23 de junho de 2011

Porque ir a la universidad

El artículo adjunto publicado en The New Yorker comenta dos libros recientes que analizan si las universidades en la era post-masificación de educación superior en EEUU agregan valor para los estudiantes. El ensayo es muy provocativo para el debate sobre educación en Chile donde

esta recien comenzando la masificación de la educación superior.




Gregory

------------------------------------

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

A Critic at Large




Live and Learn

Why we have college.

by Louis Menand June 6, 2011




More and more Americans are going to college, but how many of them are

actually learning anything?




My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The

students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to

be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being

eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which

I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with

the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious

enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of

what we were doing.




At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in

the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there

were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public

university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of

part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these

students were the first in their families to attend college, and any

distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had

complicated family responsibilities.




I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives

of my Ivy League students. I assigned my new students the same readings

I had assigned the old ones. I understood that the new students would

not be as well prepared, but, out of faith or ego, I thought that I

could tell them what they needed to know, and open up the texts for

them. Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and

asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?”




I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of

times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I

could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was

a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the

return on investment in a college education. I just had never been

called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training.

We took the value of the business we were in for granted.




I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in

college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.”

If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as

circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of

people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or

even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is

difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be

captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no

intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person

is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator,

is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not

qualities readily subject to measurement.




Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members

from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism

(such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the

slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so

that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It

wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process

that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.




College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to

demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of

subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how

smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up

in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people

according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry

types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A.,

that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of

intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important,

therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.




I could have answered the question in a different way. I could have

said, “You’re reading these books because they teach you things about

the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you

are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” This reflects a different theory

of college, a theory that runs like this: In a society that encourages

its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest

personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only

what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to

acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed

citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being. College

exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them,

whatever careers they end up choosing.




In performing this function, college also socializes. It takes people

with disparate backgrounds and beliefs and brings them into line with

mainstream norms of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated

in college, and even honored, but students have to master the accepted

ways of doing things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we

want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the

same page. It’s a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.




If you like the first theory, then it doesn’t matter which courses

students take, or even what is taught in them, as long as they’re

rigorous enough for the sorting mechanism to do its work. All that

matters is the grades. If you prefer the second theory, then you might

consider grades a useful instrument of positive or negative

reinforcement, but the only thing that matters is what students actually

learn. There is stuff that every adult ought to know, and college is the

best delivery system for getting that stuff into people’s heads.




A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher

education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to

be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional

schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it

passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the

importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be

available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the

grades they receive.




It wasn’t always like this. Before 1945, élite private colleges like

Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a

privileged social class. Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five

boys from Groton applied to Harvard. Four hundred and two were accepted.

In 1932, Yale received thirteen hundred and thirty applications, and it

admitted nine hundred and fifty-nine—an acceptance rate of seventy-two

per cent. Almost a third of those who enrolled were sons of Yale graduates.




In 1948, through the exertions of people like James Bryant Conant, the

president of Harvard, the Educational Testing Service went into

business, and standardized testing (the S.A.T. and the A.C.T.) soon

became the virtually universal method for picking out the most

intelligent students in the high-school population, regardless of their

family background, and getting them into the higher-education system.

Conant regarded higher education as a limited social resource, and he

wanted to make more strait the gate. Testing insured that only people

who deserved to go to college did. The fact that Daddy went no longer

sufficed. In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five per

cent. By 1970, it was twenty per cent. Last year, thirty-five thousand

students applied to Harvard, and the acceptance rate was six per cent.




Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year,

partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally,

and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and

Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This

degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the

acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford

eighteen per cent.




But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became

more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since

1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were

about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and

about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll

almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.




There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who

wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old

employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more

than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of

public higher education, the State of California, has ten university

campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve

community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per

cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or

graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three

per cent.




If you are a Theory 1 person, you worry that, with so many Americans

going to college, the bachelor’s degree is losing its meaning, and soon

it will no longer operate as a reliable marker of productive potential.

Increasing public investment in higher education with the goal of

college for everyone—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is

thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. Education is about

selection, not inclusion.




