By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 10, 2016
The public is steadily losing confidence in undergraduate
education, given that we hear constantly about how poorly educated are today’s
graduates and how few well-paying jobs await them.
The cost of college is a national scandal. Collective
student-loan debt in America is about $1.2 trillion. Campus political
correctness is now daily news.
How could higher education be held accountable and
thereby be reformed?
Just as expensive new roofs are not supposed to leak,
$100,000 educations should not leave students unprepared for the real world
upon graduation. Rain and snow calibrate the effectiveness of a roofer’s work,
but how does society know whether students’ expensive investments in their
professors and courses have led to any quantifiable knowledge?
SAT and ACT examinations originated in the 1920s and
1960s, respectively, as meritocratic ways to allow applicants from less
prestigious high schools and from minority groups to be assessed on their
aptitude for college — without the old-boy, establishment prejudices of class,
gender, and race. Would such blind exams also work in reverse as national
college exit tests? Could bachelor’s degrees be predicated on certifying that
graduates possess a minimum level of common knowledge?
Lawyers with degrees can only practice after passing bar
exams. Doctors cannot practice medicine upon the completion of M.D. degrees
unless they are board certified. Why can’t undergraduate degrees likewise be
certified? One can certainly imagine the ensuing hysteria.
What would happen if some students from less prestigious
state schools graduated from college with higher exit-test scores than the
majority of Harvard and Yale graduates? What if students still did not test any
higher in analytics and vocabulary after thousands of dollars and several years
of lectures and classroom hours?
Would schools then cut back on “studies” courses, the
number of administrators, or lavish recreational facilities to help ensure that
students first and foremost mastered a classical body of common knowledge?
Would administrators be forced to acknowledge that their campuses had
price-gouged students but imparted to them little in return?
Public corporations open their books to shareholders.
Shouldn’t publicly supported colleges and tax-exempt private universities do
the same for taxpayers and tuition-paying students? Shouldn’t the public know
how much of their contributions are allotted for particular academic
departments, sports programs, and study centers?
Take out a car or home loan, and there are pages of
federal regulations protecting the borrower. Why not give students the same
truth-in-advertising protections with the liabilities they will incur?
Schools should inform all enrollees in advance of the
prorated costs for a four-, five-, or six-year education, including warnings
about compounded interest on their debt.
Each school should publicize the percentage of its
students who found employment in their particular area of studies — and after
how long, and at what salary. Majoring in media studies is fine, but teenagers
entering college should be warned that such jobs have become far more scarce
than jobs in engineering or accounting.
The average pay associated with a particular major should
be posted. Surely an 18-year-old student should have as much information about
borrowing for an education as she does about going into far less debt for a car
loan.
Shouldn’t campus diversity also be defined far more
broadly?
Campuses need not just different races, ethnicities, and
religions to enrich their intellectual landscapes, but exposure to a wide
variety of political and social views as well.
The country is divided 50/50 on most hot-button issues,
not 95/5 as it is so often on campus. Life after college is about hearing and
tolerating views one doesn’t agree with — not about shouting down dissenting
viewpoints in adolescent fashion, or demanding to feel always reaffirmed rather
than occasionally uncomfortable.
Why make campuses exempt from realities commonly found
elsewhere?
Tech graduates will enter the workplace without
guarantees of lifetime tenure at Google. There will be no “safe spaces” for
supervisors at GM or Ford where others of a different race cannot enter.
Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs or NASA cannot expect their
complaints and accusations to proceed by suspending the due process and
free-speech rights of the accused.
No boss at Citibank will issue trigger warnings before
ordering subordinates to work harder. Do not tell your supervisor at Comcast
that his advice to pick up the pace was a microaggression. Try shouting down or
otherwise disrupting a presenter of a new smart-phone product line whom you do
not like and see what happens.
Saving the campus from itself is not about doing much
that is new or different.
Instead, the challenge is simply forcing colleges that
have gone rogue to grow up and to return to the rules and regulations that
everyone else follows — and which they should have long ago abided by as well.
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