But I'm not writing about the survey. I'm writing about how I know this. I turn on the local news channel and there it is: "College isn't worth the cost." I read the New York Times and it's made it onto the front page. While I don't disagree with or value the Pew research, it, like all research, needs to be taken in context.

College isn't worth the cost to who? I read the news, listen to the radio, and talk to people who know stuff. I haven't heard many argue that college isn't expensive. It's expensive because it's valuable. And, I've heard very few comments that suggest a college education isn't valuable. It's what we value and how we value it that makes or breaks. But this messaging that "college isn't worth the cost" might be further widening and extending a higher education gap.

Does the cost of college override the reality that middle earners in America are the most at risk of economic collapse? Young people whose parents earn between $65,000 and $100,000 per year are doomed. Their parents earn too much for them to qualify for federal and state grant aid. Their parents make too little to cover the gap between the costs of attendance and their estimated family contribution. What are these young people to do? The message that they're receiving is that they are destined to borrow themselves into a state of frustration and desperation. The message is that they are going to graduate from college with no clear path to economic stability. Do we think that our kids are not hearing this message? They are hearing it and it scares the hell out of them. What's to suggest that they also won't dis-engage as they stare into the abyss that is their future? If the middle of our economy can't "afford" the opportunity to move forward intellectually and economically, what about the poor?

We know that the primary pathway out of poverty is education. We also know that fewer students from low income families continue education after high school than any other demographic group. There is plenty of data out there suggesting that this is the case because poor families believe that college is too expensive, so they don't explore higher education as an option.They've received the message that college is expensive and therefore out of reach. Since it's not seen as a viable financial option, youth from poor communities are more likely to disengage during their k-12 education than are their more affluent peers.

So whether it's a matter of reality or belief, we are communicating to young people that their efforts to learn more about the world won't be worth the cost of that knowledge. It's concerning the way this research is being communicated and how it's being heard. The messaging is strengthening misinformed and under-informed beliefs about opportunity that I work daily to disspell. The reality is that youth from communities characterised by low-incomes have more access to financial aid than any other group. Middle income youth have access to private, liberal arts and sciences colleges and universities that have higher financial thresholds. And youth from wealthy families will continue to have access (sometimes in spite of low academic achievement.) The power that youth have lies in their understanding and belief that they are in control of their choices and opportunities for higher education. They control their own currency - GPA. If they understood and believed that there was something valuable to them after high school, they would likely engage more diligently in earning the capital to buy those choices.

Young people don't passively accept life conditions unless they don't see their role in changing those conditions. If they hear that college isn't a choice, why work to make it a choice? Young people armed with information and the ability to synthesize that information can be a powerful force for change. If they knew that being poor or being male, black, southern, etcetera could be viewed as an asset with regard to post-secondary opportunity, they might engage more emphatically in the academics. I tell young people all of the time, "GPA is currency. It's the one thing you can control and it's the one thing you can spend." That combined with all of the assets that they bring to the table and have no control over are their capital. They need to know that what they can spend it on is worth the effort.

What we don't need is more information out there that cuts the legs out from our youth as they try to run.

College the Easy Way

by Bob Herbert

The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America’s kids actually learning in college?

For an awful lot of students, the answer appears to be not much.

A provocative new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation’s college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”

Click here to read the article.

I received some responses to my rant that validated it, but then there were the obvious questions that followed - "So what do we do about it?" Now that's really the question isn't it. There's always the "solution" to change the teacher to student ratio, increasing the access for students to teachers. But that costs a ton. What about a longer school year? Too much push back from the unions  (and to some degree, parents.) How about sitting on exercise balls instead of chairs in the classroom? Or community involvement in the classroom? Or more nutritious snacks? All reasonable ideas and all with some merit. We know they have merit because they've all been tried with varying degrees of success and sustainability. The one glaring assumption in all of these options is that they take place in a school and classroom setting. Where else would they take place? Duh.

There's the rub. The schools and classrooms, in all of their iterations over the past 7 decades are, fundamentally unchanged. They are so much a part of our culture of public education that we don't even see them anymore. It just is. Although malleable, schools are ultimately static. They can be pounded and stretched, but they will retain their basic shape. They are the vehicle that we use for education.

I'm not suggesting that we take kids out into the woods and have them stand on their heads as adults prance around chanting various equations and requesting the children recite multiplication tables. I am suggesting that we, the adults, begin to recognize that we are in a school and that classrooms have remained the same since the institution of public education in America. When we surface our implicit knowledge we can begin to understand and approach it differently.

I ranted about how our educational lifecycle in America is like a tunnel (some might refer to it as a pipeline) and how we drive our young people through that tunnel for 12 years until we pop out the other side, give them the keys and tell them to go for it. I really focused on the tunnel as the limiting factor in the analogy. This 12 year journey requires very little investment of our youth. They make very few decisions and have very little input in the process. They are the deliverable. They effectively, sit in the back of the car and are along for the ride. They (and we) never challenge that we're in a car. We just are as it is the given mode of transportation through the tunnel.

What if we were to step outside of that car and really evaluate it as the most effective means of transportation in a tunnel (which I will get into in a subsequent article?) Like our classrooms, we would look at it and check its maintanence needs - tires, gas, oil. We'd give it a tune up, maybe slap on some sweet wheels, give it a paint job, get back in and keep going.

What if we didn't get back into the car?

