An Interview with Jackson Toby: Is everyone ENTITLED to a College Degree or Loan?

2.8.10 - Michael F. Shaughnessy - Professor Toby, in your recent book, you seem to indicate that the college degree is being lowered in value due to several factors.

An Interview with Jackson Toby: Is everyone ENTITLED to a College Degree or Loan?

Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico 

 
3) For more years than I want to count, I have seen "developmental" classes, remedial classes, ACS ( Academic Career Studies ) and Reading 100, Writing 100, Math 100 and a HOST of similar classes, that seem to inundate college campuses. Is there any research that these classes help these students?

In chapter 2 of my book, I report the evidence that I could find that suggests to me that remedial programs are too little, too late for students who arrive at college underprepared for college work.  Anecdotal cases of “late bloomers” exist, but statistically speaking they are very rare.   It is possible for students to work very hard to read the books they should have read in high school or earlier, to master the grammar and punctuation they should have mastered much earlier, but there is very little incentive for them to do so.  After they take remedial courses to which they are assigned, they move into the regular college program and eventually receive a degree, whether or not the remedial courses enable them to perform at what should be a college level. Essentially the educational problem is similar to learning to be a star athlete or a ballet dancer; one has to start young..  
 

4) Let's face facts....college administrators send very clear messages to faculty about " retention " blah, blah, blah". What should most faculty do, when they hear the latest spiel?
 

They try to teach the best students they can get.  This means avoiding undergraduate teaching as much as possible and concentrating on small graduate seminars.  Alternatively most colleges have honors courses or honors colleges that enroll better students, and teachers naturally prefer these to courses in which underprepared students predominate.

5) Names do seem to make a difference. I have done post grad work at both Columbia and NYU, and I know that there is a difference in these two places, although both are on Manhattan Island.  Nationwide, however, does the Ivy League still mean something versus the state university of so and so state?

My book is about undergraduate education, not graduate education.  On the undergraduate level, expensive, selective colleges do enroll much higher proportions of well-prepared students.  From a professor’s point of view, this is a plus.  Nevertheless, even selective colleges suffer from students who lack interest in serious study.  They are disengaged in class, unresponsive when they come at all, and unwilling to do assigned homework.  And there are students at cheaper public colleges and universities who want to learn and are a pleasure to have in class. From the student’s point of view, it may be worth going to a selective college, especially if their parents have the money to pay the expenses, not so much because of the somewhat better educational opportunities they offer but also because they will make friends with other high-ability youngsters who will constitute a link to good occupational opportunities.

 

6) I would like to see my tax dollars going to serious students who may be pre-med (God knows we are going to need them or pre-nursing or pre-pharmacy). Is the government oblivious to this?

When you speak of “government”  you must mean Senators and Representatives who pass laws governing student financial aid.  They want to get elected or reelected, and therefore they pass bills that are popular.  Consider the history of federal student grants and loans.  Before World War II academically excellent students from families unable to finance college for them could apply for competitive scholarships. There were no federal grants and loans to individual students.  Scholarships mutated into “financial aid” when the GI Bill of Rights financed college for discharged veterans of World War II. Later, Pell grants became available in 1972 to youngsters who wanted to go to college even if they were mediocre students—provided they could persuade a college to admit them. Mediocre students are being given a chance to become “late bloomers.” But Pell and other grants were never enough to cover rising college costs.  Congress authorized federally guanteed loans which, like Pell grants, did not require academic excellence.  I do not believe that it is politically feasible to restrict Pell grants to serious students.  That would be considered elitist and would be unpopular politically.  It may be politically possible to target loans to students with good prospects for repaying them because student loan defaults are a financial disaster for students and a threat to the economy – as subprime mortgages were. I argue in my book that targeting loans in this way is more prudent financially and makes more sense educationally
 

7) What responsibilities SHOULD parents have in terms of the education of their children?

Parents are crucial for encouraging children in the early grades to take education seriously; their future lives depend on doing so.  Schools are not well positioned to repair the results of parental neglect, and children have to be reminded not occasionally but every day of the importance of doing homework and paying attention in class.  The excellent average performance of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children in American schools, even when they come from low-income families with parents who do not speak much English, is testimony to the importance of parental encouragement.  I do not believe that these Asian groups perform so well because of genetic superiority. 

8) I concur with much of what you say in your book- particularly writing---writing seems to be a disaster, ignored by English departments, not understood by administration, and rarely rectified by any remedial classes. Is it that labor intensive and time consuming or do teachers simply not care?

Not only is it labor intensive on the part of professors.  It is labor intensive on the part of students.  One of my former students managed to publish an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.  He had illiterate parents who were very proud of the attention his article received.  However, he had to be willing to accept my insistence that he keep revising draft after draft.  The fifteenth draft was good enough. In fifty years of teaching I had only one such experience.    

9) You seem to be working harder in retirement than ever. What is going on in your life and why is this happening?

I am 84 years old and approaching the end of the journey.  I want to leave something worthwhile behind.  Contributing to the improvement of undergraduate education in America would be wonderful.

10) What have I neglected to ask ?

You have not asked much about a crucial element in my book, the role of incentives in contributing to the improvement of undergraduate education.  I am not proposing that academic achievement become as important as financial need for student loans in order to keep students out of college.  I am proposing it because I am confident that students respond to incentives, just as pigeons have been proved to do.  The late President of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, put it this way:

“Whatever colleges pretend, their influence over high school standards and student achievement is decisive. Kids are just like adults: they will work to get what they want. If they know they have to work hard, listen in class, and come to school every day with their homework done in order to get into college, they’ll do that. If they know they can get by with less and still get into college, that is what they’ll do.”