Gabriel Muniz – Special to the Southern News
In mid-19th century, in a burgeoning America, the beginning stages of public higher education, the famous land-grant college, was birthed. Seminaries, religious instruction, and agricultural-based curriculums, by the next century, however, soon gave way to full-fledged research universities, the classical liberal arts, and tenured professors. Today, things have changed even further.
Needless bureaucratization, sky-high tuition rates, multimillion dollar residential facilities, lax academic standards, and minimal job opportunities upon graduation make up the modern higher education system.
Long a repository of knowledge, incubating the best and the brightest for lives of meaning and service, the Ivory Tower, refashioned in recent history as the college and university of your choosing, has lost its original purpose.
Here’s Why
In today’s college system, bigger is better. From endowments and sports stadiums to salaries and enrollment numbers, just about everything has been maximized on college campuses. With practically every amenity at their disposal, college kids are aren’t learning independence, but an extended form of the dependence that defined their life from birth to 18 years.
Colleges, of course, know this, and indeed, exploit it. Luxurious housing, plasma TV’s, volleyball courts, swimming pools, tanning beds, rock walls, ever-expanding football stadiums await students on many college campuses each year.
Exhibit A
Consider two examples: the University of Minnesota’s $303.5 million football stadium expansion and MIT’s $300 million Strata Center. To put these numbers in perspective, each project is worth 25 times more than Southern’s 13.3 million endowment.
These massive expansion projects, true for top-rated schools as much as they are for second and third rate ones, likely explain why college tuition rates have skyrocketed. Someone’s got to pay the bills and colleges, led by highly paid administrators and Presidents, in some cases, making up to 7 figures a year, are going to defer those payments onto someone else. That someone: the student-turned-consumer.
Indeed, to sustain massive growth, schools, if not endowed with billions like some select schools, borrow more money, and, in turn, charge more for students to attend. The only upside for students: the above-mentioned amenities.
The upside for everyone else, whether the government and private businesses lending school loans, presidents, and administrators: deeper pockets.
None of this is to suggest that college should not be attended. Unlike the Silicon Valley talking heads thinking MOOCs will solve the college crisis, themselves driven by enormous profit, or empty slogans from the president who promises college and career readiness by implementing the common core curriculum, this writer suggests something else: stop selling college as the surest bet for the fabled American dream, the safest path for a life that becomes upwardly mobile.
Enough of this bankrupt expectation. Nobody has a right to a job and better life for four years of attending classes, barely studying, and crazily partying. “Academically adrift,” as sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find in their book by the same name, many college students today are largely misguided, unmotivated to learn, and pampered by a multitude of student “services,” easy grades, and endless other distractions. All the blame, admittedly cannot be put just on them.
The primary conduits through which students learn, professors need to understand the nature of what the system has devolved into – a trillion dollar business model that maximizes profit at every turn while sacrificing the learning experience students should be taught to love from the day they step foot on campus.
Professors, whose retention in the university largely depends on student feedback, the equivalent of a consumer satisfaction report, seem more motivated by their own interests, tenure, research, and publication, and less by leading students into a world of ideas, expression, and self-discovery.
Instead of conveyor-belt advising that provides one-size-fits-all suggestions how about the freedom to think, learn, and create with like-minded students under the direction of a professor?
With great gains in access, quantity has come to predominate over quality in the modern higher education system. Before, not attending college spelled trouble, or, at the very least, reduced one’s prospects in life. Today, attending colleges that operate for the wrong reasons leads to the same outcome, if not, a worse one: purposeless living and automated thinking. Dare, today, to live what college has long been intended for: finding the self and the truth, not a job, acceptance, or even a grade.
Photo Credit: Monica Zielinski