The Homa Files

TakeAway: Colleges are filled with unserious students learning too little.

Excerpted from WSJ: On Campus, Unprepared, Dec. 22, 2009

It is widely recognized  that the gap between the earnings of high-school graduates and college graduates has become a chasm in recent decades.

So, governments around the world — from China and India to the Middle East — are trying to boost college attendance for their knowledge-hungry populations.

But in the U.S., many students are poorly prepared for college and end up taking remedial courses. And huge numbers fail to graduate.

A few skeptics think that aiming to increase the number of American college graduates is actually a fool’s errand. Most prominent among them is Charles Murray, who in “Real Education” (2008) argued that most young people are just not smart enough to go to college and should be encouraged to take other paths instead, especially vocational training.

Now comes Jackson Toby with “The Lowering of Higher Education in America,” a provocative variation on Mr. Murray’s theme.

Mr. Toby draws on social-science data as well as personal experience — he taught sociology at Rutgers University for 50 years before retiring a few years ago — to decry the intellectual conditions that prevail on the American campus:

• The easy availability of financial aid to undergraduates who are unqualified for college-level coursework leads to low academic standards.
• Few students are prepared to meet even the minimal demands of a real college education.
• Lax college-admission standards give high schools little incentive to push their students harder.
• Too many undergrads can’t write with minimal competence or understand basic cultural references.
• Students often take silly, politicized courses, and feel entitled to inflated grades.
• Most undergrads enjoy a steady diet of extracurricular hedonism while skating through their coursework.

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703523504574604443236619168.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

This entry was posted on January 4, 2010 at 7:37 am and is filed under Education - Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.