Storm on horizon

College education not making grade

As a former college president and educational strategist, I sense a problem for our young people that bothers me. I am not referring to the deteriorating standards common in public education today; although that is serious cause for concern, I am referring to something much more insidious.

Let’s start with the value of the bachelor’s degree, say 60 to 70 years ago. At that time, having a B.S. or a B.A. was like having the keys to the kingdom. If you were a college graduate, it was only a matter of weeks before you had received a number of job offers. Many were interviewed and hired before they marched down the aisle to accept their diplomas. And only a relatively small percentage of high school graduates ever got to college.

Add that to the fact that it was a lot harder to obtain that degree than it is today. For one thing, in those days most colleges insisted on a fairly high level of competence in a foreign language as a degree requirement. A college education promised, and delivered, a broad education to its students.

Now fast-forward a little. The junior college flourished and soon hatched community colleges which then evolved into branch campuses of major colleges and universities. The idea was to offer “higher education” to the masses, and boy, did it work! The number of high school graduates advancing to college increased by light years until it was the norm, not the exception. At the same time, the quality of public education was on a downward spiral and kids came out of high school with little to no reading, writing or speaking skills.

If you take a market that has increased by leaps and bounds and couple it with much lower standards, what do you get? The denigration of the bachelor’s degree. What the B.S. or B.A. is worth today is only a shadow of what it used to be. Couple that with the growth of technology, requiring more and better thinkers, and you have a recipe for disaster.

What this means is that in the very near future, if not today, the bachelor’s degree will be the equivalent of yesterday’s high school diploma and those poor kids with only a B.S. or a B.A. will be flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s. In Mountain Home, the time is fast approaching when we will be saturated with two-year nursing and medical tech degree holders and have a town full of unemployed kids with degrees and nowhere to go.

What does that mean for the future? In the business world, if you have a product no one wants to buy, what do you do? Upgrade! Very quickly, the master’s degree will become the norm and the doctorate will be king. Obtaining a Ph.D. requires original research. The road to a Ph.D. is strenuous and, depending on your major professor, can be downright vicious. I can safely say that anyone who earned a Ph.D. earned it in spades.

If the Ph.D. becomes the new gold standard, I think a couple of things are going to happen. When thousands of students fail to make the grade, people might start taking a very critical look at why. Parents might begin to feel a little bit resentful after spending many thousands of dollars on a piece of paper with very little worth. If today’s trends continue, in 10 to 20 years the bachelor’s degree will be worthless, and the master’s degree won’t fare much better; those with the skills of a master mechanic or welder will be much more in demand and make much more money than their college-educated counterparts.

We have to start paying a lot more attention to vocational education than we ever have. I was fortunate enough to be one of the college presidents in Indiana who helped start a thing called Indiana Vocational and Technical Institute. It coupled standard vocational education and some basic college courses with the growing need for technicians, and it grew like wildfire. The very first classes were held on my campus, and we had engineering professors doing some of the teaching. If Arkansas does not grow an institution like that, it will be the loser.

I don’t mean copying what others are doing, I mean taking it to the next level and above. The world of employment has become highly specialized. But a specialist is worthless if he can’t think. And if all you ever experience is narrow courses in a particular specialty where, in that curriculum, do you ever learn to think? We should be making it harder to get a degree, not easier.

If Arkansas is going to attract new industry and create jobs, our leaders might start thinking about asking potential employers what they treasure most in new hires. I think our current group of educators might be surprised at what they learn.

We don’t really sell typewriters anymore, calculators are all but gone, and crank telephones with an operator on the other end are history. All of that has happened in most of our lifetimes. Does anyone with an ounce of common sense think higher education is immune to that kind of progress? To make matters worse, the Arkansas Lottery brags about how many college scholarships they are providing, but many go to kids who are ill-prepared to tackle college courses. How about spending some of that lottery money on increasing quality, not quantity?

If what I am saying doesn’t make sense, you had better seek some shelter from the perfect storm because it’s already on the horizon.