leftfielder.org

President Obama recently touted the importance of higher education, and set ambitious goals for increasing the number of college educated adults in this country. As an academic, I am very pleased with this idea – I care a lot about education and would love for more people to have access.

But lost in all the fanfare, is the darker side of higher ed. There are schools that graduate less than 10% of students who enroll there. There are schools that are producing functionally illiterate students. There is a big difference between providing higher ed, and providing meaningful or useful higher ed.

This article does an excellent job of driving home the issues of providing post-secondary education to everybody. I think its a lucid account of a problem that is often swept under the rug because its inconvenient to think about.