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    The College Question: Why College (As We Know It) Isn't Working For The Millennial Generation
    The College Question: Why College (As We Know It) Isn't Working For The Millennial Generation
    The College Question: Why College (As We Know It) Isn't Working For The Millennial Generation
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    The College Question: Why College (As We Know It) Isn't Working For The Millennial Generation

    By Alex Bitterman

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    About this ebook

    > College is not the answer for every high school student.
    > College costs more this year than ever before.

    > A college degree no longer guarantees a successful career.
    The rising cost of higher education is leading American colleges and universities to an uncertain future. Led by unprecedented crises in cost and demand, along with rapidly changing technology, the coming upheaval will change American colleges and universities and will shape the future lives and careers of Millennial generation students.

    Surveying generational, economic, and educational trends, The College Question examines the current state of higher education in America and questions the feasibility and relevance of a college education for Millennial students.

    Written by a university professor with over a decade of personal experience teaching college students, The College Question gives answers to important questions that parents and students want to know.

    Controversial, thoroughly researched, and informative, The College Question
    teaches parents and students to investigate the American college landscape, avoid common mistakes, and find the best answer to The College Question for every perspective college student.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlex Bitterman
    Release dateSep 11, 2013
    ISBN9781301882656
    The College Question: Why College (As We Know It) Isn't Working For The Millennial Generation
    Author

    Alex Bitterman

    Alex Bitterman, Ph.D. has been a college professor since 2001. He earned a Master’s degree in Architecture and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University at Buffalo. The founding editor of Multi: the Journal of Responsible Architecture and Design, his books include Buffalo is a Cool Place to Live and Design Survey: a Workbook Introduction to the Design Professions.

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    • 2/5
      Bitterman makes some decent points, but for the most part this book is already way out of date. It is also very opinionated, and does not seem to consider other perspectives. The author is well aware that American higher education is broken, but suggests that students should avoid the system altogether, which is not realistic. We live in a world in which the multi-thousand dollar piece of paper that comes from graduating will keep a job application from being filtered by an automatic system. Bitterman offers college alternatives that will work well for some people, but many will be left behind.

      The book itself is also full of grammatical and syntactical errors, detracting from its credibility.

    Book preview

    The College Question - Alex Bitterman

    The College Question

    Why college (as we know it) is not working for the millennial generation

    Alex Bitterman, PhD

    Smashwords Edition

    B A L A N N E & C O . P R E S S

    Buffalo, New York

    Copyright 2013 Alex Bitterman. All Rights Reserved.

    This book is dedicated to my parents who unconditionally supported my aspirations and to DBH who has lent precious hours of advice and support to make this book a reality.

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following, without which, this book would not have been possible. Especially: Nickolas Alexander, Annette Bitterman, William Bitterman, Jonathan Bleuer, Kelly Dixon, Thomas Dunigan, Joyce Hertzson, Daniel Baldwin Hess, Molly Hess, John Higgins, Thomas Ivancic, Bruce Jackson, Kasey Klimes, Beverly McLean, Jeffrey Miner.

    When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Whenever the answer has been No for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

    —— Steve Jobs

    introduction

    I have spent the past 15 years as a college professor. I have taught at four different colleges and universities in a variety of subjects—graphic design, environmental design, interior design, architecture, urban planning—and guest lectured at many other colleges and universities around the world. I began my teaching career teaching first grade for a short while, and spent some time as a substitute teacher for children ages 6 to 13. That was so long ago that many of my original first grade students would already have graduated from college! Although I have been teaching, training, or educating in some capacity for nearly two decades, I have been a student nearly twice as long as I have been teaching. I have been a student at public and private institutions and had great teachers, lousy teachers, and any number in between. My continuous access to the educational world has put me in a unique position to observe the promises made by colleges and universities, the commitment and abilities of a number of teachers, and the instances when having a college degree helps and when it does not. I also have an intimate understanding of what colleges and universities promise to students and parents, which is often at odds with what they actually are able to deliver.

    As an educator, I believe (perhaps naively) that what I do has the potential to change the world, and I am constantly analyzing what I do, how I teach it, and the outcome of my efforts. I struggle with this responsibility. I work to train my students to enter the labor force when they grow up, but I also analyze my efforts through the eyes of someone who has been a student for 40 years and still does not feel grown up! As I reflect on the past few decades, I wonder—frequently—if what I do has value to my students, and if the work my students go on to do has value to society.

    When I started teaching at the college level, I had two great mentors. One told me: teaching is 99% psychology and 1% information dissemination. The easy part is the information dissemination; the time consuming part is navigating the psychology. The other taught me: dealing with idiots will be the price you pay for being an intelligent person in a stupid world. Both sound hard, but over time I have found both to be helpful to me.

    This book project began as a presentation which I created called The Future of Design. I was fortunate enough to deliver the presentation to a number of students, and after each presentation I was regularly swamped by students wanting to talk about the ideas I presented and to ask my advice on how to solve their problems choosing a major or career. Clearly, what I presented resonated with students. The sad thing is while I had skillfully identified all the problems they were experiencing, I had not yet presented any solutions. Following this successful presentation, I wrote a short book about five years ago (unimaginatively also titled The Future of Design). I completed it quickly, and it has been sitting on my desk ever since. About a dozen students have read it. They always returned enthusiastic comments, but for some reason—to me—the book never felt complete. I felt that just like my presentation, the book identified too many problems and not enough solutions.

