I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the contradictions of American education. We keep hearing about how lousy the schools are—except when they’re not, in which case they’re highly competitive and everybody’s killing themselves to get into college. Unless, of course, the colleges are killing themselves right back to get the students:
Whether evident in student unions, recreational centers or residence halls (please, do not call them dorms) the competition for students is yielding amenities once unimaginable on college campuses, spurring a national debate over the difference between educational necessity and excess.
Critics call them multimillion-dollar luxuries that are driving up university debts and inflating the cost of education. Colleges defend them as compulsory attractions in the scramble for top students and faculty, ignored at their own institutional peril. And somewhere in the middle sit those who have only one analogy for the building boom taking place.
“An arms race,” said Clare Cotton, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. “It’s exactly the psychology of an arms race. From the outside it seems totally crazy, but from the inside it feels necessary and compelling.”
So, most of the schools in America are turning out lousy students—except there are enough good ones to justify these kind of country-club amenities?
I don’t understand this picture.
Simple. Schools are not competing for students because they are absolutely excellent. Rather, they are competing for the best showing they can make on graduation day – for relative excellence. Students, meanwhile, have to signal that they want schools to compete – Court me! Court me! I’ll make you look good!
If students don’t put in a good showing, they miss out on the cushy treatment and the leg up for a job. School administrators, who know that the best predictor of future educational performance is past educational performance, listen as students signal that they will put in a good showing regardless of the quality of instruction they may face.
What’s so confusing about that?