Pa. Faculty Union Not Happy About Contract

The fact that his writer uses the OECD finding as his excuse to say US education is declining basically shows that his entire argument is flawed.  You can’t use statistics such as what OECD takes to judge a country’s education.  If you break down the statistic to a more accurate version, with comparable populations and poverty rates, US students in some areas actually outperform the top nations in the world.  So, there isn’t a problem with US academic or US primary and high schools. There is only a problem with access.  As someone who has studied my graduate degree outside of the United States and my undergrad within the United States, my experience says that the United States is still far advanced in this area. 

As for the debate between higher academics and career preperation, the argument is not applicable. This is one of the strengths of the US education system. The community college and tech school system only has one problem; the fact that it is ridiculed by society. In fact, many of these schools (I admit, not all) are top notch and add to our workforce. The problem rests mainly in the idea that big corporations are not interested in hiring American workers anymore, because they are too busy chasing after cheap labor and exploitation of slave labor in some instances. Americans, sometimes, are too qualified, and the argument that they are not qualified enough is just an excuse to move jobs overseas to cheaper manufacturing nations that cheat on trade.

Of course, the US can always improve. But, we need to make sure we are making the right improvements. We shouldn’t be trying to focus too much attention in one area. There shouldn’t be a debate between more higher academics and career training; we should be doing both. A diverse work force requires a diverse education system as well as one that is fluid enough to let people switch tracks if they want to. We are on top, but we can do more.

“Maybe the customer of colleges is not the student, but the job market of today.”

This is the “bread-and-circuses” mindset of Corporate U. –E.A.C.

Too many colleges/universities are controlled by faculty members who got their PhDs in the 70s/80s and don’t want to or can’t change.  Students today aren’t remotely similar to students of those eras and the workplace has changed just as drastically.  A “liberal education” may still be valued by those who hire summa cum laudes from the Ivys and R1s but most employers outside of those markets want graduates with skills that can translate directly to the needs of the business within a very short period of time.  Long gone are the “on-the-job-training” periods and apprenticeships.  New hires have to hit the ground running and too few of them are ready to do that.  Why?  Because of social promotion (both in K-12 and higher ed) and false expectations we’ve given potential employers regarding the “need” for workers to have a college education.

I expect that more and more state funding will be diverted to community colleges and trade techs where the graduates (or certificate holders) are much more work-ready than the students with BAs from the comprehensives and doctoral institutions.  The faculty and administrators who continue to ignore the realities of today and pretend that employers care about French literature or 18th century philosophy are going to see their institutions go the way of the dinosaurs. What you wish it to be isn’t what it is, anymore.

I think the point is being completely missed. The bottomline –which none of the previous posters acknowledge — there is a serious problem with our higher education system and its not just about access. The fact that everyone gets on the defensive instead of taking the information in and doing something constructive with it is amazing. The writer is correct in that there is no leadership in higher ed to guide and redefine a completely outdated system.

If there are different needs (as the speaker from United Technologies suggests) then there is not one solution. Maybe if we stop talking about higher Ed as if it is one thing, it would be helpful. And judging by my experience, most institutions are aware of their mission and doing their best to meet it. However, given the ways in which the job market is changing, that probably pushes in a more liberal arts direction, where we teach students how to learn new skills and adapt to change.

It is refreshing to see the Chronicle take a stand on this issue.

Since the 1980′s a growing number of observers have been commenting on the central issues in which U.S. higher education needs to adapt to a changed world, among the more important:

- Access
- Cost
- Efficiency (credits and degrees per dollar input & time spent)
- Exploitation of modern learning and evaluation sciences (teach and evaluate better)
- Ability to serve increasingly diverse student bodies (related to the above point)
- Measurement of:
 — educational processes (to ensure continuous quality improvement)
 — learning outcomes, proficiency, behavioral competence, etc.
 — impact (how did the degree change behavior downstream)
- Time-to-Degree
- Degrees driven by societal needs rather than professorial interests

The actual list is much longer than the above and many of its elements are interactive (e.g., the relations between declining faculty productivity and efficiency). 

