I added another comment to Nicholas Kristoff’s piece The American Dream Is Leaving America – NYTimes.com.
“…Until the 1970s, we were pre-eminent in mass education…”
But then something happened. Here, in a nutshell, is what it was – and how it evolved over a few decades.
In the sixties, we poured money into making a college education accessible to everyone. But we forgot accountability.
By the late seventies, David Riesman had already observed that,
“…advantage can…be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions…those who speak in [their] name are not always [their] friends…” (from On Higher Education)
By the late 1990’s we had this.
College professors at “elite” schools getting “national need” grants of millions to produce (with no accountability) math phd’s. Some of those professors grant doctorates to students who have trouble with hard calculus problems. (Yes, you read that right. Read the details on my blog inside-higher-ed ) Some of those phd’s become professors at regional state schools, where their students graduate and become high school teachers. No fault of their own, they aren’t qualified. (You can read about them in my blog, too.)
From the perspective of someone who has spent decades in the “business”, that is the story in a nutshell.
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