"Higher" Ed

Peter Augustine Lawler, writing for National Affairs, about the many problems in higher education.

Ordinary graduates of most of our secondary schools lack the basic competence required to enter the world of work, and schools now claim victory if they manage to successfully warehouse most of their students until they graduate.

We now expect college to provide the basic levels of competence that used to be the fairly reliable result of a high-school education. That's the main reason why jobs that used to be open to high-school graduates now require a college degree, and it's why more of what our non-selective colleges do now is oriented toward teaching fairly low-level techno-vocational skills.

Not only "bonehead" courses which don't count toward graduation, but also "pre-bonehead" courses for those not yet ready to handle bonehead. Much of this is driven by the institutional survival imperative of keeping seats filled in an era where "diversity" is an understated description of current high school graduates.