Trade schools...a pit of problems

You have heard of them and seen them buy huge blocks of advertising on television [American National University, Colorado Technical University, DeVry University, ITT Technical Institute, Vatterott College, Wright Business College, and many more]. They offer an alternative to a four plus year standard college education in a multitude of vocational areas [Automotive Technician, Business Marketing, Criminal Justice, E-Commerce, Health Care, Electronics. HVAC, interior decorating, paralegal, etc.] Not a bad idea...vocational/tech schools have been around for a long time and many of them are worthy in their goals of providing basic skills in a particular trade. But things have changed. The job market has changed. Traditional college education systems have changed. My first complaint is that of the usage of the word "college" and "university". Many of these vocational schools just tack one of the two words at the end and somehow they assume an aura of authenticity and scholastic status. Wrong. Bona fide higher education institutions must meet certain requirements before those words are added. For example, a school must offer accredited Ph. D. programs to hold the "university" status. I don't think any of the votech school offer a single Ph.D. program. The second complaint involves basic human communication skills...like writing and a command of the language. None of these schools offer such a program. They are ideally interested only in the "nuts and bolts" of a trade...those things that will enable a student to acquire the skills of a trade. There is money to be made at these institutions especially when certain government funds are involved. As far as I am concerned many of these schools are fraudlent, dishonest, and taking advantage of the "down and out" individual.

"In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt"

by

Peter S. Goodman

March 13th, 2010

The New York Times

One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid.

“They tell people, ‘If you don’t have a college degree, you won’t be able to get a job,’ ” said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. “They tell them, ‘You’ll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you’ll get all your financial aid covered.’ ”

Ms. Wallace left her job at ITT in 2008 after five years because she was uncomfortable with what she considered deceptive recruiting, which she said masked the likelihood that graduates would earn too little to repay their loans.

As a financial aid officer, Ms. Wallace was supposed to counsel students. But candid talk about job prospects and debt obligations risked the wrath of management, she said.

“If you said anything that went against what the recruiter said, they would threaten to fire you,” Ms. Wallace said. “The representatives would have already conned them into doing it, and you had to just keep your mouth shut.”

A spokeswoman for the school’s owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.

The for-profit educational industry says it is fulfilling a vital social function, supplying job training that provides a way up the economic ladder.

“When the economy is rough and people are threatened with unemployment, they look to education as the way out,” said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents approximately 1,400 such institutions. “We’re preparing people for careers.”

Concerned about aggressive marketing practices, the Obama administration is toughening rules that restrict institutions that receive federal student aid from paying their admissions recruiters on the basis of enrollment numbers.

The administration is also tightening regulations to ensure that vocational schools that receive aid dollars prepare students for “gainful employment.” Under a proposal being floated by the Department of Education, programs would be barred from loading students with more debt than justified by the likely salaries of the jobs they would pursue.

“During a recession, with increased demand for education and more anxiety about the ability to get a job, there is a heightened level of hazard,” said Robert Shireman, a deputy under secretary of education. “There is a lot of Pell grant money out there, and we need to make sure it’s being used effectively.”

The administration’s push has provoked fierce lobbying from the for-profit educational industry, which is seeking to maintain flexibility in the rules.

A Lucrative Business

The stakes are enormous: For-profit schools have long derived the bulk of their revenue from federal loans and grants, and the percentages have been climbing sharply.

The Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded global giant, last year reported revenue of $1.84 billion. Roughly 80 percent came from federal loans and grants, according to BMO Capital Markets, a research and trading firm. That was up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s efforts to make higher education more affordable. The administration increased financing for Pell grants by $17 billion for 2009 and 2010 as part of its $787 billion stimulus package.

Two years ago, students at for-profit trade schools received $3.2 billion in Pell grants, according to the Department of Education, less than went to students at two-year public institutions. By the 2011-12 school year, the administration now estimates, students at for-profit schools should receive more than $10 billion in Pell grants, more than their public counterparts. (Those anticipated increases may shrink, depending on the outcome of wrangling in Congress over health care and student lending.)

Enrollment at for-profit trade schools expanded about 20 percent a year the last two years, more than double the pace from 2001-7, according to the Career College Association.

Mr. Miller, the association’s president, said for-profit schools were securing large numbers of Pell grants because their financial aid offices were diligent and because the schools served many low-income students.

But financial aid experts say the surge of federal money reaching such institutions reflects something else: their aggressive, sometimes deceitful recruiting practices.

Jeffrey West was working at a pet store near Philadelphia, earning about $8 an hour, when he saw advertisements for training programs offered by WyoTech, a chain of trade schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., a publicly traded company that last year reported revenue of $1.3 billion.

After Mr. West called the school, an admissions representative drove to his house to sell him on classes in auto body refinishing and upholstering technology, a nine-month program that cost about $30,000.

Mr. West blanched at the tuition, he recalled, but the representative assured him the program amounted to an antidote to hard economic times.

“They said they had a very high placement rate, somewhere around 90 percent,” he said. “That was one of the key factors that caused me to go there. They said I would be earning $50,000 to $70,000 a year.”

Some 14 months after he completed the program, Mr. West, 21, has failed to find an automotive job. He is working for $12 an hour weatherizing foreclosed houses.

With loan payments reaching $600 a month, he is working six and seven days a week to keep up.

“I’ve got $30,000 in student loans, and I really don’t have much to show for it,” he said. “It’s really frustrating when you’re trying to better yourself and you wind up back at Square One.”

Corinthian says it bars its recruiters from making promises about pay.

“The majority of our students graduate,” said a spokeswoman, Anna Marie Dunlap, in a written statement. “Most see a significant earnings increase.”

The increase in market opportunities for the for-profit education industry comes as governments spend less on education. In states like California, community colleges have been forced to cut classes just when demand is greatest.

“This is creating a very ripe environment for the for-profit schools to pick off more students,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit research group based in California that seeks to make higher education more affordable. “The risks of exploitation are higher, and the potential rewards of those practices are higher.”

