Thomas A. Shakely

Scott Berkun, author and self-proclaimed “kick ass speaker” delivers a fun, breezy session on “The Myths of Innovation.” Much of the lecture will be familiar, in terms of the histories behind various start-ups and successes, but it’s the meaty substance he manages to pack in to his lecture, while keeping it engaging, that should make this a case study for professors.

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a case against higher education for all:

People with college degrees make a lot more than people without them, and that difference has been growing. But does that mean that we should help more kids go to college — or that we should make it easier for people who didn’t go to college to make a living?…

The benefits of putting more people in college are also oversold. Part of the college wage premium is an illusion. People who go to college are, on average, smarter than people who don’t. In an economy that increasingly rewards intelligence, you’d expect college grads to pull ahead of the pack even if their diplomas signified nothing but their smarts. …

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. … But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish. …

It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs.

I’ve written before about what I call the “cartel of the credentialed” — to teach kindergartners, because it requires accreditation, many people are spending 4-6 years obtaining degrees and masters in elementary education. (John Roberts, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spent just three years earning his bachelor’s at Harvard.)

In “Beyond The B.A.,” which appeared in the October 2009 issue of National Review, Robert Verbruggen writes:

To decide whether policy should encourage greater college enrollment, we must ask whether marginal students — those who enrolled mainly because it was expected of them — are succeeding, since this is the type of student most open to suasion. If they’re thriving, we should send more like them. If they’re having problems, scraping closer to the bottom of the college-eligibility barrel won’t help anyone. The evidence favors the latter scenario. …

It’s rarely mentioned that this country has an enormous dropout problem. Of students who enroll in four-year universities, about 40 percent fail to earn degrees within six years. …

[Additionally] about 25 percent of 21- to 29-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees were mal-employed, says Andrew Sum, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS). Another 15 percent were unemployed, meaning that only about 60 percent of college graduates in this age range were doing work that required college.

In other words, the current paradigm in which public policy officials are enmeshed is predicated on platitudinous promises like “a college graduate earns on average a million more in his lifetime than a non college grad”, without any of the relevant qualifying data.

When 40 percent drop out of college after having attended for a least a semester, and 40 percent of graduates end up either unemployed or under-employed during the first decade after graduating, the full scope of just how many are mis-investing in higher learning and foregoing earnings potential comes into focus.

One’s 20s are one’s prime earning years, when the miracle of compound interest is most important for long term wealth creation. And because higher education is promised as a right to so many, millions attend and invest either never to finish or to find themselves underemployed, while servicing a sometimes massive student debt load to boot.

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Related: In 1970, Roy Lucas chronicled the historical development of the notion of higher ed as a right rather than a privilege. An excerpt at JSTOR is here.

Also: Marty Nemko has written extensively on higher education and its lack of consumer disclosure and protections. A catalog of his articles is here, and two relevant articles are here and here.

From Mickey Kaus:

The giant L.A. Unified school system, with 33,000 teachers, fires only about 21 a year, or fewer than 1 in 1,000, according to the findings of an L.A. Times investigation. Now either Los Angeles has the greatest teachers in the world or something is very wrong. Talk to parents and you’ll know the answer.

When I was growing up in West L.A., practically everyone went to public schools, even in the affluent neighborhoods. Only the discipline cases went off to a military academy. It was vaguely disreputable. Now any parent who can afford it pays a fortune for private school. The old liberal ideal of a common public education has been destroyed. And it’s been destroyed in large part not by Republicans but by teachers unions.

Kaus makes the point in his article that unions are stuck arguing for 1950s policies, and that that mindset explains their now unreasonable demands for both extravagant benefits and high job security in an economy that demands agility and flexibility from workers.

As regards teachers’ unions, though, the national conversation is stuck in the same decades-past era, where we imagine that “good schools” result from generous teachers’ benefits.

In LA, one third of all students drop out before finishing high school. 35 percent of Latinos will never finish. More than 40 percent of blacks will fail. 20 percent of whites, and 13 percent of Asians, too, will fail.

And with 33,000 teachers, with drop-out rates suggesting fundamental system failure, fewer than than 1 in 1000 LA teachers will be removed. I can’t even begin to imagine how soul crushing an environment, both for educators and young people, that must be.

Parting Thought: Perhaps a key to renewing education’s promise in places like LA is to explore decentralization, coupled with deunionization. A more localized structure for running schools could incentivize individual regions to take control, rather than blaming central bureaucrats for their sons and daughters’ failures.

Related: Central Bucks East High School in Bucks County, Pa. recently hired a first-year history teacher and football coach, and are paying him $109,284/year. “Finally, we have stability in CB East football,” said one parent.

City Journal‘s Sol Stern in 1996 on “The Invisible Miracle Of Catholic Schools” in New York City.

National Review‘s Bob Costa in 2010 on Archbishop Dolan’s challenge of “Reviving the Catholic Schools“.

Archbishop Dolan is taking the opposite approach of decentralization by bringing more authority into the diocese from individual parishes.

In his presidential farewell address in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned of a “military-industrial complex” dominating the interests of an ostensibly peace-time nation. This complex would use the power of Congress to direct funding and central planning to its benefit.

In 2003, an article appeared in the New York Times addressing the rise of an “academic-industrial complex” that benefits from the desire to confirm educational goals with market/employer demands, and the diminishing returns that such a narrow mission might produce.

Christopher Newfield, an English professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also points to the close connection that has always existed between the business world and the academy. In his forthcoming book, ”Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980” (Duke University Press), Mr. Newfield explores the heyday of industrial capitalism, when the university became central to economic production. In this period of economic uncertainty, he says, there is a deepening fear that the country will not be able to produce a long period of stable affluence like the one that followed World War II.

