Victor Davis Hanson has an article currently about higher education...and the fact that it really isn't higher education anymore. As a classicist, he spends much of the article talking about the importance of his own discipline, but he also points out that the classic college or university is dying right along with his subject.
His argument is simple: post-modernism, political correctness, and a focus on job skills (such as pre-med, pre-law, computer science, or business) have greatly reduced the shared knowledge that students used to gain from a liberal arts education. Have reduced the whole personal intellectual growth aspect of a BA.
But instead of whining about this decline, he points out that in our fine capitalist tradition, the private sector is jumping in where the old institutions have failed.
Want to learn a language? Buy Rosetta Stone CD's.
Want to learn about philosophy or Homer? Buy a course at the Teaching Company.
Want to learn how to do accounting, computer programming, or business management? Sign up for online coursework at a traditional-turned internet university or a University of Phoenix-style online, for-profit company.
VDH posits that in the future many technical subjects will be learned without the extra coursework of a liberal arts education. Then, if people want to broaded their minds, they can sign up for online or video courses.
What of today's schools? He says:
Traditional colleges and universities aren’t about to die, of course. But their attractions—and especially the enticements of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, Berkeley, and such private four-year colleges as Amherst and Oberlin—will largely derive from the status that they convey, the career advantages that accrue from their brand-name diplomas, and the unspoken allure of networking and associating with others of a similarly affluent and privileged class. They are becoming social entities, private clubs for young people, certification and proof of career seriousness, but hardly centers for excellence in undergraduate education in the classical sense. For all the tens of thousands of dollars invested in yearly tuition, there will be no guarantee, or indeed, even a general expectation, that students will encounter singular faculty or receive a superior liberal arts education—let alone that they will know much more about their exceptional civilization than what they could find on the Internet, at religious schools, or on CDs and DVDs.
I think he's spot on here. Many degrees today are either what a high school diploma should be, but too often is not, or merely tickets of entrée to a social upper class of educated elite.
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