    Around the same time I completed this book, I began teaching a graduate-level course called Design Issues. The global economy was beginning to sour, and my students and I spent a great deal of time discussing their concerns about entering a shrinking job market. One student stands out in my memory. She resisted these conversations and vehemently argued that we were all falling prey to the liberal media. Her combative attitude concerned me, but by the end of the semester, I was glad to not have to deal with her any longer. A few years later, I was speaking with a faculty colleague. The troubled student, my colleague recounted, was now unemployed, homeless, and living out of her car. She did all the right things—completed her coursework, graduated on time, and sent out her resumé—but found herself in an unenviable position. Her ignorance and her intolerance to consider facts and her refusal to understand the notion the changing relationship between education and work had essentially doomed her to the fate she now endured.

    That is how this book came to be. All that I do each day in class and on campus is only a small portion of what I am responsible to do. My true responsibility is ethical; to ensure that students, parents, and those that are involved in the college and university enterprise—from high school guidance counselors to university presidents—are thinking clearly and rationally about higher education. Over the past years as this book was developing, I started to discuss my ideas about work, school, and the future with students, faculty, friends, colleagues, and (perhaps most importantly) real people, outside of academia—pretty much anyone that was willing to listen. In conversations with these folks, they were eager to share their perspectives. Throughout these discussions I kept hearing similar issues surface, but a few points clearly stood out:

    * Well-intended parents are confused and overwhelmed by helping their kids to make the right choice about going to college and what to study.

    * While most students have the academic preparation to begin college, the majority of students lack necessary life experience to make an informed decision about college while still in high school.

    * American students are conditioned to study majors that are no longer relevant and will not be sustainable in the future.

    * College no longer guarantees a good job, let alone a job at all.

    * Because a college education is no longer a guaranteed path to financial security, the costs associated with it may imperil not only students but parents as well.

    * Most professors and university administrators are reluctant to significantly change a system that has worked for decades. Despite this—ready or not—change is coming quickly, and most students will wind up caught in an ugly crossfire as colleges and universities retool for the 21st century.

    I teach my students to read road signs and connect dots to predict—as accurately as possible—what will likely occur over the next decade and over the lifetime of their careers. It is my hope that this book will teach young people and their parents how to better understand the context of a college education and what to do as colleges and universities rapidly shift focus. It is my sincere hope that parents along with their current and future college students will use this book as a guide to better understand how colleges and universities work and to avoid the typical pitfalls that limit personal and professional growth and development for young adults.

    Healthy debate about higher education is long overdue. This book will undoubtedly stir debate amongst administrators and professors in academia, and it is my hope that it does. Not everyone will agree with every word, so take from it what you find useful and leave the rest behind. It is probably not necessary to read this entire book cover to cover. Read what is relevant to you. I have arranged each chapter according to the same format to help you find the most relevant information quickly:

    1. The Big Idea. Each chapter begins with a short one or two-paragraph section where I summarize the general topic and presented in the chapter.

    2. The Chapter. Next, the chapter narrative explains in detail, an overview of current problems, reasoning, and solutions centered around one area in higher education.

    3. The Bottom Line. Each chapter ends with a bulleted list of the main points presented in the chapter. (If you are in a hurry read this section first.)

    4. Action Plan. Each chapter concludes with a section called Action Plan which is to do checklist for parents and students to help navigate the college admissions and selection process.

    This book is based in reality, not on endless academic analysis of meaningless data, polls, and studies. It is based on hundreds of conversations over more than a decade with real people, and it tells—in aggregate—their stories. To do this effectively, this book examines five major areas:

    1. how generations work,

    2. the pace of change,

    3. the problem with college,

    4. making informed decisions and getting in,

    5. the coming crises and how to avoid them.

    I tend to be both cynical and optimistic, so on one hand, I am convinced (and I say this with a tinge of humor) that what I teach has absolutely no value whatsoever, but on the other hand, I think that what I do is the most important job in the world. What this tells me is that our system of higher education is not working effectively. A nearly constant stream of stories that flood the media each day about student loan debt, unemployment, underemployment, generational malaise, and alternatives to college support my suspicions. This book is for the students that are stuck in that broken system, and the parents who are kept awake at night worrying about their children’s future. It is my sincere hope that this book will dissect not only some of the biggest problems that face higher education today, but also present help students to navigate these problems by presenting a number of possible solutions. These solutions can help students already in college to sort out their academic careers, help high school students thinking about going to college to avoid some common missteps, and to provide parents a road map for navigating the college experience with their children. It is my hope that this book will ultimately help young adults begin adulthood on solid footing with a positive and hopeful eye toward the future and provide peace of mind for their parents.

    chapter 1 generations

    BIG IDEA

    We have all heard the adage those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. When examining generational patterns, we can see that there is some truth to this old saying.

    The generational cycle is the theory that generational values and behaviors repeat in 20 year cycles, every 80 years or so. Examining this generational cycle, as well as communication styles, behaviors, values, and trends that characterize each generation, is key to understanding the underlying differences between the Millennial Generation and their elders—parents, grandparents, older siblings, and teachers—from the generations that have come before. This chapter provides an overview of how generations work. This research that has been pioneered by William Strauss and Neil Howe and provides the backdrop for the first few chapters of this book.

    GENERATIONS

    I am by no means an expert on generations or generational theory, but I do find it fascinating and very relevant to my daily work with students and parents.

    The term groundhog day is common slang for the feeling of repeating the same thing over and over. The term comes from a film of the same title, starring Bill Murray. The notion of a constantly repeating sequence of events is a fitting way to introduce generational theory.

    William Strauss and Neil Howe are experts on generations. They (literally) wrote not only the book, but many books about generations and how generations work. Strauss and Howe define a generation as a cohort (or group) of people born over a 20-ish year span. Put another way, about every 20 years or so, a new generation emerges. Together, four of these 20-ish year generational spans roughly compose what

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