Degrees in Humanities Plummet

Whither the Humanities?

Check this out:

Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest. Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze. In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

So what does this mean? Can we live without the humanities? Does studying Kante and Confucius and classics make us better citizens? Or have the humanities always been a rarefied set of disciplines pursued by elitists and snobs?

Read the rest of the story from the 2/24/09 NY Times here.

Technology and the Future of College, Part 1: The Networked Student

Take a look at this video, a good overview of how current web-based technologies make learning possible. These technologies present the possibility of students no longer being physically tied to a place and time for learning. If college is about learning, and learning happened when and where the student wanted it to happen, what does this suggest about the future of college?

Defining College Readiness

According to a 4/26/06 Education Week article titled "Views Differ on Defining College Prep,"

One of the overarching goals of the national push to redesign high schools is increasing the number of students who graduate ready for college. Yet pinning down what people mean by "college readiness" and how to measure it is no easy task.

So what does "college readiness" mean? Here are the crucial aspects:

• willingness to amass colossal debt - according to an Associated Press story, nearly two of every three undergraduate students are going into debt to go to college, owing an average of more than $19,000, most often to the government. About 65 percent of students who graduated in the 2003-2004 school year did so after getting student loans, according to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
• willingness to attend lecture-driven courses with 400 or more other students
• capacity to sit passively and take notes for hours
• ability to accurately guess what will be on the test or quiz and then study the night before to engorge the short-term memory on those items which are most likely to be on the test or quiz
• ability to fully purge short-term memory during the test or quiz
• capacity to forget what was studied for the test or quiz
• capacity to manage time and assignments in order to do the least amount of work possible
• ability to binge drink on the weekends
• tendency to view college as a means to acquire a high-paying job
• cultivated interest in material acquisition and consumption, with a special emphasis on 42" plasma screen TV's and Hummers

And what about measuring "college readiness"?

How about this: why don't we ask for a federal law that focuses on superficial learning of only a couple subjects, e.g., reading and math? Forget about all the others. Let the students start practicing short-term memory stuffing, purging, and voiding in the 3rd grade by taking as many tests as they possible can. Starting in kindergarten, tell them that getting into college is the most important thing in the world. Tell them the reason they are in school is to get into college. We can measure their "college readiness" by looking at their test scores. If they score badly, we punish them by not letting them go to college and encourage them to cut grass or pick oranges. Those that do well on the tests will be ready for what lies ahead.

Oh, wait. We already have that system in place. It's called No Child Left Behind.

How Is a 400-Seat Lecture Course Different from a Tyson Chicken Farm?

High Stakes for Higher Ed

My fundamental concern is that we are at risk of creating a permanent underclass in this society that has no stake in it . . . people who don't have access to [college] because they're priced out of it.

These words from Oregon State University's president Ed Ray underscore the unquestioned belief that college is the only equalizer in America. Go to college and you're set. Get left out of college and you're cooked. The solution may not be to make college more affordable for more people. The solution may be to make more options available for more people, and to make sure that all of those options allow people to escape the confines of poverty and the underclass.

College as a Subversive Activity, Part 1

I'm thinking about the experience of going to college not only as a rite of passage, but also as a subversive activity: being away from the comfort of home and parents, cloistered inside the confines of an environment with other young people (ostensibly) committed to intellectual pursuit, binge drinking, bong toking, casual sex, etc., etc. For a lot of people -- maybe most people? -- the college experience is much more about this kind of stuff and less about what they "learn." So it's experiential learning of a different sort.

If this is indeed the case, then how might this "subversive activity" be facilitated in other ways? And, since I'm a technology guy, what role does Ye Olde Internette play in all of this?

I like the Met School model because it supports the work of students outside of school. But it also provides a place for students to gather with their mentors and peers and engage in substantive conversations about the work and learning they're doing.

The upshot? Maybe the whole "subversive experience" thing is a product of serving entitled, privileged, bourgeois kids and keeping them happy. Maybe those days are over? Maybe they -- and we as a society -- can no longer afford it? But if we get rid of it and focus on the college experience exclusively as an academic experience, might we then need to create other experiences that serve as a rite of passage for children becoming adults?