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Quality and Worth in College Degrees
In "Degrees and Dollars," Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman raised the unpleasant specter that college degrees overall have a declining economic value=="tickets to jobs that don't exist or don't pay middle-class wages." Krugman's dismal prediction runs counter to what leading voices in higher education have been saying. President Obama gave an inspiring call for America to lead the world by 2020 in the proportion of adults with college degrees , and the Lumina Foundation simultaneously announced its commitment to and significant funding for the "Big Goal" of 60% of American adults holding high quality college degrees by 2025. Is Krugman now confronting us with a most inconvenient truth?
Krugman's argument is important, but it is a half-truth. What we discovered in the WhatWillTheyLearn? study of core curricula is that too many institutions fail to require the kind of general education for which business and industry have called. This is the kind of college education that guarantees (not just hopes for) such core skills as college level mathematics, intermediate level foreign language, and laboratory science. The recently published Academically Adrift has demonstrated that in the absence of such rich liberal arts requirements, many college graduates achieve little cognitive growth. And here is the clincher: the longitudinal study on which Academically Adrift rests also reveals the not-unexpected finding that the students who failed to grow intellectually in college are the ones who have found it hardest to gain employment.
A workforce educated with high quality college degrees is the economic engine we need. And, for an excellent analysis of the obligation--and capacity--of higher education to educate for citizenship and responsibility, see Peter Wood's response to Krugman. The good news is that it is well within our capacity to make every college degree a high quality degree, and that a well-designed core curriculum is also more cost-efficient than the huge menus of over-specialized courses that too often substitute for fundamental core requirements.
Posted by Michael Poliakoff on March 09, 2011 at March 9, 2011 09:47 AM
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