Why College?
by EWA’s public editor Linda Pearlstein
In Round Two of my campaign to get you to write beyond college costs and admissions, I’m proposing that you think about some fundamental, if hard to answer, questions: Why are students going to college, and what are they getting from it?

There are real story ideas in here, I swear.

Certainly the mantra these days is College for All—the notion a degree is a prerequisite for the workforce of tomorrow (if not today). This philosophy is frequently passed along without question, but I encourage you to look at this critically, and not just in terms of the economic calculations of what a degree is worth. Should we be telling people who want to be bank tellers, nurse’s assistants, building inspectors, opticians—jobs that don’t require degrees—that they can’t be successful without an expensive college education? To what extent does college give you marketable skills, and to what extent does it merely open doors? (Not that opening doors is a small thing.) What do colleges do to engage students who are not academically inclined? Are those attempts at engagement watering down curriculum, lifting up the abilities of students, or both?

A bit has been written about the potential for a national accountability system for our nation’s colleges. That’s unlikely to happen in a big way anytime soon, but campuses are indeed thinking about ways to measure whether students are learning. For example, Niagara University in upstate New York recently told its philosophy professors, of whom my friend Steve Petersen is one, that they needed to assess more. But testing, in a standardized way, whether a college student is succeeding at philosophy is not as easy as testing whether a fifth grader knows how to calculate the area of a trapezoid.
"I'm sympathetic with the idea," Steve told me. "You want to know where your huge fortune for college is going. But the skills we’re supposed to be teaching are awfully hard to assess." The department created a logic test, because logic is the part of philosophy easiest to quantify—but that doesn’t cover nearly all of what the students should be, and are, learning.

"How do you assess ‘improved critical thinking’?" Steve asks. And that’s the paradox: Our nation’s schools are supposed to be emphasizing exactly the types of skills—"twenty-first century skills" of critical thinking, interpersonal relationships and so on—that are the most difficult to measure.

On the question of national accountability, while we are at it: Should we assess knowledge, or skills, or both? Is it important that the political science student at Drexel learn the same basket of knowledge as the political science student at UCLA, or graduate with the same skills? Speaking of graduating: Much is being discussed lately on the topic of high school graduation. What about college completion?Take a look at the good piece Mary Beth Marklein of USA Today wrote this week about how little homework college students do. (Mary Beth drew this article from the recent release of the National Survey of Student Engagement, always a treasure trove of story ideas, in my opinion.) I think there could be a great story written from following a group of students for a week. How much of their time is spent academically engaged, versus socially or otherwise engaged? What do they want from their university experience?

The Educated Reporter
"Not many people," the historian Diane Ravitch writes, "unless they are professionals in education, know how children’s textbooks are written and what kinds of political pressures shape them." That includes many reporters, too. I was certainly ignorant of the process, until I read Ravitch’s gripping book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003). No doubt, the most interesting parts of the book deal with political correctness that expunges textbooks and standardized tests of, well, a lot more than you would think. Ravitch starts by sharing her own experience with "bias reviewers," when she was involved in the creation of an eventually abandoned national test for the National Assessment Governing Board. A passage about a dolphin was rejected because not all students live near the sea; a passage about owls was rejected because Navajo Indians consider the bird a bad omen; a passage about a dotty old lady putting goofy items on her bicycle was rejected because it reflected poorly on old ladies; etc., etc., etc. Speaking of "lady," the word is banned from McGraw Hill textbooks on the grounds that it is sexist. I consider myself a feminist, but I just don’t see why the publisher insists that baby girls’ items cannot be colored pink (have you entered a Babies "R" Us lately?) and pioneer women can be shown chopping wood but not churning butter. The book goes beyond you’re-kidding-me examples of P.C. to show how textbooks do an injustice to both literature and history. Ravitch shows, too, how the structure of textbook authorship, in which committee after committee has a hand in its creation, inevitably leads to a "bland and inoffensive tone."

The Language Police is a compelling, engaging read. If only the same could be said for the reading materials in our schools.

Linda is available to help with your education coverage in any way you need. You can reach her at lperlstein@ewa.org or 410-539-2464.