<p>"Many parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality. This is because ‘quality’ is not synonymous with ‘value.’</p>
<p>Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, believes that college has become, for many, merely a ‘status marker,’ signaling membership in the educated caste, and a place to meet spouses of similar status ‘associative mating.’ Since 1961, the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen from 24 hours a week to about 15 enough for a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities (e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such tests can provoke lawsuits by having a ‘disparate impact’ on this or that racial or ethnic group." …</p>
<p>About once a decade, George Will writes something worth reading. This isn’t the time.</p>
<p>After a stale rehash of stuff that’s appeared ad nauseum elsewhere, he then picks an extreme example of a college that did something dumb (if, indeed, his description is accurate and balanced, which given Will’s proclivities is far from certain), and leaves readers with the impression that this is typical.</p>
<p>What’s typical is his using distorted examples and fallacious reasoning to push his usual partisan political agenda.</p>
<p>The drop in study time from 24 hours/week to 15 hours a week can be attributed to the use of computers almost in it’s entirety I think. Back when I was in college, we were amazed at the “power” of the Apple II’s and how we could word process on them–and even then it wasn’t until my junior year in college that we had a ‘computer lab’. When the top of the line typewriter could backspace 20 spaces to correct a mistake, it was time consuming to type even a 2 page paper without mistakes. Now, 4th graders whip off a 2 page typed paper in no time.</p>
<p>Then, add in the research capability on the computer and not having to page through the card catalog in a library to look up a book…</p>
<p>Taking decades to repay loans–well, how many decades? How do they count those? If you graduate in say 2013 and pay off your loan in 2023, is that one decade or two :D–never mind that student loans are at VERY low interest rates and from a strict financial aspect, makes no sense to pay them off early.</p>
<p>The material that my children have had in high school and college is more advanced than I had – in some classes, far more advanced. I can’t tell that there has been any “dumbing down” in education – at least not for the average to top students.</p>
<p>I totally agree with SteveMA. Maybe George Will never had to type his own papers. A ten-page paper with footnotes was a bear – constant typing and retyping pages because even the best typist couldn’t predict where he/she should end the text to have space for footnotes (and the number of footnotes was determined by the text, so it was could be fairly time-consuming to get all that just right). Even making simple corrections was a big time consumer. I type much faster now that I don’t have to think about the effort involved to correct mistakes. I also compose while I type, whereas in college I spent hours handwriting rough drafts so as to avoid using a typewriter until my paper was ready for final form. There is no doubt that writing papers is a much more efficient process than it was a generation ago.</p>
<p>Maybe Mr. Will also had someone else to spend hours trying to find specific, obscure information for him, information that now is readily available online – and on reputable websites. Researching rare diseases, for example, doesn’t involve traveling to a health science library (maybe at another university miles away) and looking through any books you can find that might be current.</p>
<p>SteveMA and Marsian are so right about the efficiency gains from computers. Don’t forget the time spent having to create the notecards before the first draft for research papers.</p>
<p>Going back one more generation, my father told me that in his day, no corrections to typed papers were allowed. So if you messed up a letter, that would mean re- typing the entire page. (I guess white out was the technology for the next generation). That would probably be another 10 hours a week for me.</p>
<p>The time I spent on research and typing papers in college was mindboggling. My research was limited to what was available at the college library. It was an isolated college in a small town, so without a car to drive to the much larger research university 40 miles away, and operating within the time constraints of a quarter system (plus procrastination in getting started on papers, anyway) the materials I worked with were pretty shoddy compared to what any middle schooler can access today.</p>
<p>My skills as a typist are below average, and my spelling is horrible. Typing papers was a chore. My finished product, held up to the light, looked like a Dada painting of muliple layers of whiteout dots and ink.</p>
<p>I had one professor, nationally well known in his area of expertise, whose classes were so terrific that I took every class he taught. He gave me two grades on every paper: one for content and one (always a D, and never counting towards the grade in the class) for spelling/typos/and general messiness. Loved his sense of humor. </p>
<p>My kids’ high school papers were better written, better researched, and cleaner than anything I ever produced in college. And they have done multiple 40 page research papers in college without batting an eye.</p>
