Gee, What A Surprise

We suppose this appalling report was intended to be a surprising and shocking revelation:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

No surprise or shock whatsoever. Merely another ineluctable consequence of our mindlessly equalitarian postmodern culture.

Since the Sixties, a college "education" after graduation has, for most high school students, taken the place of a saner era's far more sensible and hugely more useful vocational school education; an education that would actually prepare most high school students for a life's work more suited to their intellectual capabilities, and of far more benefit to society as a whole. As it largely was in saner eras, a college education is, or ought to be, an undertaking reserved for a society's intellectual elite exclusively irrespective of that elite's ability to pay which last was, sadly, not often the case even in those saner eras the availability of scholarships notwithstanding.

Also not surprisingly, colleges themselves have exploited our culture's mindlessly equalitarian postmodern idiocy in respect of a college education for all. It's the money, of course. Idiots and geniuses pay the same, and there are far more idiots than geniuses. As the article concludes,

Colleges should be held at least as accountable as tire companies are. When some Firestone tires were believed to be defective, government investigations, combined with news-media scrutiny, led to higher tire-safety standards. Yet year after year, colleges and universities turn out millions of defective products: students who drop out or graduate with far too little benefit for the time and money spent. Not only do colleges escape punishment, but they are rewarded with taxpayer-financed student grants and loans, which allow them to raise their tuitions even more.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)