In the second post of this three part series, we looked at how the late 20th century contributed to this myth that College is about getting a job. Perhaps it isn’t clear to some why this even matters. For starters, a deep confusion emerges about the product and how exactly to tell. By the late 90s, states like Florida were beginning to create tests to give students in order to provide proof about the learning that supposedly had taken place. Those tests soon began to dictate what was taught in the classroom and soon classes had morphed to start “teaching to the test.” Instead of discerning what the students had learned, the test became the “end all and be all” of knowledge and as long as the student could pass the test, apparently all was well.
However, being “learned” has never merely been about knowledge acquisition. Rather, as stated in the two previous posts, the idea of higher education was to, at the very least, move the student into the deeper realm of though, of complex problem solving, of dealing with ethical dilemmas, and the overall challenges of leading in a multifaceted community. Those aims simply cannot be captured by a test. As I have often said when asked about proof of my success as a professor, I will provide evidence 20 years after a student has left me. If my teaching has had the proper impact, it will show up in their lives much later.
Today, much of the scrutiny now cast on higher education is coming because so many of the students and their families who took out massive debt now realize such efforts may have been for naught. Not only do many find it nigh impossible to find a job, the jobs they find are not necessarily more lucrative than others. The myth has told them that “college graduates make more money on average” but for there to be an average in any industry, there must be a low end. Poor performing students who muddle through in some degree will most likely be among those in some job industry on the low end. So, years later, not only are they still paying off their school debt, they are doing so in a job that might not actually make them happy.
Rather than going to College for an education and pursing what was of interest to them, or better being immersed in the wider concepts of a broad-based education in many fields or arenas, they followed the Pied Piper of Which Degrees have the Highest Income. They got into a field merely because “you can get a job there.” Now, years later, they are miserable and not necessarily economically happy. This discontent came to the fore in 2011.
In 2011, thousands of young people, many college students (recent graduates among them) joined together to Occupy Wall Street in New York City. This “Occupy Movement” had many factors and foci, but one theme was clearly seen. These young people finally were waking up to the fact that even with their college degree, they did not have a job. Or, perhaps for many, they realized that they didn’t have job they wanted, that mythical job making 6 figures. They finally understood that for those of them massively in debt, it might take their entire lives to pay it off.
They were, and are, angry.
This decade of 2001-2011 shows us the 3 strands of increased focus. First, there is the economic pressure of a declining economy tied to the belief that College produces jobs. In other words, if Colleges were doing their work well, then of course our economy would be great because there would be more new jobs created by all these brilliant college graduates. Second, there is the pressure from former students and their families as student debt mounted and, as stated, the jobs didn’t miraculous come…or if they did get jobs, shock of shocks, those were not these mystical 6 figure jobs all college graduates are supposed to get.
Third, then, rising in conjunction with the first two, is the scrutiny from government where most of the funding emerges. Obviously (strand 1), the colleges aren’t doing their jobs well. And the constituents (strand 2) are angry, disappointed and left deep in debt with little hope. Therefore, the pressure rises on the politicians to somehow fix this and that is best done by increasing scrutiny and oversight.
In this period of our economic malaise, one recurring theme has been that we as a country must return to more stringent regulation and oversight. Higher education as an industry has been swept up into that. Surprisingly many who work in academia do not like this oversight. I say “surprisingly” because surveys show that most who work in academia (K-12 + Higher Ed) are overwhelmingly vote on the left, the Liberal side of our politics and most cries for regulation have come from there. So, now that government says “you are right…let’s regulate things including education” those same liberal professors cry foul.
Regardless, though, the scrutiny, focus and regulation isn’t going away, or at least I can’t see how it will. Thus, where does that leave us? We have a citizenry combined with the political structure that believes College is designed to create graduates to get super awesome jobs, but College remains a structure designed to create intelligent people.
Can you see the problem here?
Thus we end up with students who are shocked, literally shocked, to sit in my class to hear me say that passing my class isn’t a given and that it will take hard work. We have students who will withdraw because their grade dips below a “B” even though, were they students in the 1960s, they would probably be failing outright. We have a government who suggests we should be able to move these students through in an ever-increasingly rapid way which often sounds in many ears like “pass them regardless of how they do in class.” Thus, we have some professors who succumb to the general will and do just that, pass students we don’t really know the material, who will contribute to grade inflation. These same professors will join the many profs who, to the student, seem very bored about their own material, who give somewhat childish easy tests and who don’t seem to really care about the student in the least.
Sigh.
This is our problem. What is the solution?
We must start with teaching the nation what the real purpose of college is. Secondly, we must provide students true and honest advising, which would include telling many students that they are pursuing the wrong path, or even that they should not be in college. I know many of our advisors at Valencia try to precisely that, but sometimes find their hands tied when coming up against culture which has told the student about the myth. Thirdly, we must work to bring down the general costs of college, and partially that solution comes in helping students see that time at a Community College or (gasp) a technical school is a very wise path.
The alternative is to end up in a situation much like Alice’s Wonderland where nothing made sense. Down there we can keep telling ourselves some myth about college, and then get angrier and angrier when the truth keeps inconveniently sticking its head into the story. We can bring on even more oversight by politicians who aren’t really in any position to know how best to foster learning.
Along the way, we can lose the country. Creating “learned citizens” has been among the prime calls to education from our founding, with leaders like John Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, George Washington among the many who saw without education, the Republic could never survive. Adams wrote, “The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved.” Maybe we are already enslaved and we simply don’t know it—enslaved to wealth, to a consumer-driven god, to politicians who are run by big money from a variety of sectors with their lobbyists. Maybe there is nothing we can do. I think we can…by defending the point of College.