AWAKE! June 8, 1971 pages 3-8, "Second Thoughts About a College Education"
IN TIMES past, most people felt that the way to success and happiness was by getting a college education. But now many are having second thoughts about this.
What is responsible for the changing attitude? A combination of factors that were not so obvious a decade or two ago. These factors have now built up to the point where ?higher? education is in a state of crisis in many countries.
One of the most comprehensive studies on the problems facing education was made recently by the Carnegie Corporation in the United States. A participant, Charles Silberman, editor and former college teacher, said of the study: ?When we began, I thought the severest critics of the schools were overstating things. But now I think they were understating them.?
Inadequate Courses
One area of criticism has to do with the study courses of many colleges. Some educators feel that often the courses do not prepare youths for the fields they will be entering, or for life in general.
For instance, fundamental to the entire education structure is the training of the teachers. But of this vital area Mr. Silberman stated: ?I have yet to meet a teacher in the middle-class suburban school who considered his preparation even remotely adequate. On the contrary, the great majority agree with the judgment of Seymour Sarason of Yale, that ?the contents and procedures of teacher education frequently have no demonstrable relevance to the actual teaching task.??
This same criticism is also leveled at other fields of education, not just teacher training. Too often courses are studied that have little or no relationship to what the student will be doing after he graduates. That is why many educators feel that, for a liberal arts degree in particular, more emphasis should be placed on how to learn rather than on learning facts that will never be used. But that takes considerable skill on the part of teachers. And as the Carnegie report shows, teachers themselves admit to being unprepared.
Also, what makes the matter more complex is that the average teacher is more and more unable to give students the personal attention they need. Why? ?in the huge colleges of today, the student is lost in a maze of fellow students. The days when teachers had small classes and carried on question-and-answer sessions with about a dozen students at a time have been superseded by crowded conditions. Classes are large, campuses are congested like the streets of big cities, dormitories are cramped and some are far from quiet for study purposes.??U.S. News & World Report.
Thus, colleges increasingly resemble huge factories turning out graduates unprepared, or uncertain, as to their life?s work.
Financial Troubles
Instead of more teachers and better facilities being available, the situation is reversing. Why is this so? Dartmouth College?s president John G. Kemeny answers: ?Higher education, both public and private, is facing its most serious financial crisis in history.?
The costs of operating colleges rise swiftly, but income does not. Thus, many colleges have had to cut back personnel and facilities at the very time when expansion is needed. Already 500 American colleges are in deep financial difficulty. Twice as many are headed that way. ?Some small private colleges have already folded for lack of funds, and others are in danger of collapsing. Almost all public universities are just barely scraping by. And the biggest and richest and most prestigious institutions are finding themselves deep in the red,? says The Wall Street Journal.
Princeton foresees a deficit of over $2,000,000 this year, Columbia?s deficit for the school year beginning in autumn 1969 was $11,000,000, with 1970?s even larger. Yale?s deficits in recent school years have run as follows: 1967?$300,000; 1968?$900,000; 1969?$1,250,000; and 1970 an estimated $1,750,000. Yale?s president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., warns: ?If the present shrinkage of funds were to continue . . . we would have to either abandon the quality of what we?re doing, abandon great discernible areas of activity or abandon the effort to be accessible on the merits of talent, not of wealth or of race or of inheritance.?
Of course, not all colleges have severe financial difficulties. But increasing numbers of them do. Also, the cost to each student is skyrocketing. That is why some parents are asking themselves searching questions as to the advisability of sending their children to costly institutions that have such a clouded future with no improvement in sight.
Violence and Cynicism
Campus disorder is another factor damaging to ?higher? education. Colleges throughout the world have erupted in violence over various issues such as the Vietnam war, nationalism, racial injustice and the role of the college itself.
College youths have strong opinions. Some do not hesitate to make their opinions known even if it means violence and revolt. This has often disrupted classroom procedure. In the United States, ?the 1969-70 school year closed last spring with six students dead, dozens injured in campus uprisings, with 125 schools shut down for varying periods through student strikes, with higher education facing its most severe challenge, a struggle for its existence,? reported New York?s Sunday News. Some parents and students demanded a refund of their tuition because classes were not held.
