Article on Jobs and Degrees in Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education (www.chronicle.com) does an excellent job of reporting.  There is a recent article that describes employers views of the product colleges are, in general, producing.  That “product” is, of course, college graduates.  (I know that people aren’t products, but that just makes it sadder.) Here is a link to the article:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Employment-Mismatch/137625/

Here is the comment I made on the site.  (If you don’t want to read the article, here is my summary of it:  Many colleges produce poorly educated graduates according to employers.)  Anyway, here is what I posted.

Employers are finally learning higher education’s dirty little secret:  a college degree and a college education are not the same.  In general, the gap has been widening over time and from college to college. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa document this in their outstanding book “Academically Adrift”.  They show that there has been an enormous decrease in both critical thinking skills and in the number of hours students study.

What has happened?  In our student as consumer academic model, higher education has fallen into a vicious circle. 

For a specific example, look at AP Calculus.  The exam used to require a working knowledge of the definition of a limit.  This required both work and an increase in critical skills – to say nothing of the fact that it is usually the first step for students into the world of understanding mathematics and how it works.  It has been dropped from the requirements and this leads to statements like this from Cal Tech’s math department:

“…The typical high school courses, and the AP tests themselves, are woefully inadequate in explaining, or testing, why things work and how to justify one’s propositions…”  (See my blog post on http://www.inside-higher-ed.com/ for more on this.)

 (It is interesting to note that in the above article “Woefully unprepared” is the phrase David E. Boyes uses to describe newly minted graduates that he sees.)

I described the way I see this watering down of material in a previous comment I posted.  I will repeat it here.

 In a commentary in the Chronicle, Give AP Credit Where Credit Is Due , Mark Bauerlein, writing about an AP committee he chaired, says that there  “…was a deliberate, two-year process…If enough colleges regarded something as important…we incorporated it into the standards…”. I can imagine an AP committee looking at a lot of colleges to see what they cover in calculus – a lot of colleges that want happy students who don’t have to struggle with calculus – that don’t require the fundamental parts of calculus. Now, a vicious circle ensues. Students who took AP Calculus want credit. Colleges say, “OK, better give them credit. We certainly don’t want to tell them and their parents that they don’t know as much as they think they know.” Then the math department decides they better fit their course to – guess what – the new weakened AP standards. Then someone else makes it easier, the AP Committee looks, the AP course is made to match the now easier material and on it goes. Finally, in determining what to cover in calculus in college, math professors say “We better not cover as much since they don’t come in knowing as much.  What can we do?”  Is it any surprise that students don’t study as much or learn as much or improve their critical thinking skills as much?  Maybe student as patient, for whom we must do the best that we can, would be a better model than student as consumer who must be made to feel that they are getting a good product.  I’m afraid that this can never be achieved from the inside.