The first two years at college are less about book knowledge and more about carnal knowledge, these days. College instructors care less about teaching then about putting an academic feather into their elitist hats. Respect and research dollars come to the academics who publish not to those who teach disinterested students.
This toxic brew of booze and self interest results in stupider college students (and poorer parents).
USA Today reports the shocking findings:
Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Findings are based on transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.
After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.
Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.
[Cross posted at Liberty Pundits]
The real problems with higher education aren’t even being addressed by this article (Glenn Reynolds has done a superb job on the issue):
1. Most jobs requiring a college degree shouldn’t.
2. Most kids in college shouldn’t be there and would fail if there were any academic standards (and do fail even with the lack of them).
3. College education in anything but the hard sciences is a waste.
4. Colleges actively pursue and harm young Americans by saddling them with obscene debt for an often useless product.
5. Colleges deceive young people with funding deals that help the college administrators.
6. College tuition is inflated by government subsidies. If the Federal government didn’t up their loan amounts, colleges would be forced to cut costs.
7. The federal government should not be encouraging kids to take on bad debt and subsidizing this behavior.
Not only does college dumb down kids, they’re paying an astronomical amount of money to get dumber.
Parents need to heavily consider whether college is a good investment for their children.
Moe Lane
Dan McLaughlin
Dan Spencer
Jeff Emanuel
Neil Stevens
Credentialism keeps It All Afloat...
Repair_Man_Jack (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 2:22PM EDT (link)Fat, Drunk, Stupid and credentialed can be a fairly lucrative way to go through life…
Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic “recovery” is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded *** of what’s left of that economy – James Howard Kunstler
Well
freemanja1991 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 2:34PM EDT (link)in an hour and a half i’ll be in bio 212 or as i call it Fox Bashing Global warming pushing Hippocrit 212
I, for one, feel dumber now than when I graduated high school.
michael_j_lambert (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 3:05PM EDT (link)Then again, when I left high school, the number of things I knew I didn’t know was much smaller than it is today. Furthermore, I managed to charm my way into a school that actually takes academic rigor seriously, so I have no easy classes this semester. The easiest is the sequel to the class that, quite literally, ate my life last semester.
Then again, I’m going into engineering. If I didn’t feel dumber now than then, I would probably not be paying attention in my classes.
Ain't that the truth!
uselogic Wednesday, January 19th at 3:14PM EDT (link)I inherited a young lady in my department a few years back who could barely string two sentences together. Her written work was full of errors. Couldn’t do simple arithmetic. And she got one professor disciplined because he didn’t teach verbatim from the syllabus and refused to give test questions/answers out in advance. Serious entitlement issues! Bad news… she had a 3.8 GPA then and is now a public shool teacher.
Hate to show my age but that never would’ve happened when I was in the same university a couple of decades ago. In my opinion, colleges have become little more than a high-priced commodity (everybody HAS to go) and less and less useful in real life.
kowalski
uselogic Wednesday, January 19th at 3:17PM EDT (link)… little more than high-priced commodities.. (above).
Cut and paste is not always your friend.
Big Ed is the mother of all bubbles
JSobieski (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 3:25PM EDT (link)Before we start nickle and diming people who perform organ transplants, build artificial hearts, and other life-saving technologies, how about we cut off the absolute waste that is our K-college educaitonal system?
Did you know that China has been losing manufacturing jobs since 1995? For the specific data, see Table 1 in the following link: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/07/art2full.pdf
K-12 Will Be A Waste As Long As Its Public Education
IJB Wednesday, January 19th at 3:45PM EDT (link)Wanna improve K thru 12 education? – Get rid of universal public education.
I find it hard to believe that anyone is stupider
kyle8 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 3:48PM EDT (link)than my friends and I were in college.
“Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty”
Kyle
I know who.
