Education’s no good, terrible, very bad year continues. In a poll that should send shivers down the spines of any academic, NBC News finds that for the first time ever, a majority of Americans believe the value of a college degree does not equal the price a student has to pay for it. Sixty-three percent of respondents say a degree isn’t worth it anymore–while just 33-percent see good value in advanced education. That represents a 16-percent drop in educational confidence in the last eight years–and a 23-percent decline in the last 12-years.
The main argument put forth by the poll is that those graduating with college degrees today come out of school with no specific job skills. And the “skills” those not in a manual labor vein have are threatened with near extinction by artificial intelligence in the not so distant future. Add to that, families failing to save for college educations, exploding tuitions caused by increasing administration and student services on campus, and a willingness to take on crushing amounts of debt to acquire degrees in fields that will never provide the income to cover decades of payments, and you can see why nearly two out of every three people in this country find no value in a bachelors or higher degrees.
To further undermine the value of said degrees, came an article this week in the Atlantic covering an explosion of students claiming “learning disabilities” at some of the most-prestigious universities in the nation. Twenty-percent of kids at Harvard are “diagnosed with a disability” that grants them special accommodation in the classroom. It’s 34-percent at Amherst. The numbers have tripled at the University of Chicago in recent years and have increased by 500-percent at Cal-Berkley.
By “disability”, we are not talking about vision impairment, physical limitations, hearing issues, or cognitive birth defects. Instead, “disability” on campus today includes such conditions as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression. And the accommodations provided to these students are not things like wheelchair ramps, hearing loops, or large-print materials but are instead more time to take tests, secluded rooms with individual space to work, the use of technology not allowed for “non-disabled students”, and exemptions from doing work outside of the classroom. In the story, one professor at Michigan says the “distraction free” testing space is often more crowded than the classroom where all of the other students are taking their exams. At Carnegie-Mellon University, students who claim to have “anxiety” can have administrators order professors not to call on them “without proper warning”. At one school in the University of California system, a student was allowed to bring their mother to class with them every day–where she would often dominate the discussion in the lecture hall.
All of this is due to an Obama-era change in the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act that included conditions that “could impair learning, reading, concentrating, and thinking”–even if it did not impact a person’s general life. Schools were advised by the Association of Higher Education and Disability to rely solely on a student’s own claims of “disability” in regards to learning, rather than to require a medical diagnosis. Once kids starting taking advantage of that lax interpretation of “disability”, requests for special accommodation on campus grew–slowly at first–until more kids saw “how much easier the ‘disabled’ kids had it” and wanted in on those advantages as well.
Another point brought up in the article is that many of these “disabled” students do not claim that status or demand accommodation until they get to college. It is also mentioned that while the percentages of students at elite universities are increasing sharply, mid and lower-level institutions are not seeing nearly the same rise in demands for accommodation. The bottom line–according to the authors of the Atlantic article–is that those already with an advantage are using a system designed to help others to succeed in higher education to merely press their own advantages.
And then there was a Wall Street Journal article last month on the Ivy League’s effort to combat grade inflation. More than 60-percent of the grades given in classes at Harvard are “A’s”. That is more than twice the percentage given out in 2006. That rate was even higher during the COVID pandemic, even though students were not in the classroom and nearly all learning was virtual. The numbers at Yale are about the same. The schools have announced plans to reassess grading practices in an effort to make an “A” mean something again. As the WSJ article finds, students are not real happy with that. One students is quoted as saying “we make it through one of the most rigorous application processes in the country, we should all get A’s.”
But it’s not just Ivy League schools where amazingly, everyone is “well above average” all of a sudden. The median college grade point average has gone up by nearly 22-percent in the last thirty years–with the largest increases coming at more-expensive and exclusive private schools. All despite the fact that the rate of incoming freshmen having to take remedial English Language Arts and mathematics classes has increased to one out of three. Somehow, kids with lesser academic achievement in high school are scoring better than ever when they get to the college classroom.
All of this ties back to a point that many observers of higher education have made for the past few decades: as colleges have chosen to charge more in tuition, room, and board, students and parents have come to expect good grades and degrees based solely on the price being paid, rather than merit in the classroom. When fewer people had degrees in the past, completing college was something of a dividing line for employers–showing who can complete rigorous tasks and earn certification of greater knowledge and value. But now that degrees are mostly transactional, available to almost anyone willing to borrow enough to get them, they have become greatly devalued in our society.
I had a now-deceased friend who was a college professor. Despite being a flaming liberal, he was endlessly frustrated by the new attitudes and practices being put in place in higher education in the 21st Century. He decried the growing percentage of kids in his class with neither the reading ability nor comprehension to understand his course material. He was directly ordered by administrators to provide any and all accommodation to kids failing his classes to still earn credit, through multiple retaking of tests, allowing materials to be turned in after the semester was done, or providing partial credit for assignments not even completed. And most frustrating of all, was a directive not to tell students that even if they passed the classes–they would not have the requisite skills or talents to get and keep jobs in the field that he taught. Yet, every spring, he had to see those unprepared and unqualified graduates walk across that stage, get their diplomas, and head out into a job market that had no place for them.
If you’ve listened to previous My Two Cents, you would know that I am vehemently opposed to the idea of free post-secondary education in the US, due largely to knowing that having an almost limitless federal slush fund to draw from would only further increase higher education costs–not to mention would provide a free service to plenty of people that can easily afford to pay for it themselves. But, my mind could be changed if college went back to what it was for decades before everyone started thinking they could just buy a degree no matter how much effort they put into it. Limit admission to those who have shown the academic acumen and capacity to handle higher education in their primary and secondary educations, don’t coddle those with the attention spans of toddlers, flunk out those unable to handle the coursework or who refuse to put in the effort, and truly separate the excellent from the average by making an “A” actually mean something again.
I used to think that discouraging more kids from going borrowing tons of money to go to college when they probably aren’t “college material” would also help our growing skilled labor shortage, convincing more people to become auto mechanics, builders, and over-the-road drivers. But given surveys asking Gen Z and Gen Alpha what “careers” they want, not going to college will just create more “social media influencers”, “professional” video game players, and OnlyFans “models”.