In claiming “best in the world” status (for an elite few), U.S. higher education reminds me of the identical claims of U.S. medicine, which also makes defensive remarks when someone points out that the U.S. ranks 34th in infant mortality and 36th in expected lifespan.

“Indeed, the debate over the purpose of college—career vs. intellectual
development—is often a false one, forcing us to pick between them when
in reality the answer depends on the student. And employers like United
Technologies need both types of graduates—the designer from a
liberal-arts college and the line worker with a certificate from a
two-year institution.”

^This is most insightful part of this essay, which deflates much of the rest of the piece, and a number of the comments.  There is nothing wrong with training workers, and supplying workers for the market is an important task.  But that doesn’t make French literature or 18th century philosophy worthless as intellectual endeavors, or mean that liberal arts colleges have an antiquated model that needs to be revolutionized.  Many institutions will do just fine giving macro trends in the market the finger, and I hope they continue to do so.  But many institutions will continue to struggle with a split mission, trying to be all things for all people, and may do well at none of them.

Sadly, you are both wrong about the customer model.  I was neither hired in the 70′s and 80′s nor am I willing, as you both seem to be (sadly) to execute excellent at the chopping block of exigency.  Only an idiot wouldn’t see that students are not what they used to be (and we are, by and large not idiots), but why would any thinking academic sacrifice the ideals of a liberal arts education to suckle at the hog-nipple of commodification?  You shoats may fight for that existence if you wish, but I’m very ethically comfortable asking my students to meet a standard that exceeds their expectations (even of themselves), rather than whittling away my ethical responsibility to do my best not only to educate students in my field, but to provide them with transferable skills in critical thinking and problem solving.  I’ll send my students who want to be trained in screwing on toothpaste caps to you, and I’ll keep the students who want to be smarter people and better citizens who can do many things, solve many different problems, and think their way past a difficult and unique issue.

The logical incongruity of your thinking is startling, and brings into question the rigor of your education.  Universities are not businesses.  While we do provide a “service,” it is both a cooperative as well as individual endeavor.  We cannot return an education if we’re not happy with it.  Students pay tuition for the right to learn things they can use to make their lives and the lives of others better.  If we continue to think of students as customers, we vindicate every bad administrative decision of the past and all the ones to come.  In addition, we reduce teaching to content delivery, and while that possibly is true in your classes, it is patently false in mine (I do not teach in the servile arts).

gsp_123 says: “I think the point is being completely missed. The bottom line –which
none of the previous posters acknowledge — there is a serious problem
with our higher education system and its not just about access.”

Agreed. Our nation, indeed the world is becoming a culture of process: Write it down.  Make it a rule, law, requirement, etc and yea verily it shall be so. There are many competent observers of the human condition who question any institution who demands fees for services and promises “your future will be guaranteed if you successfully run our gauntlet.” Educational services are no exception.

The inimitable Steve Jobs understood this. He was fond of this idea: “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” What is process if not institutionalized dogma? Steve bailed from college but continued to expand his horizons from a host of sources cherry-picked to feed his curiosity.

Another story in the Chronicle today speaks to one Barbara Boxer exerting congressional pressure on schools to live up to their advertised expectations. If the likes of Ms. Boxer succeed in putting their imprint on any free-market enterprise, the outcome cannot be good. But like congress, our schools need to conduct a reality-check on expectations versus outcomes; costs versus return on investment.

Higher education should not be marketed like cars and laundry soap. Going further on a tank of gas or getting out the toughest stains are rapidly becoming insufficient incentive for forking over the price of a new house exchanged for years of time in school followed by years of debt for having purchased the service. Author Selingo noted: ” . . . it (higher ed) would focus less on how it’s doing and more on how well it’s serving.”  Agreed. Whether your selling donuts, computers, or education . . . the most successful endeavors will be driven by first line managers in close contact with their customers. Managers with the skill and willingness to add value in response to customer needs and desires.

If it worked for Steve Jobs and Dunkin Donuts, it will work for higher education. The Hillsdale business model comes to mind . . .

