Since this is election season, I’ve decided it’s time to outline the Higher Ed platform I would run on, if I were running for office. In other words, Everything That’s Wrong With Higher Education and How I Would Fix It.
1 – Invest more money. When experts identify the reasons behind the rising costs of higher education – and the explosion of students graduating tens of thousands of dollars in debt – they note that states cutting back funding for public colleges and universities has been a huge factor. In-state tuition costs vary by state, from about $4000 in Florida to around $15,000 in most of the northeast.
2 – Add a New Statistic to the Rankings. All this new funding isn’t going to help if it just gets sucked up by new management salaries or basketball stadiums. A second major factor in rising tuition affects private schools as well as public ones: spending on things that don’t support the university’s core mission of educating students. Additional and highly paid administrators, unnecessary new buildings, increased bureaucracy – none of these improve student education or outcomes. The ratio of ‘good spending’ to ‘bad spending’ should be factored into college rankings. Holding schools accountable for where they spend their money might encourage them to cut back on administrators and coaches and spend more money on things that directly impact their students – like faculty.
3 – Push Back Against the Idea that the Only Subjects Worthy of Study are STEM. For years, politicians, industry leaders and pundits have implied – or sometimes said outright – that humanities and social science degrees are not only useless but will condemn students to low paying jobs for life. However, recent studies suggest that while degrees in engineering and computer science do lead to higher paying jobs, humanities and social science majors end up with similar salaries to students with (non-engineering, non-computer science) science and business majors. This makes sense to me: engineering and computer science are essentially pre-professional jobs, equipping students with a specific skill set that allows them to do a particular job. Most other majors, whether it’s chemistry or English, develop more general skills: how to research, learn, share ideas and – most important – think critically.
Many current students insist on studying something ‘practical,’ insisting that it’s irresponsible to major in the field they love and are good at, because they’ll never get a job. (Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a parent make this point, it’s always come from the student.) Of course, some students following this path complete the degrees (and end up with jobs they like about as much as the subject?) but in my experience, many of them don’t. They switch majors, often taking longer to graduate; or they transfer schools; or some drop out altogether.
4 –Separate Sports and Education. Okay, I know this one is controversial, but here’s my idea: colleges and universities continue to have sports teams, but players aren’t required to be enrolled as students to be on these teams. Rather, they’re hired to do a job (play football/basketball/whatever) and they’re paid a salary for it. If they want to take classes, they probably could, but they don’t have to. This way, athletes would end up with fair compensation for the work they’re doing, without the worry about having to take a full academic courseload at the same time. In addition, it would take the athletic factor out of admissions decisions – an important point at elite schools where acceptance rates are in the single digits.
5. National Exam? My final idea isn’t well thought out yet, I admit it. And it goes in the opposite direction of all the schools deciding to ditch the minor role standardized tests currently play in admissions. But since pretty much every other country in the world uses a national test for university admissions, maybe there’s something to the idea? My idea – again, I’m just spitballing here – is that there would be two tests, one for students interested in the sciences, the other for humanities. And each school would set the score that you needed to get to apply there – and then at that point, it would be holistic admissions. I’m sure there are a million problems with this suggestion, so it definitely needs further thinking. My idea is something like Oxbridge admissions, I guess, a way to take some of the guesswork out of admissions decisions while still leaving room for each school to curate its own class.
Or maybe we go back to the pre-SAT age – each school sets its own admissions exam?
Strike the Write Note 