Amy Laitinen is director for Higher Education with the Education Policy program at New America. She is the product of public higher education, holding an associate degree from Miami-Dade Community College, a bachelor’s degree from New College of Florida, and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley. In March of 2015 she wrote an opinion editorial entitled College credit? Kill that. In this article Laitinen questions if American education is worth the price and if students and families are getting what they pay for. “As higher education becomes increasingly necessary and expensive, measuring time rather than learning is a luxury that students, taxpayers and the nation can no longer afford.” She believes
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Laitinen says employers want the skills that higher education says it provides to students: the ability to critically think, communicate, work in a team, write effectively, and adapt. But only one-quarter of them say that the colleges are doing a good job in preparing them. “These graduates have spent hours and hours in classrooms and taking tests, but the time doesn't seem to have translated into learning.” Her point in this is that very little employers are satisfied with the college graduates and it is because we are using credits as a measure instead of actual learning of skills needed for the real world. She blames the credit hour system created by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. “If credit hours truly reflected a standardized unit of learning, they would be fully transferable across institutions…but colleges routinely reject credits earned at other colleges, suggesting that even though they use credit hours themselves, they know they are not a reliable measure of how much students have learned.” Although it is true that some credits are not transferable that does not mean it doesn’t reflect a standardized unit of learning. Earning a credit means you learned the material and completed the course; some credits don’t transfer because it is not needed at the other college. That last part of the quote is nonsense because like I said previously in
Laitinen says employers want the skills that higher education says it provides to students: the ability to critically think, communicate, work in a team, write effectively, and adapt. But only one-quarter of them say that the colleges are doing a good job in preparing them. “These graduates have spent hours and hours in classrooms and taking tests, but the time doesn't seem to have translated into learning.” Her point in this is that very little employers are satisfied with the college graduates and it is because we are using credits as a measure instead of actual learning of skills needed for the real world. She blames the credit hour system created by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. “If credit hours truly reflected a standardized unit of learning, they would be fully transferable across institutions…but colleges routinely reject credits earned at other colleges, suggesting that even though they use credit hours themselves, they know they are not a reliable measure of how much students have learned.” Although it is true that some credits are not transferable that does not mean it doesn’t reflect a standardized unit of learning. Earning a credit means you learned the material and completed the course; some credits don’t transfer because it is not needed at the other college. That last part of the quote is nonsense because like I said previously in