When the business of education eclipses education.
Spending as much as $250,000 on a bachelors degree from world-renowned U.S. universities such as Harvard University and Yale is a waste of money, a new book asserts. “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It,” urges parents and students to consider colleges that spend on teaching instead of sports and which encourage faculty to interact with students instead of doing research, taking sabbaticals and sitting on campus committees. “Undergraduates are being neglected,” author Andrew Hacker, who co-wrote the book with Claudia Dreifus, told Reuters in an interview. “Higher education has become the preserve of professors … (who) really have lost contact with the main purpose of higher education, which is the education of students.”
I’m guessing that book will be as well received as any suggestion that higher education is too interested in accreditation and not interested enough in actual education.
Send your kids to a college where they’ll actually learn instead of spending all their time at sporting events and campus rallies and where the Profs spend more time hunkered over a microscope or dusty tome than in teaching students.
It’s really very nice to see people speaking out about the industry of higher education. An industry that has long lost its way, and its focus.
Many Ivy League professors don’t teach undergraduates at all and at many colleges teaching is largely farmed out to low-cost adjunct teachers, Hacker said. And, he said, many undergraduate degrees are vocational — from resort management to fashion merchandising — and vast sums of money have been spent on deluxe dining and dorm facilities and state-of-the-art sports centers. As the number of administrative staff has risen, he said, $1 million annual salaries for college presidents have become common place. “Bachelor’s level vocational education is, I don’t want to say a fraud, but close to it,” Hacker said.
Fraud is a good word… read the whole essay and you’ll agree.
Hi Thanks for your thoughtful blog about our book. We hope you’ll give it a look when it is published tomorrow and let us know what you think.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a website, http://www.highereducationquestionmark.com where we’re hoping folks will comment on their higher ed experiences.
Best, Claudia Dreifus
It no longer makes sense to go thousands of dollars into debt for a college education when you can learn just about anything you want online and from books. When you teach yourself, you also don’t have to put aside four or five years of your life in order to do so. There are credit-by-exam programs which make it possible to entirely test out of some college degrees.