For-profit culinary schools have long drawn criticism for leading students to rack up large debts. Now, they are enjoying striking growth. Enrollment at the 17 culinary schools of the Career Education Corporation — most of them operated under the name Le Cordon Bleu — swelled by 31 percent in the final months of last year from a year earlier.

When Andrew Newburg called the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Portland, Ore., to seek information, he was feeling pressure to start a new career. It was 2008, and his Florida mortgage business was a casualty of the housing bust. An associate degree in culinary arts from a school in the food-obsessed Pacific Northwest seemed like a portal to a new career.

The tuition was daunting — about $41,000 for a 14-month program — but he said the admissions recruiter portrayed it as the entrance price to a stable life.

“The recruiter said, ‘The way the economy is, with the recession, you need to have a safe way to be sure you will always have income,’ ” Mr. Newburg said. “ ‘In today’s market, chefs will always have a job, because people will always have to eat.’ ”

According to Mr. Newburg, the recruiter promised the school would help him find a good job, most likely as a line cook, paying as much as $38,000 a year.

Last summer, halfway through his program and already carrying debts of about $10,000, Mr. Newburg was alarmed to see many graduates taking jobs paying as little as $8 an hour washing dishes and busing tables, he said. He dropped out to avoid more debt.

“They have a basic money-making machine,” Mr. Newburg said.

More Bills Than Paychecks

Career Education says admissions staff are barred from making promises about jobs or salaries. The school requires students to sign disclosures stating that they understand that its programs afford no guarantees.

But promotional materials convey a sense of promise.

“Our students are given the tools needed to become the future leaders in the industry,” proclaims the Le Cordon Bleu Web site. “Many graduates have attained positions of responsibility, visibility, and entrepreneurship soon after completing their studies.”

The job placement results that the school files with accrediting agencies suggest a different outcome. From July 2007 to June 2008, students who graduated from the culinary arts associate degree program landed jobs that paid an average of $21,000 a year, or about $10 an hour. Oregon’s minimum wage is $8.40 an hour.

The job placement list is cited in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Portland school — previously known as Western Culinary Institute — by graduates who allege fraud, breach of contract and unlawful trade practices. Executives at Career Education denied the allegations while asserting it would be wrong to judge the school on the basis of its graduates’ first jobs.

“You go out in the industry and work your way up,” said Brian R. Williams, the company’s senior vice president for culinary arts.

On a recent morning at the campus in Portland, hundreds of students donning chef’s whites labored in demonstration kitchens stocked with stainless steel countertops and commercial gas ranges. A chef inspected plates of boeuf Bourgogne and risotto Milanese. Students melted and pulled sugar into multicolored ribbons. Others used a chainsaw to sculpture blocks of ice into decorative centerpieces.

“It’s employable skills; that’s what we teach people here,” said the school president, Jon Alberts. “We try to give them as much of an industry experience in the classroom as possible.”

But several local chefs said the program merely simulated what students could learn in entry-level jobs.

“When they graduate and come in the kitchen, I tell them, ‘I’m going to treat you like you don’t know anything,’ ” said Kenneth Giambalvo, executive chef at Bluehour, an upscale restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. “It doesn’t really give them any edge.”

What the school does give many students is debt, often at double-digit interest rates — debt that even bankruptcy cannot erase without a lengthy, low-odds legal proceeding.

When TJ Williams arrived in Portland from his home in Utah to enroll at Le Cordon Bleu in 2007, he was shocked by the terms of the aid package the school had arranged for him: One loan, for nearly $14,000, carried a $7,327 “finance charge” and a 13 percent interest rate.

“They told me that halfway through the program, I could probably refinance to a lower rate,” he said.

When he tried to refinance, the school turned him down, he says.

Career Education declined to discuss Mr. Williams’s case, citing privacy restrictions and saying he had not signed a waiver.

Mr. Williams has been jobless since last fall and recently returned to Utah, where he moved in with his mother.

After Graduation

The Career Education Corporation e-mailed The New York Times names and contact information for four graduates “with whom we hope you’ll touch base for important perspective.” One came with a wrong number. A second had graduated 15 years ago.

A third, Cherie Thompson, called the program “a really positive experience” but declined to discuss her debts or earnings. The fourth, Ericsel Tan, graduated in 2003 and later earned $42,000 a year overseeing catering at a convention center near Seattle. He said his success reflected his seven years of kitchen experience prior to culinary school.

Career Education notes that only 5.9 percent of the federal loans to students at the Western Culinary Institute that began to come due in 2007 — the latest available data — are listed in default by the Department of Education.

But default rates have traditionally reflected only those borrowers who fail to pay in the first two years payments are due.

The Department of Education has begun calculating default rates for three years. By that yardstick, Western Culinary’s default rate more than doubles, to 12.5 percent.

For-profit schools have ramped up their own lending to students to replace loans formerly extended by Sallie Mae, the student lending giant.

These loans are risky: Career Education and Corinthian recently told investors they had set aside roughly half the money allocated this year for private lending to cover anticipated bad debts.

Financial aid experts say such high rates of expected default prove that graduates will not earn enough to make their payments, yet the loans make sense for the for-profit school industry by enabling the flow of taxpayer funds to their coffers: they satisfy federal requirements that at least 10 percent of tuition money come from students directly or from private sources.

“They’re making so much money off their federal student loans and grants that they can afford to write off their own loans,” said Ms. Asher of the Institute for College Access & Success.

"Academics for all" poll

Do you believe that a college education is for everyone?

Yes--2 [40%]
No-3 [60%]

This reads like a mythical entitlement program...much like home owner ship. Over 40 years ago I saw the same thing...the baby boomers were hitting the college circuit. Why? Many reasons...and still valid today. High school was ending and eyes were on colleges and universities. It was what everyone was doing. It made no difference what the interest was...all were entitled to a higher education...it was the thing to do. Within two years of undergraduate work I began to see what some were doing: Away from home and party time, fraternities and sororities, family pressures, false expectations, misunderstanding of what a higher education at that time meant. The second part here deals with "dumbing down the academics". Many universities are closing the humanities...the fulcrum of academics for most universities and concentrating on the sciences and technology fields. Colleges and universities have catered to vocational interests better served by vocational and proprietary schools. Frankly those schools could care less about literature, history, philosophy and that's fine for they are oriented towards careers in the technical and service industry. Those schools don't even provide basic English courses. A pity. Communication skills are essential. Those that are better served by vocational and proprietary schools should stay clear of academic institutions for they do not cater to their specific needs of obtaining a trade. Those students do poorly in the humanities and struggle to keep their grades up.


