In Talk to Governors, Bill Gates Says Public Colleges Should Prove They're Effective By Derek Quizon Washington States should hold their public colleges and universities more accountable for their performance, Bill Gates, the former Microsoft chairman, said in a speech at the National Governors Association's winter meeting here on Monday afternoon. The billionaire software tycoon, who has taken an active interest in reforming public education since retiring in 2008 to focus on philanthropic work, said states should consider basing their support for public colleges and universities on performance measures—including graduation rates for students and income and employment rates for recent graduates. [...] http://chronicle.com/article/In-Talk-to-Governors-Bill/126543/
Well, that sets up public universities to fail. They can insure that everyone graduates by lowering standards, thereby insuring that the placement rate plummets (because, through no fault of their own, the economy just isn't generating tons of jobs right now), or they can actually develop serious standards, but then get punished because too many people flunk out. Of course, you can follow the "higher standards" path and actually help reduce the drop out rate by having smaller classes, tutoring opportunities, and getting tuition under control so that students don't have to work full time jobs in order to pay for their education, but we closed the door on that option during the Reagan administration. This proposal is further polluted by the same kind of thinking that clouds discussions of the relative prestige of various colleges, etc. It assumes that the student is a passive consumer there to be filled with a product called "education." In short, there's no suggestion that, just maybe, the student might be responsible for the failure of their college education. Finally, the real gist of the article is... Mr. Gates briefly alluded to the debate over for-profit colleges and proposed rules that would eliminate federal funds for programs whose graduates have low employment rates and incomes. He said that the debate should be expanded to include nonprofit and public institutions as well. "Those same types of questions, about outcomes and effectiveness, really should be asked of the whole higher-education sector," he said. It's worth noting that the reason some in congress are calling for greater oversight of for-profit "colleges" has less to do with their placement rates and a lot to do with the ridiculous stduent loan default rates that they generate. In short, the for-profit "colleges" are scamming the tax payers, but you'd never know it from proposals like this.
Okay, so first Gates watches as Apple dominates his company's market share. Then he retires and begins to destroy the public secondary school system. Now he wants to do the same to the public universities? Why is anybody giving this guy the time of day? He's a math nerd that made a few extraordinarily prosperous good decisions in the late 1980s. That in NO way qualifies him to tell people how to run a system of education.
I would've posted this several hours earlier, but my PC computer froze, but F' YOU, Guillermo Cancela. F'. You. Just leave teachers alone to do the work they know how to do. Education ain't business and shouldn't be treated as such.