Ok, reminder, no religious discussion, of any kind. I'm leaving in place a quote that happens to come from a religious source but was not cited in an inherently religious vein. Subsequent discussion of the quote has been deleted without penalties, but leave it alone.
A couple of things here;
First of all, in the American system, for the most part the student is treated as a customer. Their education is treated as a commodity they purchase with their own (generally borrowed) money. So the question isn't, in the abstract, for society to decide whether they're "throwing good money after bad" but for the student to make that decision. "We're" not spending piles of money, students are.
Secondly...
A human being is not a factory product, and college is not an assembly line. They don't pop out into the world with their degrees all packaged up and in the best operating condition they'll ever be in. It's more like planting an orchard of fruit trees; they take a lot of watering and pruning but the payoff doesn't come until long after. College students get exposed not only to a lot of information about different topics, but a lot of experiences and ways of doing things and ways of thinking. That's not all guaranteed to gel the moment they graduate. There was an interesting article about five years ago, from a women who double-majored in engineering and philosophy. She pursued a career in engineering; she said that she actually USES her philosophy degree, in practical ways, MUCH more often, fifteen years later. Most of what she learned in engineering classes is obsolete by now, but the thinking methods she learned in philosophy continue to be useful.
Sorry you don't recognize yours; but what you describe sounds a lot like mine. This is what goes on every year on my campus. We recently graduated the woman who didn't finish high school, got her GED, drove a school bus, went to community college, transferred in to us and completed her bachelor's degree while still driving the bus each day. And she's amazing, a constant fountain of questions and ideas.
I agree, there's definitely an issue with college preparedness, and it's a lifelong thing. It isn't like kids arrive at college in the same state they did forty years ago and somehow colleges can't educate them like they used to.
Part of it, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that a far higher proportion of the population goes to college in the first place. In 1940 6% of the population had a college degree, now 37% do. We're working with a broad swath of the population, not just groomed elites.
Another part is that not just education, but the total life experience, is different now. Far fewer people read books. There's a study that started tracking these things back in the 1970s, at which point something like 40% of high school graduates had read 6 or more books for pleasure in the prior year. Now it's down around 10%. I teach history; to be sure, there are lots of technological ways we convey information than were available in the past, the internet and video and all. But by the same token, the modern student has a much bigger barrier to receive information the way that people of the past received it, and therefore to understand the ways they recorded the information of their lives. That information is in books, and students have a much harder time actually reading whole books themselves.
That doesn't mean forget about college, or about teaching history in college, altogether. There are still lots of students who do great at it. But it does mean that, as a professor, I think about my pedagogy, how to meet the students where there at and give them the chance to get where they need to get to. Some won't; failure is always a possibility in the system. But I've had lots of them do very well and truly impress me.
A couple of things here;
First of all, in the American system, for the most part the student is treated as a customer. Their education is treated as a commodity they purchase with their own (generally borrowed) money. So the question isn't, in the abstract, for society to decide whether they're "throwing good money after bad" but for the student to make that decision. "We're" not spending piles of money, students are.
Secondly...
... define "lots." For all the hullabaloo about supposed deadbeat grads and "worthless" degrees, the fact is that college grads continue to place as well as ever in the job market and make good livings. And that's not even getting at the bigger issues of becoming thoughtful members of society, where I think objectively the current crop of college grads are doing as well as any generation ever did in modern times. I mean, there's a book out there about Boomers titled "A Generation of Sociopaths." 21-year-olds have always been on a learning curve stepping into adult maturity.
A human being is not a factory product, and college is not an assembly line. They don't pop out into the world with their degrees all packaged up and in the best operating condition they'll ever be in. It's more like planting an orchard of fruit trees; they take a lot of watering and pruning but the payoff doesn't come until long after. College students get exposed not only to a lot of information about different topics, but a lot of experiences and ways of doing things and ways of thinking. That's not all guaranteed to gel the moment they graduate. There was an interesting article about five years ago, from a women who double-majored in engineering and philosophy. She pursued a career in engineering; she said that she actually USES her philosophy degree, in practical ways, MUCH more often, fifteen years later. Most of what she learned in engineering classes is obsolete by now, but the thinking methods she learned in philosophy continue to be useful.
Sorry you don't recognize yours; but what you describe sounds a lot like mine. This is what goes on every year on my campus. We recently graduated the woman who didn't finish high school, got her GED, drove a school bus, went to community college, transferred in to us and completed her bachelor's degree while still driving the bus each day. And she's amazing, a constant fountain of questions and ideas.
I agree, there's definitely an issue with college preparedness, and it's a lifelong thing. It isn't like kids arrive at college in the same state they did forty years ago and somehow colleges can't educate them like they used to.
Part of it, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that a far higher proportion of the population goes to college in the first place. In 1940 6% of the population had a college degree, now 37% do. We're working with a broad swath of the population, not just groomed elites.
Another part is that not just education, but the total life experience, is different now. Far fewer people read books. There's a study that started tracking these things back in the 1970s, at which point something like 40% of high school graduates had read 6 or more books for pleasure in the prior year. Now it's down around 10%. I teach history; to be sure, there are lots of technological ways we convey information than were available in the past, the internet and video and all. But by the same token, the modern student has a much bigger barrier to receive information the way that people of the past received it, and therefore to understand the ways they recorded the information of their lives. That information is in books, and students have a much harder time actually reading whole books themselves.
That doesn't mean forget about college, or about teaching history in college, altogether. There are still lots of students who do great at it. But it does mean that, as a professor, I think about my pedagogy, how to meet the students where there at and give them the chance to get where they need to get to. Some won't; failure is always a possibility in the system. But I've had lots of them do very well and truly impress me.
