By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I was underlining sections of Victor Davis Hanson’s column from the April 9 online edition of National Review in preparation for writing about it in First Teachers when Rush Limbaugh stole my thunder. Rush devoted close to an hour of his radio program on April 10 to summarizing and extolling Hanson’s analysis of the state of the modern American university, which Davis entitled, “The Modern University is Failing Students in Every Respect.” Rush was so thorough and insightful that I started looking for another topic to write about: There didn’t seem to be much left to say.
But then I had second thoughts. Rush has millions of listeners, but not everyone who reads The Wanderer could have been tuned in that day. And Hanson’s analysis of what ails American higher education deserves as much attention as it can get, even if many readers of First Teachers have already heard Rush’s take on the topic. People have been saying for decades now that our colleges can’t go on charging higher and higher tuition for a product that does not serve the best interests of their student bodies. Yet parents and undergraduates, with the aid of burdensome student loans, keep paying the bills. Anything that helps bring us to critical mass in this matter needs to be encouraged. Hanson’s article can help do that. (It can be accessed at nationalreview.com.)
Hanson charges that American universities have failed on the four goals they have historically promised to the American people: that they would teach “their students how to reason inductively” and impart to them an “aesthetic sense”; that they would expose their undergrads to “edgy speech and raucous expression” to broaden their intellectual horizons; that their students would be “trained for productive careers,” thereby making college a “wise career investment”; and that colleges would not be “monopolistic price gougers,” but would provide these services at a price that “would allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money.”
What is the track record of our colleges? Hanson notices the same thing I would wager you have seen in many young college graduates these days: “A bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively.” Considerable attention has been paid in recent years to college athletes who earn a bachelor’s degree without being able to read and write at the third grade level. But that syndrome is not limited to athletes. I have heard more than a few merchants in recent years who insist that the college students they hire to work in their retail stores require a cash register that calculates the change for them because the college students cannot figure it out on their own.
What of the ability to think analytically when faced with an opposing point of view? Our universities are doing the opposite. “Too often,” says Hanson, “universities emulate greenhouses where fragile adults are coddled as if they were hothouse orchids.”
Political correctness reigns. Nowadays colleges go so far as to provide “safe spaces” where students are “shielded from supposedly hurtful or unwelcome language.” Professors are told to provide “trigger warnings” before assigning authors such as Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain, because of the racially offensive language included in their dialogues.
(An aside: I agree with Hanson about the extent to which our colleges go to assure students that they will not encounter “hurtful” racial stereotypes or language deemed unacceptable to feminists, Muslims, and “members of the LBGT community.” But it should be noted that the colleges are not as concerned about the feelings of all their students. They make no effort to protect the sensitivities of Christian students who may be offended by attacks from professors or student activists on their family’s views on the Bible, abortion, or same-sex marriage.)
The promise of a good job and a path to middle-class economic security? No more. Recent college graduates are more aware of this failing of our universities than anyone else.
“The unemployment rate of college graduates is at near-record levels,” writes Hanson. And the “collective debt of college students and graduates is more than $1 trillion.” It will only be a matter of time before the students faced with this debt will realize that the loans they carry resulted “from astronomical tuition costs that for decades have spiked more rapidly than the rate of inflation.” The only question will be whether this realization will result in increased pressure on the colleges to stop raising their tuitions and encouraging students to take loans to pay the costs, or political pressure to get Washington to provide taxpayer funds to pay off the student debt.
We should not be too certain that the latter course will not prevail. We can be sure that there are politicians who are calculating at this moment whether the votes of the grateful students with their debt forgiven will outnumber the votes of the taxpayers who object to this government handout.
Hanson closes with two especially intriguing suggestions for how to get the country out of this mess. One is a call for colleges to “publicize the employment rates of recent graduates” so that “strapped parents can do cost-benefit analyses like they do with any other major cash investment.”
I would add that these numbers would also be of great use to students getting ready to sign the papers for student loans that will burden them for decades after graduation. It is easy to picture dozens of successful publications popping up to inform high school seniors about the likelihood that they will secure meaningful employment if they enroll at a particular college. We could get to the point where high school seniors are as aware of which schools prepare them for worthwhile jobs as those that are the best “party schools.”
Hanson also calls for some reverse spin on the concept of SAT and ACT examinations. We have seen how colleges highlight the average scores of their incoming freshmen on these standardized tests; it is what puts a school in the much-desired “highly competitive” and “most competitive” rankings.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to come up with a test that measures how well students do after four years of study at the university in question? Hanson thinks so: “If colleges predicate admissions in part on performance on the SAT or ACT, they certainly should be assessed on how well — or not so well — students score on similar tests after years of expensive study.” Why not?
In the same vein, Hanson calls on the federal government to hold “universities fiscally accountable” by “pegging” federal grants to a “college’s ability to hold annual tuition to the inflation rate.” Again: Why not?
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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