Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Two questions about American colleges:
What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.
I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.
High school attainment in 1950 was 34.3% and Bachelors was 6.2%, 2019 this was 90.1% and 36%.
Neither high school or undergrad are as selective as they were. I'd expect the quality of graduates to suffer.
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
Yes.
Although we appear to see a similar increase of students in high school, and a corresponding reduction in average quality of graduates. The inflation and lack of rigor in high school is partially why so many would need undergrad studies now.
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