Higher Education

Should every person, qualifying for entry in an educational institution, actually matriculate?  To answer the question I believe the individual student needs an individual answer based on an interview of the student with an objective representative of society.  Then the prospective student ought to be entered into a short preregistration period of orientation (preparation) of the meaning of education and training as relates generally to higher education in general, and relating to the projections of the particular institution with this student.  This goes beyond the standard orientation programs I have known.  The benefit of such a program serves well the student and the institution, and mayassure better results for both than now attends. 

For the student, the cost in funding, in physical effort, and risks in projecting one’s future, both personally and professionally deserves more pre-preparation than it is presently receiving.  Students, entering adult life or beginning formal education/training after some young adult experience are too naive about the matter of investing themselves in life without adequate orientation.  The effort of schools to fill their quorum of student populations is not reason enough to take on every bright-eyed young person at the door.  The pressure of adequate orientation is about early adult experience that is worth the time and funding it entails.  Some formal evaluation ought to emerge from the experience.  That evaluation should become the property of the student in his/her planning for education, perhaps for life.

What ought prospective students and their parents expect?  They need to know the difference between training and education.  They ought to know whether they want education in a value system that relates to morality.  If the context is a-moral, it ought to be understood that a-morality is no morality except that which the individual decides for self.  In some way the position ought to be supported by some kind of evidence, such as the experience of faculty and alumni.  The institution ought to relate the personal benefits and dangers of the context in which it operates.  For example, there needs to be the understanding of faculty impact on the life and projections of the student.  The student should be educated about the rules, or the lack of rules, in the community.  For example, it was made clear at the University I attended (for doctoral studies) that the student was on his or her own, accountable to civic law.  Students were citizens, as anyone else is a citizen, so subject to the civil authority in right and wrong.  If they violated a law, they might go to jail, but the university was not expected to defend them.  In this sense students were just passing through.  In the Christian colleges I was a part of, either as a student or a member of the faculty and or administration, there were rules that were meant to aid the institution in providing education in an openly declared value system.  That system grew out of Christian sources, primarily from biblical counsel.

There are several reasons why I favored the Christian college for myself and my four children.  I wanted to learn, and wanted them to learn, within an approved value system, and believed that Christianity offered the most meaningful system for determining that objective for the individual and society.  In that system I found my own way, related to the person who became my wife, gave me comfort in my education and that of my children who gained the same benefits that accrued to me, and to her.  All succeeded in their personal lives to satisfaction; for occupational lives to self-support; in serving persons and institutions for the care and improvement of the human context that included an understanding of the human condition; and, whose separate families reflected best in their lives.  Life values must be learned above the margins of the laws of government.  All my children are either retired or approaching retirement in the next few years so fulfilled their sojourns professionally and personally, as far as public and personal reputations are concerned.  Three of the four completed graduate degrees and all have continued, in some efforts, to be life-long learners and problem solvers.  With the basic part of higher education addressed to their first degree, all of us could go on to graduate programming, in any context of our choice and in any institution, with greater benefit, for self and others, than would have otherwise been the case.