College scandal's big lesson: College educations are worthless
"Look closely enough, and you’ll see another shocking yet unsurprising lesson of this all: College education isn’t all that valuable. Think about what was involved here. The most brazen cheating here involved wealthy parents getting smarter kids to take their own children’s SATs, or else bribing proctors to correct the tests after they were completed." If this is the case, why bother? This is four wasted years and a huge waste of money. Colleges and universities, especially the small liberal arts colleges are facing an existential crisis. I do not have the answer to that crisis, but I can offer a bit of insight into ideas which could be used to make the college experience more valuable. 1. Colleges need to eliminate the problem of professors teaching what they want and to test what they teach not on the entire subject matter. We all have read the stories of professors spending half of all the class time indoctrinating students in socialism, or other nonsense, failing to cover the material adequately, then testing softly on what little material they covered. The administrations feed into this because they have adopted the mindset that the student is customer and customer is king, so when students want lowered expectations and lowered workloads, they get them. This dumbing down of college education has made them all but worthless. The cure is to separate the teaching of the material from the testing of the material. Schools should provide professors to teach the material, while the university should provide a comprehensive test for the material taught. The only test which matters should be the final; the rest of the tests should be for practical experience and should consist of all prior final exams. 2. Testing for the majority of courses should be uniform. This would allow for a direct comparison between students test scores between one university and another. If a group of small colleges and universities, or a separate entity altogether were to offer tests to all comers and offer college credits for those taking the tests, they could revolutionize education. There is no reason not to allow anyone to take college course proficiency tests whether they were self-instructed or instructed by a university professor. By making these changes, students would become more aligned with education and not with the idea of credentialing. They would desire high-quality professors not just easy grading professors. This would create a problem outside of STEM since these areas have long lost any component of quality. The universities would need to decide what quality means concerning the social sciences and other schools of study. They would have to do this in a world where employers have a say, and students demand results. This would be a revitalizing boon to higher education and could save it.
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