Thursday, January 21, 2010
Ivory Tower Blog Response
The Basement in the Ivory Tower seems to be a reference to Professor X teaching "at colleges of last resort". The Ivory Tower is a metaphor for college, where the professor is teaching the students who are only good enough to get into the very lowest level of college. Often times, they feel that society requires everyone to have some kind of college degree; however, Professor X makes the point that this is, in fact, destroying the accomplishment of a college degree. These people come in expecting to put forth the minimum amount of effort and pass, but instead are flunked because they just don't belong in higher education. The problem is perpetuated even more, now that colleges seem to be preying on these people just to make more money. Professor X calls this "the gulf between academia and reality", as colleges admit people they know will not be able to live up to their academic standards, but are still allowed in because of the profits they represent. Of course, it looks good that so many people in America go to college but, as Professor X points out, that while it would be great for sheriffs, bank tellers, medical-billing techs, and child welfare officers to be versed in great literature as it's a route to critical thinking its still impractical for their careers. Professor X is put in the unfortunate position of introducing these people to reality like many other Professors across the country and trying to keep a college education worth something.
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I agree with econrad as Professor X’s idea that society’s increasing pressure on everyone to obtain a college degree has in turn lessened its value. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, Professor X talks about his freshman English class, and how he won’t give a student a grade that he doesn’t feel they deserve. This, however, is not the case in many classrooms at colleges. Too many teachers are handing out passing grades to students who don’t deserve them, and that is has given good grades and in turn college degrees a decreased value.
ReplyDeleteStephen Vaisey takes this idea even a step further in his essay, College, Culture, and Class: The Declining Symbolic Value of Higher Education, by saying that the over abundance of people with college degrees will lead to unsatisfactory jobs for overeducated college grads. “In 1976, Harvard economist Richard Freeman published The Overeducated American, which reasoned that the declining relative income of college graduates was evidence that educational attainments were beginning to outstrip demand” (Vaisey 2005). If teachers keep passing below average students in college classes, there will be too many people with degrees for them to even hold their value. There will simply be no need for such a number of college grads in the work field, and underemployment will become a serious issue (Vaisey 2005).
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/2/1/2/1/pages21210/p21210-1.php