Thank you, a_voice, for giving us a unique perspective.  I concur that if there are problems in higher education, then the smart people in higher education can solve them (if they are solvable by them).  If the problems are cause by outside forces, such as social decline, itinerant legislatures, or administrative malfeasance, then we can’t expect thinking to just magically fix the problem.  The vast majority of what is done in higher education is good, even if students don’t like it.  To allow students to drive what higher education does is to allow the lunatics to run the asylum.

We are speechless together.

A relationship that admits the humanity of the student, as well as a relationship (potentially) of mutual concern.  The difference between your very good model and the one proposed by a lot of these policy wonks is that one views students as people, the other as sources of revenue.  This dehumanization might seem good in the short run, but look what it has done in our tax code.

The word “customer” says it all. How sad.

Unfortunately, an emphatic Hear! Hear! 

Students are our clients. We ought not be passive either to the students or to their future employers. We also ought not be passive to a university corporation with market goals such as prestige and high salaries for administrators. 

Colleges and universities are communities. If the community environment were not important for some worthwhile purposes then education ought to be conducted entirely by students learning by whatever means and being tested for competency by institutions controlled by the potential employers and a cadre of testers who would evaluate students as a service to them that would indicate their strengths and weaknesses for the purpose of feedback. Doing the best available history course by extension, for instance, can produce excellent results, but such a course lacks the element of intellectual interaction in the discovery of things that perhaps even the most competent historians do not know. More importantly, interactions among learners (students and teachers) are vital to learning how to learn. So the community aspect of university education is something difficult to supply by other means.

As teachers we ought to serve the needs of students, providing that we are personally willing to do so. The principle objective that we ought to help students pursue is competency. If you want to become a lawyer, then Professor X will guide your acquisition of what you need to pass the bar exam and to ethically and effectively use what your have learned in a law office. If you want to become an engineer working in the area of nano-technology, then Professor Y will guide you toward your goal. If you want to become the next world-class novelist, then Professor Z will help you become competent in the craftsmanship involved in writing, and perhaps provide some help liberating your creativity. 

Students also have dependency needs such as the need for affirmation of self worth in a society that has as a strong component the tearing down of the ego status of others. These needs are also legitimate, but the teacher cannot be truly helpful by falsifying evaluations. The teacher, to be helpful, must stand as an objective evaluator who is an ally of the student.

“No free gold stars, and no black balls either.” Educational institutions need to have objective information on the spectrums of competencies of their students both before and after their learning experiences.

Many people presently bemoan the status of student writing. In my experience, students rarely come into a university with serious grammar problems. They typically have had little experience in writing even short papers. Only writing and getting feedback (preferably from many sources) will improve writing. The competent teacher will give objective and helpful feedback on writing, and the well ordered college or university will provide ample opportunities for students to gain competency in writing if they so desire.

Institutions of higher education need to state up-front what they are prepared to do for students, and they need to measure, after the fact, whether they are actually delivering on their promises. Students need to know whether a course in “mechanics” will prepare them to be technically competent mechanics or whether it will prepare them to do more advanced work in physics. 

Students need to take responsibility for exploring their own talents and planning their learning experiences to prepare them for the careers that they choose. However, it is rare for freshman to have enough experience of their own talents and the possible outlets for those talents to plot a reasonable course through  higher education while they are still seniors in high school. So one other important function of a college education is to facilitate this kind of exploration. Whether this function receive adequate attention from teachers and administrators is another question.

You wrote, “Maybe the customer of colleges is not the student, but the job market of today . . .”

This is folly for so many.  Like chasing the hot mutual fund or the hot stock, following the metaphorical lemmings (who actually aren’t that stupid) over the Supply and Demand cliff.  By the time students graduate the shortage has become surplus or the “shortage” was yet again a case of crying wolf. I have some real estate in Phoenix I can sell you.  Remember the coming great Humanities Ph.D. shortage?
 
The pragmatic, instrumentalist college might try to imagine the job market of 5-10 years in the future, with more outsourcing, more off-shoring, more contingent labor, more crowd-sourcing, more free content, more winner-take-all markets, under the continuing pressure of Moore’s Law and all those Boomers who never retired.  A world where possibly more and more people end up with part-time, contingent, no benefit adjunct-type jobs.  
 
