Imagine you have a car that can't go over 20 mph, leaks oil, lurches left at every corner. Your mechanic has been working on it for years. Nothing changes -- except that he tells you to pour more and more money into the car. At what point do you conclude that whatever that mechanic is doing is not going to get you a high performing automobile?
Education is getting like that. We continue to pour money into the same vehicle and the same mechanics on the assumption that the solution involves spending more on the same things that aren't producing the results we need. Richard Arum (NYU) and Josipa Roksa (UVA) wrote a book entitled Academically Adrift in which they documented that
"45 percent of students (do) not demonstrate any
statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment
[CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study
has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant
improvement over four years.]"
Why would this be? They also discovered that less than half of undergraduates had taken a single course the previous semester that required 20 pages of written work. A third had not taken a single course that required 40 pages of reading. In other words, they discovered that colleges that demand little effort are getting little results. Are you surprised? More importantly does this lead to a (rational) conclusion that you ought to give the people running these institutions more of your money? The education business has simply become a scam that dupes those who are themselves too lazy or uneducated to inquire into whether they are really getting anything in return for their investment. It's time to hire new mechanics or get a new car.
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