Greg Garrison (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 4:20PM EDT (link)The individuals who partook of the same activities as you and your friends but did not appreciate the various forms of speculative fiction.
http://www.thejoyofreason.com
“The art of compromise, which is central to a successful democracy, is not something that people learn overnight.” – Donald Rumsfeld
heh
kyle8 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 5:20PM EDT (link)I ran for a seat on the student council under the pseudonym “Beastman” and won!
Then I showed up to one student council meeting and made a motion that we remove half of the yearbook funds and use it to fund a toga party.
And it nearly passed!
Then my friends and I got probation for a drunken stunt where we took a goat our of the AG building and put him on the Library roof.
/good times.
“Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty”
Kyle
heh
kyle8 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 5:20PM EDT (link)I ran for a seat on the student council under the pseudonym “Beastman” and won!
Then I showed up to one student council meeting and made a motion that we remove half of the yearbook funds and use it to fund a toga party.
And it nearly passed!
Then my friends and I got probation for a drunken stunt where we took a goat our of the AG building and put him on the Library roof.
/good times.
“Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty”
Kyle
k, what kind of lame college kids
proudmarinemom (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 6:07PM EDT (link)would vote AGAINST the toga party!? I would have supported you.
Seriously, my all-girls, Catholic Prep high school was waaay tougher than my four years at Pagan State U. I had two professors take copies of my term papers and use them as teaching tools to show the public school kids how to write coherently and provide proper footnote citations. It was embarrassing.
But I’ll admit that the past two years in Biochemistry and Anatomy at the community college has been hard, at least at my age. Great professors there — no tenure, no research projects. They just teach.
Send your kids to community college until they prove themselves, then they can pay their own way to get the Bachelor’s, if they’re serious.
Having served on the Board of Regents of a
Tbone (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 4:17PM EDT (link)liberal arts focused university for over 10 years, I can assure you it is all a scam. But, why work between the ages of 18-22 if you don’t have too? Plus, employers still ask if you have a degree. (It’s odd how seldom they want to see the diploma or transcript)
Universities exist for the benefit of the faculty and administration. The students are just their meal ticket.
Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.
Learning as its own reward is mostly gone.
Locked and Loaded (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 5:03PM EDT (link)With no intrinsic value in learning, students have a failed sense of the extrinsic value of learning. Hence, the marked increase in the willingness to cheat, plagiarize, or otherwise game the system.
No GM, GE, or any GSE for me.
Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?
Matthew 20:15 NIV
College is the new high school.
bjf182 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 6:19PM EDT (link)And grad school is the new college. Sad really. College is not the ‘right’ that the left makes it out to be. If your majoring in a program that you can’t making a living at (looking at you art history!) GET OUT. If your only future job prospect is teaching said program at the collegiate level GET OUT. If no one recruits for the skill set your building GET OUT.
The public library can indulge you in all the ‘mind expanding’ areas you want to major in without the debt.
182, you are so right
renny (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 7:02PM EDT (link)What I teach to freshmen and sophomores in college today, I already had in high school in the 50s–some in what was then Jr. High, in a little hick school system with mostly elderly women teachers who’d all been educated in 2-year “normal” schools, but knew their disciplines like any PhD today.
We MEMORIZED everything which is why altho’ I had biology 50 years ago, I can still remember the taxonomy of a dozen animals and plants to this day.
Today, students know the words to degenerate rap songs but cannot read college-level texts, write a standard, formulaic essay, or compute without a sophisticated calculator.
college is just high school, but with ash trays
macbookben (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 8:59PM EDT (link)n/t
Proud reformed liberal, born-again conservative (since 1999)
I would encourage people to find small, private
runner12 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 11:09PM EDT (link)colleges. I know they are more expensive (I have the student loans to prove it), but they are well worth it. I was able to obtain an excellent education while having a fun college life at the same time.
I would encourage people to find small, private
runner12 (Diary) Wednesday, January 19th at 11:09PM EDT (link)colleges. I know they are more expensive (I have the student loans to prove it), but they are well worth it. I was able to obtain an excellent education while having a fun college life at the same time.