An adjunct teaching night classes at a private college and a community college, Professor X is stuck “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower,” he writes in The Atlantic. Many of his students are so poorly prepared they can’t possibly pass an introductory English class.
The article “will be used as evidence that we are not doing people any favors by letting them into college,” writes Kevin Carey on The Quick and the Ed. He draws a different lesson: In K-12 and college, students with the greatest needs often get the worst education. Then we “call their failure inevitable.”
Instead of using evening and extension classes as a profit center, we should improve second-chance education, Carey argues. If necessary, drop Hamlet and poetry in favor of reading modern-day prose that students are more likely to understand.
For at least the past half century, we, as a nation, having been trying to implement mass higher education on the cheap. As more and more students go to college — because they need college, because in the information age, access to opportunity is dramatically curtailed without the knowledge and skills it provides — we’ve put lower-income students, first-generation students, disadvantaged students, working students, immigrant students, minority students, older students, disabled students, students from often dismal high schools, in the colleges of last resort. In the dirty classrooms, with the underpaid professors, teaching the wrong curriculum.
College is not essential to happiness and success, writes Liam Julian on Flypaper. After all, most Americans do not earn a college degree and yet “such degree-less people do not all lead lives of quiet desperation.” And a watered-down, no-Hamlet degree isn’t going to help Professor X’s students earn more than plumbers — or adjunct professors.
A university campus is not the place for teaching the illiterate to read and write, Julian argues.
A college diploma holds no inherent value, and if we continue to push unqualified students into university classrooms, a diploma’s value will dip and in 10 years, ed reformers will be mounting “All kids to graduate school†campaigns.
Many students go to community college to learn the reading, writing and math skills they should have learned much earlier. As an adjunct, my sister taught eighth-grade English to high school graduates at several community colleges. Her students had to pass her class before they were allowed into for-credit classes.
Prof. X also teaches at a private college, which should demand basic literacy before cashing students’ tuition checks.
The four-year, 36-course bachelor degree is obsolete, writes Wick Sloane in Inside Higher Education. He proposes letting students take whatever courses they need to get their first job with the AP English Language/Composition and Statistics exams — passed by the age of 21 — as proof of competence. If they need more education later, they can return for more classes. Go here for a link to his “Common Sense” pamphlet.
“we, as a nation, having been trying to implement mass higher education on the cheap”…I wonder what % of the GDP we would have to spend on education before he no longer considered it “on the cheap.”
If experience is part of truth, then this is more evidence of what I see all around me.
My technical profession has all eliminated the 5 year program for a Bachelor’s degree to insist all must have a 4 year + 2 yr ‘masters’ on top. My colleagues who work in our field greatly lament that what we are getting out of the alimentary canals of upper education are very poorly trained in fundamental concepts, let alone in ‘how to think’. They know what to think, how to vote, and what’s allowed to be said -or not-. I personally understand that I am not the most eloquent of speakers or writers, but these poor children cannot even construct a business letter, conduct a meeting with any sort of revelance,or find answers without a computer connected to Google or Wikipedia. With few exceptions, the majority are like ‘a cow in front of a piano’, to use a descriptive Latin expression.
As a small business, I’m guessing that 25% of our time here is teaching them to diaper themselves, so to speak. It translates into the service and administration sides of business and government, too. Try to get something done in your town or village, and if it’s not in the rule book, it cannot be done, it’s not allowed, and there’s no other way to do it.
When I explain to my clients the 20% increase in time to do what we’ve done for 30 years is due to administrative approvals, and offer that they can do that part themselves, they do it once, and then complain no more.
An $80,000.00 piece of paper that says for exmaple I’m an F-16 pilot (or insert your profession here), and I truly believe I’m an F-16 pilot because I’ve flown one on a computer, or listened to a flight instructor who’s knows flight theory but little air time for 56 credit hours, does not make me one. A non-papered pilot who’s flown 1200 hours in single engine, multi engine, turbo and jet is a much better bet.
GDP spending has some to do with it, I’ll agree. But it’s certainly not the major part.
“An $80,000.00 piece of paper that says for exmaple I’m an F-16 pilot (or insert your profession here), and I truly believe I’m an F-16 pilot because I’ve flown one on a computer, or listened to a flight instructor who’s knows flight theory but little air time for 56 credit hours, does not make me one”…quite true. Although I’d observe that flight simulators (at least the high-end multimillion dollar ones used by the airlines and by high-end flight schools) come *much* closer to simulating the behavior of a real airplane than anything in an MBA program comes to simulating the operations of a real business.
Even given the high quality of aircraft simulators, some are in the industry are concerned about overreliance on simulation and formal education vs actual experience. About a year ago, there was an interesting article on this topic by a long-time pilot who has also worked as an FAA Inspector.
You have to start from where you are.
Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of students graduating from high school unable to read, write and calculate to an adult standard. Therefore, it’s entirely appropriate, and a good use of taxpayers’ money, to teach those skills to adults willing to learn them. I’m delighted that my local community college takes this responsibility seriously, offering many remedial classes.
We should also improve K-12 education so fewer adults end up illiterate and innumerate.
“A college diploma holds no inherent value, and if we continue to push unqualified students into university classrooms, a diploma’s value will dip and in 10 years, ed reformers will be mounting “All kids to graduate school†campaigns.”
I’ve been saying that for over two years. The best kids of today understand that they have to go to grad school. I am also telling them to major in math or science, even if they don’t have much interest in it, because the courses are impossible to fake.
