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There’s good news from American higher education. Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor is now the president of Purdue. We have his open letter to the Purdue community. You would think he’s been reading Pickings.
… I doubt that even the most focused and specialized of Purdue researchers has failed to notice the criticisms and the sometimes apocalyptic predictions swirling around higher education these days. They come from outside observers and lifelong academics and from all points of the philosophical compass.
The most frequent attacks include:
College costs too much and delivers too little. Students are leaving, when they graduate at all, with loads of debt but without evidence that they grew much in either knowledge or critical thinking.
Administrative costs, splurging on “resort” amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they receive.
Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning from grade point averages and left the diploma in many cases as merely a surrogate marker for the intelligence required to gain admission in the first place.
The system lacks accountability for results. No one can tell if one school is performing any better than another.
The mission of undergraduate instruction is increasingly subordinated to research and to work with graduate students.
Too many professors are spending too much time “writing papers for each other,” researching abstruse topics of no real utility and no real incremental contribution to human knowledge or understanding.
Diversity is prized except in the most important realm of all, diversity of thought. The academies that, through the unique system of tenure, once enshrined freedom of opinion and inquiry now frequently are home to the narrowest sort of closed-mindedness and the worst repression of dissident ideas.
Athletics, particularly in NCAA Division I, is out of control both financially and as a priority of university attention.
However fair or unfair these critiques, and whatever their applicability to our university, a growing literature suggests that the operating model employed by Purdue and most American universities is antiquated and soon to be displaced. In the space of a few weeks last fall, a Time cover story called for “Reinventing College,” a Newsweek cover asked “Is College a Lousy Investment?” and a USA Today page one feature declared “College May Never Be the Same.” Other voices, many from inside the academy, had even more striking assessments. Here is just a tiny sampling:
“Bubbles burst when people catch on, and there’s some evidence people are beginning to catch on … kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.” (Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, University of Tennessee)
“Other information industries, from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight…Colleges and universities could be next, unless they act to mitigate the poor choices and inaction from the lost decade by looking for ways to lower costs, embrace technology and improve education.” (Jeff Selingo, editorial director, Chronicle of Higher Education)
“Strip away the fancy degrees, the trendy fluff classes, and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient indentured Helots.” (Victor Davis Hanson, StanfordUniversity)
“High prices, low completion rates, and too little accountability.” (Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, asked to sum up the state of today’s higher education)
“Too many kids go to college.” (Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal)
“(U)niversities will be committing slow-motion suicide if they fail to revolutionize their classroom-based models of instruction…The status quo is already disintegrating.” (Ann Kirschner, dean at MacaulayHonorsCollege, the City University of New York)
“In fifty years, if not much sooner, half the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist…nothing can stop it…(T)he residential college will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.” (Nathan Harden, writing in The American Interest magazine)
And, most succinctly and perhaps most credibly, from Stanford’s esteemed President John Hennessy: “There’s a tsunami coming.” …
Two states away in Wisconsin (We jump over the cesspool of Illinois from whence came the criminals now occupying Washington) we find a university system finding practical ways to lower costs and recognize achievement earned outside of normal educational structures. Wall Street Journal has the story.
David Lando plans to start working toward a diploma from the University of Wisconsin this fall, but he doesn’t intend to set foot on campus or even take a single online course offered by the school’s well-regarded faculty.
Instead, he will sit through hours of testing at his home computer in Milwaukee under a new program that promises to award a bachelor’s degree based on knowledge—not just class time or credits.
“I have all kinds of credits all over God’s green earth, but I’m using this to finish it all off,” said the 41-year-old computer consultant, who has an associate degree in information technology but never finished his bachelor’s in psychology.
Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. But so far, no one has figured out a way to stitch these classes together into a bachelor’s degree.
Now, educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.
Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.
No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees. …
It has been cold in the country as evidenced by the chill factor map. If you want to know real cold, Daily Mail, UK has a story about the village of Oymyakon in Yakutsk province in Russia where temperatures in the winter average -50C (122F) Why does anyone live there? Because it is located near warm springs on Stalin’s Road of Bones leading to the Kolyma gold fields in Magadan province. During the 30′s and 40′s half the gold mined in the world came along this road on the way to Western Russia. Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia, writes that it is estimated each ton of gold mined in Kolyma cost between 700 and 1,000 lives, or about one life for every two pounds of gold. Progressive that he was, Stalin must have figured they were lives well spent.
If you thought it was cold where you are at the moment then a visit to the Russian village of Oymyakon might just change your mind.
With the average temperature for January standing at -50C, it is no wonder the village is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world.
Known as the ‘Pole of Cold’, the coldest ever temperature recorded in Oymyakon was -71.2C (-160F).
Daily problems that come with living in Oymyakon include pen ink freezing, glasses freezing to people’s faces and batteries losing power.
Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them.
Another problem caused by the frozen temperatures is burying dead bodies, which can take up to three days. The earth must first have thawed sufficiently in order to dig, so a bonfire is lit for a couple of hours. Hot coals are then pushed to the side and a hole a couple of inches deep is dug. The process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough to bury the coffin. …