Academics--not for everyone

Art of essays--T. H. Huxley

Bertrand Russell...critical thinker

College beyond the reach of some?

Higher education--costly

Higher education--not for all

Liberal arts...going?

Liberal education may be dying

The disadvantaged

Universities and umbrella majors

"YouTube"...venue for instruction and knowledge?

Another argument for a "liberal education"

 

"'There's Nothing Liberal About Specializing in Philosophy'"

by

Nick Romeo

May 9th, 2014

The Atlantic

Online courses and crushing student debt are contemporary phenomena, but the arguments they inspire are often variations on older debates. Attacking and defending a liberal-arts education is an old American tradition, one that dates back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. In a new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, traces the history of these debates in American culture. We spoke recently about how history can clarify contemporary questions about the future of higher education in America.

If you could drop Thomas Jefferson into today’s educational landscape, what would he think about rising student loan costs and an increasingly vocational approach to higher education?

Jefferson would be appalled by the retreat from public responsibility for higher education. He tried to pass taxes to support people without money receiving an education, and he failed. At the same time, he would probably say it’s predictable. This is how wealthy people protect their advantages: by limiting access to higher education to their own children. This creates what Jefferson called an “unnatural aristocracy,” people who have unearned privileges. He would think it’s very sad that people are going into debt to finance educational exploration. He would worry about the possibility that talented people without financial means would be left out of higher education. In terms of a vocational approach, Jefferson was a great believer in studying things that didn’t seem to be immediately profitable.

Ben Franklin criticized the elitism of higher education. He described Harvard as a finishing school where the rich learn obsolete skills and knowledge. What do you think Ben Franklin would make of the current debates about higher education?

Franklin probably would have had more sympathy for the anti-college groups today saying, “You don’t need colleges. Go off and learn stuff on your own. You want to be a programmer; you can do that on your own. You want to start a company, you can do that in all these other ways.” Someone with a lot of smarts and chutzpah who goes off and educates himself in his own way—Franklin would admire that. But he was also someone who found narrowness appalling. Someone like Peter Thiel, who is asking kids to leave college for a hundred thousand dollar fellowship, is encouraging them to become ever more narrow, so that they can develop an app to order pizza more quickly or access pornography more easily. All this talent driven into narrower and narrower spheres—Franklin would have found it depressing. Increasing specialization makes us less capable citizens and less able to adjust to changes in the marketplace. Many studies show students choose schools based on their selectivity, the prestige factor. And the vanity of prestige, just wanting to be better than someone else, he hated that.

Many kids in the freshman class at elite schools are from families in higher tax brackets. Are we still rewarding unearned privilege rather than merit?

I think this is a huge problem. A lot of the indices we use for admission favor the wealthy, but we are looking at changing that. We’d like not to favor people who have been trained through expensive classes to do well on testing day, but rather to find people with authentic potential. We try to spend a lot of time finding students who might not find us because they think we are too expensive. Often these students could come here for free and graduate with no loans and do just as well as someone who had all the advantages. We’re also trying to expand our reach with [online courses], and with this platform we’ve reached over 600,000 students in just a year and a half. In the previous hundred years we haven’t offered content to that many people.

Why should a student attend a brick-and-mortar school if they can get similar knowledge at a lower cost from online courses and other online resources?

I think it’s to work and live and play beside other people who are also going through a similar process of learning. Being surrounded by other students and professors who are engaged in research is a hothouse environment for expanding your cultural and intellectual horizons. I’m not naive enough to deny that people also like to be on residential campuses because they often have nice amenities. Taken to an extreme, that’s a real problem. Schools that are trying to entice students with swimming pools and rock bands, I hope they lose their customers. What they’re offering students is a taste of luxury before they have to start working. I think in the future more people will get online credit and certification before coming to a place like Wesleyan for a few semesters rather than four years. Multiplying access points is crucial as long as you’re providing access to a broadening rather than a narrowing of the mind.

So many brochures are full of bromides about the power of a liberal-arts education to expand horizons and transform worldviews. How would you define these intangible benefits?

Well, there are so many bromides, and I think that’s because we are trying to describe something that’s not immediately transferable into cash or some other quantitative measure. I like to say to students that I hope that in college they find out what they really love to do. It’s important not only that they discover what they love to do but also that they develop their skills in that area. This should be measurable. You should see your skills grow in ways that matter not only to professors, but also people who are off-campus. I do think there should be some practical payoff to a broad education, and that’s why I call what I’m describing in the book a pragmatic liberal education. I don’t think it’s just about having a wonderful mind that you explore on Sundays by yourself. It’s also important to become more productive at things that other people recognize as valuable.

A standard defense of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to succeed in any number of domains because you gain the critical thinking skills to succeed in a range of disciplines. What do you think of this defense of liberal arts?

Well that's key. But you can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you're studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what's valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can't explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don't think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don't think there's anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.

W.E.B. Dubois thought only the “talented tenth” should receive liberal education. Is only a minority of the population sufficiently gifted to benefit from a liberal education?

Increasing the Value of a Liberal Education

It’s a big question. I think the American response since Jefferson and Franklin is that it may be the case that not everyone has the intellectual capacity to benefit from it, but everyone should have access to it because it’s very hard to predict who would benefit from it. It’s very easy to predict that people with power and money will try to restrict access so as to protect their own power and money. Broadening access will create some inefficiency. Some people may not get much out of it and will move toward technical training, but others who you might not have expected to benefit will flourish. Giving people access to a liberal education is really essential for citizenship, and that should start before college. Learning critical thinking so people can’t just pull the wool over your eyes should be part of everyone’s education.

Aristotle suggests in The Politics that every subject can be approached from either a liberal or a vocational standpoint. What matters is why you study something, not what you study. So you could study finance in a liberal spirit, or you could study English literature in a purely vocational one. Would you agree with this?

