I wanted to comment further on the article in the previous post.
“We are loaning too much money, that, in far too many cases, just goes to fill college coffers. In the meantime, the poor, uneducated “consumer” (once quaintly know as a “student”), gets to be fooled into thinking that she is getting an education. (And then latter gets commonly fooled into believing she now just needs more “education”.)
Though the recession confounds the data, anyone who has been there knows that “It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the education – or lack of it.” (For anyone who thinks that is not the case, either see “Academically Adrift”, or my other comment.)
We are spinning our wheels by continuing to worry about how to help students with their loans, instead of worrying about how to help them get a real education.
On top of all of that, universities have now managed, through their lax educational standards (but great student living standards), to dumb down high school. (High School teachers do either learn, or not learn, in college.) So, now universities can point to the gigantic salary gap (mainly due to lower salaries for HS grads) and claim they are doing a good job.
We must reverse this state of affairs that had already been so much in place that as early as 1980 someone like Clark Kerr could observe that
“…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American higher education…”
(David Riesman even wrote a whole book about it, again, in 1980.)”
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