America's Silent Post-Secondary Crisis in Education

Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University, has concluded in a recent article in the New York Review of Books that "a great many gifted and motivated young people are excluded from college for no other reason than their inability to pay, and we have failed seriously to confront the problem.""the college-going rates of the highest-socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels." Delbanco adds further weight to his forceful point by quoting Donald E. Heller, Penn State's director for the Center for the Study of Higher Education, that "the college-going rates of the highest-socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels."

Delbanco explains: "Everyone knows about the competitive frenzy to get into a few highly ranked colleges, but in fact most of the 1,500 private colleges in the United States do not attract significantly more applicants than they can enroll. On the contrary, they struggle to meet enrollment targets, especially now that families in economic distress are turning to public institutions, which tend to be cheaper."

Delbanco also elaborates that: "he prevailing financial model at private colleges is one by which relatively affluent students pay more than needy students, although even those who pay full "sticker price" (roughly $50,000 per year at a top-tier school) meet less than two thirds of the full cost of their own education—calculated as a proportional fraction of faculty and staff salaries, dormitory accommodations, dining, library, health, and athletic services, as well as overhead costs such as keeping the lights on, the heat flowing, and the buildings in good repair. In other words, all students in America's private colleges—except for those at institutions run for profit, such as the University of Phoenix—are subsidized to one extent or another."

Delbanco points out a significant and growing problem: "Meanwhile, at public institutions, where tuition historically has been kept relatively low by means of a subsidy derived from tax revenue, the financial model is also at risk. These institutions—long before the current crisis—were seeing what Peter Sacks, in an indignant and informative book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, calls "massive disinvestment" by the states. The University of Virginia now receives a mere 8 percent of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30 percent a quarter-century ago. At the University of Wisconsin, in a state with a long progressive tradition, only about 19 percent comes from public funds—also down from around 30 percent just a decade ago. To make up for the decline in public money, tuition rates at public universities have been climbing even faster than at private institutions—a trend likely to accelerate, at least in the short run."

Delbanco discusses the problem facing post-secondary education in the United States today; they are in trouble: "For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one."

Added to the many problems faced by American post-secondary institutions has been 'affirmative action for the rich': "Favoring the rich is hardly an attitude exclusive to private institutions. At public universities, especially the flagship campuses where children of the affluent are most likely to go, the financing system is also regressive. Qualifying for state-subsidized tuition at UCLA or Berkeley requires no means-testing for California residents—with the result that the child of a public school teacher is likely to pay nearly the same amount as the child of a trust and estate attorney. All these distortions suggest that something is wrong with our system of higher education—starting, but not ending, at the top."

Delbanco proposes that: "The fact is that America's colleges—with notable exceptions including community colleges, historically black colleges, and a few distinctive private institutions such as Berea College in Kentucky (Berea charges no tuition but requires campus work from its students, who all come from low-income backgrounds)—have lately been exacerbating more than ameliorating the widening disparity of wealth and opportunity in American society. Too many students are unable to continue their education beyond high school, and of those who do, too many find themselves in underfunded and overcrowded colleges. A report released in January by the Lumina Foundation, "Trends in College Spending," concludes that "higher education is becoming more stratified," with enrollment growing in the institutions with the least resources—the public community colleges—as more and more students are "pushed out of higher-priced institutions."

Delbanco tries to assign blame for the current situation: "No doubt, much of the relative decline in America's college-educated population can be attributed to poor preparation by K–12 schools, especially in inner-city and rural communities, and to social pathologies that leave young people—including, disproportionately, minorities—unready for, or uninterested in, higher education. But a great many gifted and motivated young people are excluded from college for no other reason than their inability to pay, and we have failed seriously to confront the problem."

When pondering remedies Delbanco proposes several: "One approach is radical cost-cutting—and anyone who has spent time in academic institutions can sympathize with the view that waste and inertia are among their salient features. Colleges may be known as places where liberalism is the dominant political point of view, but they are tenaciously conservative with respect to themselves: once a program or professorial position or new facility is established, it is very hard to get rid of it. The current financial shocks could be salutary if they provoke serious review of what really matters on each campus."

Delbanco also believes: "More promising than the three-year college idea are the enhancements of student aid contained in the final version of the "stimulus bill" that emerged from the compromise between the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Obama on February 17. The bill contains expanded tax credits for tuition payments as well as increased funding for the Pell grant program. Moreover, the President and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are pushing to make Pell grants into a true entitlement—a program, that is, which Congress is compelled to sustain and adjust annually for inflation, on the model of Social Security and Medicare. The stimulus bill also contains substantial new funding for job-training programs that provide vouchers that community college students can use toward tuition."

