Of course, the instructors wered all grad students.

On “purpose” I’m still not sure you or I get to choose for institutions. I AM sure that if you take someone’s money for a four-year degree in equine management, either your graduates can manage equines, or you’re a fraud. If colleges don’t want to be trade schools, they shouldn’t offer such majors. In fact, the land grant colleges were set up for precisely that–to provide advanced training in trades where seondary education wasn’t enough, and there was no apprenticeship program. The urge to become a bargain basement Ivy League sometimes gets the better of them.

But don’t let the fuzzy sciences off the hook: political science, sociology and–in some cases–anthropology courses–not to mention psychology–often have equally discouraging students and faculty.

As for the suitability of a research university English faculty to carry on the Great Conversation–well, maybe. During an earlier phase of the discussion, I looked up the History course offerings one of our oldest and most prestigious universities, and the qualifications of the faculty. I don’t know what the place was a century ago, but today, I’d advise anyone really interested in history to stay home and make use of a good municipal library system.

There are thing wrong in universities for which no one outside the university is to blame.

But I was talking about post-secondary schools, specifically the community college sort-of equivalent aka ‘college’. We’ve got a big public college formed by amalgamating a bunch of regional community colleges. It’s one of those not-quite-government things – they have their own management and charge tuition but get government support too. And they don’t have to take everyone, although I seem to remember a period in the recesses of history when they did. You can be on a waiting list for a while to get into one of their high-demand programs. The much smaller private colleges will offer courses where there’s a demand at a higher price in worse facilities and little waiting. They don’t tend to offer the ones that require a lot of expensive equipment (eg petroleum techonology) at all. There it’s the public college or nothing. Or moving out to Alberta to a college with a similar program.

I can’t say I’ve been terribly impressed by the achievements of the local version – that is, the ones that are still in business. They generally offer similar stuff to the public version, except for costing more money to the students and provide them with fewer resources. They do tend to have openings when public schools don’t. Some years ago, the owner of one chain that went through a rather spectacular financial collapse was later reported to be in Florida writing a book on how to make money from private schools!

Providing teachers with poorer pay and working conditions doesn’t sound good to me either.

No change is going to happen in the schools unless people somehow begin to value reading, and expect higher skills at the end of high school – which, as you point out, is going to mean more people don’t graduate.

What about a modified version of tracking? That is, at about grades 10-12, offer a range of sequences of courses. Weaker students take English Language 13, middle-of-the road ones take E.L. 12 and the best ones E.L. 11, and a glance at the transcript can tell the potential employer or admissions officer whether the high school graduate spent three years practicing spelling or writing research papers. Between-school variation can be reduced by end-of-course common exams across a reasonably large area, including all schools, reported either separately or averaged with the internal grade.

I also know that there’s friction between what the parents and students are looking for – a degree that will get them hired – and the traditional learning for learning’s sake approach in at least some colleges. I’m taking a Master’s program in business at night, and had this discussion with one of the professors and from what Martha said, there’s been quite a dialogue about the purpose of the university.

In the end, though, I suspect that what will win is what’s being sought by the people paying tuition, which means that odds are the colleges and universities will wander farther away from their original purpose.