Shopping for College: How to Get What You Really Want

By Douglas Dix

In order for college students to get what they really want, they need to start pursuing their passionsand friends and family members need to support them in that pursuit. Douglas Dix, PhD, a longtime college professor, takes on the modern higher education system in this guidebook that focuses on being authentic. Instead of studying a subject that guarantees a high-paying job, he pushes a radical idea: Do what you want to do.

Students that follow their curiosity wherever it leads will be better equipped to

work for companies founded on ethical business principles;

advance the causes of liberty and justice for all;

derive lasing satisfaction from helping people in need.

The words that matter the most often go unheard from high school guidance counselors or at prospective campuses. Get the advice that can make the greatest difference as you search for the best school for yourself or a loved one in Shopping for College: How to Get What You Really Want.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480803008

Douglas Dix

Douglas Dix, PhD, has been a professor at the University of Hartford for thirty-four years. He has taught and advised more than six thousand students, met most of their parents, and is the father of seven children.

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Copyright © 2013 DOUGLAS DIX, PHD.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0299-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0301-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0300-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918212

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/28/2013

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: To the Parent

Chapter 2: To the Student

Chapter 3: Building Alma Mater

Chapter 4: Making Health

Chapter 5: Caring for Mothers and Children

Chapter 6: Thinking and Feeling for One and All Self

Chapter 7: Being Fair

Chapter 8: Being Effective

Chapter 9: Making Law Fair and Effective

Chapter 10: Making Work Meaningful

Chapter 11: Making the World Safe

Chapter 12: Building the Future

All royalties from this book go to charity.

For Patritzia

Preface

THE ONLY REALISTIC CHANCE your kid ever has of earning a decent living is to get a college degree. But unless your kid’s a superstar, you’ll have to pay for it or at least a good chunk of it. And that’s all you’re supposed to do—just pay the bill and be gone. Your kid wants freedom from parental oversight. So does his or her college. But if you give them that freedom, you won’t get what you want.

What do you want? It’s not a question colleges ask parents because they don’t want them thinking about what they want. Parents are supposed to accept what colleges offer as if there are no other options. But within reasonable limits colleges could offer whatever parents wanted. So you could probably get what you want if you knew what that was.

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve met the parents of all incoming University of Hartford students, and in the course of our discussions, I have found that they all want pretty much the same thing. They begin by thinking they want their kids to graduate with degrees and get good jobs. But then I ask what they mean by good jobs. What if their kids found secure employment with high salaries in firms that exploited vulnerable people or our environment? Not many want that, particularly when they realize the harm such employment would inflict on their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the end when parents think about what they could have, most conclude that what they really want from college is secure employment for their kids in firms that help build liberty and justice for all. This book is a guide on how to realize that want. It begins with how to pick a college.

In the United States today there are more than two thousand public and nonprofit private four-year colleges in addition to some one thousand public and nonprofit private two-year colleges. The total annual student cost for attending one of these colleges ranges from less than $1,000 to more than $50,000, with the private colleges costing about twice the price of the public. The price differential exists because taxpayers subsidize the public colleges. But this subsidy rewards inefficiency and stifles consumer choice. Instead of subsidizing state colleges, the taxpayers could issue vouchers to be redeemed at the colleges that residents chose to attend. This would encourage colleges to become both efficient and unique. Prices at both public and private colleges would drop as variety and quality increased. But vouchers aren’t available now, and you’ve got to decide what college to pick.

You can’t help but wonder what you get for the price. Each college seeks to quench that wonder with an answer that’s been crafted to fit its own niche. I’ve no interest in evaluating those answers. My first purpose is solely to convince you that the price has nothing at all to do with the quality of the education.

You may find this hard to believe. Why would anyone pay more than $50,000 for the same quality of education they could get for less than $1,000? The answer is frills. The high prices buy reputation, trophy teams, hall-of-fame coaches, Nobel Prize-winning faculty, illustrious alumni, interesting location, cozy lounges, history, architecture, etc. College frills can be fun and profitable. Being at a school with a championship team allows students to rub elbows with champions and to feel like champions, and powerful alumni can help students secure employment and admission to graduate schools. Such favoritism violates the spirit of equal opportunity, but that’s what the high price buys, an opportunity advantage. Do you really want that for your kid?

There’s probably a correlation between the price of attendance and the size of the opportunity advantage. But I recommend against taking that bait. Equal opportunity serves us all, and frills, even large monetary ones, have nothing to do with education. But you won’t hear that from high-priced colleges.

What does it mean to be educated? To know thyself is the classic answer. In 1970 Charles Silberman suggested a modification: To be educated is to know what is relevant and to live accordingly (1). But relevant is too vague. To be educated is to know what one really wants and how to get it. Do you know any college students who know what they really want? Drop in at a local college student union or social event and just watch and listen. It won’t matter how cheap or expensive the college. Undergraduates all act and speak in the same manner because they’re all terrified of the same thing—being thought of as different.

