Univ of VA as a Microcosm of Educational Profligacy
Watching the bumbling spectacle of bureaucratic incompetence emanating out of Charlottesville put me in mind of that amusing old country and western song “First you say you will and then you won’t,/ Then you say you do and then you don’t,/ What are you going to do?” (Dum-dum-dum, Da-dum-dum-dum.) Let’s see: it’s June 10: “University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan to step down.” Thus screameth the headline, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to conclude that by “step down” the story meant “got the boot.”
But wait, that was last week. This week the news, at least the headline, is University of Virginia Reinstates President. I say “headline” and not “the news” because the real news here is the impending collapse of that house of cards known as the institution of higher education in the United States. As Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, wrote in the WaPo, “higher education is on a collision course” — with fiscal reality. “Even though the United States spends more per higher-education student than any other Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development nation, we have worse results.”
The cost of higher education, i.e., not the real cost but your tuition bill, has been rising at something close to 7.5% per year for decades. Why? Say hello to all those shiny new administrators, Mom. Dad, let me introduce you to this lavish pension over here, and let’s not forget the university president, who is paid the way a CEO of a major, for-profit corporation would like to be paid.
President Sullivan wanted to take it easy. She is for “incremental” change, i.e., change patterned on the movement of a glacier, that is, not only slow but also destructive.
Something’s got to give, Ms. Neal observes, “or everything will.”
Think about this: There are more and more elite institutions in this country where junior’s annual college bill starts with a 6, as in sixty-thousand dollars.
Oh, but what about the generous government loan programs? Yes, what about them? Total student-loan debt now tops $1 trillion. That’s more than total credit-card debt for the U.S. It is more than auto-loan debt, and at least when you go into hock for a BMW you get wheels.
I’m afraid its too late for UVA. The usual crowd is busy slapping itself on the back for having exposed conspiracies and the machinations of the white bogeyman. They are busy playing checkers when they need to be playing chess.
“liberals who have battened on a diet of entitlement”
” guaranteed to root out and small-town “guns and religion” sentiment”
Alas, a spell-checker does not a copy editor make.
Nonetheless, this is another column worth reading from Roger. Thanks for writing it.
Well, maybe… but the beneficiaries of the higher education system in this country are about as well entrenched as any interest group ever has been, and they have perfected their fund raising apparatus to continue feeding the beast even as we are complaining about the cost.
You mentioned president Sullivan getting paid like a for-profit CEO would like to be paid. I think her salary was somewhere north of $450K. After she was asked to “step down”, the Board of Visitors was going to offer her a tenured professorship at around $360K per year. Holy cow. If this is what the majority of tenured professors is making, no wonder the cost of tuition is skyrocketing. Add to that the huge increase in the number of administrative personnel and the Taj Mahal campus facitlities that every institution feels they “have to have to compete”, and you can easily see why the higher education system is headed for a major upheaval.
The putrid mass now masquerading as an Education System can’t burst soon enough for me. Why many of us have sit on our collective butts and done nothing is just about as shameful, and I’m guilty. It’s as if I was lulled into a deep sleep until the elections of 2008. The Democrats made themselves a fortress in our colleges and universities, and the sorry outcomes have been hidden by a willing press, who were themselves trained in these institutions. And are hell bent on protecting them. Now they’ve run out of other people’s money, but unforturnately we were the other people, and now we’re all broke. What a sorry legacy.
I think the ‘hoos will ultimately regret this exercise: regardless of whether firing Sullivan — a co-conspirator with Fauxcahontas/Lie-a-watha in exceptionally sloppy (at best) “research” — was a good idea or not, reinstating her was the worst possible outcome. Bad for the Board of Visitors’ authority, bad for the governor, bad for any chance at reform at Mr. Jefferson’s university, and, hence, ultimately bad for the students and the taxpayers of Virginia. The only ones empowered by this are the the left-wing scum: Sullivan and the faculty.
Wahoo! become Boohoo!
“And let’s not forget the university president, who is paid the way a CEO of a major, for-profit corporation would like to be paid.”
That’s not true. According to a study conducted by the executive compensation data firm, Equilar, *median* compensation for the CEO of a major corporation was 10.8 million. The highest paid, most controversial, college president salaries–sometimes inflated by one-time payoffs–are less than half that. Median compensation for presidents of private colleges with budgets of at least 50 million was $386,000 in 2009. That’s a lot, I suppose, but does not come close to justifying the claim Kimball makes.