Delbanco's most wide ranging proposal involves: "Perhaps the most substantive response to these problems to date is a report released last fall jointly by the Spencer and Lumina foundations and the College Board entitled "Fulfilling the Commitment: Recommendations for Reforming Federal Student Aid." Its authors call for elimination of FAFSA and for the IRS to report financial information directly to the Department of Education, thus cutting out entirely the requirement that families work through the maze of disclosure forms to determine their eligibility for federal support. Instead, every Pell-eligible family would automatically receive notification in the mail about how much the government would give toward college costs. The report also calls for changing loan programs so that debt incurred to pay the cost of education would be repaid on a graduated scale keyed to post-college income; and, perhaps most important, it calls for a federal program to establish education savings accounts for low-income families to be tapped at the time a child is ready for college."

Delbanco concludes by stressing his "painful sense of disjunction between rising hope and declining opportunity."He concludes by stating that "that we have in this country a highly stratified system of education in which "merit" is the ubiquitous slogan but disparity of opportunity is often the reality. Even with our best efforts, this fact is not likely to change fundamentally anytime soon. Indeed, the financial crisis has made it harder to change. But as we consider the future of the nation, which surely depends more than ever on an educated citizenry, it will be of great importance to keep in mind a point too little acted on during the boom years but now undeniable and urgent. John Adams put it succinctly some 225 years ago: "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it.""

Childhood Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain to Cause Permanent Deleterious Effects

The scourge of poverty remains an urgent crisis worldwide and directly effects childhood brain development. In the United States alone, it has been "estimated that 28.6 million children live in low-income families and 12.7 million children live in poor families." Beyond the borders of the United States, tit has been estimated that "in nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 47 million children live below national poverty lines. These figures pertain to industrialized countries; rates of child poverty in some developing nations exceed 60 per cent." It is believed that "a range of early social and material deprivations affect structural and functional brain organization and cognitive and socioemotional development postnatally and throughout childhood."

Although a number of young children demonstrate a resilience to the effects of poverty and are able to avoid being overcome by it's damaging effects, there are many young children for whom there remains little doubt that "poverty poses serious threats to children’s brain development." Researchers have asembled evidence that there is "a sensitive period when the brain is most able to respond to and grow from exposure to environmental stimulation. This window of optimal brain development is from the prenatal period to the first years of a child’s life. While all children are potentially vulnerable to a number of risk factors which can impede brain development during this sensitive period, a disproportionate number of children in poverty are actually exposed to such risk factors." Another recent report demonstrates that being poor is a cause for stress that effects the brain. Gary W. Evans1 and Michelle A. Schamberg of the Departments of Design and Environmental Analysis and Human Development, Cornell University have found that "cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory." Evans and Schamberg write that "Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement." In addition, poverty stricken young children are not prepared to acquire educational skills and benefits when they go to school since their home lives do not provide them with an environment that stresses education and the children are forced to eat low-nutritional meals and are availed little or no access to health care.

Studies have suggested that stress-related biological after effects confront the sufferers of childhood poverty and can be manifested in cardiovascular diseases, several forms of cancer, and diseases commonly associated with aging.

It is the opinion of researchers that increased hormone production apparently aids poor children cope with difficulties, "from unsafe neighborhoods to bad schools to at-home worries. But those hormones could produce heightened levels of inflammation, ultimately leaving their immune systems weakened and vulnerable."

Researchers also cited: "Nutrition, exposure to environmental chemicals and disease (that) could also explain ... long-term biological effects." The researchers went on to add that “We are unable to determine the relative importance of these exposures here, but doing so needs to be one of the top priorities for future research in this area.”

Wired Science Blog reports that: "For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care."

Wired continues: "Evans and Schamberg's findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete. In addition to poverty's many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too." The two researchers from Cornell explained: "A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood."

The Cornell researchers concluded that: "The income-achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood."

The researchers' findings build on work previously done by Elizabeth Gould who has linked stress to a wide range of neurological defects and Jonah Lehrer of Wired has added his own analysis to shed some light on Gould's findings: "Subsequent experiments [by Gould] have teased out a host of other ways stress can damage the developing brain. For example, if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions--like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day--her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety. Being low in a dominance hierarchy also suppresses neurogenesis. So does living in a bare environment. As a general rule of thumb, a rough life--especially a rough start to life--strongly correlates with lower levels of fresh cells.