Absolutely. I have some fights with my colleagues because they want to protect certain disciplines and not others. I come to this from Dewey, but it’s in Aristotle too. It’s not the discipline that makes it part of liberal education, it’s the way you approach it. A liberal arts school is not about having lots of classics professors and no economics professors. It’s about teaching the subject in such a way that it broadens students’ perspectives rather than closing them down into specialization. At Wesleyan, for example, I’ve been trying to bring in engineering as a way of thinking and problem solving. Not just as a trade school. I’ve met with some real resistance, but you can teach engineering as part of a liberal education, just as you can teach it as part of technical training.

Education in past centuries was often influenced by religious and civic ideas of virtue. Schools tried to create better people. Is character formation still a legitimate aspiration for a liberal arts college?

It’s a really important part of the college experience. That’s why, when schools try to appeal to the desire for luxury, it’s an educational failing as well as a moral one. I’ve always worked at small institutions, and you can see characters being formed. You can watch students become selfish, narcissistic, narrow people, or you can try to open them up to service, cooperation, and leadership. When things go wrong, when there are instances of dishonesty or violence within the campus community, these are moments to talk to students about their responsibility for one another. If they take responsibility for making their environment a better place to live, that will become part of their lives after they graduate. It’s also important for students to learn how to fail. Often students at elite schools have never had the experience of failing, and that’s a deprivation. These are things that are hard to learn online. 

The death of the "liberal arts"

Technology, technology, technology. That's all is heard--the latest new gadget. Just design, draft, manufacture, and convince the populace that life would be miserable without the new gadget....that's all that matters--WRONG. Knowledge of the world and the ability to communicate [verbally and written] is just as important.

"Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"

And why we should care

by

Joseph Epstein

September 17th, 2012

the weekly Standard

When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost.

In a loose definition, the “liberal arts” denote college study anchored in preponderantly Western literature, philosophy, and history, with science, mathematics, and foreign languages playing a substantial, though less central, role; in more recent times, the social science subjects—psychology, sociology, political science—have also sometimes been included. The liberal arts have always been distinguished from more specialized, usually vocational training. For the ancient Greeks, the liberal arts were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.

For many years, the liberal arts were my second religion. I worshipped their content, I believed in their significance, I fought for them against the philistines of our age as Samson fought against the Philistines of his—though in my case, I kept my hair and brought down no pillars. As currently practiced, however, it is becoming more and more difficult to defend the liberal arts. Their content has been drastically changed, their significance is in doubt, and defending them in the condition in which they linger on scarcely seems worth the struggle.

The loss of prestige of the liberal arts is part of the general crisis of higher education in the United States. The crisis begins in economics. Larger numbers of Americans start college, but roughly a third never finish—more women finish, interestingly, than do men. With the economic slump of recent years, benefactions to colleges are down, as are federal and state grants, thus forcing tuition costs up, in public as well as in private institutions. Inflation is greater in the realm of higher education than in any other public sphere. Complaints about the high cost of education at private colleges—fees of $50,000 and $55,000 a year are commonly mentioned—are heard everywhere. A great number of students leave college with enormous student-loan debt, which is higher than either national credit card or automobile credit debt. Because of the expense of traditional liberal arts colleges, greater numbers of the young go to one or another form of commuter college, usually for vocational training.

Although it is common knowledge that a person with a college degree will earn a great deal more than a person without one—roughly a million dollars more over a lifetime is the frequently cited figure—today, students with college degrees are finding it tough to get decent jobs. People are beginning to wonder if college, at its currently extravagant price, is worth it. Is higher education, like tech stocks and real estate, the next big bubble to burst?

A great deal of evidence for the crisis in American higher education is set out in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Its author, Andrew Delbanco, the biographer of Herman Melville, is a staunch defender of liberal arts, as he himself studied them as an undergraduate at Harvard and as he teaches them currently at Columbia. The continuing diminution of the liberal arts worries him. Some 18 million people in the United States are now enrolled in one or another kind of undergraduate institution of higher learning—but fewer than 100,000 are enrolled in liberal arts colleges.

At the same time, for that small number of elite liberal arts colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago, and a few others—applications continue to rise, despite higher and higher tuition fees. The ardor to get into these schools—for economic, social, and snobbish reasons—has brought about an examination culture, at least among the children of the well-to-do, who from preschool on are relentlessly trained to take the examinations that will get them into the better grade schools, high schools, colleges, and, finally, professional schools. Professor Delbanco is opposed to the economic unfairness behind these arrangements, believing, rightly, that as a result, “the obstacles [to getting into the elite colleges] that bright low-income students face today are more insidious than the frank exclusionary practices that once prevailed.”

Whether students today, despite all their special tutoring and testing, are any better than those of earlier generations is far from clear. Trained almost from the cradle to smash the SATs and any other examination that stands in their way, the privileged among them may take examinations better, but it is doubtful if their learning and intellectual understanding are any greater. Usually propelled by the desires of their parents, they form a meritocracy that, in Delbanco’s view, as in that of the English sociologist Michael Young whom he quotes, comprises a dystopia of sorts, peopled by young men and women driven by high, but empty, ambition. “Are these really the people we want running the world?” Delbanco asks. Unfortunately, they already are. I am not the only one, surely, to have noticed that some of the worst people in this country—names on request—are graduates of the Harvard and Yale law schools.

Attending one of a limited number of elite colleges continues to yield wide opportunities for graduates, but fewer and fewer people any longer believe that someone who has finished college is necessarily all that much smarter than someone who hasn’t. With standards lowered, hours of study shortened, reports appearing about how many college graduates can no longer be depended upon to know how to write or to grasp rudimentary intellectual concepts, having gone to college seems to have less and less bearing on a person’s intelligence.

Studies cited by Delbanco in his footnotes claim an increase among college students in cheating, drinking, and depression. In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska argue that the gain in critical thinking and complex reasoning among the majority of students during college years is very low, if not minimal. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education drawn from their book, Arum and Roska write:

    Parents—although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costs—want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. .  .  . No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduates’ academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence.

