{"id":6080,"date":"2010-09-01T14:05:07","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T18:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/news\/article.php?ArticleID=6080"},"modified":"2018-09-06T13:51:06","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T17:51:06","slug":"6080_president-s-opening-day-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/president\/2010\/09\/01\/6080_president-s-opening-day-address\/","title":{"rendered":"President’s Opening Day Address, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning everyone. It is a pleasure to greet you once again at the beginning of a new academic year.<\/p>\n

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I always try to take a little time in August to catch up on some of the reading I cannot quite fit into the work year and that often includes, before I move on to the weightier books, catching up on recent issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>. \u00a0There I came upon mention of a spate of new books, all with titles that bore a certain similarity, for example: The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It;<\/em> or Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and Its Discontents;<\/em> and my favorite, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids \u2013 and What We Can Do About It<\/em> (this one I give credit to for eschewing the colon in the title and instead going with the question mark).<\/p>\n

These books follow on a number of recent more scholarly works discussing the failures of, primarily, public institutions of higher education.\u00a0 Every year, two or three new books come out announcing that American higher education is failing the students, failing the nation, and just plain failing.\u00a0 The assertions most often made in relation to this failure have to do with the alleged failure to actually provide students with an adequate education (graduates, it is asserted, do not know what they should know and cannot do what they should be able to do), the length of time it takes to degree (too many students are taking six years to graduate when they should be graduating in four years, or even less), the large number of students who never attain a degree, and, of course, the cost of a college degree.<\/p>\n

The impression left is that students, after years of effort and financial sacrifice, struggling under accumulated debt, must come away from their college years bitterly disappointed with the waste of time and money. That apparently is what the facts and the studies indicate.\u00a0 We, on the other hand, labor under the impression that what we do is, in fact, of immense value both to the individual students we serve as well as the larger society, but we appear to be divorced from reality in so thinking.<\/p>\n

In order to test the principle, the American Council on Education (ACE) hired a highly reputable polling agency to survey a broad range of alumni aged 25 to 39 from colleges and universities across the nation.\u00a0 I made sure that 精品成人福利在线 University was among those whose alumni were surveyed because I thought the results would provide valuable information for us. What, in fact, the surveys tell us is that graduates across the country hold an enormously favorable view of the value of their college education, and 精品成人福利在线 University tracks positively with that national response.\u00a0 Among our alumni who were surveyed:<\/p>\n