A recent survey called the National Assessment of Adult Literacy survey has found basic literacy for college students to be declining, so that, for example, one out of five students at four-year colleges has basic or below basic quantitative skills. The same survey found that only 31 percent of four-year college students had proficient literacy skills.
These numbers are frightening to say the least and these declines, in part, spurred an August report by Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The recommendations include suggestions that universities move toward the sort of standardized testing so that "higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance."
This is nice in theory, but it won't help. This plan does little to address the underlying gulf between students on the one hand, and professors on the other, who have come to see "performance" in entirely different ways.
For students, "performance" has come to mean that a college should provide something like career skills or opportunities. There are a variety of reasons for this, but most stem from the devaluing of a high school education. Median income for college graduates is approximately 70 percent higher for college grads than high school grads, such that in a survey of 1,000 adults, the Chronicle of Higher Education found 52 percent believe "a four-year college degree is essential for success in our society."
The importance of a college education has caused the number of students attending college to swell, changing the nature of a college education for most students. College, for most students, is not a time to wonder about Kant's categorical imperative or John Stuart Mill's pragmatic ethics.
For many students, college is a place to gain a professional foothold. Nearly seven of 10 respondents in a survey by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education strongly agreed with the statement that a college degree is as essential now as a high school diploma had been in years past.
For academics, however, "performance" remains the sort of intellectual playground of ethical debates and epistemic quandaries.
As a graduate student, I spend a lot of time around professors. And I have never heard a professor speak of teaching their undergraduate students skills that might help them in the professional world.
If anything, academics detest the idea of preparing students for the professional world.
And this is why literacy among college students is dropping. Parsing out the differences between habitus and praxis has absolutely nothing to do with employability.
I also teach undergraduate classes and the distinction between my students' and my professors' opinions could hardly be more pronounced.
Whereas professors speak of their moral obligation to produce knowledge, my students tell me things like, "I just can't wait to get out of school and actually do something."
It makes perfect sense to me, then, that while my professors say that they have office hours to keep their undergraduate students away at all other times, I had a student who told me he had made it through four years of college reading just two books.
That student read his third book in my class, but it only happened when I threatened to fail him. It also happened, though, because I actually took the time to meet with him and help him see that becoming a better writer could be helpful professionally.
He came to my office excited and had genuinely insightful thoughts on the novel. But it took compromise.
Ultimately, professors will need to adapt. As more students enter college for purely professional reasons, purely abstract academic research will strike many students as less and less relevant.
Extrapolation from one data point is often inaccurate
Am I correct to infer from the examples used that the author is studying philosophy? It seems he is extrapolating from his experience in a field not known for career preparation to all fields of study at any university. I'm sure there are many universities and fields of study where the author's assessment is correct. But this is not universally true.
My experience is quite different. I'm a graduate student myself--in biology. I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry, and a master's in materials science engineering. In these fields, professors are very interested in preparing students for careers, both in academic research and in industry. I remember back in freshman chemistry being exhorted to follow their strict requirements for notebook entries because any future job would require the same standards. Engineering is so career-oriented that some of the other departments joke about it being a trade school putting on airs. The graduate program in organic chemistry practically guaranteed that if you got a PhD there, you could make a fortune working in the pharmaceuticals industry. My current biology thesis committee members have told me to make sure my project will develop useful skills for my career.
Now that I'm spending more time around faculty too, I have had the opposite experience from the author; the professors believe their job is to prepare students for scientific careers. At my particular campus, that's more likely to mean the Forest Service, NOAA, a natural history museum, or even medicine than it is becoming a faculty member. We also have programs to train science teachers for K-12 education.
If students want college to teach them job skills, not just appreciation of knowledge, they need to select a program that shares that goal. Some fields are more career-oriented than others; from my perspective, I'd say that the biological and physical sciences, and of course engineering, share an expectation that they are training people to work in the field. Some universities are more down-to-earth than others as well. Researching colleges is much easier these days, with college websites and online communities where you can discuss schools with current students to see how closely the college's performance matches its publicity.
In California, the California State University system tends to live up to its mission of preparing students for careers, rather than hosting illustrious research faculty. The campuses vary in size and location, as well as academic emphasis, so students can select the type of environment they prefer. I'm at one of the smaller campuses and appreciate the high degree of faculty involvement in undergraduate education. The programs here seem to emphasize undergraduate experience in research or internships, because this is so much more helpful in career preparation than coursework alone.
It's easy to look at one's personal experience and make general conclusions. But it's usually good to get some other points of reference if you want to apply your conclusions to situations other than your own.
by
khedges1 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 19 comments)
on Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 3:59:25 PM
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