| I am pretty much as anti-college as it gets, but this piece really doesn't lay out the best arguments for why our higher education system is failing us. This doesn't sound like an argument against college in general, it sounds like an argument against really bad colleges. The problem I have with college is that it tries to do two very different things:
1) Prepare students for participating in the market economy
2) Provide learning for the sake of learning It's best to separate these two things. First of all, doing (1) shouldn't take 4 years for most people. And it definitely shouldn't be four years of classroom learning interspersed with summer's of "real work." And doing (2) is something that shouldn't be tied to how we sustain ourselves economically (i.e. getting jobs). Learning for the sake of learning really needs to be limited to those who:
(a) have an aptitude for it
(b) have the passion for it
Otherwise, you're pretty much wasting everyone's time. How would this look in practice? I don't know, but I bet will start seeing this pattern emerge. The demand probably won't come from students. It will come from cashed up employers who desperately want to hire, but see long lines of unemployed grads who have no clue how to make themselves useful. |