What if, instead, we (adults) were asked to walk? How would that change the paradigm? The walk could give us the opportunity to have deeper conversations with our youth because we wouldn't be so concerned about all the things the car requires of me. It would force us to walk at the pace of the young person and force us to encourage the kid to walk faster (or slower depending on our own pace.) It would be much easier to place the young person out ahead of us so she could challenge her own pace and mark her own path within the tunnel.

Our job as educators is to inspire and nuture creativity and critical thinking. I would suggest that our job doesn't relegate us to driver. I'm not so naive to suggest that I have the answer, nor am I suggesting that classrooms aren't the best vehicle for driving through our system of education.

I am, however, suggesting that we take a moment to think about it. What are the options that we are presenting to our youth that give them the ability and support their desire to make their way through life? We are, afterall, preparing them for life - not graduation.

Schools were designed to create citizens – not individual citizens; but a model citizenry. And because they were created to achieve this social norm, the most innovative and progressive model was selected to ensure this would happen with efficiency and with sustainability. This model was the industrial model - constructed of school days set up in shifts, bells that moved us along, separated into different facilities with subject specialty areas, and grouped into batches by age. What better way to address a need of society – keeping kids from running wild on our public streets – than to provide a cutting-edge structure, free of charge, to the masses that would perpetuate the workforce and keep America on an upward, global, economic trajectory?  At the end of each school year, America would have a fresh batch of citizens who could vote, buy, sell, and serve. All in the name of civic duty.

Public schools were never intended to prepare youth for college or post-secondary education. The kids that previously had access to education for the sake of education (affluent and predominantly white) were already being prepared for college. Those kids were in private preparatory schools and parochial schools. And those private and parochial schools were already aligned with colleges and universities, set to accept the kids already in that pipeline. They were the future dream makers; not the dreamers. Public education wasn’t created for them. It was created for the masses to ensure American industrial endurance. We effectively put a child in the back seat of a car when they’re 6 years old. We then climb into the front seat, tell them to be quiet and pay attention, and then drive into a tunnel for the next 12 years. We then emerge from the tunnel, ask the kid to get out, tell them they did a great job, and give them the keys.

The special thing about public education is that we all (for the most part) know what it is. We can describe a school building, a classroom, the school day. We can tell you what teachers look like and what they ask our kids to do. We can tell you that the role of an assistant principal is to give out detention. We know all of this because, fundamentally, nothing has changed since we were in it. In fact, nothing about schools has fundamentally changed since the institution of public education.

In the past 10 years, I’ve adopted daily use of a cell phone, I’ve eliminated the “land-line” from my home, and I search news that I specifically want to read from my home desktop Mac the instant that news is news. I don’t remember phone numbers because I don’t have to. I communicate with an orphanage in Mozambique daily to make sure they’ve received the supplies that I send them from a South African-based wholesaler. I talked with my mom on Skype so she could see her grandchildren grow. My car doesn’t have a carburetor and my next door neighbor’s car is fully electric. The word “multi-task” is actually a word. If the world has changed so dramatically in 10 years, why is it that our system of public education has remained static for the last 75 years? Why are we using an analog model in a digital world with kids who are more stimulated (iPod, iPhone, 250 TV channels, Hulu, Facebook, MySpace, the list goes on) than at any time in the history of the world?

What does all of this have to do with college? While public schooling hasn’t changed significantly over the past 75 years, higher education has.  And our youth, while possibly academically prepared, are woefully underprepared intellectually. Schooling has been an exercise in persistence and conformity. We’re teaching kids how to do enough to pass on to the next stage of the assembly process, but we’re doing very little to encourage or support them to ask why they’re in this process and for what they’re being processed. Understanding how to navigate a single college – much less the 4000 plus colleges and universities in America – is a skill developed over time. The only way that our youth can be wholly successful is if we begin to demand a paradigm shift in our public schools’ practice and philosophy. 

Yes, there are young people who are successful in our current public school paradigm. And yes, there are kids who go to college prepared and supported. But more and more, kids are arriving on college campuses shell-shocked by the responsibilities and unable to ask for help because they don’t know what questions to ask. High school graduation numbers have increased and college application and admission rates have gone up. However, retention and graduation rates on college campuses have gone down. Either we’re graduating kids from high school who aren’t ready for this rite of passage or our colleges and universities aren’t addressing the needs of the students entering. Whichever is the case (and I think it’s a little of both,) I don’t think it’s the fault of our youth. They’re taking what they’re given. Perhaps what we’re giving them, they don’t want – or need.

Jeff Dotts is the director of the Nashville College Connection @ the Oasis Center.  His work includes the development of youth action for education programs in Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa. His primary focus is youth voice and self-efficacy in an adult world. He holds a Bachelors in secondary education and a Masters in Social Foundations, Leadership, and Policy of Education from the University of Virginia.

• The development and adoption of college readiness standards in reading, writing, and math -- jointly by K-12 schools and postsecondary education.
• High school assessments that measure students’ progress on the readiness standards.
• Public school curriculum that reflects the standards.
• Senior-year high school courses designed to raise students’ skill levels in reading, writing, and math.
• Professional development for current and aspiring teachers on using the readiness standards in their instruction.
• The use by colleges and universities of students’ performance on the high school tests for college placement.

Read the entire report here.

Click here to read the full article.

In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt

By PETER S. GOODMAN

One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid.

“They tell people, ‘If you don’t have a college degree, you won’t be able to get a job,’ ” said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. “They tell them, ‘You’ll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you’ll get all your financial aid covered.’ ”

Read the full article here