We are entering a new first world view of higher education and it ain't good. It is change. So we have to look at what is happening and what direction we have to go. This isn't the first time. Higher education has taken many turns as the economy and industry needs change in the U.S. The main job of professors was to teach.
Universities first started mainly as teacher colleges and some prestigious colleges were to educate the rich, white and privledged. That changed after WWII when we realized with the nuclear bomb that we needed technology and a lot of it. With technology we needed a trained workforce that not only could manage technology but create innovative products. The main job of professors changed to research and science, math, engineering and technology became king.
Now the economy of the U.S. is changing. Higher education has been able to increase costs easily as federal aid and government backed loans increased as the cost of an education increased. More and more students have entered college than ever before. And, standards have been interpreted to have slipped. And there seems to be an anti-intellectual movement in the U.S. And college loan debt has exceeded credit card debt in the U.S. So now everyone is questioning if everyone should go to college. Blasphemy!
Legislators have pretty much had it with so many high school students going into college, their not being ready, and having to paying for them to take remedial courses that catch them up to what they should have learned in college. Faculty complain about having too many adjuncts and at the same time complaining that they have to teach more than two courses and adjuncts, at a small fraction of tenured faculty's salary, complain that they can only teach two.
Pretty much the system is not functioning well. As a result, we have boards beginning to micro-manage colleges. In Texas they have begun measuring the worth of each faculty member by people with no experience in education. We even have a hard time defining what constitutes a good teacher. Sigh.
In the next couple years, experts in education are going to have to work fast to fix higher education before local and state boards jump in.
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