<p>I didn’t spend a lot of time typing papers - we had an IBM 360 and a PDP 11-70 at Boston College with DecWriter Terminals (these are like typewriters hooked up to computers). I used a line editor (very crude compared to editors and word processors today) to write my paper interspersed with SGML to provide formatting directives (kind of like HTML today).</p>
<p>I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing this sort of thing back then as most people probably found it too painful to do but it’s the kind of stuff that documentation writers and computer-typesetters used.</p>
<p>The article linked to was all over the place - a little collection of factoids without transitions. I was surprised that someone with such a reputation would write something like that.</p>
<p>*
Going back one more generation, my father told me that in his day, no corrections to typed papers were allowed. So if you messed up a letter, that would mean re- typing the entire page. (I guess white out was the technology for the next generation). That would probably be another 10 hours a week for me.*</p>
<p>I had that with community college classes in early 80s. Some profs just would not accept wite-out.</p>
<p>I will step in to defend my alma mater a bit. Although I’m sure the university makes many stupid decisions, UCSD probably felt compelled to establish those diveristy programs after all the hullaballoo surrounding that noose incident in the library.</p>
<p>White-out was not accepted when I was in college either. Erasable typewriter paper was ok until the profs figured out what it was then it wasn’t ok.</p>
<p>And UCSD is hardly alone. Many (most?) colleges and universities have come to understand the importance of diversity policies and curriculum. Of course, the necessity for these programs continues to befuddle many middle-aged upper-class white males, who don’t see what was really so wrong with the good old days.</p>
I don’t think there’s any way that would have quelled the uproar. It was a huge deal, and the university cuilture was blamed. </p>
<p>But I’m not saying that was the only reason they did this. Frankly whether you think these programs are valuable or worthless, I don’t think they amount to some huge expense. EVerybody has their opinion of valuable and not-so-valuable things that univerisities spend money on. There are lot’s of people who believe anything other than STEM classes at a university are a complete waste of money, including classes on Cervantes.</p>
<p>And those of us who feel it’s the STEM classes are a complete waste of money, since equivalent training can he had for far less money at a real trade school. <gd&r> :D</gd&r></p>
They might have a trade scholol that teaches quantum electrodynamics like I learned for my Physics degree, or the mathematics behind Weiner and Kalman filtering or the Linear Multivariate Gaussian Model for signlal processing like they learn in EE, but I’m not sure which schools those would be. I know they don’t teach this stuff at DeVry or ITT Tech, except at a very basic level. Not to mention a lot of the math that those egghead math majors learn.</p>
<p>As long as employers value the college name it will have REAL value in the market and that is all that really matters. And it is a very good way to meet similar people.</p>
<p>Decades to pay off stduent loans? This may be true, but likley such a trivial % of students with loans, that it is more sensational then reality…Go to the best school you can afford, but BEST and AFFORD are equally as important…</p>
<p>Strange. I’ve heard the opposite from many parents of HS classmates and teachers/Profs who attended US colleges/universities back in the '40s-60’s and weren’t the legacy-types preferred by many Ivy-league campuses before the mid-late '60s. </p>
<p>Common complaints are that the levels of writing/mathematical proficiency has dropped among college freshmen compared to when they attended, attention spans for concentrating on lectures/long assigned readings and problem sets has dropped, and work ethic has dropped. Keep in mind these rants were shared with me before or at the dawn of the internet becoming commonplace among the larger public in the mid-late '90s. </p>
<p>The only exceptions to the above were some from the same generation who attended their in-state midwest public universities. </p>
<p>They recalled that the policies of the time allowed for open-enrollment for any in-stater who wanted to attend…however ill-prepared they may have been. However, those universities also instituted harsh weed-out policies across the board so half or more of the incoming in-state freshmen were flunked out by the end of sophomore year. This meant that every in-stater had a chance of a college education…but he/she had to put in the work to keep up or risk being one of the weed outs. </p>
<p>Moreover, anyone who graduated was not only guaranteed to have met a certain high standard of education/intellect…but also a great work ethic. </p>
<p>Also, don’t get the HS parents/college Profs or most who was of college age during the '40s-early 60’s started on how the CUNY system went through a great decline once they not only allowed open-enrollment in '69…but also supposedly allowed a lot of students to graduate without demonstrating the same high academic standards they were expected to meet when they graduated.</p>