3 Ex-Professors Sue Oral Roberts U.

Jeff, this is what many of us have been saying for years, but when you hire mostly adjunct professors to teach courses like writing and then base decisions about their continued employment largely on student evaluations, there is little incentive for them to uphold standards. As for my own students, I once had a young woman become very agitated and tell me that she had never earned less than an A in English and I had to say “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have been receiving those grades.” She wasn’t happy to hear it, but she should have heard it years before she entered my college classroom. We do these students a disservice when we give them high grades for substandard work.

“Colleges and professors need to uphold their standards and encourage
more rigor in the classroom, knowing the short-term consequences might
be unhappy students but the long-term benefits will be better-prepared
graduates.”

Here is an explicit statement from the academic head of my college:  “Anyone can and should get a college degree.  It’s our job to support them so they can.”

And, now, we are to achieve, willy-nilly, an explicitly demanded 30% graduation rate of all majors each year.  Regardless of performance. 

There it is in black and white. Employers beware our “graduates.” 

We must also remember, however, that it it is publicly acknowledged that a college degree, if not even a Master’s, is preferred by employers. So, it would be more detrimental to persuade a student to not attend college, because an adult feels they might not succeed or be ready. Odds are that the student won’t get any more than a low-paying, hourly wage position with no chance of advancing. At least if the student has a college degree in hand, he or she will still qualify for positions where employers do find that student a good fit. Furthermore, it allows the student to become economically stable and a contributing member to society’s economy. Really, it all comes full-circle.

On writing, I think the recruiters are spot on. I grew up in a European country and went to a public school, but when I was in high school a grammar or spelling error was considered a major mistake and they were pretty tough on good syntax and style. In middle school I spent hours and days parsing sentences and understanding grammar and syntax. In high school I was always told I wrote poorly as far as style. In grammar and spelling by high school most of my classmates and I  had very rare problems. When I came here and started studying in a Ph.D. program my writing (in what for me is a foreign language) was considered quite good. I do think that writing should be taught relentlessly in K-12: no matter what you do in life, you’ll benefit from that. And that will also make you a better reader and better at analyzing someone else’s writing. By college it’s like trying to learn a foreign language: and it’s easier to do it at 6 than at 20. Students in college do not have the “rhythm” of language in their ears.

What do you mean K-12 students don’t know how to write?  They know their A-B-Cs quite well.  A is the first answer on the standardized test, B the second, C the third, etc.  What more do they need to know.  The school, the teacher and the district are all judged by how well the A-B-Cs come out, so what do we expect them to teach? 
You also forgot to blame the politicians.  Our governor says that 60% of the people of our state should have a higher education degree by 2020.  Mind you, quality is mentioned, but as a footnote.  Performance based funding is being put in place as well (it the state ever comes up with a positive increase in funding rather than cuts as in recent years).  Performance is almost always based upon retention and graduation rates.  Do these incentives encourage rigor in the classroom?  Pressures from student evaluations from students who should not be in college, from administrations with dollar signs in their minds, from parents who want dual credit on the cheap, from the public who may or may not believe in education, and the politicians who lead in the wrong direction make teaching with rigor a difficult chore. 

I am a little troubled by this statement, “Perhaps we should be encouraging more students to hold off on going directly to college from high school, or have them consider alternatives to a college degree. ” Given this country’s history, I suspect that those most likely to be encouraged to consider alternatives would be of black or brown skin.

Everyone should be able to go to college. If the quality of the applicants is not there, let’s fix the problem. Let’s not take the easy way out. Thank God I did not listen 23 years ago when some tried to discourage me from going to college for a variety of “good” reasons emanating from the kindness of their gracious hearts.

