Don't adopt this U.S. insanity

My posts on this blog are often applicable to both educators in the U.S.A. as well as international educators in various places around the world. This specific post is directed at international educators and it is a warning to not chase elite brands in higher education as the U.S.A. has increasingly done in recent years.

The U.S.A. has been rocked by the scandal that rich/privileged parents have been buying their children's way into elite institutions. At the head of the list is the University of Southern California (USC) but many other schools have also been implicated. I dare say that there are many more institutions and families that should be exposed for being part of privileging the privileged in college admissions. Whether it's donors who make "no strings attached" gifts on the eve of their childrens' applications or it's outright cheating on qualifying exams or falsifying credentials, it doesn't really matter. It's all fraud and many institutions and their staff are complicit in fulfilling the dreams of rich parents who believe that their children can't achieve much without an elite brand degree.

How did we get here? Bill McGarvey provided a number of insights in "We're sacrificing our kid's mental health to the college admission industrial complex." While this title reveals one type of ill (young people's increased anxiety over going to college), McGarvey's article goes to the deeper question of why parents who can afford to buy their offspring's admission are doing it. When one looks at how the U.S.A. became a higher education center for the world, it is easy to see that it was to provide opportunity that would create an exploding middle class in the mid-20th century. This exploding middle class was built by opening access to higher education through a large number of great public universities. Now that commitment to building of a middle class has lost favor (at least as earnings statistics indicate), public funding for universities has been in steady decline. While publics have increased their tuition to astronomical levels, elite private universities have gone even higher and it is these elite places where today's rich parents want to send their kids. There is little evidence that elite institutions have any discernibly superior outcomes to public universities but that isn't what elite families wanted anyway. They wanted elite degrees because of the networks these degrees secured.

There are big questions in the international higher education space - rankings, costs, access, quality, and workforce preparation are just a few. Unfortunately, many emerging universities outside of North America and Europe are attempting to adopt current educational practices that are now tipped toward elitism and exclusion in the U.S.A. If international higher education wants to build capacity and increase opportunity, the lessons of the 1950 - 1980 era in the U.S.A. would be the place they should go. That's when elite education was available and served the same narrow population it serves today. The really great thing about the 1950 - 1980 era was that it also served many young people not of elite background and status who went to college to improve their career opportunities and standard of living. And the outcome was spectacular - for individual students as well as families, businesses, communities and the broader nation.