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In the latest bonus episode of the HigherEdJobs Podcast, host Andrew Hibel asks John Thelin, historian and Professor Emeritus from the University of Kentucky’s College of Education, to discuss the three most important events/trends that occurred in higher education during his career.
“Foremost, in my opinion and experience, was the quiet, belated, and then blossoming of women in higher education,” Thelin said.
“If you look at the difference in the composition of, let’s say, medical schools, law schools, doctoral programs — name the most prestigious, demanding, advanced field of study — Women in the late 1960s probably represented some minuscule percentage, like 2 or 3%,” he said. “But women were doing very well in their bachelor’s degrees, in completing the grades, Phi Beta Kappa honors, cum laude, whatever. But then they were stopping. This started to change gradually, I think, around 1974.”
He references the many obstructions that women faced in regard to pursuing education but says he also witnessed the breaking down of those barriers. “These gains were slow to come, but now they’re blossoming in full theory,” Thelin stated.
Next, he lists civil rights gains as an important trend. However, he feels that gains by gender have surpassed the gains in terms of social class, race, and ethnicity.
“To me, the most sad, disappointing feature of American education today are disparities of income and social class,” Thelin remarked.
The deck is stacked against lower-income families who simply can’t afford the advantages of private tutoring, coaching, internships, etc. that upper-income families can.
At one point, the historian said those disparities seemed to be diminishing. Now, “I fear that they’re increasing, and that saddens me a great deal,” he said.
The last notable trend Thelin mentions is regarding intercollegiate athletics. At one point, he thought things would level off with college sports, but he says, “It’s not — as we know with the television broadcast contracts, name, image, likeness. The most sad to me was the front page New York Times article [a couple of years] ago about some state universities endorsing Caesars Casino as a sponsor for their stadium of legalized sports gambling.”
Ending on a somewhat bitter note there, Hibel challenges the historian to find a bit of hope, which leads to a discussion of graduation rates.
Thelin references researcher Cliff Adelman, noting that “his contribution and observation was that there was far more transferring, stopping in, stopping out at all levels than anyone had documented.”
“The perfect model that your children will fulfill was not as pervasive and watertight as a lot of the college advocates would have had us believe,” Thelin admitted.
So, while we may lament current graduation rates and the time to graduate, this isn’t necessarily something new, and Hibel notes that “kids don’t always make the first choice that fits them.”
Wrapping up the conversation, Hibel remarked that there is a real questioning of the value of higher education, which prompts Thelin to touch on the liberal arts. “Almost all young adult Americans know and understand that they must find their way in a profession or work that that is never far from their thoughts,” he said. “However, it can be, I think, thoughtfully integrated that in many ways, some of the useless arts are among the most useful. And that’s my kind of gentle hope for the liberal arts, regardless of program or of your long-term professional goal.”
He also gives a nod to community colleges, saying, “I think because it’s useful and it has patterns of in and out, allowing people in and out for any number of reasons, it has a deceptive, quiet, gentle strength in American life. And I know of no other nation comes even close to offering that.”
