Hire education

Would you be upset if you saved for years to buy something, only to find out after you'd purchased that it's not worth anything? That seems more and more to be the case for parents who fret about sending their kids to college:

(Harvey) Mansfield (professor of government at Harvard) said he gives his students two sets of grades: The first appears on the transcript, while the other is the true grade he thinks the student deserved. This way, students can realize the true score for their performance level, he said. At the same time, Mansfield is aware that professors are under pressure to get their students to perform well and that their reputations are at stake if they are known to give out bad grades.

Two sets of records? That would be called "cooking the books" in other businesses! Why is such shady behavior tolerated?

Father Peter Guerin, a former dean of St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., agreed that "there is great pressure on non-tenured faculty who rely on student evaluations to receive potential tenure."

"Many parents may view universities as a consumer market in which their in a way paying for the diploma," Guerin continued, adding that "students who attend class on a regular basis and are paying tuition feel that they should be receiving that A, even if they have not deserved it."

It doesn't matter if you learn anything, in other words. If you pay and you play at attending, you get the diploma with the nice "magna cum laude" on it. Any other service that returned so little for the money would be investigated out of operation. But the college diploma, deservedly or not, has become the expected ticket to better things in our society, so the games are tolerated, even expected. A Harvard transcript, "A's" or not, opens doors a lowly high school graduate cannot hope to enter. Sadly, the evidence is mounting that the former may not actually know all that much more than the latter.

Sooner or later, this national fraud will come back to haunt us, as nations that take their academic discipline more seriously end up outperforming us in the one test that truly counts: the real world. That exam is brutally objective. When the day of reckoning arrives, we'll find out which schools actually taught their students anything, and which were just very expensive social clubs.

(PS: look for at least three mistakes in the Fox News article that's the main link for this post. Hints: one is an incorrect pronoun, the second is a wrong homonym, and the third is a typo resulting in "a" where "at" should be. I'm sure a journalism degree or two was involved in the production of said article. I rest my case.)