Richard Arum and Josipa Rokas, authors of ‘Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,’ illustrate a compelling dilemma on our campuses when they examine the quality of the “academic and social experiences of college students.” The so-called inside/outside the classroom experiences cannot be viewed as independent entities; instead these are interdependent necessities. This is the case for K-12 and Higher-Ed. I dare not mention “No Child Left Behind” and its ineffectiveness on an already struggling K-12 system. Just as I would not mention the 2-R’s of Higher-Ed; Recruitment and Retention and the unwanted side effects of our battle-cry.  I read what I believed to be a very good book six years ago, “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk.” This book has proven to be much more predictive than I first thought. It poses great questions and defiantly examines all our failings and potential as educators. Greater economic division than ever, the digital divide has widened as well, and sadly the educational chasm between the top five percent and everyone else is virtually impassable. No one appears happy, satisfied, or very hopeful about our educational system. I’m not sure if we as educators still remember the question we’re trying to answer; or have we substituted a new one?

We can easily eliminate 1 and 3 by closing down a lot of second and third tier schools, and ratcheting up standards at the rest.  Degrees would actually mean something again.  Also, a lot of faculty and staff will be unemployed.  Think about that as you place all the blame on administrators.  There is plenty of blame to go around.

 … and with the assessment craze sweeping the country. One big part of “assessment” is simply the graduation rate.

I have had students tell me, “I’m a good writer” (or some variation thereof). When I point out the numerous errors on their papers, instead of acknowledging their mistakes, they accuse me of insulting them or they simply refuse to accept the fact that they have something to learn. At the same time, when I was an untenured professor, I had to worry about my students’ evaluations–which, on my campus, were considered the primary indicator of “teaching performance.” It’s an untenable situation.

At one time it meant something about you if you had a high school diploma, leading to a perception that applicants with high school diplomas were better than those without.  That perception persisted for a while even as steps were taken which served to steadily reduce the level of performance required to achieve the diploma and what it implied about an applicant’s ability to read, write, and do arithmetic.  The reasons for the decline are varied, but include pandering to parents and denial that the “rule of thirds” is at play in any classroom.  Programs with lofty sounding names like NCLB deny there is any winnowing out aspect to education as one progresses from one level to the next, with the unsurprising consequence that student achievement is governed by the lowest common denominator.  We now see higher education being pushed by the same mentality and for the same reasons.  The perception that applicants with a bachelors degree are better than those without is steadily going the way of the high school diploma as steps continue to be taken that reduce what is required to obtain the degree.  Many years ago, I had a student in class who complained that the amount of work required by the course put him at an unfair disadvantage because he had a job and should not be expected to do what full-time students were asked to do.  My response essentially reminded him that the worth of the degree would inevitably degrade if we lowered expectations for courses, and we had to think in terms of long term consequences, not the immediate.  I doubt that kind of thinking characterizes our educational leaders today.  When we see administrative demands to increase so-called performance measures in ways which have the effect of reducing expectations, we’ve gotten on the same slippery slope that wrecked the high school diploma.

Very interesting article!

Very much agree with you, jamesebryan. Most K-12 educators I know are every bit as committed to rigorous teaching as any profs commenting here, if not more so. Take ANY of the problems or situations mentioned in the article or the comments and substitute “high school” for “college” and — welcome to my world.

This is damning! The canary in the coal mine has spoken! And, it’s one more reason to significantly increase the opinion input of the corporate world into our educational sector.

American education, and American futures, are both seriously threatened because we have become complacent about *serious*, verifiable, results.

This problem will take care of itself, from the corporate point of view; the latter will simply not hire those who are unprepared; thus, a lost generation or more. Time for some serious reconsideration of the bloated mess our educational structures are in – and time for the in-and-out merry-go-round of educational bureaucrats who come from established academia in Washington. They have failed!

Sir Ken Robinson has a solution for this problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I completely agree here.  All too often, when trying to diagnose a problem, we look at the immediate consequences leading to the problem, when many times, we need to dig deeper.  I think of how we deal with crime really illustrates this:  more crime is being committed, so we focus more on the punishment side of things and build more prisons, when the real problem is socioeconomic/mental issues, but I digress…

I think too much of the focus of this argument is on the universities.  Certainly they share in the responsibility, but starting with them is not going back far enough in students’ academic careers.  We need to go back to primary and secondary schools–and dare I say it, parents.

