Desi Tamasha

Higher Education Woes for America

This issue of the New York Review of Books is pretty good! The article on the state of higher education in the US points out some well-known yet disturbing trends:

• Top Universities are not paying much attention to quality of undergraduate education.
• Tuition costs are increasing rapidly, but the quality of education isn't significantly better.
• There's too much flab at the top - hundreds of well-paid, tenured professors who don't do anything worthwhile - in large universities.

There are some very interesting pieces about upward and downward mobility thrown in. For example, while 30% of the kids at Harvard and Yale are 'legacy' admissions, 70% of the kids whose parents went to the top 12 universities don't get in. So they kinda regress. None of this means a whole lot, of course.

How good an education you get totally depends upon your peer group and not too much on your teachers or the university itself. That's where excellent but tiny Liberal Arts programs fail to produce the kind of world-beaters that regularly emerge from the Ivy League schools and big state universities like Berkeley.