Up until now, we thought that American higher education was the best in the world. That’s why students come from all over the world to attend our colleges and universities.
But wait! There is an OECD test that shows our college graduates don’t know much. That supposedly proves we need more tests, more regulation, motte evaluations.
Peter Greene shows how crazy this is.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At some point, as adult learners, we need to grasp the fact that education that is self-directed is mist useful. An institution is no more than a framework on which education may or may not grow. Also, most people will not “learn” that which is antithetical to their world view. We are experiencing this currently in economics, education, employment, science, history and government. This causes wars …cultural, religious, ideological, and physical.
Let guess. Pearson just happens to have a testing program for college.
Bill Gates has given a number of speeches over the past couple of years in which he argued that we need standardized tests at the college level so that we can compare results across institutions and judge the effectiveness of college professors and programs.
Which is even dumber than all the standardized testing in K-12. How are we supposed to “compare” graduates in engineering to graduates in history to graduates in business to graduates in biology? Since a low of the “general” classes for each major can be very different, we can’t even compare general knowledge. And why should we compare?
There are four recurring themes in Mr. Gates’s speeches about higher education. The first is that it is too costly. The second is that there is no way of comparing programs or outcomes. The third is that we can deal with the issue of cost by using more technology. And the fourth is that we can deal with the issue of comparing programs and outcomes by doing more standardized testing at the college level. I have not heard him go into any detail about the kinds of testing that he envisions. Is he talking about having standardized tests for outcomes in various courses or majors that are specific to those? Is he talking about tests of general ability? I cannot say. I am dubious about all this, for I think that any two grads in the same program ought to have, if their programs are indeed challenging and if they are self-motivated learners, very, very different knowledge and skill sets, reflecting their serious pursuit of their subjects. For example, at the end of my undergraduate education, I was an expert in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose and poetry of Dylan Thomas and D.H. Lawrence. I was strong in medieval and Elizabethan English literature, in transformational-generative grammar, and in 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy. I was an English major, but I knew precious little about the Victorian-era novel. So, I had developed some expertise outside my immediate subject area (in linguistics and in philosophy), and there were parts of my education within my subject that were definitely sketchy, incomplete (Victorian lit). Should my education have been deemed inadequate because I hadn’t read Oliver Twist or Portrait of a Lady? Well, I HAD read Piers Plowman and Gawain and the Green Knight in the Middle English, every scrap of literature ever attributed to Shakespeare, and a lot of far-flung stuff like medieval French troubadours and many of the classics in the Indian spiritual tradition (Vedas, Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata). I had gotten a REAL education because I had taken it seriously, had identified some areas of particular interest, and had pursued those vigorously. The whole notion of standardization seemed to me then, and seems to me today, antithetical to getting a real education, which I think of as a unique accomplishment. I tend to get excited about the work of someone who knows a LOT about something I know little about–the one who has followed his or her enthusiasms. Standardization of the tertiary education curriculum sounds to me like a recipe for mediocrity. I read James Joyce, say, because he sounds like no one else. His uniqueness and his genius are the same organic thing. Harold Bloom, in his book on the Western Canon, says that the one thing that great writers all have in common is that they are STRANGE. I think that that is true of great scholars, too. They have followed their bliss, and they have challenged a lot of preconceptions and pushed a lot of boundaries. That’s how we move forward, isn’t it?
Why does the OEDC reinforce the misconception that colleges are simply job training programs?
Contending against these attempts to commodify education will not be easy, but as your Piers Plowman reference might remind us, where there is a Will there is a Way.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
When will there be a leader in the United States from a major party who will step up and fight President Obama’s administration that is obviously destroying the best education system in the world? What happens to the United States when its public schools and public colleges are gone and replaced by private sector, for profit Charter schools riddled with fraud and incompetent teachers who don’t stay long enough to gain the experience to teach effectively?
OCED should not be messing around with ratings of higher education programs based on totally flawed assumptions, statistical and other wise.
Meanwhile, two developments bearing on higher education in the United States are worth noting.
ALEC, the conservative provider of model state legislation, wants to close a lot of public colleges and universities on a fast track.
According to Politico (July 27, 2014) in ALEC’s next meeting members will consider endorsing the “Affordable Baccalaureate Degree Act,” which would require all public universities to offer degree programs that cost less than $10,000 total for all four years of tuition, fees and books.
What’s more, the bill would mandate that at least 10 percent of all four-year degrees awarded at state schools meet that price point within four years of the act’s passage.
