Purpose of school
I'm getting ready to teach my summer course, which is called "The Achievement Gap in Higher Education," which is a 10 week look at who gets to go to college, what they get out of it, and why those things split on group differences.
The first question to address, though, is what the purpose of post-secondary education really is. I have had a number of different responses to that problem, ranging from "It is good to know things" to "It provides a well-defined path to a very limited set of career options."
By the time you are done with high school, you've run out of the top two reasons covered by public commitment to education, which are "political equity" and "babysitting." We don't send people to college to learn to be knowledgeable voters, or even supporters of the public good.
Most careers do not require any college level training at all, just a thorough apprenticeship. However, we are increasingly using college to limit access to that apprentice stage, so there's that - the credential of the thing.
But maybe still babysitting. If they don't go to college, what do we do with all those high school graduates? Is the purpose of college to turn teen-agers into independent adults? That would play better if it wasn't true that over half (62%) of beginning post-secondary students are already independent adults - living on their own, many with children, very many already fully employed. So....
It is important to nail down, because access to college is very much a socially differentiated commodity, so we need to clearly understand what it is exactly that is being socially limited. Is it the experience itself or access to some other experience? And how does it play out in terms of people's adult opportunity?
The first question to address, though, is what the purpose of post-secondary education really is. I have had a number of different responses to that problem, ranging from "It is good to know things" to "It provides a well-defined path to a very limited set of career options."
By the time you are done with high school, you've run out of the top two reasons covered by public commitment to education, which are "political equity" and "babysitting." We don't send people to college to learn to be knowledgeable voters, or even supporters of the public good.
Most careers do not require any college level training at all, just a thorough apprenticeship. However, we are increasingly using college to limit access to that apprentice stage, so there's that - the credential of the thing.
But maybe still babysitting. If they don't go to college, what do we do with all those high school graduates? Is the purpose of college to turn teen-agers into independent adults? That would play better if it wasn't true that over half (62%) of beginning post-secondary students are already independent adults - living on their own, many with children, very many already fully employed. So....
It is important to nail down, because access to college is very much a socially differentiated commodity, so we need to clearly understand what it is exactly that is being socially limited. Is it the experience itself or access to some other experience? And how does it play out in terms of people's adult opportunity?