This is not simply a blame game, it is the reality of learning:  it is much easier to address problems with reading, writing (don’t get me started about the general lack of preparedness in this area of students entering college–my blood nearly boils when students complain about writing a two page paper), math, science, etc., in the early stages of development.  Yet here we are, with some students arriving at university without the basic skill set to be successful.  We create more and more remedial education classes, and professors–myself included–struggle with maintaining high standards (see my mini rant at the start of this paragraph).

This may just be my geographical area:  so many students keep getting passed on from grade to grade, and few seem to want to tackle the problem.  In some cases, students are not being challenged/encourage to learn, but in others, students have special needs that are not going to be addressed in a mainstream class. 

And here is where parents come in:  one problem I frequently hear from those in K12 is that a student would highly benefit from special education, but parents are resistant for fear that their progeny will be labelled as “dumb,” and somehow that will reflect poorly on them as parents.  Unfortunately, they are only doing their child–and society as a whole–a disservice.  I do not have an answer on how to address this, but it is worth investigating.

On the flip side–obverse, if you will–I think we also need to have “special” education for the brightest of students, as they too do not flourish in mainstream classes.  In looking at my own education, I was not really challenged in school until the last couple of years in high school, at which point I could take advanced courses in maths and sciences.  Once I was in these classes, I made highest honor roll, where before, I was lucky to make honor roll at all.  I’m not stating this to boast, but to just illustrate a situation in which I think many students find themselves.

Clearly we need to be investing more in our K12 schools–my state actually cut spending last year–and this just exacerbates the problem.  Our investment early on will easily pay better dividends than waiting until high school or university.

I find the call for a significant increase in the opnion input of the corporate world into our educational sector ironic since the educational sector denies having anything to do with the corporate world. I remember a time when education was considered a service industry. However, today we are no longer permitted to use the industrial metaphor when considering education. ”Education is not a business.” “Students are not customers.” “Potential employers are not customers.” “The only individuals who have a right to speak about education are educators.” Does anyone else find it ironic that Charles Murray is castigated and dismissed as a quack for questioning the input and output of colleges, while Arum and Rokas are praised for raising the same questions and concerns. 
 If we listen carefully to faculty and many administrators,  ”The closest thing to a product in education is knowledge.” However, instead of charging for knowledge, we charge for seat-time. Why? We haven’t find enough buyers of our knowledge, while there are more than enough gullible students and parents who will pay for the right to sit in our classrooms. Procrustes has hit the nail on the squarely on the head when he asked,.” How many faculty and administrators would have jobs if we closed down the underachieving, second and third level schools, Is this the same question if we referred to these schools as the “minor leagues, the Bush leagues and Academic Siberia?.”

The problem
with this picture is actually over 2000 years old. In Ancient Greece and Rome,
experiential learning was considered inferior to the reflective pursuit of
knowledge through contemplative reflection. With the possible exception of
Aristotle, theoria (theoretical knowledge) was open only to free men of the
highest ability. Only Aristotle required all free men to participate in poiesis
(the pursuit of knowledge through the production of objects of value) and
praxis (the pursuit of knowledge through repetitive acts of doing), For most
educators in ancient Greece and Rome, if one was not suited to theoria, there
were always the guilds or the military. And of courses, these sectors of
society were mostly populated by slaves, the have not’s of society. Education
was about perpetuating an elite society.