Universities would be encouraged to use online education and shift to competency-based models rather than the traditional credit-hour model to keep costs down. If members of ALEC endorse the bill, they will begin circulating and promoting it in state legislatures.
I think the bait will be taken in state legislatures. This is a fast track toward the demolition of higher education with the political point of saving taxpayers money. The suggested cap on the cost at $2,500 a year for two full semesters of course work is about what my undergraduate program cost in the mid 1950s.
I believe part of the intent is to devalue specific degrees, namely those in the liberal arts and humanities, and “impractical” sciences (e.g., archaeology, philosophy, and history) where competencies are not cut and dried and tend to consolidate over multiple years. The unstated agenda is for all public colleges and universities to function as engines for economic growth, literally as vocational schools, with on-line completion of specific tasks the primary evidence of competence. ALEC model legislation also opens the door for more degrees based on “skill sets” from life experience–not entirely without merit—but a can of worms and general attack on the value of formal education, leaving only a diploma or certificate as a credential worth the investment.
Concurrently, the Gates Foundation is promoting the use of the same flawed measures being foisted on K-12 education for higher education, specifically a version of student learning objectives (SLOs) to rate teachers, courses, programs, and entire universities on their success in improving “outcomes.”
Aided by first-year funds from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, nine states and 68 participating two-year and four-year institutions will document how well students are achieving key learning outcomes. The Association of American Colleges and Universities and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association appear to have bought into this version of K-12 accountability including a process that sounds just like that “multi-state” project known as the common core initiative.
In essence, these institutions are being enticed to think that Peter Drucker’s debunked theory of management–by-objectives (The Practice of Management, 1954) is the best way to map learning outcomes of higher education, course by course, with “summative” grades for programs, and for the institution as a whole- one size fits all. The whole project is marketed as value-based education— a phrase that is likely to tempt statisticians into using all the new metrics into dubious evaluations of faculty performance. See http://www.aacu.org/
Ah, the arrival of the WalMart degree programs is here!
My wealthy children can attend an ivy league school and get a true, liberal arts education to prepare them to rule in the neoliberal feudality.
Some of your children (the few pre-selected test-taking successes from charter schools, one assumes) will buy a cheap, bare-bones degree that will enable them to work for my children at a low wage with few or no benefits, as befits their state in life. They can rent company-owned housing, shop at the company store, receive company-sponsored health care to keep them alive as long as they are useful, and die when no longer able to produce a profit for the rentiers. A utopia of capitalistic greed!
The good old days of pre-Dickensian England are back. To be followed, perhaps, by another Revolutionary Period where the heads of the neo-royal oligarchs will again roll when the peasants have suffered enough?
My favorite part of the NYT opinion piece is the graph that compares 16 to 29 year olds with bachelor degrees. Odd that, 16 year olds with BA’s? The global standard for adult educational attainment is to use the 25 year old cut off. What sort of Tom Foolery encouraged the OECD to include 16 year olds in its sampling of college educated adults? How many 16 year olds can their possibly be in the entire OECD population with bachelor degrees? For that matter, how many 17, 18, 19, and 20 year olds? There’s something funny in Denmark, and it ain’t their subpar performance on this test!
Do they deal with the other new study that shows an African American male with a BA has the same chances of being hired as a Caucasian with a high school degree? Those pesky teachers unions are to blame, of course, for this discrepancy, somehow.
The false myth of college and career readiness as the next savior and redeemer of the unwashed masses of poor Americans takes yet another hit.
Seriously, has there ever been a novel hook in the history of advertizing?
Okay– I have to confess to having made a mistake in reading the NYT piece. And my mistake made this “research” actually seem more valid than it actually is. I originally read it to say that the Piiac was given to an average of 4600 college grads from each country. In fact, when I reread the article, I realized it said that the test was given to an average of 4600 ADULTS– only some of whom would turn out to be college grads. So the sample would be even smaller, more random, and less valid than I originally assumed. My apologies.
Peter, I looked and looked through this material for some indication that college grads had been the subjects of study, and no, they were not. These folks looked at the general population. Well, as of 2013, only 31.66% of American adults 25 and older had a B.A. A little less than a third of the population.
My question is: who is taking this test? I wouldn’t sit down to take another standardized test if my life depended on it, except to get into graduate school. So who took this test, and what bribes or threats did these people get?