In a study of campus disorders, a government commission said: ?We find ominous and shocking reports that students are laying in supplies of weapons, and that others are preparing to take the law into their own hands against protestors.?
So in the case of many young folks, college is providing another kind of education, an education in revolt and violence. Many are the parents who sent their children to college with high hopes, only to be shocked to see the way they turned out.
When colleges opened in the autumn of 1970, officials held their breath. However, there was not as much violence as in the previous year. Why not? Those close to the students feel that many of them have sunk into a mood of deep cynicism, having lost all faith in their government, their elders and school officials to bring about meaningful change.
Experts warn that such profound cynicism, although resulting in a quieter campus for a while, may turn out to be far more dangerous in the long run. In another crisis, that cynicism may turn into action much more severe than anything yet experienced.
What Moral Climate?
Violence and rebellion are not the only kind of revolutionary activity going on in college. There is another kind of revolution spreading. This has to do with living arrangements. Increasingly, men and women are being permitted to share the same dormitories without supervision. In other places they are often free to visit each other?s rooms at any hour of the day or night.
A few educators have concluded that this does not lead to a lowering of sexual morality. For instance, when dismayed parents asked about the propriety of coeducational dormitories in the college their daughter was attending, an official of the college answered: ?Did it ever occur to you that boys in your daughter?s dorm may look upon her as a sister instead of as simply a sex object??
Such a view is naïve in the extreme. To think that today?s young men and women, reared in permissiveness, will be put together in the same house without supervision and then regard each other only as brother and sister is incredible, a sheer fantasy.
Some adults feel that if the students have not learned right from wrong before going to college, then it is too late once they get there. But even if they have learned what is right, the solid Bible principle holds true that ?bad associations spoil useful habits.? (1 Cor. 15:33) Under the pressure of circumstances, being around other young men and women who see nothing wrong with loose sexual conduct, youths with previously high moral standards can have them corrupted.
Of course, some school officials, parents and students do not care about high sexual morality. But if you are a parent with a child in high school, thinking about sending him or her to college, do you care? If you do you must face this hard fact: without a doubt, college tends to corrupt sexual morality. Ask those who have been there. If they are truthful, you will rarely find one who says his morals have been improved.
Dr. L. T. Woodward, author, and graduate of New York University Medical School, says that while sexual immorality has increased very rapidly in high school, ?sex in college is even more widespread. It is possible to interview whole platoons of college seniors, both male and female, and find only a small percentage of students who have never had sexual intercourse.? He noted that while many enter college as virgins, ?by the time they graduate, four years later, a very high percentage of the college students will no longer be virgins.?
The truth of the matter is inescapable: for young, impressionable students, perhaps away from home for the first time, college is usually devastating to sexual morals. There is no reason whatever to believe your child will be the exception.
The Drug Scene
The disintegration of sexual morals is made worse by the current drug craze. Most students in college have at least experimented with some kind of drug. An increasing number turn to the deadly heroin habit.
At one college campus in New York, Marshall Berman, an assistant professor in political science, stated: ?What I think is involved is that a lot of young people are eating their hearts out watching their lives disintegrate so they take heroin so they can watch the disintegration and be amused.?
So common has drug taking become in college that the New York Times says: ?With the same openness that some students . . . do homework on the major lawn of the City College campus, others congregate there to buy and use heroin. . . . the presence of users in certain areas, such as the lawn and the cafeteria, is dramatically visible. During a 15-minute period after the noon class change, 12 people were observed making purchases.?
To Be Expected
True, similar attitudes toward violence, sex and drugs exist in cities and nations at large. But in college it is more concentrated and comes at an age when young people tend to experiment and are away from home restraint.
The result? A tidal wave of behavior that few parents want. There is a personality change that takes place that often drives parents to tears. The young are exposed to a climate of violence, cynicism, sexual immorality with its accompanying venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies, disillusionment and a turning to drugs. Is that the kind of climate you want for your children?
Yet, what else could you expect? An atheistic philosophy prevails in nearly all colleges. They are dominated by evolutionary thinking, which makes people more animalistic in their viewpoint. There is little or no restraining force or guide for their lives. This leads to abandonment of the Bible?s high principles that have proved to be such a benefit in the lives of God-fearing persons, as can be attested to by Jehovah?s witnesses who believe and practice those high standards.