Before we in
American higher education hurt ourselves by patting our own backs and
congratulating ourselves on how far we come, let’s look at the history of
American higher education. According to their charters, the stated purposes of
the first Colonial liberal arts colleges ( which were founded by an unhly alliance of church and state) included producing clergy and teachers
for the new society. If we look under their rugs and in the backs of their closets,
we find that the religious denominations wanted “liberally educated
preachers who could control their congregations by their rhetoric, and not lose
congregations to the itinerant, illiterate evangelical preachers who were “stealing”
congregations through impassioned sermons. We also find that governing
bodies wanted teachers who could teach the “common folks their place in
society.”  Early American higher
education was not about social mobility. It was about defining and maintaining
a class system based on wealth and education. How much different are we today?
It has never really  become a society based upon ability.

I am not going to get myself in a rage about this. If professors simply do our jobs and take the time to walk each student through the basic skill sets attached to our discipline, we are doing our parts. Instead of grandstanding and carrying on about the fall of Western civilization, we just need to learn our students’ names and hold longer office hours — and do our jobs.

The one thing I can propose is that the higher ed system has to stop segregating students by class, but I harp on that way too much already. In brief, it isn’t right that some students go to luxurious schools and learn from Pulitzer winners in seminars of 10, surrounded by other highly prepared and motivated rich kids — while others go to state schools and sit in writing classes with 30 people in them, taught by overworked instructors with a 4/4 or 5/4 teaching load.

If you are serious about the problems indicated in Selingo’s article, then it is time for a revolution in higher education. College should be treated like a rite of passage and structured more like military entry-level training. In boot camp, people don’t care if you went to a chi-chi high school or your daddy runs Viacom, you have to do the same push-ups and fire the same rounds as everybody else. And you have to deal with the same stressful conditions, and learn to balance resources with people whom under normal circumstances you would rather avoid.

Times have changed and the US has evolved, such that the old system of sending the “best and brightest” to Princeton and sticking Joe Schmoe in a junior college then bouncing him up to an underfunded State U just isn’t tenable. The people are angry. People are encamped in the streets screaming about student loan slavery, class inequality, and oligarchic control of the country by a small elite pedigreed in publish-or-perish colleges with swollen endowments sheltered from taxation by their non-profit status, and sequestered away from the masses of people who need more resources.

The “best and the brightest” have proven that their skills in the workplace do not warrant the special privileges they earned with their high-powered degrees. Robert McNamara got us into Vietnam. Rumsfeld went to Princeton, where Paul Krugman, the Enron adviser, now teaches when he isn’t pretending to be a populist in the New York Times. Larry Summer of Harvard messed up while Columbia faculty drove our economy into disaster.

There is no reason to have an elite. On all fronts, the model is an epic fail. To prepare a workforce, we have to dismantled the elitist and segregated model of higher ed that exists. I say, let’s do it now so there isn’t a full-scale revolution. Living here in Los Angeles, I can tell you the threat of a large-scale revolt in 2012 is real; it is not fiction. People are starving, angry, and ready to burn things down. Ignore them at your own peril.

It wasn’t a swipe at adjuncts; it was a statement of fact.  We have learned that we run the risk of losing our jobs if students complain, so many faculty, both contingent and tenure track, grade more leniently than we otherwise would.  Back us up if we report plagiarism, give us some job security, and more of us will be willing to demand more of our students.

Betsy Smith/Adjunct Professor of ESL/Cape Cod Community College 

Among other onerous assessments, high schools are measured by the sheer number of students sent to college. Add this to the standardized test, data-driven mania that has undermined practically every aspect of quality in education, plus the fact that California’s high school English classes now have 40 students in them, and it becomes clear how little any teacher can comment on any student’s writing. Even in my AP courses, which have open enrollment, the quality of writing leaves much to be desired among half of my students. I do the best I can, and provide as much quality marginalia and I can in an average 52-53 hour workweek (sometimes 70 hours), yet even these supposedly elite students often cannot meet the challenge – and I am assessed for their lack of success on the AP Exam. Additionally, half of the general sophomores I teach have fourth grade level skills (and work ethics) as their starting point. Yet, teachers are mandated to raise their test scores, to perform miracles upon their willingness to commit to quality schoolwork, and to send them to college.