If you are friendly toward Theory 2, on the other hand, you worry that

the competition for slots in top-tier colleges is warping educational

priorities. You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are

overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful

substitutes. The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room

and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges

are much less expensive—the average tuition is $7,605—and there are also

many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education,

and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute

of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé.

Education is about personal and intellectual growth, not about winning

some race to the top.




It would be nice to conclude that, despite these anxieties, and given

the somewhat contradictory goals that have been set for it, the American

higher-education system is doing what Americans want it to do. College

is broadly accessible: sixty-eight per cent of high-school graduates now

go on to college (in 1980, only forty-nine per cent did), and employers

continue to reward the credential, which means that there is still some

selection going on. In 2008, the average income for someone with an

advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for

someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only

a high-school education, it was $31,283.




There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher

education. Students all over the world want to come here, and some

American universities, including N.Y.U. and Yale, are building campuses

overseas. Higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better

life. It is sometimes pointed out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

were college dropouts. It is unnecessary to point out that most of us

are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.




It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if

it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting

access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning

anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it

pretty emphatically.




“Academically Adrift” (Chicago; $25) was written by two sociologists,

Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia). Almost

a third of it, sixty-eight pages, is a methodological appendix, which

should give the general reader a clue to what to expect. “Academically

Adrift” is not a diatribe based on anecdote and personal history and

supported by some convenient data, which is what books critical of

American higher education often are. It’s a social-scientific attempt to

determine whether students are learning what colleges claim to be

teaching them—specifically, “to think critically, reason analytically,

solve problems, and communicate clearly.”




Arum and Roksa consider Theory 1 to be “overly cynical.” They believe

that the job of the system is to teach people, not just to get them up

the right educational ladders and down the right career chutes. They

think that some people just aren’t capable of learning much at the

college level. But they think that people who do go to college ought to

be able to show something for the time and expense.




The authors decided that, despite a lot of rhetoric about accountability

in higher education, no one seemed eager to carry out an assessment, so

they did their own. They used a test known as the Collegiate Learning

Assessment, or C.L.A. The test has three parts, though they use data

from just one part, the “performance task.” Students are, for example,

assigned to advise “an employer about the desirability of purchasing a

type of airplane that has recently crashed,” and are shown documents,

such as news articles, an F.A.A. accident report, charts, and so on, and

asked to write memos. The memos are graded for “critical thinking,

analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing.”




The test was given to a group of more than two thousand freshmen in the

fall of 2005, and again, to the same group, in the spring of 2007. Arum

and Roksa say that forty-five per cent of the students showed no

significant improvement, and they conclude that “American higher

education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large

proportion of students.”




The study design raises a lot of questions, from the reasonableness of

assessing learning growth after only three full semesters of college to

the reliability of the C.L.A. itself. The obvious initial inference to

make about a test that does not pick up a difference where you expect

one is that it is not a very good test. And, even if the test does

measure some skills accurately, the results say nothing about whether

students have acquired any knowledge, or socially desirable attitudes,

that they didn’t have before they entered college.




There are other reasons for skepticism. It’s generally thought (by their

professors, anyway) that students make a developmental leap after

sophomore year—although Arum and Roksa, in a follow-up study completed

after their book was finished, determined that, after four years,

thirty-six per cent of students still did not show significant

improvement on the C.L.A. But what counts as significant in a

statistical analysis is a function of where you set the bar. Alexander

Astin, the dean of modern higher-education research, who is now an

emeritus professor at U.C.L.A., published a sharp attack on Arum and

Roksa’s methodology in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and, in

particular, on the statistical basis for the claim that forty-five per

cent of college students do not improve.




Even leaving the C.L.A. results aside, though, “Academically Adrift”

makes a case for concern. Arum and Roksa argue that many students today

perceive college as fundamentally a social experience. Students spend

less time studying than they used to, for example. In 1961, students

reported studying for an average of twenty-five hours a week; the

average is now twelve to thirteen hours. More than a third of the

students in Arum and Roksa’s study reported that they spent less than

five hours a week studying. In a University of California survey,

students reported spending thirteen hours a week on schoolwork and

forty-three hours socializing and pursuing various forms of entertainment.




