Intro: The social norm of education in the United States requires reform and is striking the economy negatively. Author William Deresiewicz, in his article, “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League”, published in 2004, conveys an argument for change in the American education system within Ivy League institutions. He shares his personal experiences of being a teacher at an Ivy League university and the terrors that students face socially and mentally. He also covers very important topics such as students who come from less fortunate families and vice versa, weighs out the drastic educational differences and challenges faced by students solely based on their socioeconomic stance, and the negatives of Ivy League education levels. Deresiewicz makes …show more content…
In support of this, author Carmen Lugo-Lugo in her article “A Prostitute, a Servant, and a Customer-Service Representative: A Latina In Academia” introduces her personal experience with students as a teacher at a university and introduces the topic that she teaches at a juncture where students see their teachers as no one more than a customer-service representative. She claims: “Universities are restructuring academic and administrative units and running them like departments within a corporation.” (Lugo-Lugo 195) Her statement reiterates Deresiewicz’s, in which he believes Ivy League schools lean towards running everything more like a business, rather than a learning center: “Application numbers continue to swell, endowments are robust, tuition hikes bring ritual complaints but no decline in business.” (Deresiewicz 7). Lugo-Lugo compliments Deresiewicz since she Additionally, Lugo-Lugo provides that “Within this new structuring of the academic institution as a corporate marketplace, students begin to treat their professors and other university workers as clerks or cashiers at a department store, who are there to serve and satisfy their every need.” Lugo-Lugo explains the manner in which students communicate with their professors. Additionally, Deresiewicz argues “students are regarded by the institution as ‘customers,’ people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can.” (Deresiwicz 3) Lugo-Lugo provides support and helps clarify the argument of Deresiewicz. Both promote the idea that institutions should refrain from keeping their systems corporatized and rather focus on communication between students and professors. Synthesis 2: Deresiewicz-Ravitch:
In Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Midwestern University’s structure is discussed in regard to its composition that fosters class structure. Both authors claim that incoming college classes are very diverse in social class structure, however, by the time they graduate they’re social mobility has not shown a difference. Using an ethnographic approach, Armstrong and Hamilton argue that student experiences are fundamentally shaped by their educational institution.
What stands out about American universities today? Is it the academic opportunities offered to students, experienced faculty, or strong sense of community? Or...perhaps they have lost their focus. It is not uncommon for universities to focus their efforts and budgets elsewhere; by building state of the art gyms, for example, remodeling luxury dorms, grooming campuses, or creating more management positions. College students and professors alike are subject to the nationally occurring changes in higher level education. Colleges are becoming commercialized and tuition is rising, but is the quality of education improving? In “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.”, Fredrik DeBoer is able to provide a personal take on the issue of corporate domination
Education has always been a current issue due to the fact that it is seen as an economic cure-all. However, the perception of college is ill-conceived and there are multiple debates on how to improve it. College universities believe that having open admissions will increase the amount of matriculations, but the fact is the amount of students being enrolled into a four-year university has no relationship to the amount of students with academic aspirations. W.J. Reeves, an English professor at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, gives a few examples of how open admissions has changed education methods and student abilities. Reeves wrote this opinion piece to convince everyone, especially parents, that schools are in need of reform
Mark Edmundson’s essay really resonated with me. His essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” explains that at Universities, college students and teachers who are at these universities, focus on how much the students like the classes, rather than the information found in the class. For example, he explains this when mentions giving his students the course evaluations. Some of the comments were, “the teacher was interesting”, or, “he was funny”. Not one student commented on the information they got in the class. He describes how students have become like customers. The teachers accommodate them and are willing to do anything that meet their needs. This is consumerism. Colleges are concerned with attracting the wealthiest
The right and privilege to higher education in today’s society teeters like the scales of justice. In reading Andrew Delbanco’s, “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, it is apparent that Delbanco believes that the main role of college is to accommodate that needs of all students in providing opportunities to discover individual passions and dreams while furthering and enhancing the economic strength of the nation. Additionally, Delbanco also views college as more than just a time to prepare for a job in the future but a way in which students and young adults can prepare for their future lives so they are meaningful and purposeful. Even more important is the role that college will play in helping and guiding students to learn how to accept alternate point of views and the importance that differing views play in a democratic society. With that said, the issue is not the importance that higher education plays in society, but exactly who should pay the costly price tag of higher education is a raging debate in all social classes, cultures, socioeconomic groups and races.
Obtaining higher education is regarded as the ultimate symbol of status in the United States (US). Access to a college education in this country is seen as an expression of academic excellence and can provide access to unlimited possibilities. In the US, Ivy Leagues are considered the elite and represent the most powerful ideogram of educational opportunity. According to the National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] (2012), from 1999–2000 to 2009–10, the percentages of both master's and doctor's degrees earned by females increased from 1999–2000 to 2009–10 from 58 to 60 percent and from 45 to 52 percent. The NCES report (2012), found that in 2009-10, of the 10.3 percent Black students who earned Bachelor degrees; 65.9 percent were women. Of the 12.5% of Black students who earned Master’s degree in 2009-10, 71.1 percent were women; and of the 7.4 percent of Black students who earned doctoral level degrees (this includes most degrees previously regarded as first-professional, i.e. M.D., D.D.S., and law degrees), 65.2 percent were women (NCES, 2012)...
