SCHOOL DAZE – AT 11:29 P.M. ET:  It's commencement time at America's colleges and universities.  For graduates, it's the end of the quest for a degree.  For parents, it may or may not be the end of payments.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago, tuition, room and board for four years came to about $8,000.  Today, the same package at an Ivy League or equivalent school could easily run more than $200,000.  True, there's been inflation in the 145 years since I graduated, but at nowhere near the level that would justify the massive increases in student costs.

Rich Lowry paints a devasting picture of the empires we call colleges, and their exorbitant practices.  Maybe we should rethink the whole idea of the "college education" and its mystique:

Amid all the uplifting clichés at their commencement ceremonies, graduating college students won't hear a line applicable to some of them - you got ripped off.

Student debt just surpassed the country's credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to the New York Times, when it was less than $200 billion in 2000. For the class of 2011, the mean student-debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.

What are students going into hock for? In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa sift through data that only Bluto could relish.

They cite the work of labor economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks showing that in the early 1960s, college students spent 40 hours per week on academic work; now they spend only 27 hours per week. In 1961, 67 percent of students said they studied more than 20 hours per week; now only one in five study that much.

Considering what's being taught by some historians, anthropologists and ethnic-group advocates, that may be a good thing.

Full-time instructional faculty dropped from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 2005. "On average," Arum and Roksa write, "faculty spend approximately 11 hours per week on advisement and instructional preparation and delivery." The rest is devoted to research and sundry other professional and administrative tasks.

The hiring binge on campus has been devoted to what sociologist Gary Rhoades calls "managerial professionals" specializing in sundry student services. What kind of learning environment is it, after all, without a director of sustainability initiatives?

And...

Reformers are brimming with ideas to renovate an expensive and inefficient system. Economist Richard Vedder suggests dismantling the current architecture of financial aid - which helps drive up costs in a never-ending cycle - and giving help only to truly needy students who are performing well academically. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) asks why we can't move toward three- rather than four-year degrees. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute wants other ways to credential young people besides a BA. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is embarking on a controversial push to get the state's universities to devote themselves more to teaching than to obscure research.

Finally...

In their book, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska make the elementary suggestion that colleges foster "a culture of learning." That would seem to go without saying, except in the groves of academe.

COMMENT:  A distinguished academic who is also an Urgent Agenda reader wrote to us suggesting that the fastest way to improve American colleges would be to abolish all departments with the word "studies" at the end.  Another nationally respected educator, with whom I had a recent discussion, complainted bitterly about the cost of education today compared with the time he was a graduate student.  He also noted that a member of his family, a college student, seems to be home more than she is at school.  I noticed the same attendance issue when my kids were in school.  A vacation every minute.

The college education has been oversold.  There is very little real journalistic reporting on the quality of education that students receive in return for exorbitant fees.  Changes introduced since the 1960s often mean that students are often indoctrinated rather than educated.

If truth be told, many American colleges are glorified high schools.  And many are burdened by a strain that has always been present in universities – a perverse anti-intellectualism.  We like to think that colleges are heady places, and, indeed, some are...and there are some wonderful professors out there.  But political correctness, trendiness, the edifice complex, and the fact that education is, indeed, a business, all work against the search for truth that must be the foundation of any college worthy of its name.

May 20, 2011