Reflective Essay on The Problems of Modern Education

📌Category: Education
📌Words: 1410
📌Pages: 6
📌Published: 07 February 2022

Although education is often touted as the key to success, to be educated in modern times is to be put through a process rife with bureaucratic stagnation, institutional greed, misplaced priorities, and elitism. One of the hallmarks of college life is athletics, which has taken over a large number of universities and how they spend their time and money. There has been a significant increase of for-profit colleges that have put greed before student welfare, often falsely advertising towards vulnerable people. A cornerstone of education is separating wheat from chaff, ranking those who are worthy of gratification and those who have underperformed, often to the detriment of the overall success of the student base.  

The growth of televised college athletics, and the effect they have on admissions, has led some colleges to over prioritize their sports programs, instead of focusing on teaching their students. In an interview about the rise of college sports, Charles T. Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke stated that “between 1985 and 2010, average salaries at public universities rose 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches” (Pappano P.1158). This disproportionate rise in salary clearly shows what colleges are spending money on and therefor shows what they are concentrating their resources on. When colleges spend their time and money on sport programs, this inevitably drains resources from other aspects of college. This fact alone is not detrimental to the success of college students, at least on paper. Spending money on sports programs can lead to an increase in school spirit and student cohesion, but when the balance between what the colleges spend money on is disrupted that can lead to a cascade effect on every other aspect of college. When sports are over prioritized, the amount of power that sports coaches have over students is tremendous, which can all too easily lead to abuse. This has happened several times within several colleges. When the sports coaches get caught, they are more likely to be reprimanded or fired than they are taken to the police. This shows that when sports programs are given too much power the moral and disciplinary aspects of college deteriorate.  

Another misplaced priority among colleges is how the students, educators, and administrators view college education and their obligations to one another. On the student's part, Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, writes that “In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success.” (Edmundson 1133). Edmundson explains that students are not going to college to fill their head with knowledge that they will use for the rest of their lives but simply want to put themselves in the best possible position to achieve financial success, or at the very least financial security. Students would rather live in their social circles and make connections while partying than they would fully absorbing the information they are given in their classes. Part of the reason for this prioritization of finances over education is the cultural pressure put upon young people to achieve financial success, either for their sake or to validate those that impacted their lives. To further this idea, Edmundson writes “By the time you have come to college, you will have been told who you are numberless times.” (Edmundson 1139). Perhaps more important than students not fully committing to learning what is being taught in class, students are coming into college with a set goal of getting a job that pays well and that has some level of prestige. This goal contrasts with what Edmundson claims to be the true purpose of college for students, the journey of self-discovery. Edmundson states that “you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing” (Edmundson 1139). The prioritization of the material aspects of education has led to students taking paths that may not be right for them because they have prioritized what they can get from college and not what college is able to teach them.  

The growth of for-profit colleges, to fill the gap left by an expanding requirement for worker skills, has had a detrimental effect on how people learn and at what price, mainly by enabling businesses to shirk training costs onto their workers. With the unprecedented technological growth that the world has been going through in the past two decades, the amount of education that workers need to properly do their jobs has increased at a similar rate. With an increasing demand for higher education, colleges have been able to increase their tuition at an exponential rate while providing the same level of education or worse. Tressie Cottom, a sociologist and former recruiter for a for profit college, writes that “They (for profit colleges) are an indicator of social and economic inequalities... are perpetrators of the same inequalities” (Cottom 1206). With the rise of for-profit colleges there has been an increase in disparities among groups of people, by attracting vulnerable people who would not be accepted into a public college and then giving them a riskier degree than they would have if they went to a public college. One of the reasons there is such a significant difference between public and private colleges is the fact that public colleges look down on private colleges and therefore look down on private college students. This leads to private college students not being able to transfer credits from a private college to a public one. Another issue with for profit colleges is the increased need to be profitable, so colleges find short cuts while also cutting corners so that they can get the most bang for their buck. Cottom writes that “companies are offering private student loans so that workers can pay up to $18,000 for courses that last from one day to a few weeks” (Cottom 1208). This fast and loose style of education cannot be sustained due to the fact that it takes time for people to fully understand what is being taught to them by their instructors.  

While there may be an issue with college professors being pressured to give better grades to entice students to take their class, among prestigious colleges there has been a growing movement against grade inflation and their solution is to limit the number of A’s an educator can give. This solution is a masterful way of braking up class cohesion by making every student compete against one another for the privilege of getting a good grade, a grade that has now become the standard benchmark for success. Alfie Kohn, a scholar and critic of the U.S. educational system, writes that “a consistent body of social science research shows that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best” (Kohn 1182). This competitive mindset also encourages students to cut as many corners as possible so that they can get the highest grade possible for the smallest amount of effort possible. In the U.S. there is a strong sense of competition in every aspect of life, in fact it may as well be written in our DNA, but countries that prioritize cooperation between classmates at a young age often lead to increased ability to work in groups. The ability to work in groups is growing more and more as the necessity for large complex tasks becomes more prevalent. When writing about testing outcomes, Kohn writes that “If everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again – as high as necessary to ensure that some students fail” (Kohn 1179). This shows that even if everyone succeeded at standardized testing, there would only be an outcry that the standards are too low and therefor the scores mean nothing of value. This clearly highlights the American need for there to be losers for there to be winners and that a person's achievements are based on how often someone else failed at achieving the same goals.  

With the failings of higher education being made abundantly clear, why is this what it means to be educated? Why does it have to be a grueling experience administered by people who want to be doing something else somewhere else? The reason is the indifference of good men. When people of influence think of education, they think of a generation that they do not understand and find them unappealing by the values of yester year. People of influence do not respect the current generation going through education because they see youth like every generation before them, with apathy and sneering superiority. The only way to change what it means to be educated, other than to protest on college campuses and therefor risk bodily harm, is to go through education and then attempt to change it, but this comes with a paradox. When someone goes through something they expect the same for those after them, as if the experience is a rite of passage that they remember through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. If this paradox is eliminated, then what it means to be educated could change drastically for those in the future.

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