Reader's Notes - Higher Education?

From NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday comes a discussion with Andrew Hacker, emeritus professor at Queens College in New York and the author of Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It. With co-author Claudia Dreifus, Hacker calls into question the inefficiencies and dead-ends of the undergraduate experience -- poor instruction, bloated class-sizes, largely vocational degree tracks, and the tenure system -- all of which devalue the increasingly expensive four years of college. Combined with the PBS Frontline investigation of for-profit colleges, College Inc., Hacker and Dreifus should give students, parents, and educators reason to reconsider just why one should value going to college at all. A link to both the audio and a transcript of the discussion are here.