But predicting the future is hard. Predicting the economy is hard. Predicting the stock market is hard. The business cycle didn’t disappear. It wasn’t different this time. I wonder what people were predicting in 1926-27 for 1930?

Of course, for the club-able HYPS graduate it really doesn’t matter what if anything is learned. And for the top 10% of R1 grads there is the whole world as a market. But for the rest, they have to compete with the top 10% of the whole world.

bscmath78,

I disagree with a few of your “points” but, speaking as someone who should be wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled, I can only say that you made my day. What a delight. Thanks!

I agree with everything you’ve said, but I’ll repeat what I said above: The sad fact is that the majority of 18-year-olds would not even go to college if it were not considered a necessity for decent employment options later on. This, as much as or more than anything else, is driving the commodification of higher ed. It is possible that many of us would be in another line of work if this were not the perception of the “job” of higher ed.

Furthermore: People who hire–including universities themselves–should focus more on a person’s skills and abilities than on the degree they managed to wrest from a college or university.

Jeffrey Selingo, I’m afraid you and David Brooks are already behind the times.  We are witnessing a
shrinking of the consumer self but a much needed expansion of the social self.  This is a reaction to two factors:

1. the questioning of economic insecurity and rightwing idelogies (which have come down from a perverted Calvinism that tells us that if we are laid off, or sick, or even the victim of a natural
catastrophe, it’s because of some moral flaws in our individual nature…  (remember Max Weber’s “iron cage”?)

2. we are gradually seeing a backlash which involves becoming conscious that we are all in this together.  Certainly the Ninetyniners’ protests in NYC and across the country are an indication that
yes we are indeed “our brothers (and sisters!) keepers” 

And pray tell, in what way is “serving American society” outsourcing more and more highly qualified jobs?  And are you actually under the illusion that our country would not have had qualified workers to build the new Oakland/San Francisco bridge themselve instead of importing it pre-fabricated from China?

And how is American  society helped by its middle  class going down the tube? One of the factor in the rise of that middle class after WWII was opening higher ed to its members.  It started with the first GI  bill which was met  with vociferous objections by Brooks’s predecessors, and it went on with student aid and student loans which up to recently paid for themselves both for society and for the indivdidual students. 

How about correlating the present gradual downward slide of the middle class with turning student loans into life long debt (incidentally the tax payers ended up buying all the loans given out by banks wich reaped all the interest but none of the risk because they were fully guaranteed by the federal government.  This is yet another indication that your “market” is a god, because only a god and its priests can break its/their own rules!)  Also with the present cuts in Pell Grants by the Teapartiers pseudo Republicans who are also making attending grad school impossible to anyone carrying undegrad student loan debt (sheesh, we don’t need those specialities because we can import them from Third World countries as we already do with MDs and RNs,  –so much cheaper to have poorer countries educate them!).

The selves which are fomenting/creating this radical social restructuring are indeed very very small. They don’t give a dam-n not only about their fellow Americans and their fellow human beings but also seem intend to speed up the process whereby increasingly major parts of our history are dropped off by the wayside of our memories.

Well of course “the market” doesn’t care if the Korean war (pardon me “police interverntion”!) has been dropped from high school US history texts, and why should “the market” care if the Texas Board of Education has decided to drop any mention of Thomas Jefferson out of US history textbooks used in all Texas schools? 

The cruel and imagined god of “the market” cares nothing for human beings’ avoidable pain and neither does it care for the creative arts which seldom find their way into it (usually only after the artist is dead from illness and malnutrition — your market hungers for human sacrifices and then turns his victims’ signatures into fetishes)

Your market is a myth. It’s an ideology created and recreated by individuals who are imposing it on others but not on themselves (I mean, subsidies  for oil corporations and mega-farms!  Bailouts by tax payers? etc? And how does “the market god” benefits from us providing health care for old folks or for people whose jobs have been outsourced and are now blamed for their own predicament?  (their jobs have been outsourced to places like China where the outsourcing US corporations pay so little and makes workers work such long hours at a breathneck speed that in at least one Apple IPad factory they’ve had to put suicide nets to try to prevent workers from killing themselves?)

