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IAS > My Day > Posts > Does Kentucky have what pundits call an "educational pipeline"?

10/27/2009

Does Kentucky have what pundits call an "educational pipeline"?
Dr. Kirwan (President of the U. of Maryland System, and a distinguished alumnus of the University of KY) made a presentation before Kentucky’s legislative commission concerning the activities of The College Board Commission on Access, Admissions, and Success in Higher Education.  Here are his presentation slides (in .pdf format).  The urgency he brings to the conversation cannot be denied: if the US stays on its present course of declining numbers of college-going students who actually graduate, "our 40% degree rate will drop to 29% by the year 2025." 
 
Here some of my thoughts posturing now as a radical historian and educator.  Perhaps our educational systems (holding tight to post-WW2 iterations of academic programming) are obsolete?  Why should we expect our students to graduate when what we are expecting is for them to sit down, shut up, close your laptop/phone, and repeat-after-me?
 
While the US is, according to the latest international statistics (based on those who entered college in the early 2000s), "the only industrialized nation with a declining college completion rate," we also have created a completely unique system of postsecondary education - one that is well suited for embodying American democratic ideals.  Europeans have very few institutions of learning that provide access in ways that we do in the US.  Communist and post-colonial nations are not interested in true access for learning, instead they produce graduates that are highly trained for specific fields to meet desired economic trends... and maintenance of their autocracy. 
 
While Dr. Kirwin - and many people here in Kentucky - are interested in finding the broken parts of an "education pipeline," I propose that Kentucky is so far behind in an infrastructure of educational progression that we can't afford to play catch up games.  We need to try something completely different.  Our adult workforce includes nearly 1 million people who cannot read above the 4th grade level; our middle school dropouts get GED training in jail; our legislators maintain high schools so to keep their relatives in one of the very few wage-earning jobs in their districts instead of improving the quality of educators; despite all our best efforts since WW2 our college-going population contains the same amount of first-generation college-going students as in the 1960s.  We're at the bottom.  How can we revolutionize postsecondary education?
Posted at 9:23 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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