Few people are fully reliable reporters of time use. But if students are

studying less it may be because the demands on them are fewer. Half the

students in the study said that they had not taken a single course in

the previous semester requiring more than twenty pages of writing. A

third said that they had not taken a course requiring more than forty

pages of reading a week. Arum and Roksa point out that professors have

little incentive to make their courses more rigorous. Professors say

that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is

student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and

promotion decisions. It’s in professors’ interest, therefore, for their

classes to be entertaining and their assignments not too onerous. They

are not deluded: a study carried out back in the nineteen-nineties (by

Alexander Astin, as it happens) found that faculty commitment to

teaching is negatively correlated with compensation.




Still, Arum and Roksa believe that some things do make a difference.

First of all, students who are better prepared academically for college

not only do better when they get to college; they improve more markedly

while they’re there. And students who take courses requiring them to

write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty

pages a week show greater improvement.




The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts

fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on

the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in

non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work,

communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are

a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take

courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more

likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity

correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared

academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The

students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.




Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors,

though. The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business. Twenty-two per

cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten per cent are

awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More

than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks,

recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion.

Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the

liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.




Neither Theory 1 nor Theory 2 really explains how the educational system

works for these non-liberal-arts students. For them, college is

basically a supplier of vocational preparation and a credentialling

service. The theory that fits their situation—Theory 3—is that advanced

economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high

school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be

taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in

a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work.




Theory 3 explains the growth of the non-liberal education sector. As

work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with

specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional

master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees

available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland

Security. Close to fourteen times as many master’s degrees are given out

every year as doctorates. When Barack Obama and Arne Duncan talk about

how higher education is the key to the future of the American economy,

this is the sector they have in mind. They are not talking about the

liberal arts.




Still, students pursuing vocational degrees are almost always required

to take some liberal-arts courses. Let’s say that you want a bachelor’s

degree in Culinary Arts Management, with a Beverage Management major,

from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Hmm. I might have taken a

wrong turn in my education somewhere.) To get this degree, U.N.L.V.

requires you to take two courses in English (Composition and World

Literature), one course in philosophy, one course in either history or

political science, courses in chemistry, mathematics, and economics, and

two electives in the arts and humanities. If your professional goal is,

let’s say, running the beverage service at the Bellagio, how much effort

are you going to put into that class on World Literature?




This is where Professor X enters the picture. Professor X is the nom de

guerre of a man who has spent more than ten years working evenings (his

day job is with the government) as an adjunct instructor at “Pembrook,”

a private four-year institution, and “Huron State,” a community college

that is evidently public. The academic motivation of the students at

these schools is utilitarian. Most of them are trying to get jobs—as

registered nurses or state troopers, for example—that require a college

degree, and they want one thing and one thing only from Professor X: a

passing grade.




Professor X published an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about

his experiences. David Brooks mentioned the piece in his Times column,

and it provoked a small digital storm. “In the Basement of the Ivory

Tower” (Viking; $25.95) is the book version. The author holds an M.F.A.

in creative writing (he teaches composition and literature), and he

writes in the style of mordant self-deprecation that is the approved

M.F.A. mode for the memoir genre. He can be gratuitously snarky about

his colleagues (though not about his students), but he’s smart and he’s

generally good company. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” has the

same kind of worm’s-eye charm as Stephen Akey’s “College” (1996), a

story of undergraduate misadventures at Glassboro State College, though

“College” is funnier.




Professor X has entwined his take on teaching with episodes in his

personal life involving the purchase of a house he could not afford and

subsequent marital tension. These parts of the book are too vague to be

engaging. If you are going to go down the confessional path, you have to

come across with the lurid details. We never find out where Professor X

lives, what his wife does, what his kids are like, or much else about

him. This is a writer who obviously enjoys the protection of a

pseudonym. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is one of those books

about higher education that are based on anecdote and personal history

and supported by some convenient data (sort of like this review,

actually), but the story is worth hearing.




Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not

qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and

literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps

pushing them through the human-capital processor. They attend either

because the degree is a job requirement or because they’ve been seduced

by the siren song “college for everyone.” X considers the situation

analogous to the real-estate bubble: Americans are being urged to invest

in something they can’t afford and don’t need. Why should you have to

pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper?

