FAKE EDUCATION.  A professor at Adirondack Community challenges the austerity measures, or faddishness, or what have you, at the Albany campus of the State University of New York.

How can UAlbany justify "educational" priorities that put working- and middle-class students at a clear disadvantage in relation to the affluent who attend private universities?

The article provokes a wisecrack from University Diaries, who has covered Albany's descent into madness, in the form of a rewritten headline.  EDUCATING DRUNK, UNCRITICAL HALF-LITERATES BY DESIGN.

Perhaps Albany's model is ZooConn or ZooMass, and becoming a sub-prime party school before the championship basketball team takes shape is a tweak to the model.  That model, however, makes University Diaries base at George Washington a more secure place of employment.  George Washington have had some success emulating the price structure and admissions profile of the Ivies; and as long as the Ivies choose not to increase the sizes of their entering classes and faculties, and as long as the land-grants and mid-majors starve the academic units to fight the athletic arms races, the young people with less by way of money or connections or on occasion test scores are consigned to the academic gulags.

Or not, if the reaction of some test-prep students to a thought question has any extrapolative value.

Last Saturday, the College Board served up a mega-curveball for high school students across America: it asked them to write an essay about reality television.

Chortle.

[Do] "people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?"

Definitely not what kids who have spent countless hours brushing up on their Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens had expected.

These are the kids that are too busy studying, playing soccer, or taking piano lessons in the hopes of receiving an acceptance letter to a great college — they don’t have the time to watch or interest in the comings-and-goings of Jersey Shore’s Snooki and The Situation. These are, not surprisingly, the same kids who are complaining of the question’s ‘unfairness’ – many of whom have lamented on online forums such as College Confidential that they don’t watch any television, let alone reality shows.

One could ask whether Shakespeare's writing for the groundlings, or the Tabard Inn's enjoyment of bawdy content, or Dickens exaggerating the social contrasts, was beneficial or harmful.  The question isn't about the content of Jersey Shore at all.  As Professor Newmark observes, "Consistent with what I see in my teaching: too many kids today equate education solely with memorization."

The Forbes essayist offers the trenchant observation for the day: working life is often an open-book essay exam, with no study guide and no assigned book.

My bosses have never asked, nor have they cared, about my SAT scores. In my limited experience of the working world, you get things done well or you don’t. You aren’t always served up a fastball down the pike, and you don’t always knock it out of the park. Things aren’t black and white, right or wrong. You get an assignment and you often stumble through it, feeling ill-prepared at best, incompetent at worst – even with a degree from a prestigious university. There’s no quantitative measurement of your success; success is defined as your ability to perform the task at hand to the best of your ability. For some, this lack of structure is exhilarating. For others, terrifying.

The question asks rigid test-takers to simply adjust, a skill that’s necessary, I’ve found, for post-grad life. What are you going to do when your boss tells you that you need to do something that’s completely out of your comfort zone? Something you’ve never done before and haven’t learned in a classroom? The real world comes without an instruction manual, without a step-by-step guidebook like the illustrated directions that come with Ikea furniture. 

The default-by-test-prep protest offers students at Albany, and the land-grants, mid-majors, and party schools more generally, an opportunity for their opportunity to perform at that task.  It's up to the administrators and faculty at those institutions to so equip their students.