Again, there must be some distinction between “going to college” and “college ready”. Perhaps we should split the community college system in half. Half take kids who don’t have any skills at all (and therefore should be free, given that the public schools owed them an education and let them down.
We also have to have tiers of aptitude. Passing AP tests, regardless of age or education, would be a good requirement. SAT Subject test scores would be another. Still another would be an SAT/ACT test score (for lower levels of achievement)
The government should issue tiered certificates. Ideally, these should not be given to illegal immigrants, which would give lower skilled Americans a strong incentive to study for these markers.
Mike…”cow in front of a piano”…I have observed that people who have advanced degrees–but are not particularly brilliant–are often sticklers for “doing things by the book.” They are insistent on applying whatever methodologies they learned in school, whether or not these actually have anything to do with the situation at hand. This may have something to do with having learned to parrot abstractions that they don’t really fully grasp.
I suspect that some of these same individuals, if their history was more about work experience and less about formal education, would show more judgment and creativity in doing actual work.
It is only in the U.S. that a person who didn’t take school seriously or took more time to understand the material has a second chance by going to junior college. Many kids don’t really click in until they get a bit older. A friend of mine was getting D’s in Algebra when he was a freshman in high school. He ended up going to a small 2nd tier state school, got his grades up, and then transferred to U. of Illinoise as a math major. I asked him what was up in high school – he said his brain truly didn’t get the math then.
-Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of students graduating from high school unable to read, write and calculate to an adult standard. Therefore, it’s entirely appropriate, and a good use of taxpayers’ money, to teach those skills to adults willing to learn them. I’m delighted that my local community college takes this responsibility seriously, offering many remedial classes.
But they aren’t ready to learn. Most of them have no idea that they can’t read, or can’t calculate. They can’t even do what’s asked of them in remedial classes, and most of them aren’t taking that seriously–they give up, drop out, or otherwise get confused what the issue is, since “they are supposed to go to college.”
Teachers, parents, administrators cant’ agree on what reading and writing to an adult standard is. How do we get to where they do agree?
Carey claims that the issue in developmental courses is lack of resources. The issue is not the pay and quality of the adjuncts, how often the room is cleaned or even the curriculum. The resource issue is one of time and effort on the part of the students who take these courses. It simply takes a phenomenal effort on the part of an adult to make up for the grossly deficient K-12 education these people have had.
We can teach someone to do operations with fractions well enough to get a passing grade on a test but that does not mean the student has mastered fractions sufficiently to succeed at algebra. It takes weeks of distributed practice on tedious worksheets to gain level of mastery where the student will retain these skills and perform them quickly, accurately and with his mind mostly engaged on a higher level problem.
How can anyone learn to write well unless he reads? It is not enough to be able to read. One has to read often at a level above where one aspires to write. For the most part, developmental students are not readers, so no amount of writing instruction will take.
Most of our developmental students are not told what it takes to succeed or don’t want to hear it. The universities are in it for the money but in truth the general public wants to delude itself that 1) a college education is realistic for all students and 2) college is a good investment for both the taxpayer and the student himself. The universities are in a bind since pandering to the public’s illusions is necessary to sustain the level of public support they need.
I have observed that people who have advanced degrees–but are not particularly brilliant–are often sticklers for “doing things by the book.†They are insistent on applying whatever methodologies they learned in school, whether or not these actually have anything to do with the situation at hand. This may have something to do with having learned to parrot abstractions that they don’t really fully grasp.
True. Of course, most of these students are engineering or business majors.
I’m beginning to think, in our current culture, the only thing that might *possibly* improve K-12 education is a class lawsuit (by students and/or taxpayers) requiring the states to pay for all remedial classes to bring high school graduates, *so interested*, up to standard.
Of my children, one child was the beneficiary of a teacher who advocated on her behalf, and was instrumental in enrolling her in the state gifted program, so that she could receive instruction up to her level. I have another child (two years older), who has the same intellectual ability, but had no teacher advocacy. She is now enrolled in junior high “advanced” classes (math, science, language arts) which ARE A JOKE. There is no “advanced” aspect to the class: the students are unprepared (academically), the teacher is not experienced/competent, there is no classroom discipline, and much of my child’s time is wasted (in “advanced” math, they spent a week copying a Scooby-Doo drawing from a smaller grid to a larger grid).
Yes, I’m going to complain and advocate for my child. But getting into the “gifted” program requires advocacy on the part of a teacher (they have to document certain things that can only be culled from the classroom/educational data). The worst thing is, I see my daughter becoming very jaded/cynical regarding the whole educational process. She’s in a Catch-22 — she can’t get high-enough grades to support matriculation into the gifted program, because the teacher can’t teach/control the classroom enough to impart the material needed to earn high scores.
I’m not a big fan of lawyers or legal remedies, but I think it has to be recognized that our current public education system is simply *starving/depriving* some of our very intelligent/readily-prepared-to-learn students of a quality education. THAT HAS GOT TO STOP.
I do feel sorry for Mrs L., the poor middle aged woman in the article who has never operated a computer and can’t string together even a decent paragraph. It’s heartbreaking when she receives her “F”, but at least she had a chance… and if she had a chance, so did the 37 year old enlisted guy who works full time, raises 5 kids, blogs semi-regularly, and just completed 18 credit hours with a 3.83 GPA.