Anthonares

A cold shudder ran down my spine this morning listening to a Morning Edition report about the Bush Administration’s planning on how to improve higher education in this country. Here’s what I wish the report had said:

Sensitive to the importance of higher education in this country, and to the fact that our current system is the jewel of the academic world, the Bush Administration has been working in close concert with a comission of presidents, provots, and professors from our nation’s top institutions. Top on the comission’s agenda was the critical question of how to boost postgraduate enrollment among American students. Not far behind that is the concern that massive numbers of low-income students are failing, despite efforts at the university level to increase retention rates. It seems that social factors, outside the control of the universities, may be largely to blame; this new partnership between the universities and the federal government seeks to help identify those factors and ameliorate them so that finally the dream of a college education may be within the reach of all who desire it.

Instead, here’s what I did hear (heavily paraphrased):

Hot on the heels of their highly successful No Child Left Behind act that has turned our nation’s schools into educational mills in which daily drills prepare students for irrelevant standardized tests, the Bush Administration is looking to turn its Midas Touch on the crown jewel of international education: America’s universities. ‘Half of the students that graduate from universities can’t comprehend a basic newspaper article’ said a highly-qualified Bush appointee. ‘We’re concerned that students and their parents are paying a lot of money to a system that cannot guarantee them that they will not wake up drunk at 2:30 in the afternoon. What kind of education is that?’

Indeed, the Bush Administration has long been seeking to increase the role of government, particularly in matters of personal responsibility. ‘Americans have struggled too long with the burdens of self-discipline and entreprenurial drive,’ continued the compontent nepotistic hiree of the Admistration. ‘We seek to use legislation wherever possible to relieve them of those burdens.’ The standardized testing that the Adminstration is considering would apply to all federally-funded higher education institutions, which includes virtually every one because of government subsidized student loans. Though plans for standardized tests are vague at this point, it’s pretty clear to the comission that some sort of oval-based, electronically-evaluated, one-size-fits-all test will dramatically improve upon what is already the envy of the world.

Though the above account is a bit overly-dramatic, I think it makes the important points quite clear: the federal government screwed up with No Child Left Behind, and it is looking for a repeat by trying to implement sweeping changes onto our highly-successful higher education system without consulting with educators. It’s time for citizens to speak out against the incompetence of the Adminstration in many areas, and to think that they would apply their clumsy hand of reform to higher education is even more unthinkable than No Child Left Behind.

Perhaps there is some problem with Higher Education (a premise I don’t necessarily accept), but it is an optional expense that students willingly accede to. Their success or failure is mostly in control of the students themselves, though there are problems as I mentioned with lower-income students that have to meet financial obligations within their families. This is coming from a liberal: the federal government has no role in dictating the functioning of our higher-education institutions because it has not demonstrated the ability to do so. Until such a day arrives, let’s leave the management of our institutions in the hands of those truly qualified to run them.