Category Archives: Education / Youth

Ignorance on Parade

Words fail.

Is this what America is becoming–a society where the search for knowledge that is ultimately what makes us human–is displaced by training for worker ants?

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But What About the Children?

I see where a federal judge has upheld the part of Alabama’s harsh new immigration law that requires public schools to check the immigration status of all students. This is one more effort to punish the children of undocumented immigrants.

What I find particularly galling about laws like this, and opposition to the Dream Act (which recognizes what any sane person understands–that a two-year-old did not intentionally ‘break the law’ by coming to the US with his parents) is that the people who are dead-set against allowing these children to attend public schools or universities tend to be the same people who can be found piously proclaiming their concern for ‘the children.’

Protect the children from exposure to porn on the internet! Protect the children from recognizing the existence of gay people! Protect the children from studying ‘dirty’ books in school, or taking them out at the local library!

This heartfelt desire to ‘protect’ children would certainly be laudable if it weren’t so selective. But somehow, this often-expressed concern doesn’t extend to paying taxes to insure that poor children have enough to eat, and it doesn’t extend to educating them so that they can be productive members of the only society they have ever known.

Even Rick Perry, in the only statement he has made that I agree with, has said that people who would keep children of undocumented immigrants out of school are heartless. But then he heard the voice of the Tea Party, genuflected, and apologized. God forbid a candidate for President should show some human compassion!

How mean-spirited have we become?

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Threshold Questions

In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Joe Nocera has the sort of superficially thoughtful opinion piece that increasingly characterizes America’s “chattering classes.”

The essay is a defense of for-profit colleges. Nocera acknowledges the obvious: such colleges enroll only 12% of the nation’s college students, but gobble up 25% of all federal student aid; fewer than half of their students graduate; and some 47% of those who were paying back their student loans in 2009 had defaulted by 2010. Despite these statistics, and numerous lawsuits over unethical recruitment practices, Nocera asserts that “The country really can’t afford to put [for-profit colleges] out of business.”

Why? Nocera says that education is increasingly critical to the ability to get a decent job, and that for-profit schools educate poor, working class students who might otherwise not be able to attend any college.

Think about the assumptions built into that argument.

The first (and in my mind, the most pernicious) is the conflation of education and certification. One of the thorniest issues in higher education today revolves around that tension. Parents understandably want their children to emerge from college with a marketable skill, but if that is all they emerge with—if students do not graduate with a deeper appreciation of the importance of history, culture, literature, science and philosophy—then they have attended a trade school, not an educational institution.

The second assumption Nocera makes is that kids from poor and working-class families are prevented from attending state-supported and nonprofit colleges and universities. He is only half right; poor students with poor academic credentials do have trouble accessing institutions of higher education, but not simply because they are poor. Colleges and universities that are genuinely engaged in education must have standards; allowing students to enroll who clearly do not have the wherewithal to succeed not only diminishes the classroom experience for more prepared students, it is manifestly unfair to those who are admitted despite being doomed to fail.

At IUPUI, we talk about these issues a lot. We recognize that poor students often have poor records because they attended substandard schools, and we try to fashion admission standards that allow us to separate academic potential from past performance. We schedule courses so that students with full-time jobs can attend, and we offer a wide variety of support mechanisms for students facing fiscal, emotional and physical challenges. But at the end of the day, we are in the “business” of providing education. We are not a trade school, and we aren’t going to rip off both students and taxpayers by admitting anyone who can qualify for a government loan.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving to Costco, and I noticed the number of billboards advertising “colleges” I’d never heard of. They all trumpeted the same message: come to XYZ and get a credential that will get you a good job in less time.

Nocera says we need for-profit colleges, and just need to tweak government regulations to reduce incentives for them to cheat.

I say beware of easy answers to the wrong questions.

The question isn’t: do we need for-profit colleges? The questions (plural) are: how do we define “college education”? How do we provide job skills training to those who cannot benefit from—or don’t want—an academic program?  How do we improve K-12 education so that being poor does not doom children to a second or third rate elementary education that makes it difficult to get into college?

And along the way, can we encourage a decent respect for academic excellence and the life of the mind?

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Failing Econ 101

If I had any doubts whatsoever about the pitiful state of economic literacy in this country, yesterday provided a perfect example. I was reviewing a paper submitted by a student to one of our faculty members. He had given her a poor grade, and she argued that she deserved higher marks. I am the Program Director, so grade appeals come to me. The paper was filled–as all too many are these days–with grammatical errors, but what really struck me was the student’s answer to the question: how can government encourage more citizens to become involved in policy deliberations? The response? By reducing taxes and providing more government services.

I rest my case. (Excuse me while I go slit my wrists….)

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