Cleaning out some of my backlog of drafts….
This is an older article that’s been sitting in my to do list. The comments are still relevant. If anything, the situation has grown worse in the mean time. This article is about US schools, but the situation is little better in Canada.
Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,” Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. “We ask, ‘How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?’ With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, ‘Is it safe to eat here?'”
Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.
Living off their reputation:
“We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,” the recent federal report “A Test of Leadership” observed. “Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”
The changing economic and global context facing contemporary college graduates convinces us that the limited learning that exists on U.S. campuses—even if it has been a part of the higher-education landscape since the system’s inception—qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be the subject of concern of policy makers, practitioners, parents, and citizens alike.