What savvy employers are likely to conclude is that those who graduate from college are probably more conformist, and therefore likely to be more dependable, than those who do not. Paul Goodman, one of the now-forgotten gurus of the 1960s, used to argue that what finishing college really meant is that one was willing to do anything to succeed in a capitalist society. In getting a college degree, Goodman held, one was in effect saying, I want in on the game, deal me a hand, I want desperately to play. Education, meanwhile, didn’t have a lot to do with it.

Not everywhere in higher education have standards slipped. One assumes that in engineering and within the sciences they have been maintained, and in some ways, owing to computer technology, perhaps improved. Relatively new fields of learning, computer science chief among them, have not been around long enough to have lost their way. Medical and legal education are probably not greatly different than they have traditionally been. Chiefly in the liberal arts subjects do standards seem most radically to have slipped.

Early in the 19th century, Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, remarked that if we had made the same progress in the culinary arts as we have made in education, we should still be eating soup with our hands. Apart from eliminating corporal punishment and ­widening the educational franchise, we can’t be sure if, over the centuries, we have made much progress in education. At the moment there is great enthusiasm about “advances” in education owing to the Internet. Two teachers at Stanford, for example, put their course on Artificial Intelligence online and drew an audience of 160,000 students from all around the world. But science, which deals in one right answer, is more easily taught without a physical presence in the room, and probably works better online than humanities courses, whose questions usually have many answers, few of them permanently right. The Washington Monthly, in its May-June issue, has a special section called “The Next Wave of School Reform,” a wave that, in the words of the editor, aims to “improve students’ ability to think critically and independently, solve complex problems, apply knowledge to novel situations, work in teams and communicate effectively.” The problem with these waves of school reform, of course, is that a new one is always needed because the last one turns out to have tossed up more detritus on the shore than was expected.

The fact is that we still don’t know how to assess teaching—trial by student test scores, except in rudimentary subjects, isn’t very helpful—and we remain ignorant about the true nature of the transaction between teacher and student that goes by the name of learning. In undergraduate education, we may even have retreated a step or two through the phenomenon known as grade inflation and through the politicization of curricula.

The division between vocational and liberal arts education, which began during the 19th century with the advent of the land-grant state universities in the United States, is today tilting further and further in favor of the vocational. Even within the liberal arts, more and more students are, in Delbanco’s words, “fleeing from ‘useless’ subjects to ‘marketable’ subjects such as economics,” in the hope that this will lend them the practical credentials and cachets that might impress prospective employers.

Delbanco reminds us of Max Weber’s distinction between “soul-saving” and “skill-acquiring” education. The liberal arts, in their task to develop a certain roundedness in those who study them and their function, in Delbanco’s phrase, “as a hedge against utilitarian values,” are (or at least were meant to be) soul-saving. Whether, in the majority of students who undertook to study the liberal arts, they truly were or not may be open to question, but what isn’t open to question is that today, the liberal arts have lost interest in their primary mission. That mission, as Delbanco has it, is that of “attaining and sustaining curiosity and humility,” while “engaging in some serious ­self-examination.” A liberal education, as he notes, quoting John Henry Cardinal Newman, “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.”

Delbanco warns that it won’t do to posit some prelapsarian golden age when higher education approached perfection. Surely he is correct. A good deal of the old liberal arts education was dreary. The profession of teaching, like that of clergyman and psychiatrist, calls for a higher sense of vocation and talent than poor humanity often seems capable of attaining. Yet there was a time when a liberal arts education held a much higher position in the world’s regard than it does today. One of the chief reasons for its slippage, which Delbanco fails directly to confront, is that so many of its teachers themselves no longer believe in it —about which more presently.

I mentioned earlier that the liberal arts were for a good while my second religion. Here let me add that I had never heard of them until my own undergraduate education had begun.

When I was about to graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my going wouldn’t be a waste of time. He personally thought I might make a hell of a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good salesman, and a successful one. I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the world to work.
In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for residents of the state, an open-enrollment school. If you lived in Illinois, the school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you graduated. Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading The Catcher in the Rye, was that I would be among them.

Most of my friends, Jewish boys from the rising lower-middle class, went to the University of Illinois to major in business. “Business major” nicely rang the earnestness gong. Yet the courses required of a business major struck me as heart-stoppingly boring: accounting, economics, marketing, advertising, corporation finance, also known as “corp fin,” which sounded to me like nothing so much as a chancy seafood dish. I was especially nervous about accounting, for I had wretched handwriting and a dis- orderly mind, which I viewed as two strikes against me straightaway. Wasn’t there something else I might study instead of business? A fellow in the fraternity that was rushing me suggested liberal arts. This was the first time I had heard the phrase “liberal arts.” What it initially stood for, in my mind, was no accounting.

In my first year at the University of Illinois, I had slightly above a B average. I attained this through sheer memorization: of biological phyla, of French irregular verbs and vocabulary, of 17th-century poems. I also discovered, in a course called Rhetoric 101, that I had a minor skill at prose composition, a skill all the more remarkable for my excluding all use of any punctuation trickier than commas or periods.

After this modest success, I decided that I was ready for a more exotic institution, the University of Chicago, to which I applied during my second semester at Illinois. What I didn’t know then, but have since discovered, was that my demographic cohort, those people born toward the middle and end of the Depression, were lucky when it came to college admission, for our small numbers made colleges want us quite as much as we wanted them. In short, I was accepted at the University of Chicago, though I would never have been accepted there today, and that is where I spent the next, and final, three years of my formal education.

The University of Chicago had a reputation for great teachers, but I managed, somehow, to avoid them. I never sat in a class conducted by Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Norman Maclean, David Greene, or Edward Shils. (Of course, great teachers, like great lovers, can sometimes be overrated. Later in life, I met a few men and women reputed to be great teachers and found them pompous and doltish, their minds spoiled by talking too long to children.) I attended a lecture by David Reisman, who was then Time magazine-cover famous, and was impressed by what then seemed to me his intellectual suavity. I sat in on a couple of classes taught by Richard Weaver, the author of Ideas Have Consequences, but left uninspired. I was most impressed by teachers from Mittel-Europa, Hitler’s gift to America, whose culture seemed thicker than that of the native-born teachers I encountered, and could not yet perceive the commonplace mind that sometimes lurked behind an English accent.

