I think universities ought to be in the practice of educating people, but we have turned universities into little more than information-age trade schools.
You come to school to learn skills for a particular job or career. You graduate but are no more educated than you were when you first set foot on campus. Few students these days are learning how to think, much less becoming truly educated. All anyone cares about is being capable of completing this or that task so he can get this or that job that pays this or that salary.
How much of every class is wasted when the teacher has to explain something over and over again, employing example after example and anecdote after anecdote so everyone has at least a partial grasp of the concept? My freshman calculus instructor said the calculus textbook he used in school was the size of today’s Reader’s Digest magazines, and it held just as much information. Yet today’s texts are filled with examples upon examples, multicolor-coded graphs and useless blank space to facilitate learning at the lowest levels.
As many of you know, the curriculum has undergone a change that will take effect next fall. The state IHL board has reduced the degree requirements so it will take less time and credits to get a degree from any institution in Mississippi. This is only one sign of the dumbing down of American universities. The IHL board cited reasons like capacity issues, family savings and industry standards for the decrease in hours.
But Mississippi has no capacity issues to speak of, which is the reason Florida reduced its degree requirements. Apparently, we must compete with other schools in other states, even if that means lowering the quality of the Mississippi degree.
Fewer credits means quicker, cheaper graduation and more enrollees, which makes the university more money, and that is what this whole thing is about. And in case you were wondering, that is why an attendance policy exists. We don’t want people failing out-even if they had no business being here in the first place.
Then again, some people can get good grades and go to class sporadically. This isn’t because they are smarter; the classes are just more dumbed down and repetitive. These students do not need inane observation after inane observation to learn.
It seems we have gone from one extreme to another in America. We were facing a problem about half a century ago because education was not available for many bright and qualified people. Now there is too much opportunity, and too many people are doing little more than taking up space in our classrooms.
Student loans, federal grants and scholarship programs were created to give the less fortunate but deserving students the opportunity for higher education. Our country has gone wholesale-and I emphasize the word “sale”-to the loan department or grant application to get into college.
As long as you have the money, you can go to school. Sure, there are ACT and SAT requirements, but you can bypass those with two years at a junior college. For decades people have been flooding in the doors with help from such monetary aides and efforts like the new, lower degree standards. College is the new high school.
Since the knowledge base is doubling every two years, shouldn’t we be adding courses instead of subtracting them? That makes more sense to me. With all of this non-learning going on, it’s no wonder our country finds it difficult to compete with other nations scientifically.
When we learn how to think, that’s when we can say we have been educated. That can only happen if our universities become more like universities and less like trade schools.