Then it goes behind a paywall.

It was written by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, who teaches remedial writing at City University of New York.

I think you will find it interesting.

Professor Hellman cares about her students.

Here is the conclusion:

All too often we hear the reductive narrative that these students are simply incapable of college-level work. Allow me to be clear: These students have potential. Some didn’t take their placement tests seriously enough, not realizing the repercussions. Some graduated from high schools that emphasized preparation for other types of standardized tests, and so those students had little writing instruction. Some are non-native speakers. Some would probably have passed the initial placement exam had they familiarized themselves with the test format and prepared in advance. And some, it must be acknowledged, will not make it through the class or through college.

Despite the pressures, frustrations, and sometimes feelings of failure, I opt to teach these courses because I believe that if we fail to offer these students a chance, we will have failed at public education. President Obama has spoken about the need to improve access to education, to halt the increasing stagnation of social mobility in the United States. Serving students who are most in need is a crucial component of public education.

The difficult yet uplifting narrative of the remedial-writing course I taught last spring repeats itself, with minor variations, every semester. But those who overcome the myriad challenges of remediation have the opportunity to pursue their degrees. I am thrilled when I glimpse former students in the hallway—a space that has different connotations for them now that they have navigated remediation. Recently I crossed paths with the older veteran who had inspired his classmates to applaud him. “It’s good to see you,” I exclaimed. I meant much more. He nodded, grasping the unspoken import. We shook hands and exchanged news, the hallway bearing witness. Then we parted, off to our respective classes.

John Hechinger is one of the most brilliant investigative journalists now writing. His specialty is higher education.

This harrowing in-depth article describes fraternity hazing. A young man who suffered weeks of cruelty, degradation, and humiliation dropped out of the initiation process, told his story to university officials, and spoke to Hechinger.

The story reads like something out of a horror movie.

It begins:

“On a chilly March night, Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers ordered Justin Stuart to recite the fraternity’s creed.

“The true gentleman,” said the 19-year-old freshman, shivering in the backyard, “is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies.”

“It wasn’t easy to get the words out. Stuart was naked, except for his underwear, and standing in a trash can filled waist-deep with ice. Fraternity members sprayed him with a hose and poured buckets of water over his head. Convinced that SAE would bring him social success in college and then a Wall Street job, the lanky recruit from suburban Maryland endured the abuse.”

Over the past decade or more, we have seen and heard a lot of duplicitous rhetoric about rhetoric: we have heard politicians speak about the importance of education as they cut the budget and increase class size and slash the jobs of teachers, librarians, social workers, and others. We have learned to live with cognitive dissonance as our “thought leaders” say one thing but mean something else, often the opposite..

Now it is happening to higher education. We hear that U.S. higher education is the best in the world, but the state and federal governments are demanding cuts that will affect the quality of education.

Timothy Pratt writes that “We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education.”

He writes:

“Universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, and other states have cut the number of credits students need to graduate. A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process. A California legislator introduced a measure that would have substituted online courses for some of the brick-and-mortar kind at public universities.

“Some campuses of the University of North Carolina system are mulling getting rid of history, political science, and various others of more than 20 “low productive” programs. The University of Southern Maine may drop physics. And governors in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin have questioned whether taxpayers should continue subsidizing public universities for teaching the humanities.

“Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.”

A new Gallup poll shows that most college presidents don’t think much of President Obama’s plan to “make college more affordable” by rating them.

The Obama plan relies on metrics to determine which colleges are best and most affordable and assumes that student consumers will use this information to make better choices.

Somehow, this process is supposed to make college “more affordable,” although it does nothing to actually lower the cost to students.

According to the account by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed,

Most college presidents doubt that President Obama’s plan to promote affordable higher education will be effective, or that it will lead students to make better informed choices. Further, they expect that the wealthiest colleges and universities will be most successful in the ratings system Obama has proposed.

Those are the findings of a poll by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed of American college and university presidents, which attracted responses from 675 of them. Gallup has a 95 percent confidence level that the margin of error is plus/minus 3.8 percentage points. The presidents were given complete anonymity so they could answer without regard to the politics of opposing a plan that has become a top priority for the Obama administration.

The plan — proposed in August — would, among other things, create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes (such as graduation rates and graduate earnings), on affordability and on access (measures such as the proportion of students receiving Pell Grants). Then the plan would link student aid to these ratings, such that students who enroll at high-performing colleges would receive larger Pell Grants and more favorable rates on student loans.

