College is a waste of time and money for below-average students and party animals, writes career counselor Marty Nemko in Chronicle of Higher Education.
Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.
Drop-outs leave with little learning and a lot of debt. Those who scrape through “rarely end up in careers that require a college education.”
College benefits competent, motivated and sober students, Nemko writes. But they’re the minority.
Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.
Nemko suggests colleges be required to test new and graduating students to show what value has been added by their years in college.
Some of the test should be in career contexts: the ability to draft a persuasive memo, analyze an employer’s financial report, or use online research tools to develop content for a report.
Tests results, broken out by precollege SAT scores, race and gender, would “encourage institutions to improve their undergraduate education and to admit only students likely to derive enough benefit to justify the time, tuition and opportunity costs.”
Would-be late bloomers who start at community college can earn transfer credits or a vocational certificate without piling on debt.
I don’t foresee a mandatory value-added test but I think parents and students are becoming more cost sensitive. A few nights ago, my husband’s college-educated cousins told us they’re pleased that their teen-age son wants to be an electrician. He’s good at electrical work, he enjoys it and he’s going to earn his own way very quickly.
There was a mandate in the North Carolina state system a year or two ago to plan a capstone test for universities, and I think it’s going into place this year. My former department is using a national normed test from one of the big testing companies (which has problems - every department chooses a different section of the field to cover, and the big testing company only overlaps our coverage about 80%); if I recall correctly, the English department keeps the second essay their students write and compares it to a final-semester essay, the Biology department makes graduating seniors give a presentation on a recent scientific paper and has faculty (not their current professors) evaluate their understanding, but some of the other departments on campus have very wishy-washy “tests” that aren’t much more than their class grades.
“A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below “proficient” levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.”
Here’s a news flash: those aren’t college skills. Pundits and politicians must stop looking at colleges and universities as the source of last-minute educational intervention. Rather than encourage Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) to accept unqualified students, encourage IHL to set barriers to entry. Entrance exams, for example. An entrance exam, however, would weed out those who aren’t prepared, and who would be wasting their time and money.
A value added test at the end of a college education is a disaster waiting to happen. All it would create is a new level of bureaucracy, and it would waste the time and money of those students who are prepared. Also, college is not trade school. Build trade schools, for heaven’s sake, and stop trying to turn colleges into trade schools through back-door methods such as “career preparedness” exams. Better yet, create a system of scholarships to these new trade schools, and encourage students who don’t qualify for college to learn trades.
I agree with you for two reasons that it is unlikely (at least in the near term) for all higher education institutions to require value added assessments of their curricula.
1. Most institutions fit Tier 3 and 4 criteria. They cater to “late bloomers,” those trying out college to see how it fits, and those seeking credentials and certifications. They mostly teach what other publish. Tier 3 and 4 private schools have relied on these students and their government tuition subsidies to stay fiscally solvent for almost four decades. Value added assessments would require major adjustments for institutions and students, and perhaps some school closings.
2. Tier 1 and some Tier 2 institutions are research, not teaching, oriented. They try to admit students ready to learning in these environments with little or no extra support. Value added assessments would fundamentally alter the vision and mission of these institutions without providing alternatives for these functions.
How do these points fit your observations?
What JuliaK said, plus this: colleges aren’t really designed to be job-training programs.
By which I mean, you can’t measure the success of college education exclusively via comparing the incomes and careers of college graduates vs non-graduates. Only certain majors lead to lucrative careers.
I smiled at your last sentence Joanne. My husband and I resolved awhile ago that we would direct our kids toward a trade rather than college unless they had a passionate interest in it. In a relatively short amount of time for much less money they’d have a career which would give them the freedom and money to pursue higher learning at their leisure.
Beautifully said, JuliaK. Only one quibble–we do have entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT. Colleges simply refuse to use them in any meaningful way to create a barrier to entry.
Within 20 miles of my house there are two state universities that compete for the same largely commuter student population. They compete by erecting fancy recreation centers, new stadiums and palatial dorms. All this is funded by federal grants, subsidized student loans and state money distributed per capita. About half of this student population is unprepared for college and if they shuffle their way to a degree it does not prepare them for the kind of job that really requires a degree. Many students leave saddled with debt.
The survival of these institutions is based on maintaining the charade that some lofty educational purpose is being served here. Retention is the watchword. Lowering standards is the de facto policy.
The public and the politicians are not ready to face the facts either. Parents have to make sensible decisions.
We should be grateful that colleges are still willing to push out the weakest students. My fear is that these sorts of reports will only further the trend towards grade inflation and low standards as colleges try to improve their retention rates [there was a time when even schools like Caltech and MIT would lose as many as a third of their entering classes]. The tragedy is that the weakest students go to college and often learn nothing. However, given this fact, it is a **virtue** of the current system that standards are still high enough to deter the worst students from receiving a degree.
Indeed, if students were well informed about their prospects I don’t see why it would be so bad for late bloomers to try. Imagine someone comes to you [the late bloomer with a poor record] and says, “Try to work towards this degree for proper training and potentially high financial rewards. There’s a 50-50 chance you won’t make it.” Depending on what is learnt, that’s not always a bad gamble.
The tragedy is when they don’t understand what’s entailed or worse that they finish the degree and neither learn anything useful nor derive value from the credential.
A more logical approach would be to require vocational and technical training as part of secondary education. This would remove college as a requirement for work. For example, it’s possible that one can learn clerical work and basic bookkeeping by taking a few months of technical school. From there, companies can select qualified applicants among their employees for further studies in business school. Some companies might even be willing to support employees financially (studies will be considered part of management training) in return for a service contract.
This system has many advantages:
1. It is much cheaper for parents and the government as it allows students to work right away and to use their earnings for further studies. (Of course, the government can offer subsidized loans which can be deducted in small amounts from pay or companies can subsidize tuition in exchange for a service contract.)
2. It removes the need for having athletic programs, recreation, etc., as it is companies and not students who will probably look into the effectivity of schools. Also, students will likely be working part- or full-time and will be answerable to employers, which means they will not spend too much time on extracurricular activities until they finish their training.
3. It allows schools to work with professional organizations, such that students will be evaluated not only by schools but by their employers.