Category Archive for ‘Higher Education’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Archive for the 'Higher Education' Category

A Second Act In American Life

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 4, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Higher Education. 0 Comments

“The Dumbest Generation” author Mark Bauerlein has an interesting piece about Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bauerlein has a good grasp of his work on cultural literacy and curriculum, but his piece is about Hirsch’s career before Core Knowledge–work that set Hirsch “at the forefront of literary study.”

I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery. That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong.

Damaged By An Ivy League Education

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 27, 2008 in Higher Education. 1 Comment

What is “Ivy Retardation?” As described by former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, it’s an affliction, common to products of elite schools, that renders its victims capable of carrying on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but unable to talk to a plumber in their own houses. And that’s merely a minor symptom.

“My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class,” Deresiewicz writes. “I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were ‘the best and the brightest,’ as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright….At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.”

An elite education confers a false sense of self-worth on its recipients, Deresiewicz says, and worse yet, creates risk-averse students. “If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual,” he writes.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Meet your new leaders: “The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government, Deresiewicz concludes. “She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.”

College Admissions While-U-Wait!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2008 in Higher Education. 0 Comments

Mercy College in New York is creating an “Immediate Decision Week,” an instant, on-the-spot evaluation that allows students to learn whether they have been admitted 24 hours after showing their high school transcripts, the New York Sun reports. The paper says admissions officers will also be canvassing local beaches and malls in “roving vans” in the New Yorks five boroughs and Westchester in search of instant applicants.

The beach?? “Dude, you are, like, so totally accepted!”

The Sun’s ed reporter Elizabeth Green says appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s not an act of desperation (Mercy’s enrollment numbers are up strongly) but attempt to improve customer service — and to make sure that everyone who is qualified for the college knows that it is available.

“For the sophisticated middle class, the dignified and genteel ways of higher education do not constitute a barrier,” notes Barmak Nassirian, American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Now imagine the unsophisticated, low-income student who doesn’t have a cooperative adult in their life, for whom the very knowledge that you have to get admitted to go to college is news. What’s wrong with their running into a desk at a mall, where somebody grabs their best instincts and makes them act on it? That’s a fabulously good thing.”

The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 21, 2008 in Curriculum and Higher Education. 7 Comments

Why do colleges insist on personal essays with applications? Could changing the requirement create better prepared students?

The Associated Press ran a piece about college admissions essays over the weekend and the sturm und drang associated with them. Since the die is already cast on SAT scores and grades, the essay gets a disproportionate amount of attention from students and families, the AP notes, spawning a veritable industry with books and counseling and editing services.

Does it matter? “Applicants and their families have somewhat of a belief in the redemptive value of the essay,” Barmak Nassirian, of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers said. “It’s an urban myth that a student who has goofed off his whole academic career can get in with a come-from-behind epic struggle in which the essay serves as the primary tool. It’s not a substitute for a rigorous curriculum, good grades and evidence that you’re going to do well,” he said.

What if applicants were asked to write or submit a research paper instead? Which is more predictive of college success, past academic work, or a personal essay, where students labor to make themselves seem well-rounded, fascinating and irresistible to schools?

Dropping personal essays could have an interesting trickle-down effect as far down as elementary schools. The “curriculum” in my elementary school (the tedious and content-free Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop), forces children as young as third grade to grind out endless personal essays, “small moment” stories and memoirs (!) designed to plumb the depths of their eight-year old souls. But it seldom, if ever, called for kids to write anything approaching a simple five-paragraph expository essay, let alone a research paper. That might change if doing so became a requirement for college admissions.

Last year’s common application, used by scores of colleges and universities around the country, asked students to discuss an issue of personal concern, a person, fictional character or historic figure who influenced them, a life experience or a topic of their choice, the AP notes. At the risk of sounding churlish, the unlived life is not worth examining. Rather than require 17 year old to unburden themselves of their life experiences, how about three pieces of actual academic work, graded by the student’s high school teachers?

U.S. Education the Envy of the World. Really.

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 2, 2008 in Higher Education. 1 Comment

While the United States marvels at Asia’s test-taking skills, Asian governments come to the United States to figure out how to get their children to think. So says Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek editor. His new book, The Post-American World, is excerpted in Foreign Affairs. Zakaria believes the U.S. can continue shaping the world, but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

Zakaria’s thesis is broad, naturally, but his observations on education are worth noting. He describes higher education as the United States’ best industry, and notes “in no other field is the United States’ advantage so overwhelming….Depending on which study you look at, the United States, with five percent of the world’s population, has either seven or eight of the world’s top ten universities and either 48 percent or 68 percent of the top 50.”

Few people believe that U.S. primary and secondary schools deserve similar praise. The school system, the line goes, is in crisis, with its students performing particularly badly in science and math, year after year, in international rankings. But the statistics here, although not wrong, reveal something slightly different. The real problem is one not of excellence but of access. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the standard for comparing educational programs across nations, puts the United States squarely in the middle of the pack. The media reported the news with a predictable penchant for direness: “Economic Time Bomb: U.S. Teens Are Among Worst at Math,” declared The Wall Street Journal.

Poor and minority students score well below the U.S. average, Zakaria notes. “This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country. But it does know what works.”

The U.S. system may be too lax when it comes to rigor and memorization, but it is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind. It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why the United States produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore’s minister of education, explains the difference between his country’s system and that of the United States: “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam says. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people’s talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well — like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority.” This is one reason that Singaporean officials recently visited U.S. schools to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem solving.

TDs, FGs and GPAs

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 7, 2008 in Higher Education. 0 Comments

The President of the NCAA is promising to hold major college sports teams accountable for their performance…in the classroom. Myles Brand is threatening underachievers with the NCAA’s harshest sanctions: fewer scholarships, reductions in practice and even a postseason ban. USA Today reports the NCAA on Tuesday hit more than 200 college sports teams with scholarship reductions and other sanctions because of academic shortcomings.

“Academic reform is here to stay, and those penalties resemble what we give for major infractions. So these are serious penalties and there are a number of teams that received those,” Brand said after releasing this year’s Academic Progress Report Tuesday. “Yes, there are individual institutions who have seen a steady decline (academically) over the last four years, and for them, the situation is dire.”

Next time its multi-billion dollar football and basketball TV contracts are up for renewal, perhaps the NCAA might require the networks to post players GPAs onscreen along with their sports statistics.