I took a course from Morton Dauwen Zabel, who was the friend of Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Edmund Wilson. Although not a great teacher, Zabel was an impressive presence who gave off whiffs of what the literary life in the great world was like. I took a summer course from the poet and critic Elder Olson, who kept what seemed a full-time precariously long ash on the end of his cigarette, and who, after reading from The Waste Land, ended by saying, “How beautiful this is. Too bad I can’t believe a word of it.”

The students at the University of Chicago were something else. In his book, Delbanco, defending the small classroom, refers to something he calls “lateral learning,” which refers to what a college student learns in class from his fellow students. He cites Cardinal Newman and John Dewey on this point, and quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne:

    It contributes greatly to a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

A great many of my fellow students in the College at the University of Chicago seemed to come from New York City, several others from academic families. They appeared to have been reading the Nation and the New Republic from the age of 11. Their families argued about Trotsky at the dinner table. A few among them had the uncalled-for candor of psychoanalysands. I recall a girl sitting next to me at a roundtable in Swift Hall volunteering her own menstrual experiences in connection with a discussion of those of the Trobriand Islanders.

Some among these University of Chicago students had an impressive acquaintance with books. One morning in Elder Olson’s class in modern poetry, Olson began quoting Baudelaire (mon semblable,—mon frère!) and a student next to me, named Martha Silverman, joined him, in French, and together, in unison, the two of them chanted the poem to its conclusion. This was one of those moments when I thought it perhaps a good time to look into career opportunities at Jiffy Lube.

“I invariably took the first rank in all discussions and exercises, whether public or private, as not only my teachers testified, but also the printed congratulations and carmina of my classmates.” So wrote Leibniz about his own classroom performance. Reverse everything Leibniz wrote and you have a fairly accurate picture of my classroom performance at the University of Chicago. None among my teachers there ever suggested that I had intellectual promise. Nor should they have done, for I didn’t show any, not even to myself. I made no “A”s. I wrote no brilliant papers. I didn’t do especially well on exams. I was not quick in response in the classroom.

Only years later did I realize that quickness of response —on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers in courtrooms, and salesmen. Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there. One of the hallmarks of the modern educational system, which is essentially an examination system, is that so much of it is based on quick response solely. Give 6 reasons for the decline of Athens, 8 for the emergence of the Renaissance, 12 for the importance of the French Revolution. You have 20 minutes in which to do so.

At the University of Chicago I read many books, none of them trivial, for the school in those years did not allow the work of second- or third-rate writers into its curriculum. Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, or their equivalents of that day, did not come close to making the cut. No textbooks were used. You didn’t read “Karl Marx postulated .  .  .”; you read Karl-bloody-Marx. The working assumption was that one’s time in college is limited, and mustn’t be spent on anything other than the first-rate, or on learning acquired (as with textbooks) at a second remove.

Nor did Chicago offer any “soft” majors or “lite” courses. I remember, in my final year, looking for such a course to fill out a crowded schedule, and choosing one called History of Greek Philosophy. How difficult, I thought, could this be? Learn a few concepts of the pre-Socratics (Thales believed this, Heraclitus that), acquire a few dates, and that would be that. On the first day of class, the teacher, a trim little man named Warner Arms Wick, announced that there was no substantial history of Greek philosophy, so we shall instead be spending the quarter reading Aristotle and Plato exclusively.

How much of my reading did I retain? How much does any 19- or 20-year-old boy, whose hormones have set him a very different agenda, retain of serious intellectual matter? How much more is less than fully available to him owing to simple want of experience? What I do remember is the feeling of intellectual excitement while reading Plato and Thucydides and an almost palpable physical pleasure turning the pages of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as he made one dazzling intellectual connection after another. I can also recall being plunged into a brief but genuine depression reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

The idea behind the curriculum at the College of the University of Chicago was the Arnoldian one, abbreviated to undergraduate years, of introducing students to the best that was thought and said in the Western world. Mastery wasn’t in the picture. At least, I never felt that I had mastered any subject, or even book, in any of my courses there. What the school did give me was the confidence that I could read serious books, and with it the assurance that I needed to return to them, in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of them.

I was never more than a peripheral character, rather more like a tourist than a student, at the University of Chicago. Yet when I left the school in 1959, I was a strikingly different person than the one who entered in 1956. What had happened? My years there allowed me to consider other possibilities than the one destiny would appear to have set in grooves for me. I felt less locked into the social categories—Jewish, middle-class, Midwestern—in which I had grown up, and yet, more appreciative of their significance in my own development. I had had a glimpse—if not much more—of the higher things, and longed for a more concentrated look.

Had I not gone to the University of Chicago, I have often wondered, what might my life be like? I suspect I would be wealthier. But reading the books I did, and have continued to throughout my life, has made it all but impossible to concentrate on moneymaking in the way that is required to acquire significant wealth. Without the experience of the University of Chicago, perhaps I would have been less critical of the world’s institutions and the people who run them; I might even have been among those who do run them. I might, who knows, have been happier, if only because less introspective—nobody said the examined life is a lot of laughs—without the changes wrought in me by my years at the University of Chicago. Yet I would not trade in those three strange years for anything.

I turned out to be a better teacher than student. In fact I took to saying, toward the close of my 30-year stint in the English department at Northwestern University, that teaching provides a better education than does being a student. If he wishes to elude boredom among his students and embarrassment for himself, a teacher will do all he can to cultivate the art of lucid and interesting presentation and the habits of thoroughness. Thereby, with a bit of luck, education may begin to kick in.

Yet even after completing three decades of teaching, I am less than sure that what I did in the classroom was effective or, when it might have been effective, why. Of the thousands of inane student evaluations I received—“This guy knows his stuff” .  .  . “Nice bowties” .  .  . “Great jokes”—the only one that stays in my mind read: “I did well in this course; I would have been ashamed not to have done.” How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and again!

