Crises in Education

Via comes this interview that explains the crisis in higher education in partly thusly:

The issue, of course, is money. Since the financial crunch of the late 1960s and 1970s, American colleges and universities have worried about their bottom lines. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.

And she argues that

[t]here is a difference between education and vocational training. And, what we are seeing today is the vocationalization of higher education. As they struggle to attract warm, tuition-bearing bodies, many schools have begun to offer ever more career-oriented courses of study. That’s what students and their parents supposedly want, especially at a time when they view college as an investment that should lead to an immediate economic pay-off. But that kind of short-term thinking is damaging -- to students, to higher education, and to society as a whole. To begin with, most students graduating today will change their careers at least six times before they leave the workforce. Courses that are narrowly tailored to particular jobs may not serve these students well if the machinery they have been trained to operate becomes technologically obsolete or the occupational niche they were planning to fill ends up in Asia. They need broader skills and an educational background that will allow them to adapt themselves to a wide variety of work environments.

To which I say, you betcha.