The experience of the Western Europe and the U.S. in the last 100 years suggests that higher education provides one of the principle foundations of economic development.

There is little doubt that higher education has contributed to economic progress. An educated workforce (at least in terms of specialized skills) is essential for an advanced industrial society.

Yet, other than economic progress, higher education has accomplished very little to justify the faith.

Reports from various task forces, declining SATs and ACTs, reveal a deterioration of intellectual competence among college students over the last 20 years.

Standards are deteriorating even in the ivy league:

Only one student in a class of 15 could date the Russian Revolution within a decade."

A faculty committee at Harvard reports: The Harvard Faculty does not care about teaching. Teachers have lost their sense of what kinds of ignorance are unacceptable."

Today's college students are responding to some very real social and economic conditions.

They come after the largest birth cohort in U.S. history, they come at a time of slowing economic growth, the slimming down of American corporations.

Schools in modern society serve largely to train people for work. Many available jobs, even those in the higher economic range, require specialized knowledge or skills.

Most jobs consist largely of routine labor, and depend little on enterprise and resourcefulness--little on critical intelligence, general knowledge, curiosity, or intellectual flexibility.

Hyper-industrial society depends on a population educated to take their role in a highly complex division of labor.

It requires a population, resigned to work that is trivial and boring, predisposed to seek their satisfaction in consumption and leisure.

Many occupations have recently undergone a "credentialization" process.

Employers are able to be more choosy, requiring ever increasing credentials and specialized training for jobs because the market is flooded.

Also, with the increasing division of labor many jobs have become more complex, more specialized, and thus require longer periods of educational preparation.

The competition for middle level jobs (the type that institutions like Rogers State prepare students for) is tough.

The job situation, according to most estimates, is not likely to improve, either now or in the foreseeable future.

Colleges and Universities have responded market demands by becoming centers for career training.

We have shifted job training over to the educational system, thereby "socializing" much of the costs.

But this narrow vocational focus, the need for certification and the emphasis on diploma and transcripts has changed the nature of a college education.

Education has deteriorated into a tool for personal advancement. But there were personal and social benefits to the traditional education that is being lost.

Classes in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences are seen by many contemporary students as having little relevance for their future careers--and so are barely tolerated.

Students come into our classes because the university requires social science, art and humanities for general education, not out of intellectual curiosity.

Given their motivation for coming, it is not wonder that they are usually bored or even hostile.

Teaching in the liberal arts is too often dispensed in an alienated and cerebral form. Professors in the humanities and social sciences are devalued by their students, the university, and society at large.

The relevance of problems of philosophy, sociology, history, and anthropology to our personal life, and to the life of society, has been lost.

While students of this generation often see the disparity between what is and what ought to be, they are much more likely than the students who went before them to accept the status-quo.

People find themselves unable to use language with precision, to recall the basic facts of their country's history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most basic written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights.

People's ability to use their own language, their reasoning power, their stock of historical information, and their knowledge of literary classics have all undergone a process of deterioration.

In view of all the evidence, it should not surprise us that Americans are becoming increasingly ignorant about their rights as citizens.

If an educated electorate is the best defense against arbitrary government, if democracy truly depends on an educated and informed citizenry, the survival of political freedom appears somewhat uncertain.