Costs

Editor’s Note: Peter Wood is executive director of the National Association of Scholars. A longer version of this essay was originally published May 14, 2007 on Minding the Campus

In mid-January, a brief item appeared on an inside page of The New York Times, headlined “Student Lender Investigated.” The article noted that the New York Attorney General’s office was looking into “student loan marketing” by Sallie Mae, “the nation’s largest lender to students.” Attorney General Cuomo had requested information about “preferred lender lists,” i.e. the lenders that colleges and universities recommend to their students. The article also noted that “some loan companies have criticized” such lists, alleging that lenders got onto the list “in exchange for payments or other benefits.”

Except for the rather small number of selective colleges and universities, most schools face the problem of ill-prepared and poorly motivated students. At many lower-tier institutions, such students are the norm. The problem they create for the faculty and administration is difficult and serious: they want a college degree, but lack the skills to actually earn one.

What, if anything, can schools do to increase the likelihood that weak and disengaged students will find the path to academic success?

In a recent article in The Chronicle Review, Indiana University professor George D. Kuh (co-author of the recent book Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle) offers some thoughts on that subject. They’re worth considering.

Editor’s Note: James Côté is a full professor in the department of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he has taught since the early 1980s. He is co-author (with Anton L. Allahar) of the book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (University of Toronto Press, 2007).

While researching my recent book – Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis – and taking it through the review process, I have witnessed firsthand massive denial of the fact that our university system has problems rivaling those found in the United States. Yet we share with the United States the twin problems of grade inflation and students’ academic disengagement. We also face a third problem – university graduate underemployment, which has been well documented in Canada.

Grade inflation in the United States, especially in Ivy League schools, has received a considerable amount of press for some time. More recently, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) studies have highlighted academic disengagement. The NSSE studies measure the demands placed on students, and the effort they expend, through annual surveys with students themselves. In both Canada and the U.S., the NSSE results show that only about 10 percent of students do the level of work that professors think is necessary to be proficient in the subjects they teach.

Bowles is making teacher education a high priority.