On “College at Risk,” by Andrew Delbanco (The Chronicle Review, March 2), from chronicle.com:
Why assume that college is key to preparing citizens? Is there any sign that completing college produces better citizens? Are there better ways (e.g., mandatory military service)? The same for most jobs: Is the mass-produced liberal-arts education students will get in a universal college system necessarily the best preparation for their careers? Why not solid secondary education plus something akin to apprenticeship? Finally, is the something-for-everyone college—a nurse of citizens, career mentor, diversifier, Matthew-Arnold-glorifier, great-books-but-fun-too, small classes but big opportunities—anything but a chimera that tends to obscure rather than clarify our thinking?
whitakal
During the draft era, going the college route was a key way of avoiding the draft. There also seemed to be much activity against government research, government activities, and the draft. Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas credits the draft with causing the highest male college-enrollment percentage in history. It also probably resulted in high retention and graduation rates.
If anything, a study of history would likely reveal that college prepares citizens to avoid, shirk, or ignore their responsibilities as citizens, especially if those responsibilities had any real costs. If anything, college is prone to support the tyrant, the dictator, or the authoritarian.
bscmath78
Does the American elite want graduates to think independently, or does it want them to be “top performers”? It is the elite who decide these things. Right now we have a raucous clash of elites, with business leaders wanting “competitive” graduates and the far right often afraid of higher education itself. Neither elite wants independent thinkers.
citizenwhy
The university is around because people make enough money to support it, so much that we can pay for adults to not work for four years, to hang around thinking and reading, and not for them the spartan lifestyle of old-time students. Now they have fancy dorms, cooled in the summer, heated in the winter, pools, HDTV’s, every amenity imaginable. Those not in college must work hard to pay for it.
Angela
Dorms are “fancy” if they’re heated, cooled, and have the ability to get cable TV—which the students probably pay for? My God, tone it down a little. There’s excess at colleges, just like at many places. But you’re painting with an awfully broad brush there.
icbomber23
The real cost of education in the United States would be much, much lower if colleges’ main costs were paying the best and most engaging faculty rather than pouring unfathomable sums into supporting layer upon layer of redundant administration and wave after wave of new construction. Many colleges have become glorified country clubs with some classrooms on the side, and in these classrooms, students generally learn either specific subjects for professional reasons (nothing wrong with that, if it does, in fact, increase their competitive advantage in the work force) or take whirlwind tours of this or that historical period, set of literary texts, etc. Rarely, if ever, are they confronted with the most fundamental questions that ought to be, and once were, at the core of a truly liberal education. Rarely, if ever, are they required to engage in the sort of rigorous thinking, careful writing, and genuine investigation of the texts of the greatest minds that have shaped Western civilization. Any encomium of the liberal arts must take a stand on precisely what a liberal-arts education consists of, and alas, this author utterly fails to do so.
jfetter
Higher education is completely out of whack and divorced from any sustainable economic reality. Many college students are poor, and some colleges are run down. But how many students enjoy a better standard of living as students (living in a nice dorm, with a meal plan, and the emblematic rock-climbing wall somewhere on campus) than they will as young working adults? How does this make any sense? It is only possible because the government subsidizes going to school but not going to work. Where’s the subsidy for the kid that lives with mom and dad and goes to work in the family business after he or she graduates from high school? The student who goes to work, and his or her parents, are subsidizing the student loan of the kids who went to college.
Of course, the answer isn’t to subsidize everything, but to stop subsidizing everything. Like the housing market that went before it, the current government-subsidized, debt-fueled, higher-education regime is unsustainable and will come to an end sooner or later. At that point the sector will shrink or radically restructure to become much less expensive, based on normal supply-and-demand concepts. All of us on the higher-education government gravy train should enjoy it while we can.
recoveringmba
The grounding of citizens in a common culture should be provided by our secondary schools. The extent to which we advance this justification for college instead simply shows the depths of the failure of the public schools.
gypsyboots
As a first-generation college student who was a science major as well, my 17-year-old self had little to no patience or interest in what I considered at the time to be “mental masturbation” in my humanities classes. However, I greatly benefited from my education at an exclusive small college, which gave me small classes and lots of direct contact with my science professors, who taught me to write and think. This experience got me what I needed toward my scientific career.
