Proper Education is a Boon or a Bane?

Education is an integral part of our Lives. The society assigns a stature to a person on the basis of one’s educational qualification. Moreover educated youth helps to contribute to the country’s economy and bring about an overall development of the country. Otherwise the government of all the different countries wouldn't have bothered to take corrective measures to eradicate illiteracy.

                                                                Source: coaching-blog.com via Leona on Pinterest

But the growing tuition fees, poor faculty and diminishing career prospects is a matter of concern because if tuition fees goes on rising like this then very few families will be able to afford a proper education for their children. Hardly 1 out 2 kids will be able to complete their education that too a mere undergraduate course. Few weeks back an article was circulated on Facebook, the social networking site on the decadence of higher education.

"The adjunct crisis (of many decades) makes the New York Times," tweeted Karen Kelsky, an anthropologist who runs The Professor Is In, a service where graduate students pay for advice on how to game the job market. The article depicts a bleak world of impoverished professors, diminishing career prospects and subpar courses providing "less educational quality to the students who need it most".

{Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121223122216817378.html}

The most interesting factor is, this article was originally published in 2007, but few failed to realize that it was an old article because the situation has changed so less that it did not catch anyone’s attention only.

If we observe carefully, America is marked by an overwhelming debt and erosion of opportunity. The remuneration of college president is rising day by day, schools and colleges are spending huge amounts of money on infrastructure development but the salary packages of faculty members is not so great and in order to pursue higher education the students are applying for loans as they cannot afford the tuition fees.

However MOOCs - massive online open courses, an alternative to traditional learning offers online course which are not only affordable but also derails the equal access to knowledge.

Robert Oprisko, the author of the study, argues that institutional prestige has trumped individual merit. "It's about access. It's about class," he says. "Access" in higher education means the ability to supplement the meager funding offered on merit with personal resources. For wealthy students, attending a funded programme in an expensive city is easy. For the rest of the population, it means taking on debt - debt that new statistics reveal is disproportionately held by disadvantaged groups.

The National Science Foundation Research shows 31.8 percent of white PhDs had "no definite commitment for employment or postdoctoral study", this was true for 40.5 percent of black PhDs, 39.6 percent of Asian PhDs, and 39.6 percent of Hispanic PhDs.

{Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121223122216817378.html}

If this system prevails, soon the American education system will collapse because students who are taking loans will take 15 years to repay it and by then their children will be of the right age to go to college, but the question remains “Will They?”