Job Opportunities
Then too, what about one of the main reasons people had for going to college?that it prepared one for a better job? Now even that is open to question. Job opportunities for college graduates have never been poorer in many lands.
Placement counselors at colleges report a sharp drop in hiring of graduates by companies. Michigan State?s placement director calls it ?the worst job market in the 26-year history of the placement bureau here.? And colleges are graduating a record number of students who are competing for fewer openings.
Even those with higher degrees are having trouble. Robert Brocksbank, head of Mobil Oil Corporation?s college recruiting efforts, said: ?A lot of guys who went on to business school for that pie in the sky are going to be disappointed this year. A lot of companies are cutting way back on their MBA [master?s degree in business administration] hiring for the first time in years.?
Thousands of people with master?s and doctor?s degrees, such as scientists, educators, engineers and corporation executives, have lost their jobs in these times of economic difficulty. ?Unemployment among professional and technical workers has soared 67% in the last year,? reports The Wall Street Journal. One chemist who had been making $40,000 a year was laid off because of cost cutting. He said: ?I?ve written more than 600 letters and have not gotten one firm job offer.?
Another problem is that a company hesitates to hire a man they feel is over-qualified for a job. A person with a doctor?s degree, in desperation, may apply for work that pays less. But companies generally shy away from hiring such a person. They feel that he can become dissatisfied easily, and also as soon as he gets an opportunity for a better job he will quit.
Some have not been laid off from highpaying jobs. They have quit. Why? The Wall Street Journal says: ?Most men who have let go and stepped off the corporate ladder say any regrets they have are rare, and fleeting. Their disillusionment with their old way of life and work is so strong that it overrides any thought of turning back. That?s true even of those who aren?t sure where they?re going and of those who are struggling to stay solvent.?
Yes, just as many students are ?dropping out? from the college ?rat race,? so, too, many executives are dropping out of the executive or professional ?rat race? they entered with such high hopes after college. It has proved to be a sad commentary on the way of life promised by a college education.
Indeed, the disillusionment with the purpose and results of college is so great now that only about one third who enter college ever complete a four-year course. In a ?Report on Higher Education? issued at Stanford University in March of 1971 the following was noted: ?The majority of dropouts cite dissatisfaction with college and the desire to reconsider personal goals and interest as the major reasons for leaving school. . . . College is failing to capture the attention and engage the enthusiasm of many students. For some, it is a decidedly negative experience.?
Other Work
In days gone by, college did help many to find better positions. But times are changing. Many jobs today that do not require a college education pay well. They enable a person to acquire a trade that can be used in many places.
Until recently it was made to seem that a person working with, his hands was not doing dignified work. He was not considered really successful. But many so-called ?dignified? college graduates and professional people today wonder where their next meal is coming from, while carpenters, plumbers, clerks, electricians and others who have a trade and work with their hands have jobs. Some garbage collectors are currently making $10,000 a year.
It is no shame for a person to learn a trade and work with his hands. Indeed, these days it is getting to be the practical thing to do. That is another reason why some parents now have second thoughts about this matter of a college education. They choose to channel their boys and girls into more useful trades in high school where such things can be learned, at least in part. After graduating from high school, they may continue briefly in a trade school or get valuable on-the-job training. Then they qualify for a trade and avoid the anguish often suffered in executive-type positions.
Parents who are Jehovah?s witnesses have another very sound reason for channeling their children?s lives into useful trades. They know from fulfilled Bible prophecy that today?s industrial society is near its end. Soon it will be given its death stroke by Almighty God himself. (Prov. 2:20, 21; 1 John 2:17) After that, in God?s new order a reconstruction work will be done to transform this entire earth into a paradise. (Luke 23:43) Trades of many types will be very useful then, as will skills in agriculture and homemaking. So by guiding their children away from the so-called ?higher? education of today, these parents spare their children exposure to an increasingly demoralizing atmosphere, and at the same time prepare them for life in a new system as well.
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How beneficial is a college education?
WILL IT REALLY PROVIDE BETTER JOB OPPORTUNITIES?
WILL CAMPUS ASSOCIATIONS IMPROVE YOU MENTALLY AND MORALLY?
