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).

Collection of Links to Stories About "Diploma Mills" Issue

From our favorite email newsletter, The Scout Report, is this set of links on the recently heating up topic of "diploma mills":

Diploma Mills Continue To Be An Area of Concern for the Federal

Government

• Diploma Mill Concerns Extend Beyond Fraud [Free registration may be
  
• required]
  
• Bill to crack down on diploma mills stalls
  
• Brainstorm: Diploma Mills
  
• Psst. Wanna Buy a Ph.D.?
  
• Institution Accreditation
  
• Avoid Fake-Degree Burns By Researching Academic Credentials
  

The unsavory world of diploma mills is a complex one, and a number of

government agencies have attempted to regulate their activities with varying

degrees of success. The Internet has aided operators of these educational

"institutions" who frequently offer advanced degrees for little, or more

often, no coursework. This past Sunday the New York Times reported on the

case of Dixie and Steven K. Randock Sr. from the town of Colbert,

Washington. The Randocks have been accused of operating more than 120

fictitious universities, and the federal government's concern goes beyond

the mere matter of a phony degree. Law-enforcement officials fear that the

growth of such diploma mills offers terrorists the potential to obtain bogus

degrees in order to obtain visas in the United States. At the state level,

about 20 states have passed laws to prohibit the trade in phony diplomas,

but the U.S. Congress seems to be moving a bit more slowly on the issue.

[KMG]

The first link will take visitors to a New York Times article from this

Sunday about the world of diploma mills. The second link leads to a piece

from Dan Walters of The Modesto Bee which talks about a bill in California

that would effectively crack down on diploma mills. Moving on, the third

link leads to a timely piece of commentary from former university president

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg on diploma mills, which appeared in the Chronicle

of Higher Education this week. The fourth link leads to another special

report from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas Bartlett and Scott

Smallwood, which investigates the profusion of dubious doctorates in the

education sector. The fifth link will lead visitors to the U.S. Department

of Education's Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and

Programs, which can help those wondering about the authenticity of an

institution.  Lastly, a link to the Federal Trade Commission's page on how

to avoid "fake-degree burns" is offered for additional information and

assistance. [KMG]

Copyright Internet Scout, 1994-2008.