Some conservatives used to defend liberal education. It’s a disappointment to see so many of them doing a victory dance over the pressures universities are now facing to eliminate departments, like classics, that appear unprofitable. Whatever the tilt of higher education, there are plenty of conservatives working in colleges and universities, and it does their cause no good to side with the people who are ready, on the basis of very thin evidence (OMG! Stanford had on on-line course!), to blow everything up.
There is no question that colleges and universities face major challenges and could be doing a lot better; but it does no one any good to make false charges.
According to new accounts surrounding Harvard Professor Fauxcahantas Liz Warren, she and her husband, also a Harvard professor, are pulling down, between them, $900,000 a year, in salaries, book royalties, and speaking engagement fees. Not too shabby, wouldn’t you say?
No, not too shabby. But also not relevant to Roger Kimball’s false assertion that university presidents make salaries that major corporation CEO’s only wish for.
If you think Elizabeth Warren’s work does not merit her place at the pinnacle of her profession, I won’t argue with you, though I know almost nothing about it. If on the other hand, you think that it’s shocking for a couple at the very top of the academic profession to pull down $900,000, including book royalties and speaking fees, I don’t see why. Bruce Mann, Warren’s husband, is 36 years out from his Yale law degree. He is the author of three books and the recipient of multiple teaching awards. Is it shocking that he is also very well-off? How much should he earn? Let’s call Harvard the third best law school in the country. The average partner at Skadden, tenth in partner compensation in 2009, earned 2.16 million. If, speculating, we give Bruce Mann credit for half of the couple’s earnings, is it obscene that he earns a little more than 20% of the average Skadden partner’s earnings?
First of all “major corporations” is a huge caveat. Most CEO’s probably make a similar amount as a college president, but the responsibilities may be similar too. However, the accountability and expectations are not.
Most schools don’t have the goals we wish they would have. Say, “Produce graduates that are prepared to contribute economically and socially to society”. Their goals are appeasement and accommodation of the left. Financial integrity of the institution and providing a good value for students is not important.
Millions are spent on programs, buildings and staff that provide no direct benefit to providing a quality education. They don’t provide more professors or allow for more students. Every dollar spent on a Liberal feel-good program is one dollar directly added to reg fees.
We don’t need to eliminate Classics, we need to eliminate ALL of the X-Studies programs (people can always craft the degree from Social Science classes) and other fields of study that we know provide no meaningful future or opportunity for students. If private schools want to shove that steaming pile on their students, they should do it without subsidy.
“departments, like classics . . .”
I recommend Victor Davis Hanson’s “Who Killed Homer?” and “Bonfire of the Humanities,” both published in 2001, for trenchant accounts of the decline in classical education at our universities.
Outstanding exceptions exist, but a pompous, blinkered narrow-mindedness is all too prevalent in the field.
For the last 20 years or longer I’ve wondered why people get all wee-weed up about inflation in health care costs but didn’t seem to give a tinker’s damn about the skyrocketing cost of college. One one hand you have a service whose capabilities and quality have shot up like nothing else in a comparable period in human history, while OTOH you have far left America & capitalism-hating snobs (RBC’s for short) indoctrinating your kids in their fascist philosophy while charging you obscene amounts for doing so, AND largely neglecting actual education.
The masochism in much of the American public never ceases to amaze me.
The wonder stops when it is recognized that the players are not particularly forthright in their machinations and manipulations during the long march. Objective journalists are really advocates whether they realize it or not.
And people wonder why tuitions are so high.
Lost in the shuffle in the PSU/Sandusky horror was the fact that fired PSU President Spanier was getting an annual compensation package of $800,000 per year (one of the five top salaries in the country for University presidents), plus living rent free in the President’s mansion.
I had a friend of a friend ask me to edit a Masters thesis for him. It was shocking. Correct spelling of simple words (there were no others) was nonexistent. But even worse, the entire paper was incomprehensible. This college graduate, 1 1/2 years into a graduate degree program, was unable to string common words together into a sentence the meaning of which could be easily understood.
He’s probably a school principal by now.
A week ago I wrote a little post about the issue of governance at the University of Virginia Higher Education Bubble Update: “The Virginian Pilot Has Called for the Ouster of Helen Dragas … Which Means She Is Perfect for the Job.”
