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Cayuga Lake
in the background
of
Ithaca College's
fountain |
In 1960 there were about 1200 colleges and universities in the United States; by 2013 there were
4500, of which approximately 1700 were two year schools, or 300% increase. Yearly expenses for my first college in 1964
were $2850.00. Today they are more like
$39,000 with $14,000 added to that for room and board. Total: $53,000.
This bloat cannot not survive. Thousands of colleges (mostly private) will close in the next
twenty years according to Glenn Reynolds, the instapundit blogger.
Perhaps they will be converted to senior living and recreation centers; at least
I hope that will be their fate rather than winding up as shopping malls.
The Ivy League, and the sub-Ivies like Middlebury, will again
become “finishing schools for the elite” which Glenn Reynolds claims they were
until 1960, when they began to metastasize into their present expensive state of
self-inflation and bloat . http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
The rest, like Southern New Hampshire University, will
become competency based 'companies' which sell academic degrees based on
successful completion of competency exams. SNHU has "no faculty and no classrooms." Credit is awarded on competency not on time spent in class. In other words, exposure to great minds shaping ideas in a lecture hall is irrelevant.
That so-called 'university' in New Hampshire boasts that it was named "Number 12 in the top 50 most innovative
'companies' " by some award-designating magazine, not even recognizing that such a mercantile boast
by a university debases Academia itself.
Some like Yale (M. Div. ’80), have always been finishing
schools for the elite and even offer campuses which look like medieval
fortresses. Indeed, Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library has a replica of Windsor Castle on its roof.
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| One view of the replica of Windsor Castle atop Yale's Sterling Memorial Library |
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| Another view of the replica of Windsor Castle atop Yale's Sterling Memorial Library |
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| The Yale Campus |
But in 2014 “elite” has been redefined with
need-blind admissions policies on the basis of brains and talent, rather than
bank-accounts and Blue blood; Thus, Yale and the other need-blind Ivies can no longer be accused of
shunning the poor or disadvantaged.
Intellectual and talent elite fill their 'classrooms' -- a dinosaur term at Southern New Hampshire U.
When I graduated from Ithaca
College's spanking new campus (B.A. ’68) overlooking Cayuga Lake with a better view than Cornell, ordinary run-of-the-mill American
colleges were well on their way to becoming what they are now----- country
clubs for Joe College and Betty Coed, with lavishly
equipped gymnasiums and handsomely furnished student unions.
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| Kent State University Student Union Building |
Kent State University (M. Ed ’72) completed a student union the year
I left in 1973, a gargantuan building as large as a
major airport terminal.
The Bread Loaf School of English, a graduate wing of
Middlebury College (M.A. ’97), has a plain clapboard barn-like campus in
Ripton, Vermont, but it boasts an actual log cabin which Robert Frost lived and
wrote in when he was on its faculty.
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Robert Frost's cabin
on the
Bread Loaf School of English campus,
Middlebury College |
Yale and Bread Loaf will survive as part of the elite; and Kent State is too tax-payer subsidized to go under.
Perhaps Ithaca, which already has
a senior citizen's living component, may successfully avoid the thousand college closures predicted by Glenn Reynolds. Perhaps it will metamorphosize into something new:
a regular degree-awarding college and simultaneously a college for senior citizens who want not a college degree but intellectual stimulation (and a Cayuga Lake four-season vacation): a retreat for the senior intellectual elite.
I wish her well in this transitional time, my dear, and first, alma mater.
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Each New Year Eve
Ithaca College lights up its twin towers
with the New Year number,
a vision which dominates all of Ithaca
from atop South Hill. |
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