Sunday, January 07, 2007

Academic pretensions unmasked, costly ones.

The Chinese and the Indians are eating our lunch in science and engineering. Our poorest students can barely read by the highest standards expected in a Western democracy. But there's time enough in the bastions of higher learning for foolishness. This, my friends, is what the political left has done to higher education.

Annual tuition at Occidental, a private college, is $32,800. That means if you take "The Phallus" and "Blackness" (plus its prerequisite "Whiteness") this year on a four-course-per-semester schedule, you will have set your parents back $12,300.
If there's ever a group of candidates for victimhood it's parents who are footing the bill. And as long as the tenured 1960s radicals have their way parents will continue to be victimized. There's more:

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.
Read all of Charlotte Allen's take here.

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