In the intervening week, the political pressure got too much for the Board of Visitors, the name for the university’s board of directors, who gave in and reinstated President Sullivan. The board acted shamefully in backing down and abdicating its responsibility. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Virginia’s faculty.
A Boards of Directors role in corporate life is to represent the shareholders, the real owners of the corporation. The UVA Board of Visitors is supposed to represent the citizens of Virginia, the real owners of UVA. Instead, like many corporate boards, the UVA Board of Visitors has been captured by the very people they ought to be overseeing. When that happens, things can go wrong very fast.
The problems facing the University of Virginia are similar to the problems facing virtually all higher educational institutions: the HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE. The prices they charge for their product have spiraled out of control and people are paying ridiculous prices for a certificate that has diminished value. Students are taking on debt to get the certificate, one-third don’t even get their degree, total student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt and it’s the one debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
Apparently the housing bubble didn’t teach us a thing. The one difference between the housing bubble and the higher education bubble is that if you are upside down in your mortgage, you at least have a home to live in.
Like the realtors and the mortgage lenders ten years ago, the inhabitants of academia are in denial. They may sense that there is something wrong, but they don’t know how to fix it and are in denial about the urgency of the problem. Stuck in a thousand year old time warp, they have as much grasp of why they are in decline as newspaper editors were when they were introduced to the Internet. As recently as this week, Leonard Pitts was trying to rally the troops behind the viability and absolute necessity of newspapers. Denial is not a just river in Egypt. The simple fact that you had to watch Fox News or go to the Internet to have heard of the Fast and Furious scandal illustrates why Pitts is wrong.
But back to UVA. The faculty staged a coup and won. It how owns the problem and is responsible for the solution. I have zero faith in their ability, indeed in their desire, to address the problem. And when UVA becomes a historical curiosity, reminiscent of Colonial Williamsburg just down the road, we will know who to blame.
Thomas Jefferson weeps.
The University of Virginia has announced that it will soon launch its new Center for the Contemplative Sciences — you know, yoga and stuff . . . no kidding. The Center will offer a master’s degree in Baloney Studies and will focus on Bogus Research. No doubt the Federal government is anxiously waiting to offer funding support to the scholars and students.
Anything and everything is a “science” nowadays. Real scientists should be up in arms.
Harris, you are right. But it has a Graduate School that already offers many fuzzy degrees (Environmental Thought & Practice, Studies in Women & Gender, Media Studies, Studies in Women & Gender, Asian Pacific American Studies, Comparative Literature, Astrology (almost!)so Contemplative Studies should fit right in!
And even though they may just have a few loons in the program, it will carry 75% of the cost to operate as a large program. They should take a more business approach and ask whether a program (teaching or otherwise) adds benefit. Asian-Pacific Islander Studies, obviously provides no benefit. With the whole population of all of the people in this program being less than 1Million, it is a waste. It is a class someone can take at a few universities. I mean, most of these people don’t even identify with other islands anyway! And it goes on and on.
Sullivan’s carreer now is forever cloaked with garments she had hoped to shed.
The mills of the Gods are not through grinding on her yet.
The problems of higher education are part and parcel of our nation’s problems with education in general.
It all boils down to one simple fact that is deliberately ignored:
You can’t teach dumb kids to be smart.
If someone is college material, then they will benefit from higher education. If someone is not college material, he or she is incapable of achieving a college education.
But thanks to the willful misapprehension of the famous phrase “all men are created equal,” entire institutions have been created to “educate” the ineducable.
The results are as predictable as they are pathetic: Compromised academic standards. Degree programs cut from whole cloth that only exist to indoctrinate the not-so-bright and to make busy work for them till graduation day. All in exchange for that precious lucre: government student loans.
This is why degrees in “STEM” fields have become particularly valuable. It isn’t possible to water down the curriculum, let alone create an entirely imaginary subject of no value to anyone. A person with a physics degree has to learn physics. At the very least this means the mastery of advanced mathematics and the ability to solve a problem logically. A person with a Chicano Studies degree doesn’t have to know to think. The only thing he or she has to know is that all persons with a Spanish surname are perpetual victims, and which leftist sentiments to cop on command. Four legs good, two legs bad.
