Books on Higher Education are coming out fast and furious. A colleague drew my attention to another, entitled We’re Losing Our Minds, discussed in Inside Higher Education.
The following paragraph caught my attention:
Thinking of undergraduate degrees as commodities — tickets to a job — has led students, parents, institutions of higher education, governing boards, and state and federal officials to focus on efficiency, rather than efficacy. Attempts to improve efficiency — to produce more graduates with more degrees at lower cost — have created misguided policy “fixes” and supported demands for a particular kind of accountability that can be measured by simplistic indicators like cost and retention.
The result, say the authors, is a college education that does not adequately prepare students “to think critically and creatively, speak and write clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers.”