It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com.
This is a sad article. Yes, it describes the effects of a terrible recession. But moreso, it describes the lingering effects of not honestly giving students a good education. It describes the effects of a thirty-plus year of misallocating national resources away from university education to university buildings and endowments. It is outrageous.
I commented.
“”…is this a recessionary blip or the dawn of a whole new economic age?” (from the print story)
It’s neither.
I’m a professor. I taught at an “elite” school. I know the dark secret. It’s the education. (Yes, the economy matters, but the poor education matters more.)
I have seen this coming for over thirty years.
It was 1980, when Clark Kerr and David Riesman saw it. (Read their comments on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com )
It was 1986 when a professor told me that, after teaching an introductory course for five years, he could finally always tell when the HW was wrong, but he still couldn’t always tell what was wrong. This was at a regional state school, and it was only one of several such stories I heard.
It was 2011, when the chair of the math dept at Wash. U. in St. Louis told me to make a critical engineering math course a “cookbook” course. In response to an email I sent about that course, describing cheating on HW as a major source of engineering students having trouble with the test, a dean wrote me that he didn’t want to “discourage” them; he wanted “retention”. (You can read about this, and other stories, on my blog. )
It’s time to wake up and realize the sham that much of college has been for years.”
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