Submitted by arlenegloria on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 08:39

Send to friend

Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Observer, where this column first appeared.

The Lowdown on Higher Education

By Don Rose

The bookshelf housing blistering critiques of public education this decade might stretch from Chicago to Detroit, but performance analyses of American college education outside of academe are rare events—apart from those questionable college rankings in popular magazines.

We find the occasional article about the stratospheric ascent of tuitions or complaints by overworked, horribly underpaid teaching assistants and adjunct professors. But until now no one has deconstructed the entire college and university system from the Ivy League to tv-touted trade schools, which Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have just done in a new, brief volume that makes hamburger out of a herd of academia’s sacred cows.

Their book, “Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It” [Times Books, 271 pp, $26] is based on a couple of simple, albeit old-fashioned ideas. The first is that the purpose of an undergraduate education is to impart a wide range of knowledge about the world, to teach students to strain to use their minds to their fullest and to become what my mother used to call “well rounded persons,” rather than vocational trainees. Second is that the proper role of college professors--even the big stars--is to devote some serious time to teaching undergraduate classes.

Hacker, the noted sociologist and political scientist now at Queens College after a life-long career in higher education, is author of two recent classics, one a bestseller on race in America, the other on gender inequity. Dreifus, currently best known as a science writer for the New York Times, has published widely on a host of topics and teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. (Disclosure: both are good friends of mine.)

They find that for the most part our institutions of higher learning are failing in their basic mission; worse yet, the schools are horrendously overpriced because they are overpopulated with useless administrators and are financially burdened with a vast tier of underperforming tenured professors who avoid undergraduate teaching and do a lot of inconsequential “research,” especially on paid sabbaticals. To say nothing of wildly overpaid college presidents.

The universities also waste prodigious amounts of money on varsity sports that with rare exceptions—contrary to popular myth—actually lose rather than raise money for other aspects of the school and its overall athletic program.

This is not simply a screed against “modern” currucula or schools constructed to look more like all-inclusive resorts (yet another money waster that helps cause those $40,000 per year tuitions). They do, however, demonstrate that even the big-time “golden dozen” Ivy and related universities often do not offer the best undergraduate education. Nor are their graduates necessarily more successful in later life than those of lesser-renowned schools—though college graduates do average 1.75 times more salary than those without degrees.

One of the major problems the authors identify is that far too many classes in even the most prestigious schools are taught by graduate students, teaching assistants and adjunct professors, some of whom may be underprepared for teaching and almost all of whom are underpaid and financially exploited.

In contrast, Hacker and Dreifus offer details on a host of schools, some of them obscure, some as prominent as Arizona State University or well regarded as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Notre Dame, that are doing a serious and often innovative job of undergraduate education.

The book is scrupulously researched, going well beyond Ivy-bashing to offer plenty of recommendations for improvement. Getting top professors to commit to teaching at least some undergraduate classes is obvious. As is treating teaching assistants more fairly and drastically cutting back on extraneous administrators. Those strike me as readily attainable goals.

On the other hand, while the authors make an excellent case for it, we’re not likely to see the end of professorial tenure and sabbaticals. Nor, as proposed, do the multiversities seem anywhere near ready to spin off their professional schools and research centers—let alone end the publish-or-perish culture that leads to increasingly exotic, overly esoteric research.

Hacker and Dreifus will be as welcome at the next convention of the American Association of University Professors as Netanyanhu in Teheran, but at least a serious dialog may begin to engage the mighty forces aligned with the status quo.

Last century books by Rachel Carson on ecology, Jane Jacobs on urban planning and Michael Harrington on poverty launched popular movements and generated institutional action. I don’t know whether people pay any attention to books anymore, but this one deserves to do the same.

30