Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.
Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.
I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!
I think a lot of our problems are because people don't listen to our children. It is not always easy. They're not always so brilliant that you want to spend hours with them. But it is very important to listen to them.
Our children, our grandchildren, our students, our young athletes. We need to be pouring leadership principles into them constantly, and teaching, and instructing them how to become good leaders in the future.
No matter how many people celebrate your gifts, don't ever think that you are more important to them than your gift is to them. This is why many people fail: They fail because they think that people came to follow them.
My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.
Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.
The obsessive focus on a college degree has served neither taxpayers nor students well. Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years. Students who haven't graduated within six years probably never will.
Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem
We want our students to graduate from high school, but we want them to graduate with a plan, whether it's college or career.
Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.
Currently, only 70 percent of our high school students earn diplomas with their peers, and less than one-third of our high school students graduate prepared for success in a four-year college.
Without any formal personal finance instruction in our high school or college curricula, many college seniors who graduate in the red will continue to make common financial mistakes that only exacerbate their debt burdens.
We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.
Millions of young Americans have graduated from college during the Obama presidency, ready to use their gifts and get moving in life. Half of them can't find the work they studied for, or any work at all. So here's the question: Without a change in leadership, why would the next four years be any different from the last four years?