From the moment students set foot on campus, they’re obsessed with finding their clique. Some will smoke or do drugs to earn membership. Most will drink, drive dangerously, engage in risky sex, and live on junk food. To fit in, all but the exceptional students will waste their priceless potential on endless and mindless parties. They may get A’s because of grade inflation or cheating. They may even graduate summa cum laude. But few college graduates have any idea of who they are or what they really want.

How could they? Who a person is and what a person really wants are never topics in elementary or secondary school. Questions about what people really want never appear on the statewide mastery tests or the SATs. If pressed for an answer, students say they want to be happy. But they don’t know what happiness is or what would make it important. Uniformly students believe it’s for sale. That’s what they learn in every class in every grade through college. Learn what you don’t want to know in order to earn what you do want. Whether the prize is a report card, bumper sticker, or degree, it’s portrayed as the guarantor of happiness.

For kids to have any chance at discovering who they are and what they really want, they’ll have to cut lose from the crowd and the ulterior motives in order to discover authenticity. This above all to thine own self be true (2). If undergraduates were honest, they could discover that they don’t really want happiness. That discovery would open the door to finding what they really do want. For your kid to have a chance at this kind of enlightenment, you’ll have to lead the way.

Perhaps you’ll begin now. Ask your kid to imagine a safe and legal drug that would make him or her happy. Would he or she take it? Encourage your kid to think honestly. Then ask him or her to imagine that a close friend or relative were suffering. Would he or she want to be happy then? If on the drug, he or she would have no choice but to be happy. If your kid is honest, he or she won’t want the drug because he or she doesn’t want to be happy. He or she wants to be human and to respond to life and death and everything in between with the full spectrum of human emotion. Your kid wants to empathize, in other words, or love. But empathy is not what colleges teach. And all the ulterior rewards that colleges use to tempt and distract students are just drugs to keep them high.

Empathy is, more than anything else, what makes us human. But no one ever majors in empathy. How could they? There are no departments or professors or textbooks of empathy, and the word is rarely heard on campus. How can it be that the single most human trait is absent from college? It’s not by accident, for empathy makes ulterior rewards look bad, and trustees don’t want that. Trustees want kids to want money. Then the kids will take their places in the various assembly lines that have been set out for them, the various assembly lines that exploit poor women and convert natural resources to pollution for profit. Then the economy will grow, and the trustees will get richer. And that’s what trustees want or, more accurately, think they want. But kids who exploit or pollute for profit will hurt your grandchildren and be in crises by midlife, and that’s not what you want.

Kids wouldn’t want to be happy if their moms were suffering. But at any given time most moms are suffering. More than half are poor, living on two dollars or less per day. Nearly a billion mothers and children are hungry (3). Most are scared or sick or sad, and some ten million moms watch their kids die annually from a lack of minimum essentials (4). Do you want kids to ignore these desperate moms?

Colleges ignore them. The prizes and parties and sports wouldn’t work if undergraduates cared about desperate moms. Do you want your kid to care? Your kid wants to care. We all want to care about people in need. That’s what makes us human. And more than anything else, it’s what makes us American. Our Pledge of Allegiance is no cliché. We truly want to build liberty and justice for all. And discovering that this is what we all really want is what it means to be an educated American. Education is a priceless thing. You can’t buy it with money, and you can’t give it to anyone who doesn’t want it. But you can make your kid know that he or she wants it by showing that you want it.

After eighteen years of parenting, you’re undoubtedly yearning to just drop your kid at the college door and be done. But all the work you’ve invested and all the money you’re investing could be lost in a flash. Never underestimate the power of negative peer pressure. At best, colleges counter rampant decadence with lip service. At worst, they endorse it. A reputation as a party school can boost applications. A college degree may open the door to a high salary, but it does nothing to ensure that the work will be good for people and our environment. Nothing in the college curriculum empowers students to share or sacrifice or love. Nothing at college helps students discover what they really want or who they really are or what matters and what doesn’t. If you want any or all of this for your kid or all kids, you’ll need to shop for a college you can shape.

Colleges need shaping because campus ambience is unrealistic. Little children and working parents and elders and poor or needy people don’t live on campus. It’s easy for undergraduates to conclude that they are the center of the universe, particularly as they have maids to keep their rooms clean and chefs to prepare their meals and grounds people to tend to the grass and snow and athletes and artists to provide entertainment. It’s easy for undergraduates to be spoiled and difficult if not impossible for them to get an education as a result.

I teach biology, but I’ve no use for the textbooks except for this one sentence that you can find in some of them that I want all students to memorize: More than 97% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. Don’t take the future for granted. Extinction’s the routine, and our species is racing toward the cliff. You can stop the stampede by making your kid and encouraging all kids to want an education.

The world is not as it is by chance or nature but by miseducation. The leaders in every field rank among the most learned people of all time. Yet, as if by conspiracy, they have caused topsoil to erode, forests to shrink, deserts to expand, glaciers to melt, coral reefs to die, air and water to be polluted, fresh water to become scarce, species to go extinct at record rates, germs to grow ever fiercer, and kids ever fatter and sicker, all while the rich grow even richer and the poor even poorer and more numerous. By miseducation we have become our own worst enemies, trading human habitat and social fabric for prosperity. To save our kids, to save our country and species, we’ll need to stop the miseducators. My second purpose is to persuade you to build the market for real education by shopping for a college that wants to change in response to parents.

