Rating the "Top" Colleges and Universities

Related to my previous post on forgotten history, take a look at the Association of College Trustees and Alumni - ACTA's - project to evaluate learning at the top-rated colleges and universities at the What Will They Learn website - it's not pretty.

For $38,361 tuition at my alma mater, Northwestern University, a student is not required to take any classes in economics, history, mathematics, science, or literature - only foreign language. University of Chicago requires courses in all but economics, history, and foreign language. The question is: what are they learning?

Another unhappy finding - the graduation rates at many of the institutions are abyssmal. Economically, these institutions are taking in millions in federal loans, yet their customers are not getting the full product. If a business did this, wouldn't everyone scream?

An Evaluation of Public Higher Ed in Illinois, Grade = F

Read the Association of Trustees and Alumni/Illinois Policy Institute's "A Report Card on Public Higher Education in Illinois" - and weep. What's going on in Illinois is a crime, literally.

"I like the university"

Hilarious bit from "Ghostbusters" - only too often true! Hat tip to Quee Nelson.

And we wonder why we're in this mess...

Mises 1956 book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality: ""The essential charge brought by the progressives against capitalism is that the recurrence of crisis and depressions and mass unemployment are its inherent features. The demonstration that these phenomena are, on the contrary, the result of the interventionist attempts to regulate capitalism and to improve the conditions of the common man give the progressive ideology the finishing stroke. As the progressives are not in a position to advance any tenable objectiions to the teachings of the economists, they try to conceal them from the people and especially also from the intellectuals and the university students. Any mentioning of these heresies is strictly forbidden. Their authors are called names, and the studnets are dissuaded from reading their "crazy stuff."" (emphasis mine)

"Failure Factories"

One hundred and forty public universities graduate NO African-American students within six years of enrollment. There are 150 from which no Hispanic or Asian student graduates within six years. Only 33 percent of freshmen who enroll in the University of Massachusetts graduate in six years. These are some of the shocking figures from "The Costs of Failure Factories in American Higher Education" by economist Mark Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute.

A new book, Crossing the Finish Line, by economists William Bowen and Michael McPherson, reviewed in the New York Times, tries to analyze the reasons for this abyssmal failure and argues that universities should be made accountable.

The authors think that a large part of the problem is what they call "undermatching" - of student to institution.

"About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.""

The operative word there is "presumptively." Are these students truly "well-qualified" for college? Grade inflation, non-objective grading, inconsistent grading from one school to another, changes in the SAT standards, affirmative action: these all make it hard to know. Maybe many students are caught in a web of educational lies: that they've learned enough to function at a college level, that they have the self-organizational skills to do college work, and that they have the practical knowledge to function on their own.

Of course, the issue of accountability would be moot except that students use federal money to stay enrolled so long.

Millions of federal loan dollars. If students had to come up with their own hard-earned money in real time, not take-forever-to-pay-back student loan time, would they linger in school so long? I doubt it.

Universities make big bucks enrolling huge freshmen lecture classes. No matter if they graduate, the universities still get paid through the feds. If students were paying with money they valued, I doubt that universities could get away with this. X-box would never stay in business if it functioned this way.

Hat tip to Don Hauptman.

Schooling and creativity

Creativity researcher Ken Robinson gives an incisive - and funny - talk about how current education kills creativity, which is crucial in today's world. (Hat tip to Gennady Shenker.)

Harvard loses 1/4 of its endowment

"The Harvard endowment, the biggest of any university, stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, meaning the loss amounts to about $8 billion. That's more than the entire endowments of all but six colleges, according to the latest official tally." reports the Wall Street Journal.