Student evaluations, set in place to give the impression to students that they have an important say in their own education, are one of the useless intrusions into university teaching by the political tumult of the 1960s. Teaching remains a mysterious, magical art. Anyone who claims he knows how it works is a liar. No one tells you how to do it. You walk into a classroom and try to remember what worked for the teachers who impressed you, or, later in the game, what seemed to work best for you in the past. Otherwise, it is pure improv, no matter how extensive one’s notes.

As a testimony to the difficulty of evaluating the quality of teaching, Professor Delbanco includes a devastating footnote about student evaluations. One study found that students tend to give good evaluations “to instructors who are easy graders or who are good looking,” and to be hardest on women and foreign teachers; another, made at Ohio State University, found “no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning that is actually taking place.” As Delbanco notes, the main result of student evaluations is to make it easier for students to avoid tough teachers or, through harsh reviews, punish these teachers for holding to a high standard.

I was not myself regarded as a tough teacher, but I prefer to think that I never fell below the line of the serious in what I taught or in what I asked of my students. What I tried to convey about the writers on whom I gave courses was, alongside the aesthetic pleasures they provided, their use as guides, however incomplete, to understanding life. Reading Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Willa Cather, and other writers I taught was important business—possibly, in the end, though I never said it straight out, more important than getting into Harvard Law School or Stanford Business School. When I taught courses on prose style, I stressed that correctness has its own elegance, and that, in the use of language, unlike in horseshoes, close isn’t good enough; precision was the minimal requirement, and it was everything.

How many students found helpful what I was trying to convey I haven’t the least notion. If anything I said during the many hours we were together mattered to them, I cannot know. Not a scholar myself, I never tried to make scholars of my students. A small number of them went on to do intellectual work, to become editors, critics, poets, novelists; a few became college teachers. Did my example help push them in their decision not to go for the money? Some of the brightest among them did go for the money, and have lived honorable lives in pursuit of it, and that’s fine, too. A world filled with people like me would be intolerable.

When I taught, I was always conscious of what I thought of as the guy in the next room: my fellow teachers. During my teaching days (1973-2003), I could be fairly certain that the guy in the next room was teaching something distinctly, even starkly, different from what I was teaching. This was the age of deconstruction, academic feminism, historicism, Marxism, early queer theory, and other, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, one-idea lunacies. A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I thought David Copperfield a sexual criminal. “Why would I think that?” I asked. “Professor X thinks it,” she said. “He claims that because of the death in childbirth of David Copperfield’s wife, he, Copperfield, through making her pregnant, committed a crime.” All I could think to reply was, “I guess criticism never sleeps.”

While not wishing to join the dirge-like chorus of those who write about the fate of higher education in our day, Andrew Delbanco does not shy from setting out much that has gone wrong with it. He highlights the importance everywhere accorded to research over teaching among faculty. He notes the preeminence of science over the humanities, due to the fact that science deals with the provable and can also lead to technological advancement, and hence pays off. (He mentions the sadly mistaken slavishness of the humanities in attempting to imitate science, and cites the advent of something called the “literature lab” as an example.) He brings up the corruption implicit in university presidents sitting on corporate boards, the fraudulence of big-time college athletics, some of whose football and basketball coaches earn more than entire academic departments, and much more.

Delbanco, a secular Jew and a man of the Vietnam generation, is nonetheless ready to allow the pertinence of the earlier Protestant view of higher education in the liberal arts:

    The era of spiritual authority belonging to college [when it was under religious auspices] is long gone. And yet I have never encountered a better formulation—“show me how to think and how to choose”—of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be gives a clear picture of all the forces, both within and outside the university, working against the liberal arts. Yet Delbanco lets off the hook the people who were in the best position to have helped save them—the teachers, those “guys in the next room.” Much could be said about teaching the liberal arts before the Vietnam generation came to prominence (which is to say, tenure) in the colleges: that it could be arid, dull, pedantic, astonishingly out of it. But it never quite achieved the tendentious clownishness that went into effect when “the guys in the next room” took over.

Not that the ground hadn’t been nicely prepared for them. Universities had long before opened themselves up to teaching books and entire subjects that had no real place in higher education. Take journalism schools. Everyone who has ever worked on a newspaper knows that what one learns in four years in journalism school can be acquired in less than two months working on a newspaper. But as journalism schools spread, it slowly became necessary to go through one in order to get a job on a large metropolitan daily. Going to “journ” school became a form of pledging the fraternity. Everyone else in the business had pledged; who are you, pal, to think you can get in without also pledging? And so journalism schools became mainstays of many universities.

Then there is the business school, especially in its MBA version. Business schools are not about education at all, but about so-called networking and establishing, for future employers, a credential demonstrating that one will do anything to work for them—even give up two years of income and pay high tuition fees for an MBA to do so. As with an American Express card, so with an MBA, one daren’t leave home without one, at least if one is applying for work at certain corporations. Some among these corporations, when it comes to recruiting for jobs, only interview MBAs, and many restrict their candidate pools to MBAs from only four or five select business schools. Pledging the fraternity again.

Soon, the guys in the next room, in their hunger for relevance and their penchant for self-indulgence, began teaching books for reasons external to their intrinsic beauty or importance, and attempted to explain history before discovering what actually happened. They politicized psychology and sociology, and allowed African-American studies an even higher standing than Greek and Roman classics. They decided that the multicultural was of greater import than Western culture. They put popular culture on the same intellectual footing as high culture (Conrad or graphic novels, three hours credit either way). And, finally, they determined that race, gender, and social class were at the heart of all humanities and most social science subjects. With that finishing touch, the game was up for the liberal arts.

The contention in favor of a liberal arts education was that contemplation of great books and grand subjects would take students out of their parochial backgrounds and elevate them into the realm of higher seriousness. Disputes might arise from professor to professor, or from school to school, about what constituted the best that was thought and said—more Hobbes than Locke, more Yeats than Frost—but a general consensus existed about what qualified to be taught to the young in the brief span of their education. That consensus has split apart, and what gets taught today is more and more that which interests professors.