In recent years, many have debated whether or not a college education is a necessary requirement to succeed in the field of a persons’ choice and become an outstanding person in society. On one hand, some say college is very important because one must contribute to society. The essay Three Reasons College Still Matters by Andrew Delbanco shows three main reasons that students should receive their bachelor’s degree. On the other hand, many question the point of wasting millions of dollars on four years or maybe more to fight for highly competitive jobs that one might not get. Louis Menand wrote an article based on education titled Re-Imagining Liberal Education. This article challenges the main thought many americans have after receiving a secondary education. Louis Menand better illustrates the reasons why a student should rethink receiving a post secondary education better than Andrew Delbanco’s three reasons to continue a person’s education.
College is a popular topic for most, and Sanford J. Ungar and Charles Murray have a unique way of explaining both their opinions. In his essay, “The New Liberal Arts,” Sanford J. Ungar advocates that the liberal arts should be everybody’s education, regardless of the fact that most Americans are facing economic hardship. The first misconception that he begins to explain is “a liberal arts degree is a luxury that most families can no longer afford”. Career education” is what we now must focus on.”
Success. Society tends to correlate “success” with the obtainment of a higher education. But what leads to a higher education? What many are reluctant to admit is that the American dream has fallen. Class division has become nearly impossible to repair. From educations such as Stanford, Harvard, and UCLA to vocational, adult programs, and community, pertaining to one education solely relies on one’s social class. Social class surreptitiously defines your “success”, the hidden curriculum of what your socioeconomic education teaches you to stay with in that social class.
Long ago, receiving education was once something only the rich could afford; it was a luxury. Nowadays it is open to everyone, but many students enter college only to discover that they are underprepared, and in turn they become disenchanted. David Leonhardt’s article, The College Dropout Boom, addresses the issues that are apparent in the education system and how it contributes to the gap between the upper and lower class while Access to Attainment by Abby Miller, Katherine Valle, Jennifer Engle, and Michelle Cooper calls to improve access to college education for today’s students. This is incredibly important because many students either drop out or never attended college and in today’s time, having a Bachelor’s degree has become a requirement
College education also does a large of things for college students, these things can be both counted and not counted. Delbanco wrote about this when he wrote “The best reason to care about college – who goes,.... is not what it does for society in economic terms but what it can do for individuals, in both calculable and incalculable ways”(Delbanco 507). In the article Delbanco writes about what one of the alumni at one of his talks said to him afterwards. He writes about the experience of this alumni in his article when he writes “Not only had a college education enriched his capacity to read demanding works of literature and to grasp fundamental political ideas, it had also heightened and deepened his alertness to color and form, melody and harmony...Such an education is a hedge against utilitarian values”(Delbanco 508). Delbanco also wrote how college education has maintained the same in some ways for many years. He writes “The tradition of liberal learning survived and thrived throughout European history but remained largely the possession of ruling elites. The distinctive American contribution has been the attempt to democratize it, to deploy it on behalf of things cardinal American principle that all persons, regardless of origin, have the to pursue happiness… is helpful to that pursuit. Educated can be characterized as “snobbish and narrow”, but that is not
An industry that once promoted fairness and attainability was now itself becoming an obstacle to overcome. “American universities are in fact organized according to middle- and upper-class cultural norms or rules of the game and that these norms do indeed constitute an unseen academic disadvantage for first-generation college students transitioning to university settings” (Stephens et. al, 2012). This proposed characteristic serves as an almost uncontrollable and unchangeable disadvantage that students will likely fail to subdue. Institutions should serve as mediating platforms that allow students to start at impartial grounds, where their talents, abilities and connections are the only factors that can influence their
Authors Michelle Tokarczyk, Peter Sacks, Robert Haverman and Timothy Smeeding all write about certain problems that working class students are facing in education in the U.S. , especially in college education which is usually defined as higher education. Although they focus on different aspects of the problem, they still have some ideas in common. In their articles, all of them discuss how economic and social class occupies a very significant role in the quality of education an American student receives. In order to support their claims, all of them employ studies as their strong evidence. They also imply that college education fails to consider the special issues and conditions that working class students have. In addition, higher education fails to help those students to improve their circumstances and social mobility. Even though all of the problems that working class students face are important, some of them are extremely significant factors to their struggles to obtain a college education, such as the economic and social class of the working class student. The main problems that working class students face in America also occur in the education system in China.
Studying a university degree is one of the biggest achievements of many individuals around the world. But, according to Mark Edmunson, a diploma in America does not mean necessarily studying and working hard. Getting a diploma in the United States implies managing with external factors that go in the opposite direction with the real purpose of education. The welcome speech that most of us listen to when we started college, is the initial prank used by the author to state the American education system is not converging in a well-shaped society. Relating events in a sarcastic way is the tone that the author uses to explain many of his arguments. Mark Edmunson uses emotional appeals to deliver an essay to the people that have attended College any time in their life or those who have been involved with the American education system.
One of my favorite short stories was One Eye Two Eyes Three Eyes from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. By the title you would assume it was about witches or shrews but alas it contains none of the sort. The story starts with three sisters and a mother, one sister had one eye, one had two eyes and another three. When setting up the background for the story a line states “Thou, with thy two eyes, art no better than the common people” this was said by the mother to two eyes. Throughout the tale two eyes is treated badly and luckily a prince wanting an apple from a tree sprouted from magical goat guts took her away to live a life of wealth and leisure in a plot line that can only make sense in a fairy tail. What interests me in this is that