CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Lessons from the for-profit side
Tác giả
Ruch R.S.
Năm xuất bản
2004
Source title
Globalization and Higher Education
Số trích dẫn
4
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
The beat poet Allen Ginsberg visited my campus in the fall of 1969, when I was an undergraduate English major at a large state university in the Midwest. He spoke in a kind of prose-poem about the purpose of American universities, characterizing them as giant warehouses designed to occupy the time of young people that society did not know what else to do with. A proper college education, he suggested, was simply a way of efficiently housing people who were too young to be adults and too old to be children. Most of the assembled students, myself included, identified strongly with Ginsberg's straightforward explanation of our own experience. The giant warehouse metaphor may still work in some of the large, state university systems, but in general it no longer describes reality. For one thing, the demographics have radically changed. Half of the college students in America are adults, and only about 7 percent are eighteen-to twenty-two-year-olds living on campus and pursuing liberal arts degrees. Perhaps even more dramatic, it has become increasingly common to tie the outcome of a college education to the economic earning power of graduates, and that is how the payoff is measured in many studies. The earning power of graduates is in turn tied to regional and national economic health. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) now tracks the relationship between national productivity, the educational attainment of individuals, and individual earning power, which it uses to demonstrate the tangible benefits of investing in education to the economic well-being of the nation. One recent NCES report (1997) asserts that improvements in worker productivity in the United States are the result of increases in educational attainment and that the "best available measure of a worker's productivity is that of worker's wages." The focused educational missions and values the for-profit provides fit harmoniously into this conversation about the relationship between educational attainment, the earning power of graduates, and national productivity. These institutions thrive on providing an efficient and cost-effective route to a degree and job placement in a high-demand field at a good salary. This, in essence, is what they do as educational providers. Allen Ginsberg might have described it as mass assembly-line job training tied to the needs of the market. A small but growing proportion of students (ca. 400,000 in 2000) and, to a lesser extent, faculty (ca. 3,000 full-time faculty in 2000) are choosing to study and teach in these pragmatic, applications-oriented colleges and universities. The rise of the for-profit model in higher education, and in particular the growth of the large, publicly traded corporations that offer accredited degree programs at the associate's, baccalaureate, master's, and even doctoral levels, will continue to have a profound influence on the higher education industry in America. I seek to accomplish two primary goals in this chapter. The first is to frame the for-profit model within the larger context of the continuing development of higher education in general and to identify how for-profit institutions are influencing our evolving understanding of what constitutes a college education. My second goal is to identify some of the lessons that traditional higher education institutions may learn from the reemergence and growth of the for-profit providers. By understanding what seems to be working well in the for-profit model, in particular, by observing how the for-profits are addressing needs that are not being met by some traditional colleges and universities, traditional institutions may be able to more clearly understand and articulate their own values and purposes. © 2004 University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
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Nơi xuất bản
University of Hawai'i Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus