What Is the Purpose of Higher Education? | The Glittering Eye
IMO our present system of higher education is targeted with unerring precision at the economic conditions of the 1950s. Then the purposes of higher education were clear. They were
A) To prepare professionals for their post-graduate education.
B) To pre-select managers for big businesses.
C) To function as a place where middle and upper middle class women could meet and marry men of the appropriate social classes.and none of those are operative today except maybe the first. The system of legal education seems to be collapsing even as I type and Lord knows the system of medical education is in drastic need of reform. How much sense does it actually make for GPs to get the same training as medical researchers?
D) To provide those who will not proceed to graduate school with a broadly-accepted imprimatur of generalized intellectual ability and reasonable work ethic, and thus plausible employability.
E) To provide a social environment that transitions the student from adolescence into young adulthood through 1) a variety of initiation rituals both formal and informal, 2) indoctrination into the cultural corpus of the bourgeois, and 3) facilitating the self-guided creation of a social network that will endure to the lifetime support of the enrollee.
and most importantly,
F) To allow the people who do the real work of the university (earning grant and research funds in exchange for producing publishable intellectual work) to credibly claim the title of “educators.”Report
G) We’re gonna smoke and drink and fool around.
We’re nookie-bound!…
We are the North Star…
Oh, wait, that’s summer camp…
Never mindReport
Re: MOOCs
Isn’t there a lot of evidence and studies that show on-line education is a failure? A week or so ago Vox had an article on how a lot of Silicon Valley types see on-line education as being more about finding diamonds than they do about it educating the masses.
There simply don’t appear to be any good solutions to this problem. No one has any idea on how to make employers take risks on people with high-school educations alone. Yet many people take longer than four years to graduate which could be for a variety of factors including but not limited to not being right for college. No one wants to tell people that they are going to deal with lives of job and income insecurity because that will lead to political revolt.Report
For some colleges and universities, to provide a cover of plausible deniability for their highly profitable sports franchises that utilize unpaid labor. For other colleges, to provide a source of easy money, grift, and real estate development for corrupt business people and their friends.Report