"The comments divided relatively predictable ways, according to whether the commentor were inclined toward Republican or Democratic policies, but relatively little energy was given to the question of the value of higher education. Most people can appreciate the beneficial technologies will that depend upon the scientific training and research that goes on in universities, although not everybody recognizes the debt that society owes to higher education in such developments.
Higher education can mean more than learning about science or classical literature. My own first learning experience in higher education had little to do with a classroom. I found myself in contact with a much wider variety of people that I had ever previously encountered. That in itself broadened my perspective on life. Classes in history, as well as classical music and literature, helped to give me a sense of the life and culture of other parts of the world. My greatest benefit from higher education was a curiosity about the world that I had lacked before.
Let me turn for a moment to an observation about my field, economics. Many of the economists who other economists recognize for making the greatest contributions to their field are people who benefited from exposure to different fields. The winner of the not-really Nobel Prize, Kenneth Arrow, was trained as a meteorologist during the Second World War. Similarly, Nobelist Paul Samuelson worked with mathematicians, engineers, and physicists developing radar during the war. Phil Mirowski’s Machine Dreams is filled with such examples. Of course, scientists have gotten inspiration from similar experiences.
In short, education in general is not something that can be easily measured in objective terms. Ideas, which initially seemed kooky, often later turn out to be crucial for future development.
The me finish by saying that my complaints are not the product of some disgruntled academic, upset over low pay, mistreatment, or any other personal problems. I enjoy what I do. In fact, if I were willing to retire, I could teach half-time for a few years while collecting my pension. If I did, my income would increase but I can only do so [keep teaching] for five years. Consequently, I pay to keep teaching. I have good relationships with my chairman, my dean, and president of the University.
My anger is directed toward the forces that are working to destroy a world, which I love."----------------------------------------
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Anyone who knows academics knows most love their work, whether a teaching prof , a research prof or one who balances both.
They would also know academics tend to see the sky falling with every minor set back, tend to huddle together and spread pessimism, and tend to have an "us-vs.-the-world" mentality. Public school profs tend to whine perhaps more than most, especially when not getting "enough" taxpayer dollars.
Relax, the sky is not falling, higher education has lots of resources and lots of really good people, and is still doing the mission.
Problem? Sure. Crisis? No.
And higher education is different. In addition to preparation for a career, a college education enables each student to pursue, among required and optional courses, interests heretofore only begun or not started at all.
While my career is firmly in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), my freshman history professor reversed the damage done by an inept high school teacher that ultimately led to membership in the History Book Club. I was able to further pursue foreign languages (French, German, Russian) that have been supportive in my technical career. In literature classes, I gained a love of reading widely.
The proposals for three-year baccalaureate programs that eliminate the central core of a liberal education are ignoring this point of view. Just as a PhD is not just more MS work, a BA or BS is not just career training. European countries, and many others around the world, offer a three-year program but, at least in Germany, another year qualifies for a "real" degree. Likewise, most US graduate schools do not recognize three-year foreign degrees as meeting the requirement to admission.
One think I noticed there were two kinds of teachers that loved teaching
And only one of those two kinds ought to teach
The other kind oughta get an honest job producing something useful
Higher Ed sold as a luxury good that we are all entitled to if we can get in
is nasty
The rest of us subsidizing this luxury tour and the gaggle of tour guides that conduct them thru it
Strikes me as only less bad if compared to
counter insurgencies
corporate tax loop holes
The war on drugs
hyper incarceration rates
and bank bail outs
think you need, and it may indeed be useful
career-wise, else why else do it? Perhaps to
achieve a modicum of liberal perfection,
before senesence begins to set in.
http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Only_Connect.pdf
I routinely assign it to my public policy students.
In 20 years you won't be able to get a non-STEM first degree at a land-grant university, with possibly Ann Arbor and Berkeley and either Bloomington or Champaign-Urbana the remaining exceptions.
