Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
California’s three-part higher-education system is a disaster, writes Kevin Carey. While the national media focuses on Berkeley’s problems — larger classes, fewer janitors — non-elite students are being denied a chance to pursue education and job training.
The state’s community colleges are considering a series of reforms to improve graduation and transfer rates.
While men tend to take whatever work they can find, more women are choosing college over a bad job. Will the ex-Starbucks barista be able to pay back $200,000 in student loans with a masters in strategic communications?
California’s Dream Act promises undocumented students college aid but no path to citizenship.
Do Americans spend too much on education? asks the New York Times‘ Room for Debate.
Americans are spending more and more on education, but the resulting credentials — a high-school diploma and college degrees — seem to be losing value in the labor market.
Americans who go to college are triply hurt by this. First, as taxpayers: state and federal education budgets have ballooned since the 1950s. Second, as consumers: the average college student spends $17,000 a year on school, and those with loans graduate more than $23,000 in debt. And third, as a worker: in 1970, an applicant with a college degree was among an elite 11 percent, but now almost 3 in 10 adults have a degree.
Several debaters kick around the question: Does college pay? Others asks whether the traditional comprehensive high school pays.
Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, calls for tailoring K-12 education to students’ interests.
Other developed countries offer adolescents a choice of curricula. Finland, for example, offers all students leaving ninth grade — the end of compulsory schooling — the option of attending a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school, with about 50 percent of each age cohort enrolling in each type of high school. The “comprehensive” American high school has outlived its usefulness, but our policy makers have chosen to weaken its academic goals and ignore its career-forming capacity rather than serve the diversity of adolescent interests, talents and needs in grades 9 through 12 — at a much greater cost to the students, their families and society
Middlebury Psychology Professor Barbara Hofer wants to reallocate time and money.
High school degrees offer far less in the way of preparation for work than they might, or than many other nations currently offer, creating a growing skills gap in our economy. We encourage students to go on to college whether they are prepared or not, or have a clear sense of purpose or interest, and now have the highest college dropout rate in the world.
We might look to other counties (like Germany, Finland or Denmark) for models of how high schools can offer better training, as well as the development of a work ethic and the intellectual skills needed for continued learning and development. I recommend Harvard’s 2011 “Pathways to Prosperity” report for more attention to this persistence of the “forgotten half” (those who do not go on to college) and ideas about how to address this issue.
“Spending on K-12 schools, adjusted for inflation and enrollment growth, has roughly tripled over the last 50 years, yet there is little solid evidence that today’s students are better prepared for work and citizenship than their grandparents were — and even some evidence that they are less so,” writes Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and an Ohio University economist.
Indiana will encourage students to skip senior year and go straight to college, the Hechinger Report notes. Under Gov. Mitch Daniels’ plan, high school students who complete their core requirements by the end of their junior year can go straight to college with a scholarship based on how much money the state would have spent — $6,000 to $8,000 for most — on their 12th-grade education.
Daniels said he came up with the idea after years of asking seniors he met across the state what they were up to and too often being told “not much.”
“I kept bumping into seniors who said, ‘Well, I’m done,’ ” he said. “They’d laugh and tell me they were having a good time. We are spending thousands of dollars on students who are eligible to move on.”
Senior year is a time for “drift and disconnection,” concludes the National Commission on the High School Senior Year.
Solutions over the past decade have trended toward mixing college and high school courses through dual-enrollment programs or early-college high schools, where students can earn an associate degree and a diploma.
But Daniels’ preferred strategy — shortening high school altogether — also is catching on.
In Idaho, 21 districts will give early-graduation scholarships. Kentucky is thinking about it. In the fall, eight states will begin a program that lets students test out of the last two years of high school and go directly to community college. The National Center on Education and the Economy and the Gates Foundation are backing the idea.
One of my best friends in high school left after 11th grade for college. She was impatient to get on with it. (She dropped out after a year to organize the proletariat for the revolution.)
My daughter’s half-sister skipped high school entirely. Now 18, she will earn a bachelor’s in classics, summa cum laude, on Saturday from the University of Santa Clara and go on to Berkeley for her PhD. It was a challenge to buy her a graduation card. Nothing seemed to fit quite right.
Update: Ed Next looks at high school students who attend college part-time.
How many different ways can I say ambivalence? Courtesy of Educationnews.org:
The Oregon House of Representatives recently approved a bill that would make the laying out of a future education or employment plan a requirement towards a high school diploma, The Huffington Post reports. House Bill 2732 requires students to either complete and submit an application to college or internship program, enlist in the military, or attend an apprenticeship orientation workshop before they can receive a diploma.
One the one hand: “Yes! Kids need guidance and driving everyone to college is silly.”
On the other hand: “School isn’t shouldn’t be about getting a job or going to college. It should be about developing skills and autonomy.”
But back to the one hand: “Yes but autonomy requires an ability to plan sensibly about the future. No one is saying that the student has to implement the plan, are they? Just make it.”
But the other hand replies: “Then why not require all three of every student? Why risk derailing a kid’s self-image? Isn’t this just the slightest bit eerie?”
But the one: “It’s no worse than the silly community service requirements that we’ve got these days.”
