The general-education core is what distinguishes the B.A. from a vocational program and makes it more than “just training.” It is designed to ensure that all degree holders graduate with a breadth of knowledge in addition to an in-depth understanding of a particular subject area. Students are exposed to a broad range of disciplines and are pushed to think critically about the social, cultural, and historical context in which they live. It is supposed to guarantee that all graduates can write, have a basic understanding of the scientific method, have heard of the Marshall Plan and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and know that iambic pentameter has something to do with poetry.
.. The pyramid structure of the bachelor’s degree, which requires that students start with the broad base of general requirements before they specialize, is what makes college unappealing to so many young people.
.. but there is solid evidence that some students learn better through experience. For these students, theory does not make sense until it is connected to action.
.. It is often said in the United States that no member of Congress or leading CEO started their career in a community-college technical-training program—pathways to positions of leadership start with a bachelor’s degree. Is this true because graduates of technical-training programs are not fit to become leaders, or because we don’t allow them to? Try saying the same thing to someone in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland.
Diane Ravitch: on Education Reform
Yet irony abounded in what she said. Less than a decade ago, she was one of the “they” she denounced in her speech. For years, Ravitch supported many reform goals—accountability, school choice, charters. But now that the ideas she championed have taken effect she is dismayed by the results and has disavowed her previous positions. Her disillusionment has been slow and painful and has ended some old friendships, but, she asked me, “how many people actually admit that they’re wrong?”
.. Federal, state, and local spending on education comes to more than six hundred billion dollars a year, about the same amount that is spent on defense.
.. The slow accumulation of pension benefits—which keeps burnt-out teachers on the job for years—should be revised. Some believe that pay should even be “front-loaded,” with higher initial wages, to attract capable young people to the profession.
.. “American public schools as a whole are not failing,” she told me in Detroit. “High-school graduation rates are higher than ever”—up to 75.5 per cent, in 2009, the last year for which numbers are available. And she mentioned a slight increase, among all ethnic groups, in reading and math scores on national tests.
.. If you want people to be creative and entrepreneurial, forget the test scores. It’s character that makes success.” She added, “Testing doesn’t close gaps—it reveals them.” She is not against state tests per se, but she thinks that “testing should be used for help—to diagnose learning problems—not as a basis for rewards and punishments.
.. The reformers, Ravitch believes, are mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires coöperation, sharing, and mentoring.
.. At the same time, she defended tenure as important to academic freedom. “Without it, there will be huge parts of this country where evolution will never again be taught—or climate change, or anything that is in any way controversial.”
.. Ravitch points to low test scores in Southern states, where fewer teachers are unionized, and to states with high scores, like Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where schools are almost completely unionized.
Soundslice: by Django Creator Adrian Holovaty
The Soundslice philosophy:
The best way to learn music is by listening to it, not just reading it.
College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education?
During recent decades, tuition and other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than fifty thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”
.. No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, and for the past twenty or thirty years it has gone largely unchallenged.
.. During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t.
.. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education.
.. Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes and conveyed this information to businesses and other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence and could carry out assigned tasks and work in a group setting.
.. According to one study, just twenty per cent of executive assistants and insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than forty-five per cent of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,”
.. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession and its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, and more lasting, also seems to be happening.
.. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”
.. “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.”
.. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state and federal benefits equivalent to roughly fifty thousand dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just two thousand dollars per student.