A STEM major has proven their ability to master a difficult subject, making him or her a good investment as an employee. A Leftist-Studies major has proven his gullibility and lack of sound judgment, making that person someone you don’t want around, not even to empty the trash.
The problem is not Liberal Arts. I graduated from college in 1953, with a major in Physics. Through some academic quirk, Chemistry majors could get an B.S. Physics majors were required to get an A.B. That meant I had to take a lot of “extra” (i.e., non-Physics/Math) courses in literature, history, English, etc., in addition to the courses for my major. In effect I crammed five years of college into four years, graduating with 150 semester hours instead of the standard 120.
Ever since, I’ve been grateful for that A.B. My high school English teacher used to tell us, “A technical education teaches you how to make a living. A liberal education teaches you how to live.” She was right. It was work, but I got both.
What is appalling is that the content of “liberal arts” has been corrupted over the nearly 60 years since I graduated from college. It is no longer “teaching you how to live,” but indoctrination in hatred of Western culture. I, for one, will not be sorry to see the bubble burst. Maybe we can get back to the way things were when I was an undergraduate.
One of the commenters decries the pending elimination of Classics departments. Many of these have already dropped the requirements of Greek and Latin, and are little more than subdivisions of already weak History departments. He also accuses conservatives of dancing on the graves of the universities, as if learning is to be a thing of the past. What rubbish. Learning will probably be advanced with the decline of the univesity. What we are hopefully ridding ourselves of is the pretense of learning in which our children are put through diploma mills, told they’ve been enlightened, and loosed on the world with an unearned sense of entitlement.
I mentioned the elimination of classics departments because, if the Washington Post is correct, Sullivan was ousted in part because she “lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.” Whatever the condition of classics departments elsewhere, the classics department at UVA is certainly not a subdivision of the history department and, far from having eliminated Greek and Latin requirements, expects majors to do most of their work in the original Greek or Latin. Classics is moreover, deeply rooted at the University of Virginia. I am with James Ceaser (no Western-culture-hater he) who wrote this in the Post: “Jefferson would have argued against such cuts. He considered the study of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as well as German, to be an essential component of the university’s curriculum. And he insisted on an education that “generates habits of application, of order, and the love of virtue.” There are financial bottom lines, and then there are academic ones.” Both of these bottom lines matter, to be sure.
“What rubbish” is not an argument, and no one said that universities as presently constituted are the only environment in which learning can take place. I do think that it would be helpful to distinguish, as, for example, the Jack Miller Center for Teaching American Founding Principles tries to, between programs that are worthy of support and programs that aren’t. I also think that people who have in the past defended liberal education should not get in bed with people who have no sympathy for liberal education. Handing the keys to people who disparage programs not because they are unrigorous but because they are “obscure” is hardly likely to make schools less like diploma mills or puncture anyone’s unearned sense of entitlement.
Everybody knows that universities are politicized from top to bottom. UVa might still have a strong classics department — I don’t know. I do know that the UVa law student Johnthan Perkins lied about being harassed by the police. He graduated and has a job somewhere. President Sullivan and others on the faculty defended Mr. Perkins.
College education in the liberal arts in the US is a mess, as Roger says. But graduate education in science and engineering is not so bad. Students still learn to think, reason, criticize, and construct arguments. In fact I think it is fair to say that American science is still the envy of the world.
Of course, once the government manages to devise and impose some kind of “Title IX” for science, which mercifully was too low on President Obama’s list to be implemented in his first term, we will lose our edge there as well.
What do undergraduates get from four years in college? Good question. Another good one: What do graduate students get from 10 more years in college? Yes, ten years (or more) is typical for Ph.D. programs nowadays. It’s quicker to get through medical school.
Take a look at the “100 reasons NOT to go to grad school” blog:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
As big as the higher ed bubble is, there’s still not enough room to employ all of the people coming out of graduate school with credentials that are of little use outside the bubble. Yet more and more people are rushing into grad school because they don’t know what to do with their $100,000 bachelor’s degrees.
In the category of be careful what you wish for, American higher education is being radically transformed. The US, at the instigation of this federal DoED and the Quality Assurance process pushed by the regional accreditors (who aren’t so regional after all. Think Goliath), is dramatically reforming higher ed. Think Outcomes Based Education comes with that tuition check and all that debt.