 Incidentally, if you re-read (or read?) the works and life of Adam Smith, you’ll remember  that he  supported social programs until such time when the “hand of god” would equalize  how the market worked and everyone  would have their necessities met.  Adam Smith who lived at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the nineteenth century Karl  Marx both believed that human history was headed towards utopia.  Progress was part of the nineteenth century European faith which went off the side with WWI.

I hear you:  all that  knowledge and so much more is totally useless because you can’t sell it to your Market God.  Don’t you realize that by holding that the market is the true “consumer” of education, you are creating a new version of slavery where an external entity becomes the owners of our body parts (our brain, among others!).  

And then (I’m on a roll, not rant) how about all the scientists who tirelessly worked in the past to eventually get us this modern (Medieval?) world we are living in?  Did Louis Pasteur labor for the market?  Do so many of our most brilliant medical researchers?  How about Jonas Salk who invented the polio vaccine and then refused to patent it because he said it belonged to all of mankind.  I suspect your market god would have sent him to death row!  And then, good grief, how about Einstein?  And what good is astro-physics to the market? And of course, what good does knowing history, what good does civics, what good does logics, what good does pure mathematics, what good is an educated people since none of these are sellable goods and education makes people ask too many questions?

People who care about their contemporaries and who are grateful and amazed at and whish to preserve the accumulation of knowldege we inherited from our forebears have very very large selves indeed.  I’m afraid today’s blind believers in “market” ideology have some of the tiniest, most isolated selves ever experienced by humankind.

Very well-put. The marketing and commodification of colleges and universities is a way to keep them open. Stark, simple, and true.

Selingo’s article is not that students are “customers”, it’s that the market is the customer and the students are products.

It  comes down to a choice of words, which,as the tried and true cliche holds, are pregnant with meaning (political, that is)

PS:  I too am a strong believer in practical training, but like you I too believe we need “to teach the whole person”  — these aims are not mutually exclusive.

“The writer is correct in that there is no leadership in higher ed to guide and redefine a completely outdated system.”

Indeed. Two disparate examples:

- The majority of the professors teach as they were taught, out of 1906 playbooks, ignorant of the contributions modern learning and evaluation sciences to the speed and quality of learning.

- The accounting and decision-support systems were developed in the 1930′s and before. They provide no disaggregated real-time information on any mission-critical functions and their structures facilitate waste and a lack of accountability.  

3rtyrant, on the whole I agree with you, except your downplaying the intellctual and creative abilities of those doing so called menial work.  You’d be amazed at how people can benefit from the public library and the web. 

I suspect some people working in a toothpaste factory (which of course would be in China!) or at your local 7/11 or flipping burgers ( a growing number of them being senior citizen as well as younger people with college degrees and even some with graduate degrees) might actually be smarter than your than your average college students and more aware of the world at large than many a faculty member.  (sorry but your example of a hypothetical menial task dates you — I’m  thinking of telling on you to your car mechanic next time you need  her or his help!)

Perfectly put!

While I don’t disagree with your main point, I would not say that “most institutions are aware of their mission and doing their best to meet it.”  As one who looks at “missions” of universities and colleges day in and day out, I’d say that nearly every reputable 4-year institution has pretty much the same mission:  to do it all.  Prepare for the job market. Engage in cutting-edge research.  Teach the liberal arts.  Transmit culture.  The works. 

My sense is that not every person who wants to be “educated” wants to be educated in the classical liberal arts sense.  I pursued a liberal arts education, and I value it mightily.  But many of my clients couldn’t care less: they just want to be prepared to survive the economic slings and arrows of the 21st century. 

I think it’s an open question as to whether the liberal arts have value for the majority of Americans.  Most professors in the academy will say that they remain relevant–and they build the general education requirements around their belief.  But from where I sit, many, many “customers” do not see that relevance.  And they are making other choices.  Or in the worst cases, they are trying the general education requirements, hating them, failing them, and dropping out before they get to the more relevant, career-advancing subjects they really want. And maybe need.

