In the New York Times, Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia, identifies challenges facing higher education and offers several possible solutions:
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course—with no benefits—than it is to hire full-time professors.
[…]If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps.
Read the rest of the piece here. Read James K. A. Smith‘s thoughts on the article here.