The new direction for American higher education was developed by the Lumina Foundation and is consistent with the worldwide radical restructuring of higher education being pushed by UNESCO. It’s called a “transformational competence-based Degree Profile.” The learning is through assigned tasks and major projects with an emphasis on application of skills and knowledge. The DQP was released in January 2011.
Lumina says the DQP is based on “innovative, integrative, inquiry-focused and colloborative pedagogies.”
It looks to me like College Ready for All as the aim of K-12 means a greatly reimagined definition of the purpose of college. From what I can see it looks like even less knowledge for all that money.
I guess that will make it accessible for all. But will anyone have a credential that represents more than the paper it is written on?
Exactly.
You can’t teach dumb people to be smart. So instead they are reworking the meaning of a college degree to include the unintelligent, all under the ridiculous notion that by doing so they can somehow be improved, and with a blind eye to the fact that doing this depreciates the value of a college education to the point of worthlessness. The brand equity of “college educated” is slipping every day, and nonsense like this is the reason why.
This is precisely what happened with secondary education when a high school diploma became an assumption rather than an achievement.
If human beings were longer lived and time spent churning the hamster wheel of schooling for an increasingly elusive payoff was not time wasted, then this might not matter so much. Someone who expected to live to be 1000 might not begrudge spending 20 or more years in a classroom without truly learning anything, for no reason other than social expectation. But we are not such creatures.
The bubble will burst when possessing a college degree ceases to carry with it the assumption of an educated mind.
Colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them.
Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.
If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.
I am a grad of UVA and have been alarmed at the behavior of this university. It is becoming a model for how not to be accountable for the millions spent on administration over the years and the sky rocketing cost of tuition. I also heard that they were considering the re-appointment of the infamous climate-gate co-conspirator Michael Mann (now at Penns State and former UVA professor) to head some kind of PC global warming department. Needless to say everyone on campus has bought into this religious global scare mongering scam in a big way. I simply cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves semi bright academically cannot see through this global warming debacle and the incredible damage it has done to our energy industry over the past years. If this is the direction of the university, they have lost my support forever.
I think the bubble is bursting right now. With about 50% of the current graduates unable to find any decent jobs, both parents and students are wondering what a college degree really is worth these days. Especially if you come out of school roughly $100,000 in debt and with no prospects of getting a decent job. Four years of college and all that debt is a stiff price to pay if all you can find is a job at Starbucks. I think you’ll see fewer and fewer people buying into this nonsense that they need a Liberal Arts degree in “marketing” when all they can find is a very low-paying job at K-Mart. The thing that will kill higher education isn’t higher education itself, but a chronically bad job market, and we have one of those right now. Colleges will have to either become more competitive and cost-effective, or they will lose their customers. You can only squeeze so much money out of your customers and Americans right now are resenting the fact that they’re being squeezed.
Yesterday I became aware of this $12 million Contemplative Sciences Center that opened at UVa in April. This press release http://www.uvatibetcenter.org/?page_id=5760 indicates a contemplated partnership between the traditional disciplines and the contemplative traditions.
When reason and emotion are treated as equally valid forms of thought, rational thought and knowledge are usually jettisoned quickly. Jefferson must be weeping somewhere.
This is especially troublesome since outcomes based education is already being proposed as the new model for higher ed. That partnership with the College of Ed suggests this emphasis on social and emotional learning will become the dominant emphasis of the desired outcomes.
Which is not what most people assume a college degree means, especially from a school with such a vaunted tradition.
You think that’s bad (and it is), but EVERY high school in our region (they’re big schools) has a 10-15 million dollar theater in it. One high school that had just a regular theater (that most adults somehow survived with)has not built one for $16million+. And we wonder why kids don’t take math?
I guess this will date me. I completed the “standard” five year undergraduate program followed by law school at a Pac 12 state school. I landed a summer clerk job at a monstrous private law firm after my second year. It was for the then stupefying salary of $1,000 per month, or stated differently, about $2,000 per month more than a summer law clerk is worth to a firm. At the end of the 13 week clerkship, I had paid for both my undergrad and law school tuition in total — a year and a half before taking the Bar Exam!
Of course, my first semester of undergrad instate tuition cost around $250. I was thus rightly indignant when my last semester of law school approached $1,000, a quadrupling in eight years! There’s a lesson in Progressivism in here somewhere.
