 Recommended Reading
Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in CrisisBook rebuts conventional wisdom about college study
By George LeefJuly 16, 2007 Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, By James Côté and Anton Allahar, University of Toronto Press, 2007, 251 pages
For a university press to have published this book is the same as if the American Bar Association published a set of self-help legal books. In both instances, the impact of the book is contrary to the interests of the institutions. But while the American Bar Association has actually tried to stop the publication of self-help legal books, you have to tip your hat to University of Toronto Press. It has brought to the public a shockingly frank book about the state of higher education in Canada and if people were to take its message to heart, the result would be fewer students, professors, and even universities.
Professors Côté and Allahar both teach sociology at the University of Western Ontario. They have observed the swelling of the Canadian higher education system for the last several decades and don’t like what they see at all. Just as in the United States, Canada has been pushing higher education on large numbers of young people who have little interest or ability in academic work. Our northern neighbor has one of the highest percentages in the world of citizens with college degrees to their names. While most Canadians boast about that “accomplishment,” Côté and Allahar regard it as a tremendous waste.
It’s a waste, first of all, because relatively few jobs – even in “the knowledge economy” we are said to have entered – really call for advanced studies. “Canada actually graduated twice as many university students in the 1990s as the number of jobs created during that period that required a university credential,” the authors report. Therefore the Canadian labor market is glutted with young people who have college degrees and expect “appropriate” positions, but can’t find them.
Secondly, it is wasteful because many of the students don’t learn very much during their college years. The problem is that only a rather small percentage enter college with the right skills and attitude. Only about 10 percent of the entering students are “fully engaged,” which is to say are ready for and interested in serious work. Unfortunately, the largest group of students – approximately half – are “disengaged.” They just want to try to get by with the absolute minimum of effort. Many of those students are adept at “playing the system,” however. They’re good at pressuring professors for passing grades that they haven’t earned. Quite a few of those students drop out, but eventually many others get their degrees, a piece of paper signifying learning that never occurred.
How professors cope with this flood of weak students is a major part of the book. One way they cope is to lower their expectations while at the same time inflating grades. Both are necessary since the incoming students are increasingly less capable of doing academic work, but have been coddled throughout their K-12 years to think that they are excellent students. Rather than give them the bad news that they aren’t, most Canadian professors have chosen to continue the charade. Cote and Allahar provide a poignant anecdote to illustrate the point. They know of a professor who had been in university administration for twenty years prior to a decision to return to the classroom. The man was shocked to find out how much the capability of students had declined and how much the course material had been watered down. Anyone who is inclined to think that the reports of the erosion of higher education are just a fiction employed by “higher ed bashers” should read the book carefully.
Another coping technique that many professors have had to adopt is that of “spoon feeding” course material to their students. In decades gone by, professors could assume that nearly all of their students would read and think about assigned material prior to class so that class time could be devoted to analysis. These days, unfortunately, most students enter college after twelve years of simplified pedagogy; they aren’t used to much reading and thinking in preparation for class. They expect the material to be slowly fed to them and that they’ll only have to regurgitate it. Professors who don’t follow suit discover that their students quickly become lost and frustrated. Thus higher education is “dumbed down.”
Those profs who don’t play along with the game and try to keep their standards up can expect to face extremely negative student evaluations. The authors don’t much care for evaluations: “While these evaluations have their positive uses, their negative aspects include the invitation to disgruntled students to take their disaffection out on professors, diverting students from taking an honest look at the whole system and their own role in it, and instead taking the easy way out of blaming their woes on ‘bad’ professors who would not teach them ‘properly.’”
Canadian higher education, just as in the United States, now is much more like big business than the serious educational institutions we used to know. Administrators want to maximize the inflow of revenues and know that if they’re going to do that, they need to have lots of contented tuition payers. Presiding over a big and growing institution outweighs such considerations as whether students are really learning anything valuable. For their part, the professors, write Cote and Allahar, have been “passively complicit” in this scheme, “perhaps thankful that they have a job that is so highly sought after.”
K-12 education comes in for some sharp criticism, in particular the emphasis it now places on the student’s “self-esteem.” Students who have had their self-esteem boosted for years through false feedback are hard to teach in college because they can’t take criticism of their weak, error-filled work. They assume that criticism is a personal attack, a childish frame of mind that is ill-suited to the world outside of the education cocoon. Dealing with such students is difficult and requires that professors learn how to “cool” them – to get them to accept the reality that they aren’t capable of doing the work necessary in the top-paying occupations.
Cote and Allahar also observe in Canada the phenomenon of credential inflation that has become so prevalent in the United States. Many students complete their undergraduate work only to discover that if they want a shot at the “good jobs,” they must take another degree. More than half of the students who earn BA degrees in Canada continue on to pursue “higher” (or at least further) studies. This is good for the university business, but just makes the whole education process much more costly and time-consuming than it needs to be.
Ivory Tower Blues is an extremely valuable addition to the literature on higher education because it effectively rebuts so much of the conventional wisdom about the nature and value of college study these days.
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