It's fun watching Left-leaning newspapers these days

http://tinyurl.com/cjnman
Biden Calls for Affordable Higher Education
April 17, 2009 Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed today to seek new ways of helping American families afford to send their children to college.
****Let's understand that Biden et al aim at improving the economic lot of those he has in mind. Making college more "affordable" harks back to making home ownership "more affordable." Both goals sound laudable but we should be cautioned since enabling "affordable" home ownership for those who couldn't really afford it led to our present problems. Extending this state-mandated goal, presages possible debasement of the very value of higher education. Sending to college people who aren't suited to, or ready for,it ( or at least college as it once was ) is silly and will only pervert the nature of college and debase its value. (The goal and the cautions refer to undergraduate college and some ostensibly-graduate and "professional-qualification" education but, for the most part, graduate study works by qualifying people for its specific benefits and proceeds from there. )*****
The Rise, Debasement and Resurrection(maybe) of CCNY
City College of New York was, for many years, a paragon among schools. Its academic excellence was unparalleled ( for years only Reed College rivaled it for having graduates going on to get PhDs )as it catered to a working-class population, albeit one highly selected. Known as the "Harvard of the Proletariat," it produced among its graduates NINE Nobel Laureates in substantive disciplines ( Arrow and Aumann in Economics; Axelrod,Kornberg and Salk in Medicine; Hauptmann in Chemistry; Lederman, Penzias and Schwinger in Physics; and such other notable alumni as Dan Goldin (NASA),Andy Grove(Intel), Colin Powell etc. These are notable for having graduated before or during the 1960s.
Debasement
During a 1969 takeover …activists and their...allies demanded... City College implement an aggressive affirmative action program…any graduate of a New York City high school would be able to matriculate either at City College or another college in the CUNY system. Beginning in 1970, the program opened doors to college to many who would not otherwise have been able to attend college. The program, however, came at the cost of City College's and the University's academic excellence. No alumnus after the 1960s came close to the achievements of the previous years. The idea that excellence can be painted on to others by automatic admission, an absurd idea on the face of it, was falsified empirically at the cost of a great institution.
Possible Resurrection
By the 1990s CCNY (City University of New York ) stopped admitting, and offering remedial classes to, students who did not meet its formal entrance requirements. CUNY by then began enrolling these less well prepared students in its community colleges, and not senior colleges such as CCNY. CUNY began recruiting for the University Scholars program in the fall 2000, and admitted the first cohort in the fall 2001. CCNY was one where the program was initiated. The newly admitted became undergraduates in the College's newly formed Honors Program. Students attending the CCNY Honors College are awarded free tuition, a cultural passport that admits them to New York City cultural institutions for free or at sharply reduced prices, a notebook computer, and an academic expense account that they can apply to such academic-related activities as study abroad. These undergraduates are also required to attend a number of specially developed honors courses. In 2007 CUNY initiated the Macaulay Honors College.Both programs are run out of the CCNY Honors Center.
In October 2005, Dr. Andrew Grove, a 1960 graduate of the Engineering School in Chemical Engineering, and co-founder of Intel Corporation, donated $26,000,000 to the Engineering School, renamed the Grove School of Engineering.
****Who would go against my bet that this "elitist" program might restore at least some of CCNY's former luster? Changed demographics may, however, prove to be more permanent; many people moved away from NYC because of the degradation of one of the best reasons to continue to live there and they will likely not come back. The best of the newcomers, however, will now be well-served, better than in the three decades lost to political correctness.****
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Colleges are getting competition for what it is they purport to do but it first behooves us to ask, what is it that they really do that benefits people? Is it to expose young people to experiences that they might not otherwise have?
The college experience
One can learn binge drinking and experience "weed and blow when they can afford it" outside of the college ambience. Preparation for the NBA and NFL outside of college seems possible since professional tennis and baseball don't need it. Often the college experience is said to provide a first life-away-from-home, working-living-playing well with others etc. One of the major advantages of applying to prestigious colleges from private preparatory schools is easing the shock of this transition. Nevertheless, aside from the chance to participate in demonstrations, strikes, etc. the experience can be reasonably substituted for by the military, merchant marine, etc.and even independent living and employment.
Intellectual benefits
When it comes to exposure to intellectual matters, either the traditional "liberal" education or even more specific ones,there are now online courses, with and without credit -- the latter also being often without cost. N.B. one can "attend" online courses from M.I.T. and Stanford without cost but, of course, without getting grades, credit or acknowledgement of any accomplishment. It would be interesting to investigate how much online usage is made of the "Studies" curricula of the past generation (i.e. those things beyond "disciplines" like mathematics, the "hard-sciences", the social sciences, language, history, etc. )which many think are largely insubstantial melanges of "stuff" and lose most value if not resulting in a "degree." (There, is of course, the academically traditional practice of teaching any nonsense to others determined to study it, so various Departments of "Studies" have flourished.)
Credentialing
This gets us to the second function of undergraduate "higher" education: that of providing a certification that one has been triaged for admission from among others, graded ( with a continually inflated-and-meaningless metric ) and triaged and credentialed for graduation.(Actually some schools are hard to get into and easy to get out of / graduate from; others are easy to get into but hard to get out of.) The economic "value" of an undergraduate degree is largely due to this certification process. The more stringent the triaging process, the more valuable the degree. Does one really learn MORE at an Ivy or is it just harder to get into?
Sometimes, this issue is not restricted to undergraduate education. An associate, a professor at a Top Five business school, got into hot water with his dean when word came back that my friend had humorously posed to a group of MBA students the following proposition: "Suppose I could make a deal with you for two options, not now available; would you choose one and which? 1) You can take all the courses you want without cost but you would not get your MBA ever or 2) For twice the tuition, you could get your MBA without taking any courses at all but granted a credential indistinguishable from the one you are embarked on." It was the question that dared not be asked.
It is the case that a necessary but not sufficient part of credentialing is the passing of standardized exams, often long and complex ones but not to get a degree ( PhDs require a thesis defense but that is different.) To practice law somewhere, one must not only pass a bar examination somewhere but must also graduate an approved law school program. The prestigious Certified Financial Analyst ( CFA ) designation requires only an exam ( albeit one over a three-year period ) as does the program for members of the Actuaries Association. (There is also a less-stringent Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation.) Surely one can think of similar examination protocols that would certify the equivalent of the degrees of BA, MBA and even JD ( the professional-association inflation from the older LLB degree ) without the necessity of attending formal classes ( except for passing their exams ).
Association
There is a tangible benefit from associating both with people who are different and/or people who are excellent in some ways. Diversity has been raised to a standard both unrealistic and less valuable than it appears ( the self-segregation of college campuses that have been diversified demographically is a sad fact.) However, associating with others of similar interests and equal or higher standards, is invariably stimulating and can raise one to greater achievement of individual potential. Harvard graduates may be smarter than those of Compass-Point-Geographical U not because Harvard makes them smarter but because Harvard selects more and they make each other smarter ( professors sometimes even help in this regard! )
Networking
It is hard to argue with the idea that the superior economic achievements of alumni of certain schools, and even business and law schools, is due to the networking among the alumni and their loyalty to each other.***
Competition
What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline By Kevin Carey
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30a02101.htm
Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before... Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing...Less-selective private colleges and regional public universities — the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper — are in real danger...Undergraduate education could be the string that, if pulled, unravels the carefully woven financial system on which the modern university depends...someday, sooner than we think, we're going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.