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WORD COUNT
625
October 24,
2007
COLLEGE, THE NEW MELTING POT – by William A. Collins
American
Diversity;
Swamping
Universities.
High school used to
be America’s
chief melting pot, but since our nation has gone back to segregating its
schools, much of that duty has now fallen to a different institution –
college.
Decades ago, I spent
an illuminating semester at a special program in
Washington, D.C., the
most memorable part being a required night course. The bulk of the
students were from foreign lands and English was strictly a tertiary
language. Bless the professor for his patience. It was surely an
eye-opener for the few Yankees in the class.
But now those heavy
ethnic mixtures are much more common in higher education. Immigration is
rampant, the white birth rate is low, and wealthy foreigners want their
kids to study here. While some of us may feel that American colleges
remain a bit hidebound, compared with Asian, African, and Latin American
schools they are models of free inquiry. And with the Baby Boomers’
youth now past, administrators are suddenly scrambling to fill some of
those empty desks.
This is swell for
working class Americans who have painfully observed that there aren’t
many manufacturing jobs around anymore, unless you’d care to move to
Taiwan.
Now our kids really do need college, even just to qualify for mom and
dad’s same old work. For example in the old days, our daughter-in-law
learned veterinary tech work on the job and picked up needed
certificates along the way. Now her daughter, another horse whisperer,
needs a degree just to get in the door.
And so do less
technical workers. So, more and more young people with remarkably humble
preparation are flooding the gates of academia looking for that ticket
to a higher rung on the economic ladder. This means that community
colleges, the new kid on the education block, are booming, even as our
traditional universities have to dig a little deeper into the applicant
pool. And often that digging unearths still more foreign students to
spice up and complicate the academic mix.
Which is OK. Our kids
learn as much from them as they learn from us. That’s pretty much the
concept of the melting pot anyway. And as students from the lower income
rungs spiral upward into community colleges, state colleges, and the
less-storied private universities, what’s wrong with that? It’s like the
classic American GI story following WWII.
Well, one wrong thing
is money. College has gotten expensive, really expensive. And so have
the loans needed to nurse one through the process. Many poorer kids have
to drop out. And with a layered public college system, the melting pot
starts separating.
State U. and the
other regional public universities tend to gobble up the whites and
Asians, while blacks, Latinos and immigrants tend to sift down the local
institutions.
Ironically, the Bush
administration is unwittingly countering this separatist trend. By
reneging on promised funding to historically black and Indian
institutions, it is forcing more and more minority students out into
integrated public colleges, thus pushing up their diversity ratio. Not
necessarily a bad outcome, except that many poor kids inevitably do then
fall through the cracks trying to make the transition.
And so running a
college today is no picnic. If it isn’t the uppity women in your face,
it’s the macho alumni on your back. If it isn’t shady student loan
companies darkening your reputation, it’s slippery professors fudging
federal grant reports.
And now it’s
shrinking white enrollments that force the acceptance of more foreign
and minority students. Colleges originally were meant to be elite
institutions, not melting pots. If their administrators had wanted to be
integration counselors, they’d have gone into social work. But now
suddenly we’re assigning them to remix the cultural ingredients of
America. We
may need to cut them a little more slack.
--
Columnist William A.
Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut.
A photo of Bill Collins is available
CLICK HERE
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