The Great Dilution: The Decreasing Component of Academics in the Undergraduate Experience.
Abstract: American undergraduate education has been subject to a “great dilution” in academic content for the past 50 years. This dilution has been caused by several factors, but the principal drivers are a nationwide emphasis on making higher education available to all and trying to maintain reasonable retention rates for the many poorly prepared students that increasingly enter the academy. Curiously, this dilution has also taken place at the 300 to 400 colleges and universities of high merit in the U.S. even though their students are, on paper, often of better quality than in the recent past. This change has significantly altered the nature of educational achievement in the nation, creating both an increasingly more educated citizenry and a poorly educated intellectual elite. An effort to claw back rigor for the nation’s best and brightest would be difficult, but highly desirable.
2 comments:
Anti-elitism in the USA isn't all it's cracked up to be. By fulfilling Bill Clinton's dream of a college degree for everyone, we've lowered the bar so that literally everyone can get one, often with federal education grants and loans to be defaulted. Now, a college degree doesn't mean anything to employers because it is no longer evidence of literacy or knowledgability. A degree from a university that has competitive admission standards is only one of the ways for employers to find the brightest applicants without using elitist, legally dubious pre-employment IQ tests.
My view is that creating "high school plus" B.A.'s isn't at all bad for most schools. It serves to give more people more education, and that's a good thing. But we need to carve out 300 to 400 schools and say, here it's different. We expect you to work. If you don't, you can go to the minor leagues of higher ed.
Doing such a thing, however, would be very difficult. It's almost an un-American approach. That said, if we don't carve out a major league for higher ed with real standards our nation will continue to suffer. Almost everyone earns a "high school plus" degree today. It's a tremendous waste of intellectual talent. Plus we keep diluting that education little by little, year after year.
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