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.
Now critics are raising the alarm that speeding up college and making it cheaper risks dumbing it down.
Click the link to see more: 'We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education' - Timothy Pratt - The AtlanticPoints:
- “…the push for more efficiency in higher education often leads to lower quality, and that reforms are being rushed into practice without convincing evidence of their effectiveness.”
- “…more conventional classrooms are filling up with part-time faculty, often hired two or three weeks before they’re due to begin teaching.”
- “’We are creating Walmarts of higher education—convenient, cheap, and second-rate,’ says Karen Arnold, associate professor at the Educational Leadership and Higher Education Department at Boston College.”
- “Steven Ward, a sociology professor at Western Connecticut State University and the author of Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, likens the new world of higher education to another American business known for its low prices. Ward calls it the ‘McDonaldization’ of universities and colleges.”
- “The best ways to help students succeed include providing them with ‘a critical mass of interesting peers, interactions with professors and outside-the-classroom experiential learning,’ says Boston College’s Arnold. Yet, ‘At the same time we know this, we are moving in the opposite direction.’”
- To be fair to Walmart, the chain does provide sound products at a low price.
- Consider this quotation from the article: “In the end, says Humphreys, when it comes to ‘getting students through more efficiently, more quickly and with the learning they need, we need to pay attention to all three. Otherwise, at least one will suffer.’”
- This is similar to the triple constraint of project management: cost, time, and scope. About that, project managers like to say, “You can have any two.” In this case:
- More efficiently = cost.
- More quickly = time.
- With the learning they need = scope.
- The implication is we can’t have all three. At least one of the constraints has to give to meet the others. For example, to finish something more quickly, you may have to reduce the scope to lessen the workload or spend more money to bring additional resources to bear.
- Education is widely held to be a prerequisite for a prosperous and civil society. What kind of society will a utilitarian education system produce?
