What Is College For?
Careers, say students; learning, argues a major new study.
“I want to go to college to become a doctor,” the high school pupil told the rearchers. Why? “Basically so I can make some money and then take it easy.” A college student described her priority as “having a job when you get out”. As for broad scholarship that might expand one's vision or values, another student declared: "I'm not interested in hearing about the professor's Ph.D. disrtation (论文)."
According to a major new study, conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and relead this week, such careerist replies reflect the views of 90% of U.S. high school students and 88% of parents on the prime purpo of a college education. Only 28% of parents and 27% of high school students e college as a place to become a more thoughtful citizen.
The study draws on surveys of 5,000 college faculty, 4,500 undergraduates and 1,300 ad
ministrators and 1,200 high school students. The author, Carnegie President Ernest L. Boyer, points to the realities beneath career orientation: “The University of Illinois reports that only 19% of its humanities students have guaranteed jobs upon graduation versus 90% for business majors.” Small wonder that according to U.S. Government statistics (统计资料), bachelor's degrees in business have doubled from 114,865 in 1971 to 230,031 in 1984, while B.A.s in English and literature have plunged from 57,026 to 26,419. In the competition for enrollments, some schools have dropped such subjects as geology（地质学） and music education to emphasize business specialties like restaurant management. Says one college president: “It's all right to talk about educational values, but we have to face up to what students want today.”
Since it yields (屈服) in the ways to societal pressures, the report argues, “undergraduate education is in trouble. Driven by careerism and professional education, the nation's colleges are more successful in providing credentials (证书)for future jobs than in providing a quality education.” The document singles out veral "deep divisions" in the typical undergraduate experience in the U.S. Among them are:
✩“A mismatch between faculty expectations and the academic preparation of entering students. Said a math professor: "The biggest problem I have with my students is getting them to read and write."
✩A “chaotic” (混乱的) curriculum who “subjects have fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces, unrelated to an educational whole. ”
✩A cleft (裂缝) between undergraduates who expect to be taught and faculty for whom “promotion depends on rearch and publication.”
✩A divorce between an undergraduate's major and general education requirements. Many schools permit such narrow focus on the major that “the broad vision of learning" are lost.
✩Disagreements and confusion over goals. The student-body president at one public university told Carnegie interviewers: "If there are any goals around here, they haven't been expresd to me."
The Carnegie report is far from the only alarm being raid about undergraduate education. During the past two years, similar criticisms of undergraduate curricula and values have come from such authoritative sources as the National Institute of Education and the Association of American Colleges.
As for what can be done, Boyer argues that colleges should rai their standards of language proficiency by, first, requiring a written essay of incoming freshmen. Freshmen ought then to take a yearlong English cour, with emphasis on writing that should extend to other cours through all four years. The heart of tho four years, he declares, should be a required core curriculum that embraces language, the arts, history, social and governmental institutions and the natural sciences. Thus everyone, regardless of individual goals, gets a ba of esntial common knowledge. Moreover, the major subject must be enriched with related requirements on the history of the field, its socioeconomic implications and the ethical issues it rais. If, writes Boyer, a major cannot be discusd in the terms, “it belongs in a trade school.”
The status of teachers, he continues, must be raid through higher salaries and greater involvement in university policy-making. There should be cash prizes for top instructors and grants to develop improved teaching methods. “If I were to open a college tomorrow,” Boyer sums up, “I'd tell the students, ‘You're not going to come away from this place without experiencing the core of the learning experience.’ That way, they'd have a t of values to support their knowledge.”
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