Complete Georgia: Completely Mistaken

The pressure is less than it once was, but Georgia colleges and universities are still being asked to graduate students as quickly as possible.  One of the measures of success is the percentage of students who complete their degrees in four years.

This is a mistake.  Indeed it is a profound mistake.  Part of the impetus is to save money, yet another is apparently to improve the quality of education.  Unfortunately in the long run it does neither.

As is well known, there is a robust correlation between economic success and a college degree.  As a result, this credential is often regarded as magical.  It is thought to be especially useful to students who come from straitened circumstances.  This is to be their ticket to social mobility.

This, however, confuses a piece of paper with an appropriate education.  As I have been telling my students, the three most important things they should get from college are an ability to read, to write and to organize.  These will later enable them to be self-directed in the workplace.

Nonetheless, these abilities are not acquired merely by sitting in classrooms.  Unless students have the proper orientation, many do as little reading, writing, and organizing as they can.  Only with time, do some of the least prepared among them go through the necessary emotional transition.

Let me be blunt.  Students who are the first in their families to go to college are entering an unfamiliar world.  The values to which they are being exposed may be very different from the ones they experienced at home.  This, in part, requires an adjustment in deeply entrenched attitudes.

Few personal transformations are as difficult.  This one often requires a major reorganization in self-identity.  Huge shifts in dealing with others are also in store.  These are not just cognitive modifications.  For many, they involve emotional traumas.

If this is true, a rigid timetable is an impediment to change.  It forces students to work at a pace with which they may not be at ease.  The upshot is additional anxiety that can slow their personal growth.

Sometimes people imagine that the only thing happening on college campuses is a transfer of information from professors to students.  At least as important is the interaction between students.  Especially when they are from different backgrounds, these voluntarily exchanges can herald a crucial modification in their approach to life.

Why would we want to stop this from happening?  What is gained by artificially speeding up the learning process?  Will graduates be better equipped for life because they finished their schooling a semester or two earlier?

This world can be confusing.  There are so many moving parts, it is difficult to keep track.  Moreover, it is often impossible to predict when a critical insight will arrive.  Why then do we want to put our students in a straightjacket?  Shouldn’t they be allowed to decide when they are ready to move forward?

The irony is that it is the poor and minorities who are hurt most by undue haste.  As Sander and Taylor, the authors of the book Mismatch, discovered, when students feel uncomfortable they are least likely to live up to their potential.  They begin to doubt their abilities and withdraw from the fray.

Colleges are bad at fostering emotional development.  This was never their historical mandate.  But in a society encouraging social justice, growing up may be more important than learning calculus or becoming proficient in French.  It may be what the young need if they are to compete on an even footing.

Richard Nixon was much maligned when he recommended “benign neglect” in dealing with race relations.  Nonetheless, his point was that if we don’t know how to fix something, it might be better to stand back and permit those involved to figure out what needs to be done.

Maybe the same is true for our colleges.  Given that academics don’t always know how to facilitate learning for every student, perhaps they should stand back and permit many of their charges to do this for themselves.

The ancient Greeks warned of the dangers of personal hubris.  Perhaps there is also institutional hubris.  When colleges imagine that they are able to control more than they can, they accomplish less than they might.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University