{"id":341072,"date":"2010-02-19T14:58:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T19:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.36191"},"modified":"2010-02-19T15:53:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T20:53:40","slug":"three-and-out-why-college-should-be-shorter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/341072","title":{"rendered":"Three and Out: Why College Should Be Shorter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eight states are introducing<\/a>
\na program that will allow tenth graders who pass a series of tests to jump
\nstraight to community college. It’s not an entirely surprising move, since the American educational
\nphilosophy since World War II can be summed up thus: get
\nkids to college. It’s a noble and well-meaning goal, but it’s folly to funnel more kids to higher education without questioning some of the system’s basic assumptions. Lets start with one big question: are we keeping them
\nthere too long?<\/p>\n

A U.S. college education is a four-year, full-time endeavor, and an
\nincreasing number of students are extending it even longer. And that’s
\njust
\nundergrad — any worthwhile graduate degree will set you back a few more
\nyears. It’s no longer
\nclear what students are gaining from such a long and intensive
\neducation.<\/p>\n

For a student deciding whether or not to attend university,
\na four-year commitment can be overwhelming — and extraordinarily pricey.
\nTuition is, as always, skyrocketing. It has increased, beyond general inflation, an average of 4.9 percent a year in the last decade<\/a> at public universities. <\/p>\n

Students not blessed with wealthy parents or scholarship opportunities
\nare forced to take out loans to finance their educations — huge, staggering
\nloans that regularly break six figures. The average graduate in 2007 carried a debt exceeding $20,000<\/a>, a 6 percent rise from 2006. It’s much too much. A shorter time to graduate would dramatically ease the load, as well as allow the student to begin
\nrepayment earlier and get out of debt earlier. <\/p>\n

And not all graduating students are 22, either. The
\npowers-that-be in the education world can’t afford to ignore community colleges
\nany longer. These schools are now supplying about 20 percent of the
\ntraditional four-year college student body, and nearly 6.2 million students were enrolled in community colleges<\/a> in 2006-07. Students transferring from
\ncommunity colleges aren’t usually forced to attend the full four years, but
\nmore often than not, some credits aren’t accepted, and, if they’re lucky, they’re
\nlooking at a five year education. This can be incredibly resource-expensive, especially
\nfor mature students and those who have dependents. If we really want to
\nincrease college attendance, we have to lower the barrier of entry in time and money.<\/p>\n

What about the quality of education —
\nwould it suffer? It needn’t. Firstly, there’s no reason a tiered system can’t
\nbe put in place. In Ontario, many universities offer a full bachelor’s degree in
\nthree years; an honors degree is earned with a fourth. It’s not a complicated
\nproposal: let the students who can afford it stick around, offer scholarships
\nto the promising ones who can’t, and don’t penalize everyone else. Secondly —
\nand this is especially true in the liberal arts — there’s a diminishing return
\nat play in higher education. I’m a big proponent of the
\nvalue of a liberal arts education, and I’m not promoting cutting or limiting
\ndisciplines. But the fact remains that in most colleges students are primed to
\nsucceed by earning grades, not by amassing knowledge; by senior year, they’ve
\nusually discovered their level of maximum efficiency, how to get the best
\npossible marks with the least possible effort. Senioritis isn’t exclusive to
\nhigh school. <\/p>\n

What about the sciences? Here, too, reform is in order. The
\ncountries that are serving as the models for the new high school plan — including
\nDenmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore — all approach higher education
\ndifferently, as well; these countries are successful because of the holistic
\napproach they bring to education, and, likewise, we can’t attack this problem
\nin piecemeal. Students in those countries (and really almost everywhere but
\nhere) begin their professional training — what we would call graduate school —
\nright out of the gate. Students studying the sciences now realistically require a
\ngraduate degree to be competitive, so why aren’t colleges integrating
\nundergraduate and graduate programs better? Why are we making it more difficult
\nand expensive for a student to pursue a science education, especially when we’re
\nrelying on precisely these future industries? We need incentives, not barriers. <\/p>\n

Many regard college as a four-year utopia, a long and drawn-out
\npreface to real life. Maybe it’s even, as they say, a party occasionally interrupted
\nby class. But as it stands, that party is simply too long, diluted, and expensive. Sometimes the best parties end early.<\/p>\n



\n

\n Email this Article<\/a>
\n Add to digg<\/a>
\n Add to Reddit<\/a>
\n Add to Twitter<\/a>
\n Add to del.icio.us<\/a>
\n Add to StumbleUpon<\/a>
\n Add to Facebook<\/a>
\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eight states are introducing a program that will allow tenth graders who pass a series of tests to jump straight to community college. It’s not an entirely surprising move, since the American educational philosophy since World War II can be summed up thus: get kids to college. It’s a noble and well-meaning goal, but it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4833,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4833"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}