College Education, Good Jobs: Why Degrees Are Overrated

The Case Against College Education is a Time.com viewpoint by Ramesh Ponnuru:

We may be close to maxing out on the first strategy. Our high college drop-out rate — 40% of kids who enroll in college don't get a degree within six years — may be a sign that we're trying to push too many people who aren't suited for college to enroll. It has been estimated that, in 2007, most people in their 20s who had college degrees were not in jobs that required them: another sign that we are pushing kids into college who will not get much out of it but debt.
The benefits of putting more people in college are also oversold. Part of the college wage premium is an illusion. People who go to college are, on average, smarter than people who don't. In an economy that increasingly rewards intelligence, you'd expect college grads to pull ahead of the pack even if their diplomas signified nothing but their smarts. College must make many students more productive workers. But at least some of the apparent value of a college degree, and maybe a lot of it, reflects the fact that employers can use it as a rough measure of job applicants' intelligence and willingness to work hard . . . It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs. The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

'Credit Hours' or 'Chunks of Learning'?

Credit hours? Chunks of learning? The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk observes that the recent angst between the DOE's Inspector General and the North Central's Higher Learning Commission has given new life to the question of "credit hours." Are they outdated? A relic? Do they do more harm than good?

Along the way, Blumenstyk mentions an interesting Lumina-backed effort to create a new college ecosystem (DGREE, it has a conference going on this week), touches base with Carol A. Twigg at NCAT, and notes an internal Department of Education initiative to redefine "credit hour":

Meanwhile, the Education Department may itself take that step. Last month, during negotiations with 16 representatives of colleges and associations over new rules to govern federal student aid, the department proposed its own credit-hour definition, based on the Carnegie Unit (one credit would equal one hour of class time or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class work per week for approximately 15 weeks; in cases where there was no formal class, the college, with the accord of its accreditor, could establish equivalents). It's uncertain if this proposal will be adopted. Negotiators are expected to vote on the credit-hour definition, along with other proposed rules, in late January.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Why Johnny Can't Jump-Start

One of our favorite blogs is "Getting to Green" at Inside Higher Ed, written by an anonymous person who we believe is a SCUP member and who goes by the pseudonym "G. Rendell." He has assured us, BTW, that he will be joining us at SCUP–44 in Portland, July 18–22 this summer. In this post, he finds an engineering grad he wouldn't trust to jump-start his car and writes about the relationship between that and how higher education helped us get into the sustainability mess we're in, in the first place:

He’ll be graduating with a BS in engineering from a respected school, and he was confused when a household light bulb (120 volts, 60 watts) didn’t seem to be lighting up from a flow of 12-volt current. In a nutshell, this guy might be an engineer with (soon) an honors diploma, but I wouldn’t trust him to jump-start my car.

This student might be an extreme case, but in some ways I think his story exemplifies why college and university graduates have created a world (society, economy) with a sustainability crisis, and why colleges and (especially) universities are having a hard time making the cultural change necessary to make that crisis go away. We don’t do a good job of connecting subject matter to real world problems/applications. We don’t even do a good job of connecting it to closely related subject matter (like other engineering specialties).