"Poverty is stress," Gould says, with more than a little passion in her voice. "One thing that always strikes me is that when you ask Americans why the poor are poor, they always say it's because they don't work hard enough, or don't want to do better. They act like poverty is a character issue."

Gould's work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the brain."

Encountering the Past: Thoughts on the Literal Representation of Reality

Unlike the opportunities offered to them in the studies made in other disciplines, historians are able to achieve an unequaled sense of detachment from their studies of the past in the way that they are able to manipulate time and space for the purposes of their narrative inquiries. In this sense, historians are the first disciplinary practitioners of abstraction within the confines of existent life, physical, and social science norms. In addition, historians must be prepared at all times to have their abstractions checked for the validity of the sources that they use because after all, theirs is above all else an attempt to convince their readers of the pertinence of their texts.

Let us first consider the element of time and it's relationship to the writing of history. In it's earliest form, history was produced as a chronology of events and actions pertaining to such a wide range of topics including climatological occurrences, agricultural production, and astronomical phases of the night sky. The point at which these observations of various natural phenomena took place is the point in which the human element affixes itself and applies the form of narrative reconstruction in which a beginning, middle and end to a story is related to enable the information being discussed to attain the interest of a human audience. This is the point in which the historian deals with representation in that a rearrangement of events is structured to fit the narrative portrayed and this is the point in which the historian frees his or her text from the constraints of literal representation. This is the region of human consciousness that distinguishes the passage of time within and beyond the human mind

Similarly, the historian rearranges the actualities of space to fit the purpose of the text making up the narrative form. Spacial explanations are constructed from the human artifice of closeness and distance and their witness to detail. A summary example would show that the closer an affair, action, event, or object is observed; the greater the details can be ascertained. Like the distinctions between the scientific purposes represented by microscopes and telescopes; the point of focus informs the narrative. Taken together, the powers granted to the historian by the manipulation of time and space are impressive indeed and offer a valuable starting point for the dissemination of the narrative being produced.

Historians are directed to abstractions as a matter of course due to the impossibility of their task: They cannot literally represent the past because it simply no longer exists and cannot be moved from its place in the past to the present. This paradox simply means that the way we choose to represent the past is limited by the transitory nature of the past and its finite existence. In addition, when we enter to observe the remnants of the past left through time we are objectively becoming a part of what we are attempting to study and we are contaminating what remains of the past with our inquisitions, rendering objectivity impossible and rearranging the truth we are seeking. In other words, as investigators of the past historians cannot escape the past because it is a condition that envelopes us and draws us into it, with or without our intentional forethought or permission and it is only by being immersed in time can we understand it by changing it as it moves about us. That is the key to a historical understanding of the past.

And the flux in linear transitions that we call time is itself but a stream of many different currents that give the appearance of movement to the past, the present, and the future. It can be reasoned that it is only the most elusive of the currents which we call the present that affixes us between the past and future; never to wholly experience either as current event but only as possibility. And so it can be reasoned that present time is perceived as the difference between what it is and how we perceive it through representational means.

On the other hand, space is something entirely different, for it represents a place of occurrences where the passage from past events through the present to the future and represents a type of cartographic understanding of movement which introduces a pattern of mappable recognition to the mind. With this in mind we must consider the metaphor of history as a landscape with all of it's inherent dimensions of height, width, and depth.

Mediterranean Based Missing Link?

Anoiapithecus brevirostris, a species that existed between apes and humans is being referred to by some researchers in findings released in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as a 'missing link' and was originally found in a fossil-rich site near Barcelona Spain in 2004. The 11.9-million-year-old fossil ape species has an unusually flat, "surprisingly human" face and has created momentum among scientists to postulate that humans' ape ancestors split from primitive apes in Europe, not Africa—the so-called cradle of humanity. The fossil may also represent the last known common ancestor of humans and living great apes—including orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.

"With this fossil, our opinion is that the origin of our family very probably took place in the Mediterranean region," said study leader Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona. The Mediterranean theory disputes the “Out of Africa” theory, which postulated a completely African origin for modern humans and has been a near-consensus position among scientists, would lose it's acceptance.

