One thing that worries most is how we are supposed to prepare students for five different careers.
Often, it doesn't prepare anybody for one career. There are plenty of stories of people graduating college with a major in ceramics and a minor in comparative religion and $65,000 in student loans who wind up working at Starbucks.
hey hey! i work in higher education! i'm an administrator at UC San Diego, which is also where i received my BA. i came out with about $35k in debt. i worked crap temp jobs for a year, but once i had some work experience built up, i landed a pretty decent job back on campus.
anyway, part of the problem here is how people think of education in this country. they often conflate it with what i'd rather call vocational training. the root philosophy behind education is NOT career advancement; it was englightenment. some European models are much better, having separate intitutions for vocational vs. academic schooling.
the UC was designed from the get-go to be a research university, while the Cal State system was more focused on vocational training. but the UC is "better," which leaves many students and parents with the impression that it'll secure their kids with better jobs. it's simply not the case, even in hard science fields. a friend of mine graduated with a BS in molecular biochemistry and spent over a year working under the table at a cactus farm before landing a lab assistant position.
the sad thing is, i see these 18-year-olds coming in and hating the experience. they only care about sliding through and making some money. they're already pretty spoiled, too. only about 60% of students here get a job during their time, and usually then it's for partying, not bills. and the average family income here was $85k several years ago. these are spoiled, money-hungry kids. which is fine, except it detracts from those students who are here to learn. and it also makes me sad because i think most people would love learning if they weren't so focused on jobs they don't have yet.
for what it's worth, i wasn't one of the spoiled kids. i came from a dysfunctional working class family. i just wanted to get away from them at that age, and i know college would be the easiest way for me to do it. so in high school, besides getting good grades, i was senior class president, captain of the academic decathalon, under secretary general of the model U.N., played sport for two years, and participated in a half dozen clubs. throw in a 3.9 GPA and a 1510 on my SATs, and you've got a fair picture of what the "average" university student needs to go through to get in to a school like this... all for an illusion. (well, my freshman year the average incomming GPA was 4.2, weighted for honors classes, and a 1250 SAT, but you get the picture, and both figures have gone up since then).
but there's more.
I'm not sure our current college system is really doing anything other than making money for the colleges.
well, yes and no. many of our universities are making money for
industry. one of my profs called it "the university-industrial complex." a lot of university funding comes from the federal government, but a lot of it also comes from grants (public and private). large private grants usually come from wealthy individuals (often interested in the arts) or corporations (usually interested in profitable sciences - biology, material science, computer and information technology). the discoveries and education of budding young scientists benefits industry, of course. but the problem with this is that many universities that fall into this end up emphasizing these hard sciences and de-emphasizing the social sciences, liberal and fine arts.
but even outside of those fields, there's a game being played. universities gain prestige when their faculty publish new discoveries or works (in all fields), and this results in an emphasis on research over teaching. further more, each discipline develops a kind of insularity - the "quality" of the knowledge matters above all else, even above use-value. so for exaple, sociologists who tend to care deeply about the state of society end up sealing themselves from the public in a rigorous technical jargon; it's where we get all these twenty-five cent words. we try to "reach out" to the public, but no one cares because it sounds like we're talking down. it's the ivory tower effect, and it's damn hard to avoid.
amidst all this, actual education ends up low on the list of priorities for educational institutions. this is despite the fact that many professors care deeply about teaching. it becomes a struggle against the bureaucracy and bullsh*t.
