David Kirp has spent worked on higher education issues for a long time and can be outspoken. I was a little surprised at this op-ed http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/opinion/how-to-help-college-students-graduate.html?ref=opinion&_r=0. Here is why.
“Professor Kirp must realize that the programs that he advocates would be instituted in universities where “”the pursuit of money…has become a virtue” and where “Nowhere in the university is this market mentality more on display than in the luring, caring, and feeding— and almost incidentally the educating— of undergraduates”. Prof. Kirp must realize this since this correct description (see my other comment) is his. (See “This Little Student Went to Market” in Hersh, Richard H. (Editor). Declining by Degrees : Higher Education at Risk. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. p 127. )
I have no doubt that Prof. Kirp has the best of intentions and wants to see students truly educated. It would be great if he could follow up this piece with an explanation of how to implement these ideas in such an unscrupulous setting.” (Comment pending on NY Times)
Here is the first comment I posted on the Times site.
“Just how does a school like Northwestern graduate 93 percent? I was a math professor at a similar school. In many cases, this high graduation rate is not due to administrators and advisors working to see that their students get the college education they need. They work for the opposite – to reduce the education required for a degree.
Here is just one example. I was asked to dumb down a critical prerequisite for engineers – to make it a “cookbook” course – because the engineering deans were concerned about “retention” and because my chair didn’t want the engineering school to “wrest” the course from his department.
I had written the engineering dean that about half the class had cheated on the homework, and that when the problems were on the test, they missed them. He replied that he and his advisors were most concerned about retention, even though he was also the Dean of Academic Integrity.
Only through my own efforts, neither retention nor education turned out to be a problem. The complete story, “A Tale Out of School”, is on my blog inside-higher-ed.com
Even given that experience with the misuse of advisors, I agree with Prof. Kirp that there are schools that use advisors to help students to LEARN. Advisors can be a great help. But until we hold schools accountable for really educating, any assets that colleges get will be looked at by some to see how they can use the new asset to improve their “numbers” for the places where it counts, like US NEWS ratings.”
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