A Small Sense of the Problems in Higher Education
The project is really beginning to really heat up. The Student Experience Lab team has scoured the web and read hundreds of pages of reports with thousands more waiting in the wings. We have spoken to experts such as Louis Soares from the Center for American Progress and Michael Thomas, President of the New England Board of Higher Education, who were both unbelievably helpful. From our secondary research we are beginning to see a pretty powerful picture of how the world of higher education works.
Our work in the Lab consistently challenges our assumptions. When many of us think of college graduates, we see that powerful image of a young fresh face crossing the stage to get a handshake, a diploma and the applause of family and friends. This really isn’t the true face of today’s student experience.
Sure, there is a lot of that, but there is much more too. Around 78% of today’s college students are considered non-traditional. By 'non-traditional' we mean students that are not supported by their families and/or are not in school full time. These 'nontraditional' students often take up to six years to graduate with only 60% of the students making it through four year public schools and around 25% making it through community colleges.
Some 2.2 million of 3.2 million students graduating high school students enroll in college, but less than half graduate. If those students stayed in school we would move closer to covering the education gap that has been pushing the United States down the charts on the World Economic Forum list of competitive countries. A list on which the U.S. position fell from 1st to 6th in 2006.
As we move forward with our work, we see more clearly the tangle of questions that need to be sorted out before transformation in higher education can occur…starting with the big one: “How will we as a nation understand what to offer, how to offer it, and at what price?”
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Comments
Fri, 08/21/2009 - 15:03 — Anonymous (not verified)
Why higher education is overrated:
First of all, people learn more from their experiences than what is actually being taught. I think it is not the subject matter of the classes that counts, rather, the experience of taking the classes and learning how to work with the subject matter.
If people keep demanding that everyone get a masters, the value of a masters degree will go down to what the bachelor's degree is today. We cannot have this happen!!! Make sure that there are plenty of jobs available that apply to just a bachelor's degree. A master's degree should be a choice. If society turns the master's degree into a necessity, will that really improve anything? As Billy Joel says in his song "Second Wind," "you learn more from your accidents than anything that you could ever learn at school."
Let me tell you something else:
I went to college to study music. The music program collapsed. I changed my majors to behavioral sciences. After I graduated, I went back to take private classes with my old piano teacher from High School. SHE, not some hot-shot, PhD. professor, told me I was ready for semi-professional performance. I auditioned at several bars, and I got a spot at one of them. I play there now for an hour and a half per week. I started out at just a half our.
SEE? College is not overrated, but the more society demands of it, the value will actually go DOWN!!!! It is simple economics.
In college, I had the worst math teacher in history. He was extremely vain, and he acted as if we did not know probability & statistics, we would be executed by firing squad in public. He also made us write reports on essays other "math geniuses" wrote. I dropped his class, took another statistics class with a real math teacher, and AGAIN, all I learned was mean, median, and mode, which I already knew from grammar school.
Of course, I am not saying that a college education has no value. What I am saying is, a master's degree should really be optional, and of course, so must a doctorate, for some, but not all jobs in the field.
SEE? WHAT'S THE POINT? more...
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