Tuesday, April 2, 2019

The Real College Admissions Scandal? Higher Education For the Highest Bidder.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ― W.B. Yeats

To make a living? To make a life?

Those are the questions I keep returning to as I've read with increasing sadness about the college admissions scandal revealed last month by federal officials right here in Boston. Prosecutors charge that fifty wealthy and privileged parents used bribes, totaling more than $25 million, to get their sons and daughters admitted into the "best" colleges and universities. Ethics and legalities be damned. Buy off a coach to put your kid on a team even though she never actually played the sport. Pay off a cheating adult to take a test for "junior" so he won't have to actually make the grade himself.  Above all do whatever you have to do to ensure that your kid is "in". 

Rules? Laws? Those are for other folks, I guess.   

What bothers me most about this episode is not the shamelessness of these Moms and Dads, college employees and college counselors who carried out this alleged fraud. No, what really depresses me is the transactional nature of the crimes. Pay enough money and you can buy anything, even a "perfect" future for your kid. Come up with the bucks and your child gets a pedigreed (emphasis on greed) sheepskin, that in just four years will open every single door to the "good life".

It's all about the cash, not the classes. Education is thus reduced to dollars and cents, economics, and the bottom line. Getting your money's worth. The final assumption is that the better your school the more money you will make thus ensuring you get to live a "successful" life. Checkbook learning. 

Ka-ching!

But God help us all if that is the ultimate the goal of higher education. Granted, we all have to learn how to make a living, make enough money to support ourselves, to pay the bills, to live. Yet the best education is always about so much more.  Education is about shaping young hearts, souls and minds, an exciting journey for the young as they work to figure just what their unique God given gifts, talents and strengths finally are.

Who are they made to be and to become? What are their passions? What matters most to them? The best education exposes a person to different ideas, asks them to engage those ideas and wrestle with them and then draw their own conclusions. To think for themselves. A great education opens the young, and all of us, to a world far beyond our upbringings and introduces us to a diversity of people and experiences. This isn't Kansas anymore nor is it supposed to be! 

Education as transaction or education as discovery? To make a living or to make a life? What will it be?

How we answer those questions as parents and citizens and folks who care deeply about our children: it matters. It's not just the future that's at stake. It's the future hopes and dreams of our sons and daughters too.

It's not an easy time to be a college student or college bound or college hopeful.  Young folks and parents are going more deeply into debt than ever before to attain education.  What were once research and education oriented places of higher education are now too often sharp elbowed players in a multi-billion dollar highly competitive business. Colleges close as the pool of applicants shrink.  Foreign students coming to the United States to learn make it harder and harder for U.S. young people to secure a place at the school of their choice. It's not hard to see why so many children and parents feel under so much pressure when it comes to picking a college or university.

My hope is that even in this highly charged atmosphere we won't ever lose sight of the greatest gift of all that comes from increasing our knowledge and wisdom as human beings.  Growth. To grow up into the persons we are meant to be and made to be.  Philosophers and writers. Engineers and artists.  Doctors and craftspeople.  Managers and parents.  Farmers and factory workers. Soldiers and first responders.

When it comes to the education of our children as they discover life calls and life paths: these can't ever be bought, not with all the money in the world.  Our sons and daughters must make this discovery for themselves. 

Let this be the lesson we all learn in the classroom called human life.






 


   

 

      




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