"[W]e really have to get higher-education funding right."
--Gov. Asa Hutchinson
Well, that is something that few could argue. The devil is, as always, lurking about in those pesky details. For example, how does Arkansas get higher-education funding right?
Alas, House Bill 1209 is now Act 148. That is, the coordinating board for colleges in this state will begin to put together a plan that funds higher education based on student success rather than enrollment. As if more college degrees floating around make a better education, and a better state. Like the Scarecrow getting his "brains" at the end of the Wizard of Oz, there must be magic in that degree. ("But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma!")
How can a funding formula based on numbers of degrees not encourage grade inflation in our colleges? Will that demanding English prof get "a little talking to" if too many of his students don't get passing grades? Will the hard-nosed history instructor get a note from the dean if his class is pulling the average down for the department? Something tells us the little-talking-to would be more likely. On these touchy matters, you wouldn't want to put too much in writing.
"I take seriously objectives that we set as a state," says the governor, "and it's a challenge for us, but it's an important objective to increase degree and certificate attainment from the 40 percent level up to 60 percent by 2025." And he added: "In order to accomplish that, we really have to get higher-education funding right. The move from simply student enrollment measurements to student progression measurements is a landmark change in the state of Arkansas."
It certainly is. But for the better?
And why stop at only 60 percent by 2025? Why not rig it so everybody in the state has a degree from an accredited college or university? Then we'd have the perfect education system! Until folks realize that such a system makes the degrees not exactly worthless, but maybe just worth less. Education should be a continuing experience, not a spending formula. And it should never resemble churning out parts. They aren't making widgets in university classrooms.
Talk about specialization run amok: This state's Higher Education Coordinating Board is now to adopt formulas for financing each of Arkansas' 22 two-year colleges and 10 four-year ones. Among the factors the board will be called on to consider will be progress toward the students' completion of their programs of study, "institutional collaboration" that encourages them to transfer from one part of this educational juggernaut to another, how best to serve students under-represented in this quota system, and how to graduate students duly certified in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields. Check any or all of the above.
In another century, another exile--Jose Ortega y Gasset--had a term for all this bureaucratic rigmarole: the barbarism of specialization. It's important for the subject of such social engineering never to let his eyes stray in the direction of the humanities or he might start asking embarrassing questions instead of taking his duly appointed place on the assembly line. Shelve all that, put your shoulder to the wheel and get on with it. Publish or perish, as they say on campus these days, and specialize till you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.
What, after all, is an educated man or woman? He's someone who can entertain himself, who can entertain another, and entertain a new idea. There may be dollars and cents involved in trying to devise a spending formula for reaching those goals, but all too little common sense.
Change, however, is coming. It's the law now. What it'll mean on campus later, some of us are eager to see.
Editorial on 02/14/2017