Over all, if you come from a poor family, it is difficult to relax and enjoy a philosophical discussion (or even get a lot of out one). It does not directly put food on the table or lead to a quantifiable career and does not directly allow you to rise from poverty. If you come from less-poor family, you may be more open to the “liberal” disciplines, but if you leave college without employable job skills, the resentment comes later, when the large student-loan bill comes due and you are making $10 per hour.
graddirector
I wonder if (some) students’ hostile attitudes toward the humanities reflect dominant perspectives more so than they reflect actual interests and inclinations. After all, “earning potential” is determined by employers. Doesn’t it seem odd that people are turning away from their sense of humanity—their interest in themselves as persons, in life, and in what makes life “worth it"—in order to get a good job?
I also was a first-generation college student who shouldered my own costs of attending college; I watched how my parents worked and worked only to work again the next day. What was it for? All they could do was survive. I look at my students, and that’s all they seem to want to do, too: get the education that gets them a decent job. They’re all ready to be full-time robots “producing” stuff so that they can drink the good beer or eat at the nice restaurants. Their curiosity (which the humanities foster and reward) has been burned off by things that have a more present, visible appeal—things that are promoted and advertised, whereas the humanities are derided.
nadienne1
It is important to consider—economics aside—that only a small percentage of students take naturally to the liberal-arts education we envision. Most of the rest are looking precisely for the instrumentalist benefit.
steverankin
The pursuit of a college degree has become endangered by the very push to get everyone college-educated. That more and more employers are requiring their new hires to have a bachelor’s degree sends children unwittingly into an environment where they can study whatever they want without recognizing the consequences. So, either they come out with a cookie-cutter business degree that does little to differentiate them from the crowd, or they come out with a liberal-arts degree that does little to get them a job. What a surprisingly large number of students don’t come out with are the skills and behaviors necessary to function in a business environment. Even fewer come out with critical-thinking skills that prepare them for empowerment in the real world.
Why? Perhaps because professors focus on delivering content but not on the application of content delivered. My professor apparently believed that the thoughts I placed in my blue book were the application of the content he had shared with us, either in reading assignments or in lectures. But they weren’t. Not by a long shot. Not until the professor holds the student accountable for the thoughts he puts on paper by asking follow-up questions.
pvenderley
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On “What Would Great-Grandma Eat?” by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (The Chronicle Review, March 2), from chronicle.com:
Guess I’m an anachronism; I baked bread two nights ago (whole wheat, like my mother used to make). When making bread, I feel a strong connection to my mother, both my grandmothers, and all the women in my family, marching back into time.
Loved the article. I always wondered why Americans seem to like Wonder Bread instead of European-style bread.
laxmi66
When I was a small child, my father taught us to make horrible gagging noises when we passed restaurants that advertised “food like grandma used to make,” because neither of my grandmothers was even a half-decent cook. The assumption that once all women could really cook, let alone that what our forebears recognized as food is necessarily better than what we eat now, is based on edenic notions of the past in which social roles were somehow “natural” and not exploitative, and in which food was never contaminated or rotten, no child ever died of “summer complaint” when they were weaned from the breast to solid foods, milk never served as a vector for lethal diseases, etc. While I have all sorts of issues with modern mass-produced food, I think it’s important to recognize the ways in which it has been and can still be part of a general improvement in access to good nutrition and thus lower rates of morbidity and mortality.
hayforda
When will people learn there never were any good old days? You could not go back far enough in history to find a time in which people did not have problems with their food. If you went back far enough to find food that was entirely pure, you would be talking about food that was too scarce to feed everyone. Even advanced civilizations experienced famines and had classes that were regularly malnourished. Life was never simple and easy for everybody—there have always been challenges of one sort or another. What this great-grandmother advice amounts to is nostalgia rather than a true understanding of the challenges faced by our ancestors or respect for their accomplishments. But then, the urge for simple explanations is so strong that it regularly leads to simplistic ones.
jamesebryan
While wholesome, fresh wheat bread is now plentifully and cheaply available in supermarkets and grocery stores (alongside the dwindling sales of Wonder Bread), the same cannot be said for grass-fed, “organic” beef. The simple fact is that for many Americans, the “organic” stuff is too expensive. They buy the industrialized product at Wal-Mart because that’s what they can afford on meager lower-class wages.
Nathaniel M. Campbell
Americans have become almost comically neurotic about food. Organic, grass-fed, gluten-free, peanut-allergy hysteria, vegetarians vs. vegans vs. hipster carnivores, cupcake frenzy, soda in school vending machines (the horror!), Paula Deen’s diabetes, carbs are bad, carbs are good, eat like the cavemen, eat like the peaceful natives, McDonald’s markets to kids, the list goes on and on.
There are plenty of things in this world worth obsessing over. What you eat does not have to be one of them.
rlarsi