What Might We Hope for From a System of Higher Education?

Lately I have been writing a fair bit about the failings of "the higher learning in America." Considering the failings raises the matter of the standard by which the system is being judged to have failings--and that in turn raises the question of what the system should be like, as against what we actually have.

For the purposes of this post I think it best to stress broad desiderata rather than specifics of their realization. These would, at a minimum, include the system's being such that:

* Personal finances and social background will be no barrier to an individual's not only attending college but achieving in college--all as no one is forced to go to college by a "credentialing crisis" compelling the acquisition of "unnecessary" degrees for the sake of being able to land employment offering a "living wage," or simply because they "don't know what to do with themselves" at the end of high school.

* While any system affording a measure of academic freedom and scope for innovation will guarantee that performance will not be perfectly identical across institutions, the standard of education across the entire system would be uniformly high, and perceptions of the differences based on an institution's practical performance rather than social snobbery and caste prejudice masquerading as "meritocracy" and other such idiocies of the "Cult of the Good School." Accordingly the possession of a college degree will command respect as an indication of the expected competency regardless of which institution granted it.

* At least the higher-performing portion of the body of K-12 graduates will finish their studies at that level genuinely prepared for college-level study, should they elect to continue their education there (as we cease to rely on college to make up for the failings of lower levels of schooling). At the same time college instructors will not be assigned a class until they themselves have been properly trained to oversee a class of the type in question (as against the present system where the hardest teaching might well be dumped on unprepared junior personnel for the sake of administrative convenience).

* No college instructor would be expected to accept a life of poverty and insecurity as the terms of their job, the competent teacher would not be penalized for failing to produce research, the competent researcher would not be required to grudgingly bear a teaching load as the price of being able to do their research (or spend their whole lives jumping through hoops to get hold of inadequate sums of grant money), and the burden on instructors of the college's administrative tasks would be kept to the absolute minimum.

* The content of teaching within "the Academy" would correspond to the world's actualities as its scholars ascertain them, rather than falling into irrelevant Scholasticism, or worse, political indoctrination, such that professors of their subjects would have meaningful expertise to lend society at large. (Those looking for an example of the extreme opposite of this ideal can find it in academic economics as it has been these past many decades.) The elimination of the hierarchy among institutions would simplify this, insofar as it would eliminate the dominance of the training of instructors and editing and publication of scholarship by a very small number of institutions (a fact that, again citing the example of economics, contributed to the degeneration of science into dogma).

* Students would have the benefit of transparency from their administrators regarding everything demanded of them academically or in other ways, and what they can expect in the way of the return on their effort in and out of the classroom--with this extending to the career prospects entailed by particular lines of study (instead of the generalities, pieties and outright lies that students are offered instead about what they might hope for from their major).

* The sciences would flourish on campus--and the liberal arts flourish along with the sciences--with the two being seen as complementary and even symbiotic rather than in contention with each other.

Do I see any chance of reform meaningfully moving American higher education in such a direction? I must admit that I do not even see a chance of meaningful discussion of such standards for the system, let alone means for enabling it to attain those standards--the microscopic room within the mainstream today for discussing anything of consequence at all guaranteeing that, the more in as any serious discussion of education is apt to quickly raise matters far, far beyond the narrow understanding of the subject on which our so-called "pragmatists" so naggingly insist.