Like Mr. Gould, he calls for a better balance between the two historical objectives of the university: economic development and human development. He said that as a discipline, the humanities has always understood ”the difference between art and work.”

”What a lot of higher education is doing is selling a trade education that is part of an old economy,” he added. The new economy, he says, demands creativity.

Question: Do centralized systems of education necessarily diminish the creative capacity of learning? In other words, to what extent is our obsession with managing the outcomes of young people’s education harming their learning?

To talk of “producing” a certain type of graduate has become a common thing, but that language remains an off-putting way to describe education, a word originating in the Latin educare, meaning “to draw out of”.

Learning wasn’t a process of instilling skills or producing mindsets, but of drawing out one’s natural talents and abilities and allowing them to flourish through a diverse, pluralistic devotion to all avenues of human thinking — history, science, math, literature, oration, and the natural world.

On the whole, are more of America’s young people having their innate talents drawn out of them through  pluralistic study, or are they being trained in skill sets and produced for industry and ever-changing market needs in a giant economic engine? To be a cog in the machine or a real human being?

Last month Fast Company spotlighted some intriguing movements in the education architectural field. Reformers are making the case that education reform must address the physical, structural impediments to learning. This starts with tearing down the factory-style architectural model of schools, they say:

Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. School designers call these hallways “double-loaded corridors.” The factory model of control and direct instruction still pervades most new schools.

The human element — the spontaneous interaction of real people in unplanned, unmoderated, and creative ways — seems like a neglected aspect of the school reform conversation.

Teachers’ unions bicker endlessly over annual raises, and school boards clamor for whatever the latest technology is. Meanwhile, a lot of children are passing through the system like cattle with the less than stellar impression that a smart board and group “collaboration” are two fundamentals to learning.

Let’s design hallways with human beings in mind. Dispense with the banging of metal lockers and the hallway chaos in favor of daylight, colors and the connection to the outside. Corridors can be spaces for informal learning, to display work, to meet and to reflect, as shown in the Denver School of Science and Technology designed by Klipp. Adding furniture, nooks, information portals and views into classrooms, or the outdoors will invite students and visitors to slow down and interact in new ways – to learn in the places that were formerly strictly for transport.

Related: In the spring issue of American Educator, a journal from the American Federation of Teachers, an article appears entitled “The Most Daring Education Reform Of All.” The article hits a key point: too much of the reform argument made from generation to generation is fad-based, and far too little focus is paid to a coherent, universal core curriculum.

One way to reform the education system would be to eliminate state mandates for teachers to be certified, and leave the decision up to individual local school boards.

So many well educated, brilliant people are scattered through communities but prohibited from reaching children to teach and mentor simply because they haven’t paid their dues to the certification cartel. This would be a way to move beyond the perfunctory task of information-conveying and into the realm of wisdom-transmitting.

The average college campus today is bursting with as many special interests and socially fragmented cliques as is the average sidewalk in Washington, DC. There are the gays, the straights, the Christians, the Muslims, the Pacific-Island Student Associations, and the Indoor Skiing Association. If you can imagine it, it probably exists.

And with so many interests and atomized student associations, a coherent student body is a tough thing to find these days. Rarely does a student government really ever speak on behalf of anyone but itself.

Students themselves no long see the University itself — their alma mater – as having any role or authority in acting in loco parentis — in defining limits of acceptable social, moral, or legal behavior above and beyond the law.

(And none of this is to suggest a college would need to impose, say, Christian or Muslim standards, but that it could impose certain broad supra-legal standards in regards to alcohol use, community service, or off-campus social expectations that are more exacting than baseline — and often violated — “academic integrity” policies.)

What this results in is a de facto view of college as little more than a contracted job training and skills service where services are provided for payment. The notion of the university as a molder and transmitter or civilization’s customs, history and traditions, along with the teaching and mentoring of the classes themselves, is largely dead.

This change isn’t necessarily a catastrophic thing, but it does beg at least two immediate questions:

1. If it is not the proper place of the college campus to set explicit social, ethical, or moral standards in how it requires its students to conduct themselves, in what other ways can (or do) young men and women grow in to capable, prepared, pluralistic adults?

2. What civic or social institutions have taken the place of the college to pass along and transmit civilizational traditions and perspectives on the full range of human pursuits, from history to science, literature and the arts?

Do you remember your college newspaper? Where its pages often filled with thought provoking articles by serious student journalists and in-depth analysis pieces on community goings-on or cultural values, social standards, sexual mores, etc?

Or were the pages of your college newspaper (or other college papers you’ve seen) filled with the banal, the bestial, and the belligerent rantings of students training for careers in punditry rather than provocative, remarkable careers?

The Daily Collegian at Penn State University is published by a non-profit parent corporation, Collegian, Inc. The company’s annual costs are approximately $1.5 million, which includes use of a large physical plant, printing press, full-time staff of about 12, paper and ink costs, and student stipends.

There is a serious void in terms of non-profit and philanthropic aid on state and national levels for the development of the next generation of compelling, technologically advanced and thoughtful campus news media.

Proposal
New or existing philanthropies or business ventures should target major campuses across the nation and/or those campuses which represent thought leaders amongst their higher education peers and invest annually to establish independent weekly print newspapers with a web and multimedia component updated daily.

Using only minimal wire content to satisfy national news coverage, these media groups would focus on the emerging trend of so-called hyperlocal journalism by recruiting local professors, thinkers, workers, farmers, businessmen, students etc. in each community to generate original, compelling content worth saving and worth talking about in addition to student news reporting. [Read more...]