Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

This book (Times Books,2010) is subtitled How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- and What We Can Do About It, a rather lurid subtitle for an intelligent and analytical book that I found especially useful as my son, now a sophomore in high school, starts thinking about college.  Of course the common sense this book demonstrates is something my wife Susan and I share:  she went to Binghamton and I went to Columbia and we both received an excellent education, an education that came from our own intellectual curiosity as much as from our professors and courses.  As Hacker and Driefus make clear, a good education can be obtained at many different colleges, state and private, though many parents who think only the Golden Dozen (the eight Ivy League schools and Stanford, Duke, Amherst and Williams) will do won't be dissuaded by this book, which proves, with statistics and interviews, that these schools do not provide a better education than many others. Some of this book appeared first in The New York Review of Books, where Hacker has been writing excellent articles about education for years.

Half of all undergraduates are now enrolled in vocational training programs and I agree with Hacker and Dreifus that it is difficult to call these programs "education."  They say, correctly, that "college should be a cultural journey, an intellectual expedition, a voyage confronting new ideas and information, together expanding and deepening our understanding of ourselves and our world."  And to those who say that that is not realistic in today's economy the authors recommend that we stop relying on loans and have the colleges make up the difference from what parents can pay.  It seems that one of the reasons that college tuition increases are so much greater than inflation is simply because loans have become more available.  Activities other than education should be made to justify themselves:  administrators, athletics, amenities and top-heavy faculties add to the cost of college.

As far as top-heavy faculty goes, the authors recommend replacing tenure with multiyear contracts, especially since tenure does not protect academic freedom but subverts it, promoting conformity.  Replacing tenure can lead to better teaching, less emphasis on research and less exploitation of adjuncts, who get paid a fraction of what a professor gets for teaching the same course.

The authors also suggest that colleges should engage all students and make all students use their minds.  This is going to be tricky and difficult and should start early with parents and high schools; too many of us know high school graduates who have never read a book:  no wonder they want vocational training and to avoid stretching their intellect!  Parents need to read and to encourage their children to read and to think for themselves.