To show that you can tough it out with Henry James? As Professor X sees

it, this is a case of over-selection.




It’s also socially inefficient. The X-Man notes that half of all

Americans who enter college never finish, that almost sixty per cent of

students who enroll in two-year colleges need developmental (that is,

remedial) courses, and that less than thirty per cent of faculty in

American colleges are tenure-track. That last figure was supplied by the

American Federation of Teachers, and it may be a little low, but it is

undeniable that more than half the teaching in American colleges is done

by contingent faculty (that is, adjuncts) like Professor X.




This does not mean, of course, that students would learn more if they

were taught by tenured professors. Professor X is an adjunct, but he is

also a dedicated teacher, and anyone reading his book will feel that his

students respect this. He reprints a couple of course evaluations that

sum up his situation in two nutshells:







Course was better than I thought. Before this I would of never

voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a desire to pick one up

and read. I really like [Professor X], this is why I took the course

because I saw he was teaching it. He’s kind of enthusiastic about things

that probably aren’t that exciting to most people, which helps make the

three hours go by quicker.




Professor X blames this state of affairs on what he calls “postmodern

modes of thought,” and on the fact that there are more women teaching in

college, which has had “a feminizing effect on the collective

unconscious of faculty thought.” He also takes some shots at the

academic field of composition and rhetoric, which he regards as low on

rigor and high on consciousness-raising. This all seems beside the

point. Professor X’s own pedagogy is old-fashioned and his grading is

strict (he once failed nine students in a class of fifteen)—and he

hasn’t had much luck with his students, either.




When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd

about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to

write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial

ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1)

having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the

rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those

rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you

start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can

write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like. Someone

who has reached the age of eighteen or twenty and has never been a

reader is not going to become a writer in fifteen weeks. On the other

hand, it’s not a bad thing for such a person to see what caring about

“things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people” looks like. A

lot of teaching is modelling.




Professor X has published a follow-up essay, in The Atlantic, to promote

the book. He’s on a mini-crusade to stem the flood of high-school

graduates into colleges that require them to master a liberal-arts

curriculum. He believes that students who aren’t ready for that kind of

education should have the option of flat-out vocational training

instead. They’re never going to know how to read Henry James; they’re

never going to know how to write like Henry James. But why would they

ever need to?




This is the tracking approach. You don’t wait twenty years for the

system to sort people out, and you don’t waste resources on students who

won’t benefit from an academically advanced curriculum. You make a

judgment much earlier, as early as middle school, and designate certain

students to follow an academic track, which gives them a liberal

education, and the rest to follow a professional or vocational track.

This is the way it was done for most of the history of higher education

in the West. It is still the way it’s done in Britain, France, and Germany.




Until the twentieth century, that was the way it worked here, too. In

the nineteenth century, a college degree was generally not required for

admission to law school or medical school, and most law students and

medical students did not bother to get one. Making college a

prerequisite for professional school was possibly the most important

reform ever made in American higher education. It raised the status of

the professions, by making them harder to enter, and it saved the

liberal-arts college from withering away. This is why liberal education

is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the

high-status professions. And this is what people in other parts of the

world mean when they say they want American-style higher education. They

want the liberal arts and sciences.




Assuming that these new books are right (not a fully warranted

assumption), and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the

academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system

has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all

who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of

people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire

focus. This is what Arum and Roksa believe, anyway. Students at very

selective colleges are still super-motivated—their motivation is one of

the reasons they are selected—and most professors, since we are the sort

of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want

to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing,

when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in

it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.




If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional

phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end.

That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years.

Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the

veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944

and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when

the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came

co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the

military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the

nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial

and ethnic diversification.




These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket

punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the

Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in

doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the

favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of

Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had

been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been

segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to

the United States precisely so that their children could go to college.

For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not

only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting

a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was

a token of its transformational powers.




This is why “Why did we have to buy this book?” was such a great

question. The student who asked it was not complaining. He was trying to

understand how the magic worked. I (a Theory 2 person) wonder whether

students at that college are still asking it.




Gregory Elacqua

--

Director

Instituto de Políticas Publicas

Facultad de Economía y Empresa

Universidad Diego Portales


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