Daniel De Vise Eight Ways To Get Higher Education Into Sharp Summary

In “Eight ways to get higher education into sharp”, Daniel de Vise discussed the potential solutions for problems of higher education nowadays in the U.S. The first issue is about the measure for evaluation of students learning in college. The colleges lack a standard test for student’s learning and “we don’t know whether our graduating students know more than freshman.” The author suggest that colleges participate in association like Collegiate Learning Assessment or Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency for measuring student learning and join to National Survey of Student Engagement for measuring learning environment in college. Next, the author discusses about the problem of merit aid. Students from affluent families are easier to get access to merit

However, critics argue that three-year program would damage the classical liberal education and “even four years of college often fail to produce literate adult.” Moreover, students might have no time to be benefited from education life. Hence, the author calls for the standardization of three-year program. Disappearance of core curriculum is the fourth question proposed in this article. Because of the rising consumerism, specialization of professors’ research field, and the expanding basic knowledge, core curriculum about old, basic thing, such as Shakespeare, have become lesser and lesser in college. Indeed, students do learn essential knowledge from and satisfy with the core curriculum. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has led the campaign for reviving core curriculum and some colleges have planned to add core curriculum back to required courses. The fifth way to improve higher education is to bring back homework. Compared to students who spent 25 hours a week in study in 1960s, students nowadays only study 15 hours per week. This situation could be attributed to professor’s attitude in