Subway cars are a rolling index of aspirations, writes Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Monroe College declares, “Your career will now be making express stops only”—a play on the dreaded announcement that the train is about to skip your local stop. “Start here. Go Anywhere,” promises BMCC, Borough of Manhattan Community College. “Choose your next career at Apex,” advises Apex Technical School, with pictures of a welder, an automotive technician, and some other cheerful tradesmen plying their skills. “Think master’s in education. Think MCNY,” whispers Metropolitan College New York. Most succinct of all is City College of New York: “Breaking boundaries.”
Upscale colleges — New School, New York University, Hofstra, St. John’s, and Columbia — don’t advertise on subway cars, Wood notes.
He sees “unparalleled educational opportunity” and hucksterism: “Start here, go anywhere, but more likely nowhere.”
While some students will learn skills and move ahead in their careers — those Apex welders have a good shot at success — others are just being fleeced, Wood writes. They didn’t learn much in high school and know they need more education, but lack “the aptitude or the steadiness to make much of this kind of postsecondary training.” Colleges feed false hopes, but eventually “reality kicks in.”
While riding the subway, Wood is reading In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by Professor X, an adjunct English instructor who teaches at a liberal-arts college and a community college.
He has described his students as “poignantly desperate for success,” though not likely to find it in the programs they have enrolled in. They have “done poorly in high school; college is not a goal for which they prepared single-mindedly for 18 years. College is a place they landed in.”
. . . Community colleges, he realizes, are “American egalitarianism at its best. We are happy believing that we can and should send everyone under the sun to college.” But he no longer believes. He sees the plain evidence that his students are for the most part incapable of writing a simple English sentence; that they don’t read; and that even those who dearly want to learn are generally so underprepared academically and so overburdened personally that they seldom move beyond the most rudimentary steps.
Professor X is also aware that President Obama, major foundations such as Gates, the business community, Government (his capitalization), the media, and the entire higher-education establishment is “all for it”—“it” being the feel-good notion that everyone can and should go to college.
The belief that college can transform all comers is fading, Wood believes. Young people will “discover better ways both to learn useful things and to get certified for knowing them,” he hopes.
People who’ve had trouble learning in school aren’t likely to be good at learning on their own or online, in my experience. Most need more help from teachers, not less.
However, many jobseekers would save time and money by taking certification tests to prove they’ve mastered a set of skills and knowledge. Combined with online learning, certification tests respected by employers would transform postsecondary education.
