I am delighted to see that Asian-Americans are speaking out against racial preferences in admissions. That stands to reason, since their children are the big losers in the racial preferences game. But they should be joined by non-Asians who understand that the purpose of college is for students to maximize their learning, not for administrators to play at social engineering.
Every economist will tell you about the benefits from specialization. We have known about that since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. But for some reason, this knowledge is thrown out when it comes to specialization in academia.
Writing a comprehensive history of American higher education from colonial times up to the Second World War is a monumental undertaking, but if anyone is up to the task it’s Penn State University professor Roger Geiger, perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the history of post-secondary education in America. Geiger’s new book The History of American Higher Education is the most fact-filled treatment of its subject to date, and will likely remain the standard work for years to come.
Strong cultural momentum—strengthened over several generations by parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and elected officials—has fostered an unwarranted faith in college’s benefits, raised attendance to irrational levels, and yielded an oversupply of graduates.
We ought to send more people to college. Our country is rich enough, our lives are long enough, and our economy is productive enough to justify the costs of providing more opportunity for our citizens to think and read and learn a little longer.
Few people know the challenges faced by community colleges as well as Scott Ralls. For the last seven years, he has been president of the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), the nation’s third largest community college system. He will soon leave for a new challenge: he will become the president of North Virginia Community College—the nation’s 11th largest college. Jay Schalin of the Pope Center had a long talk with him about the role of community colleges, about how the NCCCS has dealt with a variety of issues, and where the NCCCS stands today.
On May 21, the Supreme Court held a conference to discuss whether or not to accept the Fisher<.i> case—again. At this time, I don’t know the decision, but I do know that a seemingly strange mixture of liberals and conservatives wants the Court to take the appeal.
My previous beliefs regarding higher education’s impending doom—shared by many others—were reinforced by pundits who sounded alarms whenever a new report predicted catastrophe or an insolvent college made headlines. I fell into a trap identified by Thomas Jefferson in a 1787 letter to Charles Thomson, then secretary of the Continental Congress: “The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.”
College is no longer just for recent high school graduates; in North Carolina’s community college system, the third-largest system in the nation, the average student is 28. College students of the older, “non-traditional” variety need flexibility. They often have steady jobs, families, and other priorities, and they would prefer the option to finish as quickly as possible, without semester-long breaks. Does it really make sense that they are tied to the same academic calendar as their younger peers who prefer summers off?
Such assignments do not prepare students for the world of work and adult responsibilities, where their emotions do not factor in performance reviews, where they are expected to communicate in a clear and logical manner, and where they will have to know certain facts in order to build a bridge, argue a legal case, treat a heart attack victim, or teach children to read. Nor do such assignments prepare them to participate as free and literate citizens in a constitutional republic.