Here’s the crunch, “But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education.”
I don’t exactly see an argument for this conclusion, but rather an illustration which is supposed to reveal a larger problem:
1. Some college in Oklahoma appears last year to have given nearly 6,000 students credit for a 3-credit hour course which they taught online in between session.
2. About half the students were college athletes who needed the credit to be able to play.
3. The regional accreditation board didn’t even notice this was going on.
4. The althete’s school accepted the course as fulfilling what was required.
So everything is up to date in Kansas City; they’ve gone about as fur as they can go!
Best of all is the solution:
But the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do. There are many routes to doing this. In the arts and sciences, scholarly associations could define and update what it means to be proficient in a field. So could professional organizations and employers in vocational and technical fields.
I dibs that committee, as long as they pay travel and hotel costs!
Feminist Philosophers 