Columbia still provides two years of traditional liberal arts for its undergraduates. The University of Chicago continues to struggle over assembling a core curriculum based on the old Robert Hutchins College plan. St. John’s College, both in Annapolis and in Santa Fe, has, from its founding, been devoted to the cult of the liberal arts, even to the point of having its students study medieval science. The hunger among students for the intellectual satisfaction that a liberal arts education provides is not entirely dead. (At Northwestern, a course in Russian novels taught by Gary Saul Morson attracts 600 students, second only to the recently canceled notorious course in sex education offered by the school.) But the remaining liberal arts programs begin to have the distinct feel of rearguard actions.

The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

[Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Essays in Biography.]

Trade schools...time for scrutiny and change

"Plan would crack down on for-profit college industry"

by

Mary Beth Marklein

July 23rd, 2010

USA TODAY

The Education Department, concerned that some students are graduating from short-term training programs with excessive debt and worthless degrees, is cracking down on the for-profit college industry.

Under a proposal to be released today, vocational programs in which a large share of students don't earn enough to pay back their loans would be required to disclose debt burdens and could become ineligible for federal financial aid dollars.

The proposal covers training programs of less than two years that provide credentials for careers in fields such as the culinary arts, medical support and automotive technology. It applies to public and non-profit institutions, but the impact is expected to fall primarily on the fast-growing for-profit college industry in which, federal data show, students are more likely to borrow and to default.

Last month, education officials proposed other measures aimed at protecting college students and taxpayers from for-profit schools that engage in abusive or fraudulent practices, including aggressive recruitment tactics.

In remarks Thursday to reporters, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said 5% of for-profit vocational programs would be ineligible for federal aid if today's proposal were in effect now.

Education officials plan to accept public comment before publishing a final rule by Nov. 1. Colleges would have until July 2011 to adjust their policies and practices.

"Overall, I firmly believe for-profit schools are doing a good job in training students," Duncan said Thursday. But a few "bad actors" are "doing a disservice" to the entire industry.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who began hearings last month on the for-profit higher education industry, called the new proposal "plain common sense." But both critics and supporters of for-profit schools raised concerns about the details.

The Career College Association, which represents more than 1,800 for-profit schools, said in a statement that using the proposed formula to determine eligibility "is unwise, unnecessary, unproven and is likely to harm students, employers, institutions and taxpayers."

And critics of for-profit schools said the plan is a step in the right direction but doesn't go far enough.

The proposal has "some teeth in it (but) it isn't as strong as it should be to protect students and taxpayers from getting ripped off by career education," said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the non-profit Institute for College Access & Success.


Trade schools...a pit of problems

More grads?

"Do We Really Need More College Grads?"

by

George Leef

March 11th, 2009

Investor's Business Daily

The first seven weeks of Barack Obama's presidency have been notable for the use of our economic turmoil as an excuse for showering money and favors on the interest groups that worked to put him in office.

The education establishment was one of those groups. If there had ever been the slightest doubt that Obama would see to its care and feeding, it was erased by his Feb. 24 speech.

Operating in his usual central planning mode, Obama stated that the country is underperforming on education and will face trouble unless we put more people through college. "Right now," he said, "three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half our citizens have that level of education."

Sounds ominous, but where does that "three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations" number come from and what does it mean?

Fudging The Numbers

The number comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes a document on the 30 fastest-growing occupations. If you look at what it actually says, you find that the president fudged the numbers.

To get to 22 of the 30 occupations (just short of 75%), you add together the 15 occupations where most workers have a bachelor's degree or higher (such as computer software engineers), four where workers usually have an associate's degree (such as dental hygienists), and three where workers usually have a vocational certificate (such as manicurists).

We have never had difficulty filling any of those occupations, but the real problem with Obama's use of the BLS data is that he doesn't look at the projected numbers of workers in the various occupations.

On-The-Job Training

The three occupations expected to have the largest increases in the number of workers employed are personal and home care aides, home health aides and medical assistants — all jobs that can be done by people with only on-the-job training.

If you add up all the occupations where on-the-job training is sufficient, it's nearly 52% of the expected job growth. Add in the others that only call for vocational training and it's over 58%.

So instead of proving that the country needs more "investment" in higher education, the data on these fastest-growing jobs show nothing of the sort.

And if you look at BLS projections for the entire labor force, you see the same thing — the demand for workers who don't have bachelor's degrees remains strong.

The supposed educational shortfall is a myth.

What about the fact that college-educated workers earn more than noncollege workers? Doesn't that show how beneficial it is to earn a degree, and why the country would gain from having more people graduate from college?

It's true on average that college grads earn more, but it's not true that having obtained a degree automatically causes an individual to become more productive.

Glut Of Graduates

We have so over-expanded higher education that academic standards have plunged to keep weak, disengaged students content — that is, to keep their money flowing in. Consequently, America now has a glut of college graduates, many with basic skills that would have been thought poor for middle-school kids 50 years ago.

Lots of those people end up in jobs that require no academic training and don't pay well. The BLS also keeps statistics on that, if the president is interested.

Therefore, the country won't get an economic boost from shepherding still more young people through college. Keeping students in school longer and longer benefits the education establishment, but it doesn't give us a more productive work force.

Finally, Obama said the U.S. should strive for "the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. He seems to think that there's some necessary connection between the average level of formal education in a country's work force and its prosperity. If we want the fastest-growing economy, we just need to put more people through college.

The trouble with that notion is obvious. There's no more an automatic connection between a nation's educational level and prosperity than there is for an individual. We already have a surfeit of people who have been through college, and adding to it won't pull the economy up by its bootstraps.

Prosperity depends on capital investment, entrepreneurship and freedom, all of which are under siege in the Obama agenda. Expanding college attendance may be good politics, but it's folly to believe that it will cause economic growth.

[Leef is director of research at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C.]


"Academics for all" poll

Academics--not for everyone

Art of essays--T. H. Huxley

Bertrand Russell...critical thinker

College beyond the reach of some?

Higher education--costly

Higher education--not for all

Liberal arts...going?

Liberal education may be dying

The disadvantaged

Universities and umbrella majors

"YouTube"...venue for instruction and knowledge?


Thanks to stringer Tim.