Bearing a number of commonalities to both primitive ape species and our early ancestors, Anoiapithecus has been called a missing link. The creature has a wide nose and long palate like many ancient apes, the precursor species that bifurcated into great apes and humans. Leading to further questions is Anoiapithecus' thickly enameled teeth and robust jaw are like those of primitive Kenyapithecus fossil apes (often thought to be common ancestors of humans and the great apes) found in Africa and Europe.

"The Spanish ape suggests this key evolutionary transition occurred after Kenyapithecus arrived in Europe from Africa some 15 million years ago—likely crossing over before the Mediterranean Sea formed, separating Africa from Europe—Moyà-Solà said.

"The 'folks' that migrated from Africa to the Mediterranean area were in fact completely primitive, without the [hominid] features that identify the members of our family," he said.

"The ancestors of gorillas, chimps, and humans then went back to Africa close to some nine million years ago, " and eventually gave rise to the first humans.

"Anthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto believes the evolution of African apes can be traced to Dryopithecus species that had migrated from Africa to Europe during the pre-Mediterranean Sea period...The new Spanish fossils do indeed support that hypothesis," said Begun. However Begun "does not see any compelling evidence" linking Kenyapithecus with the newfound Spanish species. "Frankly, [the new species] does not look like Kenyapithecus to me," he added.

"Moyà-Solà, the study leader, doesn't rule out the possibility that each of the great ape species evolved independently from different Kenyapithecus species.

"And it's possible that Africa could yet yield a species that, like the new Spanish ape, bridges the gap between early human ancestors and more primitive apes, he admitted.

"It's impossible to test our hypothesis [as of yet], because the fossil record in Africa from this period is very poor," Moyà-Solà said. "We need more and better fossils from Africa."

"To that end, he said, the team's next major scientific stop will be somewhere south of the Mediterranean."

Our Insignificance: Using Historical Method

We are insignificant creatures.

The evolution of modern human beings stretches back into our planets past a mere 250 million years; an insignificant scratch on the Earth's surface when we consider that life began some 3.85 billion years ago on a planet that is some 4 billion years old. But before we become lost in the minutiae of discussing ancient bacterial life with the human genesis that we are a direct descendant of today let us consider the paradox of time that for the most part eludes human consciousness concerning origins viewed from the panorama of Earth's incomprehensible length of history.

What I am alluding to is of course the recognition of geological or deep time which has washed over humankind's significance in the universe like a giant wave that powerfully sweeps across and engulfs an island bound piece of land. The impact of the discovery of deep time initiated the dethronement of God from the center of the universe. With God gone, man stood alone to understand and create humanity's place in the universe. And it created a secular consciousness in the minds of human beings that forced our species to acknowledge responsibility for what takes place in the course of human affairs and events and place it squarely on the shoulders of humankind. Simultaneously we became a happenstance creation in an infinite universe with the handicap of only being able to represent reality by rounding off the edges, seeking out the longue durée, and confronting the problems associated with our biased perceptions of all that is etched on our consciousness.

The problem, of course, with having such ultimate powers of representation is that we are forced to draw a comprehensible explanation which our senses relate to us and then explain that perception to fellow human beings. For those who try to walk the tightrope of representation; they must deal with the foibles of their own abilities to represent a reality that is struck between their own significance and insignificance as mortal beings. It is inevitable that self-doubt permeates our self confidence.

The significance of this observation is that we as observers cannot escape drawing conclusions from what we are focused on. And while we are focused on our observations, we might as well approach them in a systematic manner. And don't forget, human beings, although making observations of current, complex phenomena are doing so with brains that are no different in composition from those of our ancestors of some five thousand years ago.

The answer to our individual shortcomings is to widen our range of collective experiences to extend beyond that which an individual can take in and encounter by using the experiences of others who have confronted comparable instances in the past with the theory being that by taking such an approach, humanity's chances of drawing conclusions with greater wisdom would increase proportionately.

But what of other methods of observation including religion, culture, tradition, environment, and technology? Isn't historical observation lacking in responsiveness and authority when compared to these other areas of human endeavors? The problem is disputed easily when one considers that religion and culture are so dominated and answerable to orthodoxies, while human beings are highly adaptable creatures and make technology and environment less dependable as markers of human activities. Finally, traditions exist as manifestations without any solid consistency. This leaves historians with the sole task of providing interpretations of the past from the present to shape the course of the future. But do not let us venture too far afield: Studying the past guarantees no sure method of predicting the future. All that history can hope to accomplish is to prepare humanity for an uncertain future contained within certain bounds of past familiarities and humanizes the vagaries of deep time upon human consciousness and it's limitations.