You describe an educational catastrophe, a budget catastrophe and a
big reason why California is beset by repeated budget crises. Classes
must have exams, be rigorous, and teach something useful. CSU has
deteriorated to where most graduates cannot maintain the economy, much
less improve on it. Faculty need to go to meetings and stay current
and not be overwhelmed by masses of students who are not prepared for
college. CSU has deteriorated to a state where they need to fire the
entire administration and merge selected programs into the UC and sell
off excess campuses to National University of Phoenix or other private
colleges. If students want to goof off they should pay for that
themselves and not expect Government support or loans. Harvard has
made some good proposals below on alternatives to college.
Joe
Hi Joe:
I was on campus a few weeks ago and found that Lecturers are few and
far between. None in the Business School, and Professors have been
denied Student Assistants. The budget has all but killed any travel to
meetings, and class sizes have doubled. Really a miserable work
environment. It seems that most Prof’s have gone on line for texts and
working on changing the examinations. They don’t even require them
now. N.C told me that many Prof’s are not even giving exams. This is
what we have on the faculty side in todays world. …Rich
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2011/02/report-calls-for-national-effort-to-get-millions-of-young-americans-onto-a-realistic-path-to-employa/
Despite decades of efforts to reform education, and billions of
dollars of expenditures, the harsh reality is that America is still
failing to prepare millions of its young people to lead successful
lives as adults. Evidence of this failure is everywhere: in the
dropout epidemic that plagues our high schools and colleges; in the
harsh fact that just 30 percent of our young adults earn a bachelor’s
degree by age 27; and in teen and young adult employment rates not
seen since the Great Depression. Today, the Pathways to Prosperity
Project, which is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
is releasing a major new report that examines the reasons for our
failure to prepare so many young adults, and advances an exciting
vision for how the United States might regain the leadership in
educational attainment it held for over a century. Pathways to
Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the
21st Century contends that our national strategy for education and
youth development has been too narrowly focused on an academic,
classroom-based approach. It is now clear that this strategy has
produced only incremental gains in achievement and attainment, even as
many other nations are leapfrogging the United States. In response,
the report advocates development of a comprehensive pathways network
to serve youth in high school and beyond.
http://cms.gse.harvard.edu/about/directory/listing.shtml?vperson_id=85268