How to Find The Circumference of An Idea

Higher education in America is a mess.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with me on that score.  Just look at the statistics of student debt, or the comparisons between the American system and some of those abroad.  I have been out of college for two and a half years now, and I can reasonably expect to be making loan payments for the next eight years.  That’s if I keep on schedule—it will be longer if at any point I have to defer.  And I’m one of the lucky ones.  I remember the panicked expressions on my classmates’ faces at the end of senior year when we attended those mandatory loan meetings.  Some of them faced twenty thousand dollars of debt or more.  In the current economy, where a college degree doesn’t guarantee you a well-paying job (I’m still working in a restaurant), that’s a huge number.  And tuition prices are only getting higher.  Now, there might be any number of reasons for this, and I’m no economist to speculate on what those might be.  But even I can read the alarming line graphs I see online and in the papers. 

The government is trying to deal with this, inasmuch as the government can.  President Obama has instituted a debt forgiveness program that allows students who enroll this year to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and after twenty years all debts are forgiven.  As for the universities themselves, a new program is expected in time for the 2015-16 school year that will rate universities all over America and assign them financial aid according to those ratings.  Universities are up in arms about this, saying that there is no way of quantifying an education, and that deserving universities will slip through the net cast by the government rating tests, having a terrible impact on the quality of higher education.

I agree that it is next to impossible to measure the value of an education.  I wouldn’t give up my liberal arts degree for the world—if I could do it over again, I’d do it exactly the same way.  But I do admit that it doesn’t make me employable at first glance.  The problem is that federal programs like this require a homogeneous standard that can be measured, and education simply isn’t homogeneous.  Every student wants something different and needs different things from the school and its professors.  This is true at the lower levels, too—standardized tests may give the government the numbers and statistics it wants, but it doesn’t help those students who are dyslexic, or have learning disabilities, or who are kinesthetic learners.  All of these students may be brilliant in ways that don’t come up on the tests, and a good college education can give them the tools to hone that brilliance.  What happens if those good colleges are missed by the tests that only measure graduation rates and graduate income levels?

On the other hand, something has to be done.  A system that bankrupts its students for an education that they need to survive in the world is a system that needs to be changed.  Perhaps other factors could be added to the ratings list—range of options offered to each student, or number of awards received by professors, or even student happiness rankings.  Though these things are harder to measure, they are vital to the value of an education, and they have as much to say about the quality of a university as dollar signs and percentages.

The glory and the downfall of mankind, in my opinion, is how different we are.  Every human being on the planet has a little bit of a different idea as to what’s important and what needs to be known.  Our education is what teaches us those different ideas, and I would hope the government would remember that it’s not what our schools teach us that’s important, or at least that that’s not the only important thing.  What is the most vital thing a student has to learn is how to think for him- or herself, and I learned that in college.  I'd hate for younger generations to never have the chance to learn it at all.  

Some of the websites I looked at for this post: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/ensuring-that-student-loans-are-affordable

https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/charts/public-service

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Neil_Fleming.27s_VAK.2FVARK_model

Also an article in Time, the April 28, 2014 issue, entitled "Should US Colleges Be Graded by the Government?" written by Haley Sweetland Edwards

Photo credit: https://searchingeyes.wordpress.com/tag/education-assessment-comic/