The Wall Street Journal published an article in November called Is This the End of College as We Know It? If you are interested in the direction education is headed, you should read it.
I will attempt a brief summary in hopes of transmitting the power I found in the article. Quotations in what follow are pulled from the article.
It is my belief that elementary school and high school have used college as their beacon, their guiding light. Curriculum and instruction have developed along lines that lead to getting high marks on the SATs so everyone can enter college.
“the nation set a course for something more aspirational: college for all.”
The article begins:
Rachael Wittern earned straight A’s in high school, a partial scholarship to college and then a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She is now 33 years old, lives in Tampa, earns $94,000 a year as a psychologist and says her education wasn’t worth the cost. She carries $300,000 in student debt.
Dr. Wittern’s 37-year-old husband worked in a warehouse for several years before becoming an apprentice electrician. He expects to earn comparable money when he’s finished—minus the debt. When and if they have children, Dr. Wittern says her advice will be to follow her husband’s path and avoid a four-year degree.
I just don’t see the value in a lot of what I studied,” she says. “Unless they have a really specific degree in mind, we’d both prefer they take a more pragmatic, less expensive route.
The article explains the place college has come to hold for so many Americans who want to achieve the American Dream. And yet the cost of going to college has become so great that its benefits are diminishing. And with advances in technology and globalization, alternative ways of becoming qualified for good-paying jobs are growing. The author claims that only 20% of students who experience college come away with a job worth the effort. Colleges had been struggling to maintain its hold on high-school graduates when the pandemic hit, swelling the tensions and uncertainty of choosing college. Considering the growing unease with college, they make an important point,
Americans aren’t turning their backs on education; they are reconsidering how to obtain it.
This sentiment has occupied me since I homeschooled my children and taught in a traditional school. Education can be obtained so many different ways and Americans have become obsessed with the school systems that have developed over time without giving much thought to all the alternatives.
The WSJ article follows their claim by listing not only changes colleges are making to entice students, but the growing number of cheaper and briefer alternatives offered in the private sector.
College-for-all has been a catastrophically bad system. It has to change. — Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a conservative think tank
If these claims have merit, I argue that we can rethink education at lower levels as well. I want to continue this conversation looking at alternative ways younger children could learn.
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