When Plato gave the (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) definition of man as "featherless bipeds," Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy: "Behold! I've brought you a man!" he announced.
The Academy, in turn, added, "with broad flat nails" to the official definition.
Now that was back-and-forth between professors and students!
A new survey, of sorts, came out late last week, and folks in and around higher education in Arkansas seemed very much put out. Maybe we should all take a breath. The demise of education in Arkansas is very much exaggerated.
It seems that, by one measure anyway, the percentage of students going to college dipped again. More than 31,300 kids graduated from Arkansas' high schools last spring, and just 15,000-some-odd went on to attend college. Which amounts to about 48 percent. That's down from 49 percent the year before, and 51 percent the year before that. Those in the education business--and it is very much a business--quickly began to find mitigating factors to excuse the numbers:
• Students going to college in other states aren't counted!
• Neither are home-schooled students!
• The economy is great! Kids can get jobs right out of high school! It's not our fault!
The question should be: Why the ruckus and general panic?
Some folks in Arkansas are putting too much focus on mere numbers. Experts have even given it a terrible name: The College-Going Rate. As if an education can be rated, like movies, restaurants or unemployment.
Like many things, "the top" is a good place to look for leadership. Back in 2016, Gov. Asa Hutchinson introduced a new system for funding colleges--while telling the papers he wanted to increase the number of college graduates here. Or as he said at the time: "My goal continues to be increasing the percentage of Arkansans that are career-ready and equipped with degrees and industry-recognized certificates." Which is fine as far as numbers go. But industry-recognized certificates aren't literature and career-ready isn't the same as educated.
For years, some of us have endorsed a liberal education for a liberal education's sake. It makes for a better citizenry. And it shouldn't start in college, but long before. Our colleges seem too focused on GPAs and credit hours. Which may be natural for students, who might be thinking more about graduating than learning anything. But that shouldn't be natural for professors and administrators. Shouldn't they be focused on making better . . . people? By educating them. Truly educating them, not putting them through job training.
(Oh, the students. How many of us wish that we'd actually paid attention in Spanish? Instead of memorizing for tests and forgetting everything the next semester. What do they say about youth being wasted on the young?)
These days, the best college education may not be a professor on one end of a log and a student on the other. There is much more involved. One thing is for sure: Numbers can't measure a college education, nor the value of it.
But some will try:
The state reported a 5 percent drop in college enrollment from 2012 to 2016. In Arkansas, an estimated 6.4 percent of adults have associate degrees, 13.9 percent have bachelor's and 7.6 have graduate degrees. That translates to an estimated 127,004 people with associate degrees, 273,557 with bachelor's, etc. etc. et-forever-cetera.
And officials worry because those numbers are behind national averages.
But college isn't for everybody. And never will be. Chasing higher numbers in higher education might even contribute to grade inflation and a lower value for those degrees. The road to you-know-where is paved with good intentions.
Forever forward! Always improve! We do understand the state's political and education leadership's not being satisfied with the status quo. But let's not put too much emphasis on stats. Save it for baseball.
University is called higher education for a reason. We should move beyond the numbers. Or at least give it the ol' college try.
Editorial on 07/30/2018