By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, September 19, 2013
For the last 70 years, American higher education was
assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning
experience.
Young Americans for four years took a common core of
classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete
knowledge to make informed arguments logically.
The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent
democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship
universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.
Yet most elsewhere, something went terribly wrong with
that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or
antithetical to their original mission.
Tenure -- virtual lifelong job security for full-time
faculty after six years -- was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How,
then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant
of politically unpopular views than open-minded?
Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses
cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.
The university is often a critic of private enterprise
for its supposed absence of fairness and equality. The contemporary campus,
however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time faculty with the same
degrees far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully
tenured professors.
The four-year campus experience is simply vanishing. At
the California State University system, the largest university complex in the
world, well under 20 percent of students graduate in four years despite massive
student aid. Fewer than half graduate in six years.
Administrators used to come from among top faculty, who
rotated a few years from teaching and scholarship to do the unenviable
nuts-and-bolts work of running the university. Now, administrators rarely, if
ever, teach. Instead, they became part of a high-paid, careerist professional
caste -- one that has grown exponentially. In the CSU system, their numbers
have exploded in recent years -- a 221 percent increase from 1975 to 2008.
There are now more administrators in that system than full-time faculty.
College acceptance was supposed to be a reward for hard
work and proven excellence in high school, not a guaranteed entitlement of open
admission. Yet more than half of incoming first-year students require
remediation in math and English during, rather than before attending, college.
That may explain why six years and hundreds of million dollars later, about the
same number never graduate.
The idea of deeply indebted college students in their 20s
without degrees or even traditional reading and writing skills is something
relatively new in America. Yet aggregate student debt has reached a staggering
$1 trillion. More than half of recent college graduates -- who ultimately
support the huge college industry -- are either unemployed or working in jobs
that don't require bachelor's degrees. About a quarter of those under 25 are
jobless and still seeking employment.
Apart from our elite private schools, the picture of our
postmodern campus that emerges is one of increasing failure --a perception
hotly denied on campus but matter-of-factly accepted off campus, where most of
the reforms will have to originate.
What might we expect in the future?
Even more online courses will entice students away from
campuses through taped lectures from top teachers, together with interactive
follow-ups from teaching assistants -- all at a fraction of current tuition
costs.
Technical schools that dispense with therapeutic,
hyphenated "studies" courses will offer students marketable skills
far more cheaply and efficiently. Periodic teaching contracts, predicated on
meeting teaching and research obligations, will probably replace lifelong
tenure.
Public attitudes will also probably change. The indebted
social science major in his mid-20s with or without a diploma will not enjoy
the old cachet accorded a college-educated elite -- at least in comparison with
the debt-free, fully employed and higher-paid electrician, plumber or skilled
computer programmer without a college degree.
Real skills will matter more than mere college attendance
or a brand. New competency in national tests in math, science and English will
be considered by employers to be a far better barometer of past achievement and
future potential than the mere possession of a now-suspect university
transcript.
As in any revolution, much good will be lost along with
the bad. The traditional university used to offer a holistic four-year
experience for motivated and qualified students in a landscape of shared
inquiry and tolerance. The Internet and for-profit trade schools can never
replace that unique intellectual and social landscape.
Yet because professors of the traditional arts and
sciences could or would not effectively defend their disciplines or the
classical university system, agenda-driven politicians, partisan ideologues and
careerist technocrats absorbed them.
The college experience morphed into a costly sort of
prolonged adolescence, a political arena and a social laboratory -- something
quite different from a serious place to acquire both practical and humanistic
knowledge.
No wonder that it is now financially unsustainable and
going the way of the dinosaurs.
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