A Pincer Movement in Higher Education

If wishes were horses... - image by Fibonnacci BlueRecently, in short succession I came accross two exposes on higher education in the United States: "The Long-Haul Degree," Patricia Cohen's April article for the New York Times about the hopeless economics of humanities PhDs, and then "College Dropout Factories," by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly for the Washington Monthly on the colleges with the worst graduation rates in the country.  In both cases students suffer from an information disparity before they embark on their education.  For very different reasons, many PhD candidates and low-income, high risk undergraduates are worth more to their institutions than the educations they are receiving.  These PhDs, earned in subjects that only allow for jobs in academia, take an average of over 9 year to obtain, yet afterwards finding any gainful employment proves elusive.  Meanwhile, the worst colleges in the country graduate less than fifteen percent of the students who enroll and treat incoming students as disposable assets that are easily replaced by fresh meat.  It is quite a system that fails to serve both the best and the most common equally- not quite the sort of equality we should aspire to.

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