Only 2% of the college presidents said the plan would be “very effective.” Another 32% said it would be “somewhat effective.” Only 16%  said the plan was a good idea.

One of the criticisms of the Obama plan from the start is that it would favor the wealthiest institutions, which tend to attract the best-prepared students (and so have high graduation rates), enroll students who are well-connected (which, combined with their good preparation, lands them good jobs) and have the endowments to support generous financial aid packages. Fifty-two percent of presidents agree or strongly agree that wealthier institutions will fare best under the Obama ratings.

Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said that the results were consistent with what she is hearing from college presidents, which is a lot of concern “about unintended consequences that may come from a well-intentioned set of metrics.” She stressed that most college presidents are “fully aligned with President Obama’s ultimate goals — expanding access and making college more affordable.”

But she said that there are doubts among many presidents both about the idea that these data will help students, and that ratings can be done correctly. She noted that most colleges already share considerable data — often covering information similar to what President Obama says should go into ratings. “But there’s not much evidence that the array of key data metrics that most institutions routinely post have made a huge difference,” she said.

At the same time, she said she worries about the impact of ratings. If one looks at existing rankings systems, most college leaders “are skeptical but we pay a lot of attention to them.” Broad said that she feared a new ratings system might have create the wrong incentives. “There’s a real concern that some of the measures might cause institutions to alter their admissions and aid awarding in ways that don’t advance access to low-income college students,” Broad said.

Secretary Duncan defended the approach of the Obama plan. He assumes that data–as in Race to the Top–will solve all vexing problems.

If college costs are too high, wouldn’t it make sense to increase student aid, instead of collecting more data and trusting to the marketplace to magically lower costs?
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/16/most-presidents-doubt-obamas-plan-promote-affordable-higher-education#ixzz2neXL6NEs
Inside Higher Ed

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, has some concrete suggestions to improve higher education. His most prominent suggestion is that Ph.D. Candidates should be trained to teach, not just to compete their dissertation.

But the most interesting comment occurs near the end of the article when he writes:

“A more plausible reason for the sluggish pace of reform is the scanty preparation given to graduate students for their role as educators. Lacking such training, newly minted Ph.D.’s naturally begin their teaching by trying to emulate the professors they respected most during their student days. While there is something to be said for this practice, it hardly encourages innovation in the classroom. Rather, it tends to produce an uncritical, conservative attitude toward teaching, quite at variance with the way most faculty members go about their research.

“Continuing this approach is likely to prove even more costly in the future than it has been in the past. President Obama has called for a significant increase in the number of Americans graduating from college by enrolling hundreds of thousands of new students every year. Many of these young people will be less prepared for college work than the average student today and, hence, more difficult to teach.

“Even if colleges manage to meet the president’s goal (and that will be a tall order indeed), America will never regain the huge lead in educational attainment that helped to make it the world’s most prosperous nation from 1870 to 1970. Now that a dozen or more countries have made the transition from an elite to a mass or nearly universal system of higher education, it will be all that we can do simply to keep up.

“If the United States is ever to regain a significant economic advantage from the education of its people, it will have to come through the quality of instruction that our undergraduates receive and not just from the quantity of college degrees being offered. Such instruction will surely be slow to arrive without a faculty trained to bring to its teaching the same ample store of background knowledge, the same respect for relevant data, and the same questioning, innovative spirit that professors have long displayed in carrying out their research.”

Arne Duncan often says that our education system must compete with other those of other nations, and President Obama says that we must raise our college graduation rate to first in the world by 2020. But this reader (Reteach for America) disagrees. He or she might have added this recent article about unemployment among college graduates in Europe.

It’s not a matter of educating Arne. It’s been all over the mainstream media for years now that there is a glut of people with college degrees and a lack of decent paying jobs for them, including in:

The US: “millions of college graduates over all—not just recent ones—suffer a mismatch between education and employment, holding jobs that don’t require a costly college degree.”
http://chronicle.com/article/Millions-of-Graduates-Hold/136879/

China: “China’s Graduates Face Glut Mismatch Between Their Skills, Job Market’s Needs Results in Underemployment”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443545504577566752847208984

South Korea: “Education in South Korea Glutted with graduates”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/11/education-south-korea

and “India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire”http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826

(Heads Up Arne: Singapore is a city-state, not a country.)

People like me have sent a lot of links to those reports to Duncan and Obama, so that they cannot claim they didn’t know. It’s just planned ignoring.

Our country needs to stop talking about a bogus competition with other nations and cease the “college for all” mantra and focus on providing decent paying jobs for our own workers, including all the underemployed college graduates right here at home.