Higher Education's Lost Value

Education.  The word conjures up images of teacher’s pets, spelling tests, ISTEP (for us Indiana kids), algebra, home economics class, science projects, research papers, and calculus homework.  But what about college?  Endless exams, indecipherable professors, confusion about career plans, the exhausting search for an internship, résumé building, and astronomical tuition bills come to mind.  Is it a stretch to call education exactly what it is: an industry? 

By the time that the average student graduates from college, he or she will have accumulated somewhere around 125-150 class credits.  The key word here is “accumulated.”  Each major seems to contain a variety of required courses that are out of touch and will serve the student no purpose in life.  After the final exam is taken and the course textbooks are sold for less than half of what they were bought for, the material is forgotten and never used again.  Liberal Arts students are required to take 6 credit hours of science and 6 hours of mathematics. Krannert students must also complete 6 hours of science, 3 hours of fine arts, and 3 hours of literature. Let’s be honest: how often will a Creative Writing or Management student use the material “learned” from those classes?  Most of the classes are dumbed down to tailor to students who are weak in the given subject area or they are heavily curved at the end to compensate for low grades.  The teachers know that most of the students do not care and are only taking the class because it is required.  As a result,  they make the material so easy that it would be palatable to the average 5th grader, or they originally make it difficult, but eventually end up curving the grades. 

The entire situation could be avoided if these pointless requirements were removed entirely.  The leftover credit hours could be applied toward free electives to provide students with some enjoyable class work, or better yet, the extra hours could be eliminated.  Given the fact that they are wasted anyway, why not just get rid of them?  The answer is simple: the student could graduate early.  That is exactly the opposite of what colleges want.  What happens when students graduate early?  The college loses money.  It seems that anymore, that is what it is all about.  

While the price of a college education continues to increase, the standards and quality of that education are steadily declining.  From 1995-2005, public college tuition prices rose by more than 50%.  If there were a way to measure it, could we expect to see a similar increase in learning or quality of education?  My guess is no.  We are made to memorize and regurgitate information so that when the time comes, we can be tested over it. How much of that information do we actually absorb?  We are not asked to think critically or question the material, and often when we do question it, we are ridiculed.  The motivation to get good grades is not to learn, but to get a good job after graduating.  Good grades do not even guarantee that a student will get a good job; they are a false predictor for success.  Without lofty club credentials and executive connections, great first jobs are not in the cards for most graduating students.  

Often, if a company chooses a graduate on the basis of his or her high GPA alone, they will be disappointed with job performance because the bulk of collegiate coursework does not adequately prepare one for the real world experiences that one will face in a given career. This course material is presented from PowerPoint slides, cryptic textbooks, and dull lectures.  The information is pushed into our brains in a format that has little connection with the world of employment.  Therefore, once most students are thrust into the workplace, they don’t know how to apply the concepts they memorized on paper  to real life situations.

Throughout the course of four (or five) years, students push through all sorts of different classes.  In a blur of going through the motions, some of us will come out at the other end with a degree.  But what will we have learned?  We know how to BS our way through the easy classes and squeak through the hard ones thanks to the professor’s 50% equals a C+ grading scale.  We know how to bolster a résumé with bogus skills and titles.  When we get into the workforce, will we actually know how to apply anything from the previous four years of classes?  

Some might assume that I am against higher education, but that is not the case.  I am actually in favor of higher education and that is why I feel this subject needs to be addressed.  The point that I am making is that higher education is no longer about the education.  The only thing that is higher about it is the cost.  Today, a college student can expect to shell out $100,000 or more for four years at a public university like our own, so it is only fair to ask that we get what we are paying for.