Government cutbacks in funding make college more unaffordable meaning fewer attend meaning less support. College is very easy to attack and more difficult to defend to those who lack the experience.
A lot of money is spent on education and there are plenty of people who would destroy public education to have a better shot at skimming education money into their own pockets through private for profit colleges.
-- Michael Perelman
[I think the problem is letting readers know that what is wished is a discussion of the value of higher education, also I have no clear idea what the differences between Republicans and Democrats are on higher education and could not respond to the differences unless they were explained.
I thought the initial complaint was about cost of schooling.]
Me too. After rereading Perelman's original post I don't understand what his complaint is about. The theme of educational funding and affordability runs through virtually every sgle paragraph.
If he wanted a debate about the value of education perhaps he should have written a post about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/africa/24africa.html
October 24, 2004
In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger
By CELIA W. DUGGER
MALINDI, Kenya - More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot, clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger, stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's classroom each day. Squeezed together on the concrete floor, they sit hip to hip, jostling for space, wildly waving their hands to get her to call on them. Their laps and the floor are their only desks.
One recent afternoon, the line of wiggly children waiting to have Mrs. Mwanyonyo check their work snaked around the bare, unfinished classroom walls. Girls and boys crowded around her, pressing their notebooks on her. Some cut in line. Fights broke out. Boys wrestled. Girls dashed from the room. Giggles and shrieks drowned out her soft voice.
Mrs. Mwanyonyo pulled a boy in front of her and eyed his attempt to list his numbers. "Can you write 1 and 2?" she asked quietly. His head sank to his chest as he shook it no. While she laboriously graded each child's work, the noise level rose to deafening. "Quiet, keep quiet!" she shouted, her voice on the edge of desperation.
Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.
Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.
The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened, often ill-managed education systems.
What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle.
Near the end of a school year that runs from January to November, Mrs. Mwanyonyo, an earnest wisp of a woman, is still struggling to teach most of her students the alphabet and basic counting. She knows the names of only half of them. She estimated that 100 of her 250 students - split into morning and afternoon shifts - would have to repeat the grade.
Salama Kazungu, a willowy girl of 12, sits among Mrs. Mwanyonyo's multitudes, her small shapely head rising above those of the 6- and 7-year-olds. She failed last year in the class of another first grade teacher who had 248 pupils. ("If I could have, I would have run away," the teacher confided, relieved he has just 110 pupils this year.)
Not Enough to Eat
It is hard for Salama to learn because her belly is often empty. Her mother sells charcoal but makes too little to buy enough food. Salama never eats breakfast. For supper, she often has only boiled greens foraged from the wild.
On her hungriest days, the child said, she looks at Mrs. Mwanyonyo and sees only darkness. She listens, but hears only a howling in her ears. Yet she is determined to continue. At 12, she has already had her fill of the African woman's lot: fetching water, collecting firewood and carrying it to market on her back like a beast of burden.
"I was always working and working," she said. "I told myself that the best way to get out of this is to come to school and get an education."
In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found it a great vote-getter. Deepening poverty had meant even small annual school fees - less than an American family would spend on a single fast-food meal - had put education beyond reach for millions.
The abolition of school fees is also owed to the changing politics of international aid. In the 1990's, the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, encouraged the collection of textbook fees. Its experts had reasoned that poor African countries often paid teacher salaries but allotted little or nothing for books. If parents did not buy them, there often were none.
But evidence began to mount that fees for books, tuition, building funds and other purposes posed an insurmountable barrier for the very poor....
[Surely so, and I would only hope for as many people to share such an experience as possible and we can make it increasing more possible to do so.]
"Our obsessive focus on college schooling has blinded us to basic truths. College is a place, not a magic formula. It matters what subjects students study, and subsidies should focus on the subjects that matter the most—not to the students but to everyone else. The high-school and college dropouts are also telling us something important: We need to provide opportunities for all types of learners, not just classroom learners. Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well educated."
"Tuning in to Dropping Out" Chronicle of Higher Education. (http://chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/130967/)