Here is a link and my comments.
Recovery at Last? – NYTimes.com.
“…Many young Americans graduated into a labor market that didn’t want their skills, and will never get back onto the career tracks they should have had…” [quoted from Krugman’s Op-Ed]
The fact is true. The implication is false.
The reason so many will never get into those career tracks is that they never got the education that they should have gotten.
The dramatic drop in higher education, decades in coming (and documented in Roksa and Arum’s seminal “Academically Adrift”, and illustrated with examples on my blog inside-higher-ed), is a bigger threat to this country’s well-being than any recession could ever be.
The reason for this decline?
First, here is David Riesman in 1980.
“…advantage can..be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions…the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends…”
Thirty years later, here is a Dean of Student Academic Integrity at an “elite” school, upon learning that students who didn’t do well on the test were, with few exceptions, those who cheated on the homework .
“…math…courses are crucial for student retention in engineering. It pains us to see students give up engineering due to lack of confidence in math…”
Here is the Chair of the Math Dept.
“…teach it as a ‘cookbook’ course…”
(from “A Tale Out of School” on my blog )
Unscrupulous people work their way to the top everywhere, not just at banks. From there, they wreak havoc on all of society.
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