This was posted yesterday.
The Promise and Failure of Community Colleges From the article: There are two critical things to know about community colleges. The first is that they could be the nation's most powerful tools to improve the opportunities of less privileged Americans, giving them a shot at harnessing a fast-changing job market and building a more equitable, inclusive society for all of us. The second is that, at this job, they have largely failed.
The article went on.
What the president chose not to emphasize is that precious few of the students at community colleges are likely to fulfill the promise and complete their education. Of all the students who enroll full time at Pellissippi, for example, only 22 percent graduate from a two-year program within three years. Just 8 percent transfer to a four-year college.And that's hardly the bottom of the barrel. There are many community colleges with much worse records.
What about elitism? College education has always been elitist. That's what parents are buying: an edge for their kids.
Meanwhile, American higher education has become a preserve of the elite. Only one in 20 Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn't finish high school has a college degree. The average across 20 advanced industrial nations assessed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost one in four.
Everyone is blamed.
The primary solution, if there is one, probably lies further up the pipeline, in high schools, where the Obama administration is running up against political flak and parental objections to its push to establish a common core of proficiency to ensure the vast majority of high school graduates are indeed equipped for college.Or perhaps the true challenge is even earlier, from birth to age 3 or 4, as the Nobel laureate James Heckman from the University of Chicago has been urging for years, when investments in cognitive and emotional capabilities have an enormous impact on children's future development.
What's the answer? Every government bureaucrat always has the same answer: more government money.
"Community colleges have the students with the greatest problems -- yet they get the least resources," said Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College. "It's unrealistic to think we can have a better outcome without investing more money."
Conclusion? The passive voice.
Better outcomes are sorely needed. That is, if education is to recover its role as a motor of opportunity for those who need it most.
I have taught at the junior college level. I have taken classes as a student at the junior college level after I earned a Ph.D. Not many people can make this claim.
According to this government report, "Community Colleges: Federal Resources supporting Local Opportunities," there are 1600 of these institutions in the USA. If they have failed, why will more federal money fix them?
Most high school graduates are academically incompetent. They do not belong in college. The fact that about a third of them go to college indicates the nature of the problem. Of these people, about half of them fail to graduate in six years. Every dime that the government spent on these dropouts is wasted.
Most students do not belong in college. Most students do not want to go to college. Most students cannot be persuaded to go to college. In the inner cities, most students drop out before their senior year. Any bureaucrat who thinks that anything that the government can do to cure this problem is simply naive or else a person hustling government money. The government school programs have existed now for 150 years, and with every decade, student performance gets worse. There are no solutions to this problem that can be funded with more government money poured down the bureaucratic academic rat hole.
Let's assume that a community college can motivate students who have never been motivated academically in their lives. What is the best way to get this motivation to the students? Simple: do what Salman Khan has done. Put all the courses on video. Post them on YouTube. Make it all free of charge.
A nonprofit foundation could do this. The person in charge of the project would select teachers who have reputations of being highly motivational teachers at a community college. In each field, choose three instructors for a particular course. Pay each of them $200 per lesson for 90 lessons. In an academic term, meaning one semester, there are at most 45 lectures. Then there are reading assignments. So, for one academic year, that is 90 lectures. In other words, pay a person $18,000 for a course. Then you pay two more instructors, just to make sure you have at least one professor who can teach well enough to motivate not very bright students.
Select these liberal arts fields, all of which qualify as prerequisites for upper division work at a four-year college. Each is a one-year course.
English
U.S. history
U.S. government
Education
Sociology
Economics
Business
Political science
Western civilization
Philosophy
Math 1
Math 2
Biology
Chemistry
Physics (calculus required)
Geology
This is all you need for the liberal arts.
At $18,000 per instructor, times three instructors, times 16 courses, the total bill is $864,000. You pay this once. Maybe once every five years, you have one of the instructors update some of his lectures, but since he doesn't do this in his entire career anyway, this probably isn't necessary.
In other words, for a one-time expenditure of $864,000 for the entire United States, this would elkiminate the need for 1599 community colleges. Keep on. It has accreditation. We only need one. Hire Ph.D. candidates around the country to grade any essay exams. Most of the exams in a community college are true/false exams or multiple-choice exams, and these are all machine graded. So, you really don't need many Ph.D. candidates to do the work. But Ph.D. candidates are certainly capable of grading any exams that a computer program cannot grade. Ppay them basic teaching assistant wages of about $20 an hour. An alternative would be to hire adjunct instructors at various community colleges. This is what most instructors at a community college are: low-paid, part-time instructors. They can be bought cheaply.
Charge $100 per course. That is plenty to pay cheap part-time essay readers.
If videos by inspirational teachers cannot motivate high school graduates to take a few exams, pay $100 per course, and use this to get into a four-year college, then these students don't deserve the enormous sums that are wasted on community colleges locally. We don't need community college campuses. We can close them.
Do students need to come into a classroom? No. The teacher just gives the lectures in a room. There's nothing unique about it. It's just an extension of high school. These students didn't like high school. The only students who go to a junior college are students who didn't get into a state university. Or maybe their parents didn't have the money to send them off to boola-boola land.
By the way, we can eliminate virtually all of the lower-division liberal arts courses in the four-year universities, too. The junior college courses will take the place of lower division. But, of course, lower-division students are cash cows. The universities would never accept this as an alternative. This is a gigantic scam, and it has been going on ever since the end of World War II. It is not about to stop now. Obama just wants to make it bigger and more expensive. It hasn't worked. That is the message of the New York Times article.
What about vocational courses? These should not be any at the community college level. These should be taught in apprenticeship programs. You can simply eliminate all of the vocational courses. The taxpayer should not subsidize any of them. A student can get a job as an apprentice, and he can earn money. He is taught on-the-job skills on the job. That is where the skills are to be taught.
So, all the hype about community colleges is nonsense. We don't need them. The Internet makes possible the complete replacement of the entire system. For $864,000, once every 10 years (for updates), the nation can save billions of dollars that are poured into community college education. But this is not what the educational bureaucrats want to hear.
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