This is not great. The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job. That's certainly a nice side-effect and I hope that all my students will be able to support themselves through good employment. The university is there to educate you, not train you. It's to turn you into a better thinker, a better person, and someone more capable of living well.
Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!
(EDIT: the article does mention that this bar is low—so not too bad—but the fact that this is a metric and criteria in the first place opens this up to abuse in the near future.)
I get that it's intended to cut down on ballooning tuition and fees, but *this is not the right way to do that.* (Actually, if we eliminated half the administration, I wonder how much we could cut costs…)
Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!
(EDIT: the article does mention that this bar is low—so not too bad—but the fact that this is a metric and criteria in the first place opens this up to abuse in the near future.)
I get that it's intended to cut down on ballooning tuition and fees, but *this is not the right way to do that.* (Actually, if we eliminated half the administration, I wonder how much we could cut costs…)