This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, June 12, 2006

A Most Ill-Timed Alarm…

…coming, as it does, on the same day the absolutely scathing report on European universities (I’ve quoted parts of it in various posts below) was released.

Inside Higher Ed discusses a paper by John A. Douglass, a Berkeley professor, The Waning of America’s Higher Education Advantage: International Competitors Are No Longer Number Two and Have Big Plans in the Global Economy.


The author, with heap big scary rhetoric, warns us that the American higher education system is well on its way down shit’s creek. For instance, fewer and fewer Americans are going to college:

“Douglass says that other nations are using government policy to match or exceed U.S. participation rates.”


Yeah, trillions of French and Greek and Italian people are in college right now. But it matters what they’re doing there. Many are doing nothing forever, like some of their professors. See the stuff about Greek universities and failure rates and completions directly below. Participation rate in itself is meaningless. (In any case, in IHE's Comments section, the president emeritus of the American Council on Education writes, “ I would question Douglas’s statistic on US participation rates. His figure is much lower than other studies I have seen. Also, it is not the case that state support of public institutions has declined in absolute terms. The problem is that higher education’s share of state budgets has declined.”)



“Douglass says that interventionist efforts of national governments in the European Union to direct their institutions of higher education illustrate that lawmakers abroad often view higher education as a major policy issue in a way that U.S. politicos do not."


Love the word “interventionist.” While the EU clearly regards education as a major issue, it’s not at all clear that particular national governments, having over the last few decades intervened their state systems to death, have the will to go up against their rioting students and professors (see, currently, France and Greece) to intervene in the right way.


“…While EU countries are engaged in national and international debates regarding the future of higher education, setting goals for expanding access, considering and implementing alternative funding schemes, and negotiating cooperative initiatives between nations, such as the Bologna Agreement, American higher education remains a second-tier political issue.”


A certain sort of policy wonk thinks it means something if a talky turmoil's going on about stuff -- they’re debating things and setting goals and considering changes in Europe, so this must mean something. But in fact there’s little movement on the proposed EU changes. The only thing moving with any alacrity in response to them is the European street, which is on fire.