Source: The Washington Monthly
I hope this analyst reads my comment and looks into the real problems. Here is what I wrote.
The author doesn’t seem to recognize that the problem is not when you get a college degree. It’s that so few college degrees actually come with a college education. Whatever you may think that education should be – vocational, theoretical, liberal. It doesn’t matter. They are not going to get it, and then, they are unlikely to get that good job. That is what is going on. I know. I was there. I saw behind the screen.
Here is what they are going to get, and why.
They are going to get something like I was told to give them – a “cookbook” course, not the course I was giving. You know, “cookbook”; where students can get an A, and brag that they can hardly do MIT problems on the same material – with the obvious conclusion that MIT’s course must be inappropriate.
Now for the why.
The chair of the math dep’t told me he didn’t want “problems”, and that he “just wrested a course” from Engineering and he wasn’t going to let them take this one. (200 students a semester)
On the Engineering side, their Dean of Student Academic Integrity wrote me that he didn’t want to discourage students. He wanted “retention”. That was in response to an email that informed him that the students who cheated on their homework were the ones who did poorly on the exam.
Most of today’s university leaders are all about revenue and prestige, built on the back of students – by definition, young and uneducated, and, thus, easily taken advantage of.
By the way, my students regularly did MIT problems.
The complete, documented story, and much else can be found on my blog inside-higher-ed .
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