Purpose of school

[qrssama]

I'm getting ready to teach my summer course, which is called "The Achievement Gap in Higher Education," which is a 10 week look at who gets to go to college, what they get out of it, and why those things split on group differences

Comments

[_earthshine_]

What are your thoughts on the idea that some of the perception of the necessity of (increasingly higher levels of) higher education is simply the result of cultivation by the higher education industry?

[qrssama]

I don't see it. For one thing, for it to be coming from colleges and universities, we in the higher ed industry would have to have power over business. We really, really don't. If we did, we would be advocating a great knowledge of the classics in order to enter into the industiral complex.

What better fits the existing data is that industry has taken it upon themselves to use the limiting mechanism of access to and completion of higher education to (as Tish mentioned above) limit their hiring pool.

[_earthshine_]

Well, in response to your first paragraph, i'm inclined to delineate between the higher ed "industry" and academia itself. (Id est, i view you and your immediate colleagues as the expertise and teachers that define the product itself, and the "industry" more as the salespeople are who marketing that product.) I don't think the "industry", as i'm defining it, gives a tinker's cusp about knowledge of the classics, or anything resembling a liberal arts or even truly practical education. Perhaps this is just a throwback to my own experience, which was within a highly trade-oriented and theoretical branch of higher ed