Has anyone seen the new PBS documentary Declining by Degrees? It's an investigative report on the state of higher ed, and worth checking out if you haven't seen it yet. The program tries to cover too much, I think, but it introduces some interesting questions. The two issues they seem to focus on are 1) the decline of the social contract that education should be accessible to all and 2) the existence of an unstated "no harm" contract between students and faculty--that both parties have tacitly agreed "I won't expect much of you if you don't bother me."
While I am interested in item #1, I found myself most bothered by #2. The reporter (John Merrow) asserted that the responsibility for remedying this situation lies with instructors (and in small part with the institutions, which he says need to focus more on teaching and learning). About this issue, he primarily talked with profs at 4-year schools, focusing on the distractions of research/ tenure. The assumption seemed to be that if profs did less research and taught more the problem would be solved. But I don't think it's that simple. I've taught at a 4-yr LA and a CC (both of which promoted teaching/ learning over research) and I've felt more of the "no harm" pressure at SLCC than at Knox. The difference? (and mind you, this is an anecdotal argument) Money. Knox had money, the students had money, and they had time to focus solely on education (and drinking, of course). Students at SLCC don't have money. They are working part-time, full-time, raising kids. They are in school to get a better job. I know I'm generalizing here, but whatever the circumstances, many students at the CC are there not because they were unprepared, but because they cobuldn't afford other options (and I actually would like to get more than an anecdotal sense of this). Because of economic pressures, I think students are more likely to pursue credits than education. It's not necessarily that they are disinterested in education, but rather that they are overwhelmed by the obligations of their lives. While Merrow's report focused somewhat on these economic issues, I wish he would have considered more fully how re-affirming the social contract about educational access might provide some remedy to the decline of teaching/learning.
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You know, I have been thinking a lot about the first half of the problem--the decaying of the social contract--but had never linked it to the latter half, and I think that's a really valuable insight.
My own thoughts about the community college have changed as I have worked here longer. I also believe that a general consumerist feeling permeates nearly every human enterprise, just as Marx predicted it would (perhaps wealthier kids just express their consumerism in a more veiled way--entitlement is, after all, one form consumption takes, perhaps?). So for me, the trick is seeing if there's something else going on. If they want value
--i.e., credit--out of their English class, maybe they would also like some other value added to it? (sorry about "value-added"
--another one of those business-y terms that's crept in everywhere).
I swear I wrote something on this at 3:00 am. Where the hell did it go?
But hasn't higher ed also become more accessible in this last century? Don't more high school graduates go on to college than a generation ago, and isn't this in part due to the rise of community colleges--which are, in large part, a consequence of the GI Bill or Serviceman's Readjustment Act after WWII? Which is to ask, where's the decline? (a great book, by the way, is "The Opening of the American Mind" by Lawrence Levine--a response to Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" and too conservative arguments against the so-called "decline" of higher ed.) One point of Levine's book is that conservative critics tend to equate democratization with decline. There must be someting wrong with higher ed if poor people can get a college degree.
If you confine higher ed to the few, then it becomes easier to maintain the idea that education is removed from the world "out there"--the world of students' economic goals, etc.
Representing the current situaton as a "decline" fails to capture, I think, the very real challenges we face today in higher ed. It suggests that things were hunky dory a generation ago, i.e. that the solution to our contemporary challenges can be found in the past.
So I'm not arguing we don't have problems. I too dislike the consumer model of education, and I too would like students to be more interested in education for education's sake. Still, the show sounds interesting.
One of the arguments Merrow made is that while higher ed is ostensibly more accessible because of community colleges and the like, the accessibilty is diminished because of economic hardship(he never made the argument that the standards of higher ed were decreasing because of open enrollment). He profiled two students (one cc, one 4-year) who were working full-time in order to pay for tuition and fees. One was also a mother of three. Because of their work schedule, they often missed classes, had to drop out occasionally, etc. The argument was that while we have open enrollment, the govt. is providing less financial aid than it used to. Individual schools are also providing less financial aid because they are focusing on merit aid in order to up their U.S. News ranking. Because of this, you have students who want to get an education, who try hard to accomplish that, but are thwarted because their finances are so tight.
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