A lot of what David Leonhardt says in this article is important information, but I believe he, and others, need to understand, that data based on students from 30, or even 2o, years ago, is not suffecient to draw conclusions about today’s students. What worries me is that there seems to be a rush to hold colleges accountable by counting graduates. My comment is below.
The Reality of Student Debt Is Different From the Clichés – NYTimes.com.
“…history suggests that most [graduates of expensive colleges] will do just fine…” Not true. Here is why.
History is about people who graduated many years ago, and, thus, not only “graduated” but, also, received an “education”. How do I know that has changed? There are two reasons.
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in their book, “Academically Adrift”, that over the past 50 years the amount of studying required at even elite colleges has decreased by about half. They also show that critical thinking skills hardly increase with four years of college. Just thirty years ago those skills increased dramatically.
That is the data. That data can be filled in with personal experience.
I was a college math professor for thirty years. I have taught at a regional state school (long ago) and at an “elite” school. What I have seen is outrageous. (Departments dumbing down coures, to keep students happy, so that another department can’t “wrest” the big revenue generator from them; graduating faux-phd’s, (under the guise of helping with a “national need” (= govt grant) …etc.)
Almost all of the decrease in real learning comes from a view that students are consumers, whose “wants” need to be met, in spite of the clear knowledge that those “wants” are, in many cases, in direct conflict with “needs”.
History shows, not that “graduates” will do fine, but that “acquirers of a good eduation” will do fine.
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