I am perhaps a little more hopeful, though I would agree that the changes are unlikely to come in the university setting. The elephant in the room is that the currently existing university and college system is simply unsustainable. When Reagan changed the funding of college from state governments and grants to loans he basically killed the university system.
It is like the patient my father operated on when he worked in an ER. The man walked in with a little hole in his chest joking The small caliber bullet had passed through his heart. He was dead already, he just didn’t know it.
Americans who are shown the door at 18 simply can not compete with Europeans who often leave home in their mid thirties, and Chinese and Indians who pay a tenth or even a hundredth as much for housing.
As wages fall to reflect these realities college education is swiftly becoming a bad deal for Americans who have to pay for themselves as opposed to Europeans or Chinese. For minority groups who make less money with their degrees it already doesn’t make sense to pay for a four year degree.
The sad truth we all want to deny is that the African American male who doesn’t make any plans to attend a four year institutional is making a logical not a lazy choice. Soon this will be true for all Americans. Only those who graduate with advance degrees will recoup their investment.
Colleges seem totally oblivious to this. They waste money on luxury dorms and providing the farm leagues for the NFL and NBA. They are spending more on administration and less on students. Just like the housing market they are providing a service that their customers just can’t afford.
Something will have to radically change and soon. The vast majority of the children of people who went to college will not be attending anything similar, they simply can’t afford it.
Something new will come. It won’t be able to be a four year party. It may have to be combined with some sort of required military or public service. It will have to be more vocational, but also life long.
Hopefully more people will think of themselves as life long thinkers and new more democratic institutions will arise to support classical concepts of education.
The first step is realizing we can’t keep what we have now, but what comes next might be even better.
— Robert Lee Hotchkiss