Fascinating. And, well, it flies in the face of the way this story is generally reported, which is: BURN DOWN THE HUMANITIES BUILDING AND START MORE ENGINEERING PROGRAMS!!!!!

(All caps for hysteria, there)

But all the skills noted are ones that humanities degrees (not exclusively, but it’s the humanities that are often thrown under the bus as irrelevant to career-training) excel at promoting: college material? It’s pretty clear from the first critical essay (as opposed to multiple choice test) that some students are really ,really not ready. Writing? Dude, in English, writing is what we do. All the time. Work ethic? You should take a course in the 18th century novel: the books are long (and hilarious and/or shocking), the diction is unusual (and rich in idiom and metaphor), the associated critical materials are dense and counterintuitive (and mind-changing).

It sounds like employers want more humanities grads: smart students who can write well, work hard, think clearly, and understand how the world works from outside the bubble of millennial helicopter parenting.

It boils down to liberal ideology and the feel good society, socialist desire for equality at all costs and colleges who fill the seats to ensure their survival.  In other words, no one is to blame for their decisions, everybody counts as one regardless of ability and we have too many colleges.

The government blames the colleges for putting out poorly educated graduates. The college blames the high school for not helping students be academically prepared for college. The high school blames the middle school for not teaching more of the basics. The middle school blames the elementary school for not teaching the more basic basics. The elementary school blames the parents for not preparing their children for school or supporting the efforts of the elementary school. The parents blame the government for not spending more money on education.

Do you see the vicious circle? NO ONE takes responsibility for the whole mess.

Employers are not happy with new employees because of two reasons.  

1. They are looking for superman without wanting to pay to train them.  Companies need to realize that people aren’t going to pay out the first year or two of their pay to learn skills that help the companies make more money.  College isn’t for that to begin with.  People go to college to learn a wide variety of topics and to grow intellectually.  Companies need to realize that they have to pay for some pre-work training.  

2.  Companies say they are not happy with the American graduates, because they want to use it as an excuse to import more visa workers from abroad or to outsource to cheaper, more under-educated places like China or India.  It is an excuse, nothing else.  

US university students are more educated than ever before, and I would even argue they are more educated than most other nations’ students around the world.  The problem is not with the Universities and how many students they take on.  The problem is with the companies who are seeking cheap labor or who will only hire Americans if they are supermen or superwomen (although still at a lower pay)  Employers don’t want to pay for training and assume Universities should become career prep.  

My current job trained me.  I work in advertising.  I had no experience when I started.  But, after six months of on the job practice, I know more about this position than anyone who happened to study marketing or advertising as their degree.  My company is an exception (And it isn’t an American company).  American companies should realize that they need to take on the added cost of training, otherwise we can just assume they are using this argument as an excuse to outsource for cheaper, less quality services elsewhere. 

This is a very
interesting article. It really points out some major problems that have failed
to be addressed in our education system, starting with K-12 classes and
teachers and schools being underfunded and forced to “perform” to standardized
tests in order to get more funding and keep their doors open. When teachers are
one of the poorest paid individuals, and schools have some of the poorest
funding allowances, what kind of results can we expect? Not to mention when
standardized tests are implemented, we as a society are basically saying, every
child and every individual learns the exact same way at the exact same pace and
should be scored the exact same way, which is very far from the truth. When we
don’t give youth the opportunity to learn, teachers the opportunity to teach or
schools the opportunity to grow, well, we get out what we put into education.
Unfortunately, we don’t put enough emphasis on individual learning as a
society, nor do we look at the change in student learning habits throughout the
years and try to adapt to the modern student. Again, we get out what we put in.
Perhaps some businesses could lend education the money they’ve made in profits
for a year and see if they get different results or better educated students
for their workplace. It’s all about investment, right?