The University Has No Clothes

The University Has No Clothes. Data point one:

Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.

Data point number two:

In the past 30 years, private- college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent.

Mull those two together.

2 Comments

Steve May 25, 2011 Reply

I’ve always liked the term “Educational-Industrial Complex”. But exponential growth is not sustainable in any system. The current economy may finally break that model.

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