Update: Just saw the Obamacare ruling. People should recognize that the court didn’t uphold Obamacare — it crafted Robertscare, a new healthcare law based in the government power to tax. Who knew the court had that power? Guess my legal education was an epic fail. Well this should guarantee Romney’s victory by landslide proportions. Who will think the Tea Party is dead 24 hours from now?
Instead of getting into drugs, extortion and prostitution the mafia should have gotten into higher education. It is the biggest racket of them all and it’s totally legal, unbelievable dough and no chance of going to jail.
I think the ultimate answer to the problems with the education system is at hand: the Internet.
The objective of an eduation is essentially to learn things that either interest you or prepare you for a career in a field that interests you (or, ideally, both). The only reason a college is actually needed in this equation is that your degree is your proof that you did the required work to be considered knowledgeable in your desired field and, so far, the college is the only legitimate grantor of these degees.
It seems to me that if the degree-granting process could be separated from the attending-college process, you’d soon find that colleges weren’t all that essential, at least colleges in the traditional sense. I expect that some degrees could be earned entirely via online facilities or even old-fashioned paper books. I think you could learn most of the “studies” subjects and a lot of the traditional arts subjects by reading and online seminars. Then, once you’d learned enough, you could take the exam for that subject and get credit for it, if the exam was offered and graded by an independent testing facility. Get enough credits and you get your degree.
Clearly, some subjects need active hands-on training. No one wants a surgeon who has only read a bunch of medical books! But who’s to say that private institutions can’t be set up to teach those skills? Aren’t they already in place in many cases? Let doctors and engineers and all those other skilled professions apprentice in real world settings and then have them take exams from independent testing facilities.
You’d probably need some standardization of what skills a person needs to be a surgeon or accountant or whatever but I expect that a lot of that is already in place. Then someone like you or I could learn the skills needed to do one of those jobs and then get degrees for those skills assuming we can pass the exams, all without having gone to a college. And if the employers have more input to the prerequisites for the degrees – as I think they should – there’s be a strong push to remove those courses that are largely irrelevant to specialist degrees. Then we wouldn’t get most doctors, engineers, etc. taking Psych 101 or Astronomy or other courses just because their college insisted they needed that to be well-rounded individuals. That might well reduce the amount of time it takes to get these degrees and would likely also reduce costs considerably, simply be reducing the number of overpaid and unnecessary administrators.
Mind you, if the colleges actually started getting some real competition, I think they’d figure out for themselves that a lot of their bureaucrats are unnecessary as are some of the courses. Wage competition between college and private educators would also tend to drive wages down.
The key in higher education, if you are advising a college-bound kid, is to get a Bachelor of Scienct (BS). That is the only way that a college education is near to being worthwhile.
A Bachelor of Arts (BA) is all but worthless.
BS for the technical future.
BA for Politicall Correct Progressive indoctrination and victimhood trainin
At what point did it become okay for a university degree to provide no tangible return? The British model was originally set up to train religious men who needed a deeper understanding of certain subjects to perform their jobs. The German technical model has always been about return on knowledge studied. When did we lose our way?
Lance-one thing that has been positively lethal is looking at K-16 or now P-20. The first treats elementary, secondary, and college as one system. Student is a source of revenue all along the way and that has not encouraged anything but paper credentialing.
P-20 now is Preschool through graduate programs. This is even worse because you get Qualifications Frameworks that start telling private employers what type of training and credentials their employees are to have. Hard on smaller businesses who are in the best position to know if employee has desired knowledge and skill. More paperwork and regulation.
There has also always been a recognition that you could not shift K-12 away from the transmission of knowledge unless you changed the nature of college. I would argue that the Contemplative Sciences Center coupled with the Lumina Foundation push into a Competency approach instead of knowledge confirms their is at least an attempt to dramatically alter higher ed.
The administrators are on board and the accreditation agencies and the federal DoED. The only way to stop this expensive travesty will be widespread recognition as to what is going on. I correspond with people in the UK and Australia where the higher ed transformation is further along. Hardly anyone is pleased with what is happening.
But the Qualifications Frameworks force everyone to pay for a worthless credential to even be considered for a job.
Here’s the real problem:
http://unclevladdi.posterous.com/a-higher-cost-education-101#
Njoi!
Here’s the real problem:
http ://unclevladdi DOT posterous DOT com/a-higher-cost-education-101#
Njoi!
Ran across this tidbit on a Govt site, 17% of the millionaires in the US are in the education field.