Then the other: “That’s your argument? It’s not a flagrant constitutional violation? You should be able to go to school, learn, and get a diploma based on your demonstrated learning. What you do with it is your business and your business alone.”
“Paranoid hyper-individualist.”
“Statist commie sympathizer.”
Then my hands start to hurt each other.
Does college make you smarter? Not so much, say respondents on the New York Times’ Room for Debate.
First there was the news that students in American universities study a lot less than they used to. Now we hear, in a recent book titled Academically Adrift, that 45 percent of the nation’s undergraduates learn very little in their first two years of college.
After four years of college, 36 percent of students showed no improvement in reasoning or writing skills, according to sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. Students majoring in humanities, social sciences, math and natural sciences learned more than students in pre-professional fields such as education, business and social work. In addition, students who took courses that required significant reading and writing were more likely to show learning gains.
Most college students want “a credential attesting to their employability, accompanied by as much fun as possible,” writes George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. They didn’t work hard in high school and expect college to be just as easy.
Intellectually vapid courses and programs that will attract customers have proliferated. Professors who would rather devote their time to their own career-advancing research projects often strike an implicit deal with their students: don’t expect much of my time and I’ll keep the course easy and the grades high.
By making it easier for students to borrow money, the federal government is luring “more marginal students into college, further increasing the pressure to lower standards,” Leef adds.
It has been accurately said that college is the new high school; the way we are going, soon it will be the new middle school.
Students aren’t interested in learning, writes Gaye Tuchman, a sociology professor at the University of Connecticut. Nearly all want to know, “Will I be able to get a job?”
Today’s college students average 14 hours a week of study time compared to 24 hours a week for students in the 1960s, writes Philip Babcock, an economics professor at University of California at Santa Barbara. Thinking requires more effort than most colleges require.
Ninety-three percent of top universities assign a “common reading” to new college students, reports the National Association of Scholars in Back from the Beach: 100 New Books by Ashley Thorne.
President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, selected by Quinnipiac University and the University of Washington in 2009, was dropped in 2010.
§ The book with the biggest leap in popularity from June to September is Outcasts United, a story about a group of refugee boys from different countries in Africa and the Middle East who settle in Clarkston, Georgia and are discovered by a Jordanian woman who forms them into a soccer team.
§ Two other top books had a spike in popularity: This I Believe (and This I Believe II), the NPR-assembled anthology that was already the most frequently selected book for common reading; and Persepolis, a graphic novel (comic book) about a girl living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The society/poverty/women category surged with a number of books exploring “social justice.”
Here’s the recommended reading list from NAS. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop left me cold. O Pioneers! is a good feminist novel. I should read The Blithedale Romance.
Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio spent the summer tracking down his first class of fifth-graders from 2002-03. The South Bronx students should be high school graduates. Many are not. Three were accepted to four-year colleges. One will live at home and go to Pace. But the two who were planning to leave home for college have decided they’re not going.
The boy was accepted to SUNY Oswego. The girl — “cheerful, eager to learn” — got into Boston University.
The Oswego-bound young man opted to stay home and enroll at a CUNY college. The young lady, however, is no longer headed for BU. She has no firm plans for September but is “thinking about going to Hostos,” a South Bronx community college.
In both cases, these two kids cited the same reason not for going away to school and in nearly identical words. There is “too much going on at home right now.” Both said they have sick relatives. The young lady said her mother was not well and that she was needed at home.
”I don’t feel ready,” she told her former teacher.
So many of her classmates have already failed. So many have already repeated the mistakes of their parents—quitting school, becoming teen parents. Lives going nowhere fast. But here’s a terrific, sweet kid who grows up right, with a good family in a tough neighborhood. She has the brass ring not just in her sight but in her hand and decides, “I just can’t.”
I suggested he persuade her to defer at BU for a year, go to community college and plan to transfer after a year. That will keep the goal — and the BU scholarship — alive.
A number of college-prep charter schools that serve students whose parents aren’t well-educated are providing counselors that follow graduates through college. Students are much more likely to persist if they can turn to someone for help with financial, academic or family problems. It helps if that person expects them to earn a college degree and will push them to keep going, despite obstacles.
It’s hard to get parents to go home again once they’ve dropped off their kids at college, reports the New York Times.
In order to separate doting parents from their freshman sons, Morehouse College in Atlanta has instituted a formal “Parting Ceremony.”
It began on a recent evening, with speeches in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Then the incoming freshmen marched through the gates of the campus — which swung shut, literally leaving the parents outside.
When University of Minnesota freshmen move in at the end of this month, parental separation will be a little sneakier: mothers and fathers will be invited to a reception elsewhere so students can meet their roommates and negotiate dorm room space — without adult meddling.
Grinnell College gathered students on one side of the gymnasium bleachers, parents on the other.
The president welcoming the class of 2014 had his back to the parents — a symbolic staging meant to inspire “an aha! moment,” said Houston Dougharty, vice president of student affairs, “an epiphany where parents realize, ‘My student is feeling more comfortable sitting with 400 people they just met.’ ”
Then the parents were urged to go home.
Colleges officials talk of “velcro” parents.
Recent Comments