3dtyrant, don’ t you object to all those new expensive buildings on higher ed campuses. 
Wouldn’t you rather teach in a refurbished  old railroad carriage and use the money saved to solve some of the financial hurdles of access?

Did Socrates teach in a palace? 

R117532,
Wonderful example of the corporate blah blah blah. Keep it up, you will do great in administration.

I don’t know too many faculty in public higher ed in my state of California feeling ‘good’ about what’s happening to the “delivery” plans for education here and our “consumers.”   As the undergraduate adviser for my department, I have new graduates coming back for help to find jobs.  Where is this 21st economy that business folks keep talking about?  Right now, it is students fighting over free internship positions while worrying about the  debt they have accrued getting the BA.   There is something false about promoting a collapsed economy for our children without the privileged adults doing the hard work of rebuilding something viable for their future. 

That smacks of irony.  My toothpaste reference, btw, is not dated (per se), it’s from a film.  Another irony is that our university is one of the least expensive in the country, and we have, actually, taught in railroad cars converted to classrooms, and then they were converted to married student housing.  Of course, I wasn’t here when that happened shortly after WWII, but it has gone on here.  Unfortunately, our institution is probably unassailable on that point, and I’m not sure why you would think I had any problem allowing financial access to higher ed. for more students, as long as entrance requirements, academically speaking, remained high.  Socrates taught in a palace of his own intellect, an edifice of which, sadly, I could not construct even a pathetic mockery.

That was an epic “roll,” not “rant.”

The 2000 book “From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry” provides an 80s case study showing the economic, educational, tax, quality and speed to market advantages of moving manufacturing and much engineering elsewhere, leaving just the upfront research and product design in the Silicon Valley.  
 

This quote from the article is very interesting:

“We can secure all the grads we need from elite schools,” said Thomas Bowler, a senior vice president at United Technologies. “That’s not a challenge. It’s the other half of the work force that I worry about.” He sees a wave of retirements coming in manufacturing without a pipeline of highly skilled workers to replace them.

So it would appear that half the work force is easily obtained “from elite schools” which nicely eliminates at least 95% of colleges.  And based on the Economist link, those 95% of colleges have no real chance for “the other half”, since the colleges have “never heard” of the techniques, never mind the lack of prestige and the high probability of unemployment.    One might ponder how the situation developed: “without a pipeline of highly skilled workers to replace them.” It is almost as if most hired since 1980 were eliminated (assuming a unionized workforce forcing seniority based layoffs).

Think of that 3 week welding course, how well did they learn the techniques?  How well do you think they will apply the techniques 6 months after the course if they haven’t been using them on the job? If one decides not to have on the job training or apprenticeships then you are left with raiding or a system of Just In Time Training outputting directly onto the plant floor for the final exam, assuming you want effective employees instead of people with some high priced paper credential that tells you nothing about their on the job performance of tasks. In any case, Higher Education is not part of the solution for “the other half.”

The Economist article was dated September 10, 2011 and it says 30 welders took the community college course between January and April. But interestingly there is no mention of:
 
- How many passed the course
- How many were hired
- How many are still employed
- How well they did the welding
- How well the welders thought the course prepared them for their actual welding
- How well the instructors performed
- How well weld quality and speed is measured on the course and on the job.
 
One might suspect since the article says that no product has been produced that no welding is being done and thus whatever might have been learned 5 or more months ago is now long forgotten. 

Though maybe being Higher Education it was a multiple choice test or you wrote an essay on welding. :-) 

3DTYRANT.  I didn’t mean to throw aspersions on you.  I find your experience teaching in railroad cars fascinating. 

Also, I was grumpy this morning or I wouldn’t have picked on the toothpaste factory exemple…  I haven’t seen the movie but I’m sure it is pretty funny.

You and I obviously think alike on these issues, we just have slightly different ways of putting it.

with best wishes,

Kati

I always thought Diogenes said, “Stand a little less between me and the sun.”
His quest was to find an honest man, which why it was in vain.

