Posted by
Conservatarian on Friday, September 15, 2006 2:12:33 PM
The miserable state of American public education was illuminated by John Stossel on a recent television news magazine, a program and report that raised the ire of countless numbers of teachers brainwashed by their unions into defending a failing system. Too often ignored is the failing state of American public collegiate education, all the more apparent after watching the interviews with these supposedly college-educated but radicalized numbskull educators, many of whom were literally foaming at the mouth and spewing vitriol against private education and charter schools.
The reality is that our colleges are failing American youth as much, if not more so, than the primary schools. Costs continue to spiral upward, while the quality of education, and the quantity of actual knowledge passed on, plummets downward. More and more students are apparently attending college (on the government dole) than in the past, but this means little if the first two years of college equate to little more than a junior and senior years' worth of high school education 15 years ago. Now students can invest +$40,000 worth of their future earnings in order to get a job they easily could have learned to do out of high school just a few decades ago.
What college students are actually learning (when they go to class) is not necessarily what they can use or need to know, but instead what they want to know, a discriminating tendency particularly lethal to curricular and academic integrity. Curriculum in the liberal arts especially is coopted to indulge nearly any whim or fancy or petty ideology, from pottery of ancient civilizations to oft-criticized studies in "feminist" thought. Of course, its one thing if your daughter is studying to be an anthropologist, or your son (God help him) the next Gloria Steinem, but you will find only a tiny fraction of students who enroll in such classes develop a career path that made a particular class-load worth its while. Too often a class that sounds fun is enrolled in at the expense of a class that imparts in-demand computer and business skills.
One argument frequently heard from businesses that hire large numbers of new college grads is that so few of their new hires know anything useful to their newfound trade, to business, or to reality in general. This inability of the universities to provide useful skills, when coupled with the government (taxpayer) subsidized and controversial course work of many college students, burdens the economy with niche-educated and indebted grads that are hard-pressed to find jobs pouring coffee at Starbucks or renting out cars for a living. No disrespect intended - if you have little or no college education, and you do something like this for a living, good for you, you'll move up in life. If you graduated with a Bachelor's in Art and you do this for a living, well, you could've done alot better.
Those who can't make it in the private sector turn to the government sector, where their less developed skills and inadequate initiative won't be challenged. They teach in the public schools, where they pass on only small portions of their swiss-cheese education, completing an expanding cycle of ignorance and miseducation.
All of which makes me wonder why there are almost no aggressive, profit-driven private colleges. The evidence from the lower levels is encouraging: charter schools frequently report lower expenses and per student costs, greater profits, higher teacher salaries, and more well-educated students. Currently private colleges tend to follow the public college model of finance, living off endowments and begging always for more. Concievably, a college motivated by the bottom line could crank out real-world ready grads for minimal investment and strain on their parents' wallets, by cutting down on the often absurd overhead of public and private schools, such as dormitories, dining halls, student entertainment and facilities, upkeep, security, etc. A stripped down college would be less fun for students, but you don't get a job based on how nice your campus recreational facilities were or how roudy and wild the parties were. Instead, money could be invested in non-tenured professors who are now responsible for their academic productivity.