economy rebounded in 2015, but became worse across Europe and in many parts of Asia, particularly in China. The National Post reported that “students have high expectations that their university degrees will amount to a job fairly soon after graduation … To the statement ‘obtaining a post-secondary degree ensures I will have a job in my field of study after graduation,’ the average response was 4.5 out of 10—meaning about half of the students strongly felt their degree would fairly easily score them work.”[4]
So, what went wrong? How did the dream of a university education become so substantially disconnected from the reality? It is important to realize that the focus on the experiences of college and university graduates actually understates the problem significantly. Imagine, if you will, that a hospital reported the success rates of open-heart surgeries basing its data entirely on the health outcomes of those who walked out of the medical centres on their own within a few weeks of the operation. This would be absurd, of course, for it would exclude those who died or became sicker in the hospital after their operations and those who were not helped by the procedures. The statistics, obviously, would be a success story, skewed in favour of the hospitals and their medical professionals.
But universities do this all the time. Statistical reports, particularly those issued by universities or academic associations, routinely focus on university graduates—the ones who enrol and then continue through to the end of their programs, graduating as planned. These are the patients who walked out of the hospital on their own, in other words. But what about those who fall by the wayside? In the United States, over half of those who start a college or university program do not complete their degrees within seven years. And the dropout statistics vary according to institution and race: the rate is much lower for Harvard and much higher for two- and four-year community colleges. “Traditionally Black colleges” in the USA have a six-year graduation rate of only 39 percent.[5] David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times on September 9, 2009, reports that “only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as ‘failure factories’ and they are the norm.” If universities are going to take credit for the employment outcomes of their graduates, then surely they should also be morally responsible for students who are admitted into programs of study but drop out for academic, financial, or personal reasons.
Educational Outcomes
Educational outcomes vary widely across and within countries. Canadian universities do better than those in the United States, on average, although approximately 30 percent of Canadian first-year students do not graduate. At India’s highly regarded IITs, dropout rates are low, as they are in most elite universities. High-quality institutions, like Hong Kong Polytech, Cambridge, Stanford, and Swarthmore, have very low (as in less than 10 percent) dropout rates after admission. There is a simple lesson here. If you are juggling statistics to favour universities, you should select smart, highly motivated, and hard-working students at high-end institutions. Then graduation outcomes and employment outcomes will certainly tend to make the system look good.
At the other end of the spectrum lie America’s open-entry institutions, where graduation rates are routinely under half and occasionally lower than one-quarter of all entrants. In northern Europe (Germany and Scandinavia), doubly blessed with excellent high school systems and selective admissions to universities, dropout rates are under 10 percent. The United Kingdom, which raised its university fees dramatically in recent years, has a dropout rate under 9 per cent, much lower than France’s free and open university system, which loses about half of its students after first year. The message here? If an institution accepts poorly prepared and struggling students, even if it provides substantial assistance and support along the way (and some don’t), it will have trouble getting its students through to graduation. The top employers know these realities, and thus recruit heavily in the best colleges and universities, leaving graduates from the lower-tier and low-status institutions to fend for themselves in the workplace.
The global preoccupation with universities as a means to employment has introduced yet another worrisome element into the evaluation of the college and university system: declining standards. Recent studies of the American university system have produced disturbing insights into the limited learning that occurred among many students, and the low skill levels among both entering and graduating students. This is also seen anecdotally in, for instance, the notorious YouTube video in which undergraduates at Texas Technical University are asked the question “Who won the Civil War?” and a disheartening number don’t know.[6] The nature of the modern academy, where the expansion has been fuelled by an increasing commitment to accessibility, is such that the quality of the education provided has come under intense scrutiny. The picture that emerges is not pretty, for it describes (for American students and for many of their counterparts in other countries), serious problems with the students’ basic skills, limited curiosity, lack of commitment to studies, and disengagement from learning as a whole.
There is another set of issues related to the faculty members that includes an overemphasis on research and professional engagement; a surge of political correctness and sensitivity to issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and the like; the intellectual turmoil associated with post-modernism; and a publish-or-perish mindset that detracts from faculty commitment to the university experience. The struggle to reassert the primacy of college teaching is shaping up as one of the epic professional battles of the twenty-first century.
But governments, to say nothing of parents and students, want results. And just as the commitment to universal high school education has led to a gradual reduction in the quality and academic standards of the secondary system, so are pressures to retain and graduate students from universities resulting in noticeably lower standards for course work and eventual graduation. The one place where this really attracts attention in the United States relates to college athletics, particularly basketball and football, with a regular cycle of scandals relating to “bird” courses, assistance in writing papers and examinations, special concessions from faculty members, and other measures designed to keep the student athletes in school and eligible for competition (and, less urgently, on track to graduating from college). The worst current example is the appalling scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where football students for years took fake courses to retain their eligibility to play.[7]
At many institutions, faculty members are under various forms of pressure, subtle and otherwise, to allow students to progress so they stay eligible to play, with many non-elite colleges and universities mirroring the behaviour of public schools in their desire to reach performance targets. That keeping students in programs adds to the institutions’ financial bottom line and therefore pays for faculty and staff salaries is an additional incentive to let academic standards sag.
Overall, the picture from the perspective of student success is not a happy one. Certainly it is far removed from the cheerful pictures in the recruiting brochures and the promises to students and their parents about supportive academic environments. Some American institutions—places like Reed College, Colorado College, St. John’s College, and the members of the Colleges of Distinction consortium—uphold the spirit of the learning-centred academy (as opposed to that of places focusing on preparation for careers; for instance, a teachers’ college or a law school), but they are clearly the exception rather than the norm in the modern university system. What this means, to be blunt, is that many students—the number unknown and likely unknowable—have mediocre college and university experiences, do not see their skills improve significantly, and are not well positioned for the transition to the workplace. Some universities do much better than others. Elite technical institutions, such as MIT, CalTech, and Waterloo, for example, and specialized universities like Juilliard (fine and performing arts), Rensselaer (technology), and the Colorado School of Mines, attract focused, eager, and career-oriented students and, not surprisingly, produce graduates whom companies, government agencies, and organizations find very attractive.
But too few people have noticed