No Plato isn’t likely to be telling the truth. His story doesn’t match Xenophon or Aristophanes. Also see Diogenes’ quest.

I haven’t read the book, I am a slow reader, lazy and waste too much time attempting to apply my previous reading by posting.

Nietzsche staged this photo as a version of the story of how Alexander the Great harnessed his tutor Aristotle to his cart and then whipped Aristotle to pull the cart. Lou Salomé is playing the role of Alexander in this recreation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg

Alexander also famously solved the problem of the Gordian Knot.

@ jupiterjazz

I think the Khan Academy does some good work on teaching concepts. One of the best college courses I had could have been largely replaced by a transcript of the lectures. With foresight the university could have hired him for one year, taped his lectures, and let him go. Another of my best courses consisted mostly of the professor feeding us a basic picture of some part of his subject and then making us figure out the full implications of the bare facts. That course could not have been handled well even by a video tape. On top of that, fully half of what I learned occurred because I hashed things out with schoolmates — a process that the Harvard’s physics department has learned to make very effective use of. The problem for the individual student is usually finding a meaningful and also efficient path through all the available courses. What is the student really going to find fulfilling? Besides schoolmates to argue things out with, traditional college environments provide mentors for a few lucky students, people who can see more in the student that the student sees in himself/herself.

Richard Feynman records how some of the calculations he performed while working on WW II projects were facilitated by his having learned an unusual calculus method unfamiliar to his colleagues. It is very difficult to know beforehand how something may turn out to be useful in the future. It is even more difficult for someone who does not already know a subject to plan an efficient series of courses so that all courses that one desires to master will have a sound foundation already in place. 

Not only is it difficult for students to make a good plan to carry them through offerings such as are available at the Kahn Academy, there are two other problems. One (which also affects ordinary courses and especially accelerated summer school courses) is how the student can achieve sufficient consolidation of the skills learned in the classroom. The other is how the students who do not go through a traditional school experience can be evaluated in a way that makes manifest to themselves, to grad schools, to potential employers, et al., what levels of competency in various areas they have achieved. 

Wherever you are in your self-directed studies, it would probably be very helpful for you to find a mentor, somebody who has the background to know what you need to achieve mastery of, what your full range of options are, etc. Even with such help you might end up in the position of some people who have learned more than people who have received degrees but who evaluate themselves, and are evaluated by potential employers, at a low level simply because they have not gone through the accepted system. The Kahn Academy is thinking about the need for providing people with a credible measure of student accomplishments.

Hear, Hear!

Sounds like you are in Texas.  That is the model (students as customers) that Rick Perry is trying to push on the whole state.

some arguments true. About “Americans, sometimes, are too qualified” I agree with that but want to emphasize on the “sometimes”. Just an example: if US stops bringing-in tens of thousands of Indian engineers every-year (i am not talking about taking jobs oversees, i am talking about bringing engineers into the US), the high-tech industry simply can not move forward. This example about a particular industry is not supposed to address every aspect of the argument. However, some stuff are clearly not working as good as they should in higher-ed. 
Relying on “community colleges” is dangerous because China and India (an many others) are not replying on their “community college”, in long run.

Today, how many prestigious physics journals would publish papers from an ABD Swiss patent clerk who went to a 2nd or 3rd rate university?  Of course, Albert Einstein still didn’t get a university job even after publishing his famous 1905 papers. He continued as patent clerk until 1909. 

Some have argued that his originality was possible exactly because he wasn’t a university professor and exactly because he was intellectually isolated from the physics establishment.   Instead, working on clock synchronization patents, isolation and free time provided the environment for excellence and originality.