I have long thought it strange that we still have a model of education based on its being something that one does at the beginning of a life in preparation for a career rather than something that one does FOREVER. There’s a dramatic disconnect between the nature of life today and that model. We live in a time of exponential change, in a time when we cannot predict what skill and knowledge sets are going to be essential to us ten years from now, in a time when technology is making the world smaller, a time in which people continually encounter new possibilities and as a result of those encounters decide to reinvent themselves throughout their lives.
And so that old model will inevitably have to change. We desperately need a new one. Here’s a possibility: Instead of granting these broad degrees–the B.A., the M.A., the Ph.D.–we create certificate programs, and throughout people’s lives, after high school, they add certificates to their resumes. Education schools and school districts have already begun to pioneer in this area by providing programs leading to “endorsements”–in reading, in gifted education, and so on. But why not do that for EVERYTHING? Why not be able to get a certificate in HTML programming? in 19th-century American poetry? in educational statistics? in New Testament Greek? Why should one have to carve out several years in one’s life and take a lot of courses one isn’t interested in taking in order to fulfill requirements for a general degree when one could, throughout a life, from time to time, seek to add endorsements to a resume through some combination of online and in-class work?
Really, isn’t it time to throw over the MEDIEVAL model that we’re following?
And I am not suggesting that we do this for the purpose of turning all of education into utilitarian jobs training.
We need to start taking seriously the notion that education is not something that is done to us in the first 12, 16, 18, or 20 years of of a life but something that we do over the course of a life, not something that we undergo when we are young but something that we undertake throughout a life, as we need or desire it.
Really, it’s CRAZY for us to continue to try to make a MEDIEVAL system work in the contemporary age.
The idea of trying to STANDARDIZE tertiary education seems, to me, really crazy, for what we want of such an education is UNCOMMON expertise–the degrees of freedom within which innovation can occur.
Steven Jobs claimed, and I have no reason to doubt this, that the most important thing he learned in college was calligraphy.
Calligraphy!!!!
Can anyone imagine any subject that would seem of as little importance to most people? But it was studying calligraphy that taught him about typefaces and design and that led him to become a pioneer the graphical user interface and typography on the Macintosh–the guy who insisted that the machine be capable of handling proportional fonts. And as a result, we got the whole computer revolution in publishing. I and a visionary accountant at Allyn & Bacon set up what I believe was the first desktop publishing department in educational publishing using Jobs’s new Macintosh computer and laser printer.
It is HIGHLY DOUBTFUL that if Jobs had had to take a standardized educational program in computer science and mathematics in the 1970s, that program would not have had calligraphy as a core requirement. No. He would have studied FORTRAN and ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE and COBOL.
But CALLIGRAPHY turned out to be THE CORE REQUIREMENT, the sine qua non, for what he was to do with his life!!!!!
There’s a moral here:
WE MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE WHEN WE OVERLY SPECIFY, when we OVERLY STANDARDIZE.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
We are a nation of innovators. Let’s keep it that way.
Yikes. One of my paragraphs, above, was completely garbled. A correction to that post:
If Jobs had had to take a standardized educational program in computer science in the 1970s, that program would NOT have had calligraphy as a core requirement. No. He would have had to study FORTRAN and ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE and COBOL, and there wouldn’t have been time in his program for such frivolity.
But the frivolity turned out to be THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.
The idea that we need more standardization, more testing, etc. in higher education is nuts.
At the same time, it is simply a fact that many college graduates don’t know very much, can’t write well, don’t know how to think or analyze, and are basically no better off educationally than they were before they enrolled. Too much grade inflation, too many dumbed-down “studies” classes, too much politically-correct hogwash.
Higher ed needs help… just not the kind that Gates and his ilk would offer.
it is not simply a fact that many college graduates don’t know very much, can’t write and don’t know how to think. that is just absurd. they may not know what you want them to know, or know much about the things you know about, but they certainly know the things that they want to know.
this new “initiative” is following the same script as the the K-12 reform movement established:
1. manufacture a “crisis” where none exists, by magnifying a set of problems that, ironically, may have been created by your own policies as an outside “reformer”
2. attack your opposition by defunding and weakening their financial support (teachers unions)
3. provide “solutions” to the manufactured crisis that conveniently result in huge profits for your shadow supporters (Pearson, Gates, Broad, Koch Bros.)
4. use the media to weaken, demean and destroy your opposition (myth of the bad teacher, evil unions, etc.)
Sit back and cash your checks…