THIRTY YEARS AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Years ago, I asserted "Universities are failing to carry out their mission."  Martin Center contributor F. Andrew Wolf words it as "Universities Are Doing Education Badly."  His continuation is "By regurgitating high-school curricula and ignoring the virtues, higher education is delivering a flawed product."

It might help if the universities called out the high schools that are sending the Distressed Material their way.

Mr Wolf suggests that university faculties are in on the con, as a sort of jobs program.  It starts with an etiolated core curriculum.

Under-preparedness is surely to blame in large part. College undergraduates spend time and money taking “general-education courses” under the guise that these will make their education, and therefore them, more “well-rounded.” Yet these courses offer only a superficial treatment of subjects that should have been mastered in high school. Given the testing results and dismal college-completion rate cited above, the only things that truly get “well-rounded” are the coffers into which student tuition money flows, amounting to thousands of dollars’ worth of wasted time and effort.

Then, when the students aren't properly prepared after four years, the university gets to sell them a graduate degree of some kind.

Consequently, due to time constraints, students receive insufficient instruction in their “specialization” area, thereby creating a felt need to pursue further study at the graduate level.

Additional study entails more time and money to receive (in many respects) the level of training that should have been accomplished at the undergraduate level. Many people (parents, students, and educators alike) believe that this approach has more to do with protecting faculty jobs and generating revenue than with educating students.

I recall raising objections to that sort of remedial stuff at Northern Illinois University, and yes, somebody on the committee defended it as a way of keeping us employed.  But is it?  In a pretend university catering to students pretending to be prepared, a lot of effort goes into coping with the special pleading from the mediocre students, which these days turns into whining about having to do emotional labor.  Faculty get paid to say no and uphold standards, whether that is in the introductory class or in developing the next generation of colleagues.

Take care of those things, and the development of graduates with minds in their heads and hearts in their chests will take care of themselves.