Why did you write 'Is a College Education Still Worth the Price?'----
I realized that most of the books written about higher education were written by college presidents, faculty and public policy pundits. Deans can offer a unique perspective. Graduate deans, in particular, are very close to the faculty; they understand the central activities of the university. At the same time, deans are exposed to the innerworkings of the bureaucracy and the actions of senior management in a way that faculty are not. With 40+ years in higher education, nearly three-quarters of which was spent in the dean’s office I thought that I had some useful things to offer. My Now and Then eBook is part of a larger book on higher education on which I am now working.
What is the most important problem facing higher education?
The notion that higher education ‘should be run like a business’ overlooks the fact that it has indeed been run like a business for at least a generation. The problem is that much of the management of higher education has overlooked its fundamental product (the development and dissemination of new and existing knowledge). It has not been faithful to its central purposes. In effect, it has been run like a business, designed to maximize tuition revenue and insure its own survival. It offers entertainment, creature comforts and credentials; actual education is often of secondary or tertiary importance. It focuses upon ‘brand’ rather than upon ‘signature’ and as a result its ‘customers’ have not received value for dollar.
What is the most common myth concerning higher education?
The notion that all students should attend college. This has led to the warehousing of many students for 4-6 years of their lives. It has led to ‘credential creep’, which forces students to achieve ‘credentials’ which were unnecessary in previous generations. It has forced many students to incur significant debt and jeopardized (or ruined) their financial conditions. It would be reassuring if we could be certain that all students in college have at least been exposed to solid general education courses which formed a liberal arts-foundation for life and work, but core curricula have been eroded or removed for several generations now. If you want a coherent and substantive education (particularly in the humanities and soft social sciences) you have to seek it out for yourself; it will generally not be required.
What single change would do the most good in advancing the cause of higher education?
I would have to pick between two: first, closing colleges of education, which have failed to produce teachers and underwrite learning methods and processes which would bring success in elementary and secondary schools. Instead, they have touted self-esteem over achievement, offered crackbrained schemes de jour for teaching reading and mathematics and generally attracted weak undergraduate students. Coming at this from the other direction, graduate schools should return to the expectations experienced by the postwar generation. We cannot restore core curricula, roll back grade inflation and challenge undergraduates in appropriate ways without a professoriate that is more rigorously trained.
Is the current situation desperate?
No, not for conscientious students. The resources are still largely there; the problem is that you have to seek them out. Every year I encounter students who are absolutely superb. They have, in effect, challenged themselves, since the institutional structures in place are chiefly designed to ‘support’ them in the new age/touchy-feely sense. The ‘support systems’ are there to insure students’ continuation in school (and continuing remittance of tuition), not to insure that they are being stretched and educated in the fullest senses of the term.
Where is the greatest value and the greatest quality in American higher education today?
Most likely in the honors programs of AAU flagship public universities.
What is your favorite book on higher education?
I would mention two: Bart Giamatti’s A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University and Jary Pelikan’s Scholarship and Its Survival: Questions on the Idea of Graduate Education.
And your own favorite books in general?
‘Favorite’ would not necessarily be the best or finest but those works which I can reread or rewatch over and over with no diminution of enjoyment or appreciation. Poem: Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”; Novel: The Great Gatsby; Creative Nonfiction: A River Runs Through It; Play: The Tempest; Nonfiction Prose: Johnson’s Lives of the Poets; Film: Patton, particularly for Francis Ford Coppola’s script; Genre Fiction: anything by James Lee Burke; Guilty Pleasure: the novels of Dan Jenkins and the film made from one of them, Michael Ritchie’s 1977 Semi-Tough; Television: Homicide: Life on the Street and two close seconds: The Wire and the Damian Lewis series, Life.
Richard B. Schwartz' e-essay Is a College Education Still Worth the Price: A Dean's Sobering Perspective can be purchased for $2.99 through Amazon, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble. To preview the title visit http://www.nowandthenreader.com/is-a-college-education-still-worth-the-price/
----
Richard B. Schwartz is Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. The author or editor of eighteen books, including Samuel Johnson and the New Science and Daily Life in Johnson’s London, he is now at work on a study of American higher education. Mr. Schwartz was educated at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, and has taught at the United States Military Academy; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Georgetown University; and the University of Missouri, Columbia. Over the course of twenty-nine years he served as an associate dean, dean, and twice as interim provost at Wisconsin, Georgetown, and Missouri.
No comments:
Post a Comment