What bothers me the most about the current surge in college attendance is how it has cheapened the bachelor’s degree. When substantial percentages of the population have a college diploma, it’s no longer so special. Right now it’s about 30 percent of the population over 25 years of age. In 1966 it was just over 6 percent. Amazing, purely amazing.
In order to get into a colonial college you had to have a working knowledge of Latin and the ability to at least read Greek. Moral philosophy/ethics was the highpoint of their education taught by the president of the college. The attendance numbers throughout the first one hundred years was about a dozen students per year. By the American Founding Yale had about 150 students total.
I compared the kind of education they received with what is taught at Harvard right now. The closest I could find to our Founders education was in the classical philosophy Phd. program. I found a couple dozen students, roughly the same number as the colonial time.
So, it is evident that education has been dumbed down. In the 1850s there was a push to ignore the type of education that had trained our early leaders. And, they wanted many more students. So began our education mess.
The stated goals of the colonial colleges was to prepare students for positions of leadership, mostly as judges and preachers. They did an excellent job as is evident in our founding leaders and the documents they produced.
Think about it - our Founders were educated equaling what today is considered the most difficult and sophisticated training. And they read Plato, Cicero, Aristotle, etc., in the original languages and then had to debate it all in Latin. They very well could have written all of the documents in Latin and debated the finer points of Federalism, in Latin.
It leaves my head spinning.