Credentialism has greatly tightened its grip in years since.

raymond_j_ritchie, I am somewhat surprised that you don’t mention the world-wide excess supply of university graduates.  Or have things greatly improved in Australia since Nov 2010 when you wrote:

“I never cease to be amused at this propoganda about huge shortages of Science & Technology experts. It has not been my career experience. I have applied for over 300 academic positions over the past 30 years. The lowest number of applicants I have heard of was 36, the highest 256. I have been interviewed 6 times (twice by telephone, which is a scam). Only two were for what americans call “tenure-track”. Some shortage. If a shortage exists it is in technical labour not university graduates.”
http://chronicle.com/article/American-Universities-See/125564/

I thought this was an accurate summary of the general environment (excluding periods of boom for particular areas and times like the Dot Com Boom) since about 1970.  For much of this period, STEM students could resort to being under-employed in computers, software, I/T or technical sales, which could strangely enough result in better working conditions/pay than staying in their area of education what with the rise of postdoc limbo. Some also went to Wall Street, though established scientists leaving weapons labs with the end of the Cold War led the way. The end of the Cold War created a glut in some areas especially with the influx from the former Soviet Empire.

Your angry personal attack is based on a flawed or lazy reading of my initial statement.  Nowhere do I assert that the education we provide be less than rigorous.  Neither do I state that we are not responsible for helping students learn to think critically and logically.  What I do say is that a liberal, classical education isn’t appropriate for everyone who wants the degree that we, ourselves, have promoted as necessary for a job/career.  Had we, higher education, not been so money-hungry, we would not have played the role we did in making sure that employers require a college degree for jobs that do not need one.

Since you do not know what I do in higher education, what I teach, how I teach or where I received my degrees, you’re clearly speaking out your a**.  The readers of these comments will see you as a stellar example of the arrogant ivory tower resident that has lost touch (if it ever was possessed) with the realities of today.

Self-agrandizing blather at a university–e.g., “the University of Southern Mississippi is a world-class institution”–can have an unfortunate consequence: If you ask questions that may reveal incompetence or misconduct or simply to discuss concerns about the direction of a university, you may be subject to violating the group-think that promotes the public relations/advertising imperatives of administrators and some faculty. An interesting hypothesis is that the self-agrandizing public relations/advertising promotes faculty self-censorship and mobbing of faculty who “violate” the “world-class” claims.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA, Professor, School of Accountancy, College of Business, University of Southern Mississippi, also, http://www.usmnews.net

I agree that we need to get over ourselves. Higher education was concieved as something for elites and delivered by elites (at the time all white male). As education overall has democratized and workplace skills have become more complex we have not adjusted our attitudes or educational agenda accordingly. I am still a believer in the liberal arts. It is still the degree earned by the elites who govern the majority of our major institutions. However, non-elites (read first generation, low-income and minority in particular) are directed to vocational programs that may or may not provide the deep skills of the liberal arts degree– the communications, research, problem solving skills. When such courses do exist we do not explain why they are relevant. I had the pleasure of deconstructing a history course for a criminal justice student recently who suddenly understood why it could be useful to know the skills taught in history as a practitioner of criminal investigative work. We in the academy have behaved as though there was no tie to vocation in the outcomes of our work. Our students need to know explicitly, given price and expectations, why they are taking philosophy. I get it but do they?
Marcia Cantarella, Author of I CAN Finish College: The Overcome Any Obstacle and Get Your Degree Guide.

raymond_j_ritchie, thank you for sharing your latest experiences in your response.  I am sorry that you had to go into exile, but this is the very kind of experience that people thinking of a STEM career need to keep in mind, since my impression is that your path has been better than at least 50% of  your cohort.

If you had written in your original post: all current systems of STEM undergraduate and graduate are inherently terrible for the vast majority of students in terms of job prospects, I would have been content.

But since you wrote, “no system for undergraduate and graduate education is inherently better than the others,” I sought clarification.

Sadly, I doubt many people will read your post (the attention span for a given blog article seems to be about 1-2 days), but I encourage you to continue, via various venues, to make the very important point that the STEM path is high risk for most students.

Now you did write, “If you try to tell them otherwise they do not understand.”  But I would think that fact that there are over 10 Ph.D. graduates for each good job anywhere in the world and that it might take 10 years as a poorly paid postdoc to be one of the lucky ones getting the good job, might appeal to their “rationalist inclinations”, since as you point out in your July 2010 post relatively fewer Western students have been going the STEM Ph.D. route over the last years.