What most needs changing? Motivation. Students can’t bear to learn what’s being taught. They only do it for a degree. They cram for exams and then forget all they’ve learned because they don’t want the knowledge but only the degree. They think the degree will land them a job that will enable them to buy what they want. But it won’t. They’ve got to learn what they want and how to get it before they graduate. How will they do this? By voting. If you want your kid to be educated, you’ll have to shop for a college that cultivates democracy by giving students and faculty the vote on all that matters. The vote gives students a reason beyond profit for learning to think critically and discover and collaborate and communicate. By voting, students can help people in need and in that way help our country and species.

But college administrators fear democracy. They say students aren’t qualified to vote when in fact it’s the college administrators who have consistently proven themselves unqualified to lead. When Europeans were most in need of sanity, their college administrators preached anti-Semitism, harassed Jewish faculty, and fueled the Holocaust. When Americans were most in need of reason, college administrators preached racism and sexism. In 1962 the United States Army had to invade the University of Mississippi to protect James Meredith because the administrators there and throughout the South thought he didn’t qualify for college because he was black. At the time Ivy League and Jesuit college administrators thought women were similarly unqualified.

Where were American colleges when Americans needed the truth about Native Americans, slavery, the Confederacy, Jim Crow, World War I, the Depression, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, homosexuality, women’s rights, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, Somalia, Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea? Were they collecting data and helping the public interpret it? Were they holding referendums? Where are our colleges now when we need the truth on what to do about Native Americans and immigrants and Guantanamo and Syria and health care and the budget and poverty and obesity and drugs and genetically modified organisms and energy and pollution? Are they collecting data and helping the public interpret it? Are they holding referendums? No! Colleges are where they’ve always been in times of need, out in left field, teaching how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs in foreign languages, classify organisms by the binomial system of nomenclature, distinguish the noumenon from the phenomenon, read and write poetry, and elaborate on the works of Aristotle and Charlemagne and Shakespeare. In times of need college teams play for championships so their students and fans can cheer for victory. Is that what you want in times of need?

On April 5, 2010, twenty-nine coal miners were killed in the West Virginia Upper Big Branch mine disaster. On April 6, students at the University of Connecticut were jubilant because the UConn women won the NCAA basketball championship. There was depression at Stanford, not for the miners’ families but for loss to UConn. Is that kind of detachment from reality what you want to fund as education?

Colleges are tax-exempt and consume enormous amounts of public resources. We the people have the right and responsibility to control them even when they claim to be private. I want colleges to serve the cause of liberty and justice for all by teaching kids to become what their parents want them to be. If that’s what you want, you’ve got to shop for a college that cares about what you want. By making your wishes known, you’ll build the market for colleges that care about parents.

In this era of multiple intelligences, college administrators remain elitist, fueling counterproductive competition by portraying rank in class as the criterion of success. College trustees are champion competitors. They’ve amassed wealth by converting natural resources into pollution for profit while some ten million children die annually of poverty. Is this the brand of success you want your kid or any kid to emulate? College trustees intend to mold your kid to their image. They’ll work to erase every trace of empathy and stifle every democratic aspiration. Don’t let that happen.

College trustees teach kids to compete rather than collaborate, to exploit rather than protect, to hoard rather than share, and to chase material success rather than true love. Resolve now to protect your kid and all kids from unrestrained trustee influence. You’ve given your life and your fortune to bringing your kid to college. Don’t fail now to provide the oversight that will make that investment pay true dividends. Shop for what you want and make democracy the first item on your list. Look for a college that seeks to govern by consent of the governed.

Ask colleges about their student government association. What percentage of the students vote in the elections? How frequently and on what issues are referendums held? How does the student government relate to the faculty and the trustees? Is there a healthy tension? Does the student government advocate for needy people? Does it work for liberty and justice for all? How does a student bring an issue for college-wide consideration and vote?

Ask colleges about their parents association. What power does the association have to shape policy and curriculum? Does the association advocate for needy people and work for liberty and justice for all? How can a parent bring an issue for college-wide consideration and vote?

Ask colleges to describe how administrators are hired. Is it by appointment or election? If it isn’t by election, ask why it isn’t. Ask how the mission statement and strategic plan were approved. Was it by democratic consensus? If not, why not? Ask how the college ensures that residents of the host municipality are appropriately compensated for their hospitality. Ask how members of the host community can bring issues for campus-wide consideration and vote and ask what happens as a consequence of campus-wide consensus.

Ask about the faculty. Do the professors enjoy teaching? At some colleges promotion and tenure decisions are determined by publications. In these colleges teaching is commonly viewed as a distraction from the research that generates publications. The colleges may be famous for those publications and the grants they bring it, but I wouldn’t pay for less than enthusiastic teaching. Ask if all courses are taught by professors. Some