Ward Churchill talk you read on the Web. Conservative bloggers are very good at rooting out the far-left nutbars, and that's good, but at most universities they're not representative of what the typical student will experience. As an undergraduate at big northeastern state university, I encountered only one avowed Marxist. He responded politely to my less politely stated belief that much of literary theory was hogwash, and he even wrote me a letter of recommendation later on.
University liberal-arts programs "indoctrinate" fewer people than you might think; in fact, I'd bet that in the past 25 years, they've been much more successful at turning skeptics or middle-of-the-road types into outright conservatives! Traditional universities are still the best place to avail yourself of history, politics, economics, literature, etc., especially if you're an adult student returning for "pure knowledge." Don't let far-left bogeymen scare you away. It's true that American higher education could use a good shake-up, but if you go into it with the skepticism that any intelligent adult should already possess, I think you'll be amazed by what a terrific resource a traditional university can be.
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