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October 08, 2009 3:15 PM
An Inefficient System
Ethan Zuckerman says “We need to rethink the whole four year college experience - this isn’t working, and it may be setting us further back as a society.”
He makes a strong case:
Students make bad decisions in part because they’ve got very little support. There’s roughly eight hundred students for every college admission counselors. Only 23% of students have the math, reading, science skills to fully embrace higher education. They’re playing catch up, which is never fun.
The financial consequences are serious. 28% of college graduates delay having kids due to student loans, and more delay buying a house. She believes that lots aren’t getting much for their investment. Only 39% of college graduates felt they were doing more critical thinking after their four year college experience.
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David Martin on October 08, 2009 11:45 PM:
Back during the Vietnam War, protected by a high draft number, I got an undergraduate science degree in three years, despite not being the best of all possible student. GRE scores were perhaps better than anyone would have guessed. The same huge state university had a compressed undergrad-med school program for the considerably-more-gifted.
So why not push programs to get hard-working students through college expeditiously? Incentives to study during summer term can work wonders.
Anonymous on October 09, 2009 3:50 AM:
As a college professor I would say that the problems identified here are not college problems, they are high school problems. If students are not prepared for college why do we need to rethink college and not the method of preparation.
If we say (as we do in our society) that we want young people to go to college then we need to dedicate the resources to high schools that both prepare the graduates for college and help them to choose the right kind of college.
And asking college graduates if they felt they were doing more critical thinking is not the best way to assess if in fact they are doing more critical thinking.
Nothing in the above statement indicated that colleges need to be reformed or the system of sending students to a four year college is even the issue.
SYSPROG on October 09, 2009 11:20 AM:
A million years ago (when I was in college) I read 'The Ideal of the University' and it has stayed with me all these years. The basic premise was what's a four year education doing for you. Yes, anonymous, we SHOULD be concentrating on High School but we should ALSO be asking what a 4 year degree is doing for you other than a resume padder.
VaLiberal on October 09, 2009 12:56 PM:
What needs to be rethought is the amount of debt too many of the graduates are going to be saddled with and how that affects their choices of majors and careers. What we've got now is the equivalent of indentured servitude.