Normally, I have no use for Bill Maher because although he is smart, he is so pleased with himself, he doesn't leave much room for the rest of us to participate. But a couple of weeks ago, he said something so right, I've been thinking about it ever since: "College is now what high school used to be."
That is so RIGHT, I pumped a fist in the air.
High school used to be where the sorting started. If you didn't show up and do passing work, you didn't graduate. If you misbehaved, you were sent home for a few days or a week or two weeks, depending on the severity of the infraction; if you behaved badly enough (as I recall, coming to school drunk was badly enough), you were expelled, so you didn't graduate. If you didn't graduate, you didn't go to college, as a result of which exclusion, you joined what used to be called "the work force," which meant you pumped gas or sold dresses, or cosmetics or brushes door-to-door, until you decided to become an electrician for the rest of your wage-slave life.
Then, somebody decided everybody in this country SHOULD go to college. This is different from everybody having the RIGHT and the OPPORTUNITY to do so.
As a result, all American high school students--public as well as private--are on a conveyor belt that runs from 8th grade to college. Parents, in concert with high school administrators anxious to please them, have constructed such a safety net under this conveyor belt that it's almost impossible for a kid NOT to go to college straight out of high school, whether or not the kid can read or write, or might like to take a year off to take a look at something other than school.
So the kid arrives at college, having been babysat for the past four years. If s/he was in public school, s/he has been babysat in a succession of overcrowded, rowdy, underfunded classrooms presided over by harried, embittered persons who wished fervently they were elsewhere. If s/he was in private school, the classrooms were less crowded, and the books and supplies were ample, but the teachers were so hamstrung by ruthless administrators and overinvolved parents, they dared not do any really dynamic teaching even if they were capable of it.
So--again--the kid, quite possibly illiterate but in any case having learned almost nothing, and certainly never having been sorted according to abilities or interests, arrives at college. If s/he is at a public institution, the same conditions prevail as above, complicated by the fact that required courses are so over-enrolled, s/he stands slim chance, or none, of graduating in four years. If s/he is at a private institution, and s/he really wants to learn something, s/he can do so if s/he hustles.
Ostensibly, in college, if you don't do the work, you don't pass, and you don't graduate. At last, the sorting begins. But no--wait! You can graduate without actually learning much of anything! The college version of social promotion (one of the safety nets under the conveyor belt) is grade inflation, legacy of the Vietnam War, when professors understandably gave As to save lives. Unfortunately, grades never deflated back to their pre-war standards, so now it is encumbent upon professors to teach in spite of grades.
One Harvard professor has taken to giving two sets of grades: the one for the transcript, and the "real" one. A UC Berkeley professor announces on the first day of class that everyone will get As, in return for which beneficence, he reserves the right to tell them exactly what he thinks of their work. His opinion is often shattering to students who have never had a cold eye cast on anything they've produced. After all, babysitters aren't allowed to critique, or to teach. And if you're 19 years old before anybody ever tells you the truth, you're not a late bloomer, you're dead on the vine.