1. Consider a scenario where a person gets a vocational education, with no liberal arts components whatsoever. She gets a job, then gets fired and can’t get work. Given a scenario like this, which probably happens a lot, can this be seen as the major reason for a liberal arts education? Should the liberal arts be seen as the foundation for a specific area of study?

2. In that parents’ survey, nearly 40% state that the most important reason for a child to go to college is to get a good job. Is this feeling (which will only grow over time) be the reason for the demise of the liberal arts education or do other factors come into play?

3. In the parents’ survey, about 45% strongly agree that vocational school is the pathway to a good job, about 32% strongly agree that not going to college is the pathway to a good job, and about 28% strongly agree that a liberal arts college is the pathway to a good job. Why does the liberal arts come in last place, even after ‘not going to college at all’? Has the reputation of a liberal arts college diminished that much already?

4. Since many employers are looking for candidates with a well-rounded education, where she can read, write, solve problems, and have many other capabilities, can the liberal arts college be seen as a road to this kind of candidate? A liberal arts university is really the only type of institution of higher education that can grant these capabilities to its students. With these notions of a good potential candidate, why is the liberal arts college still diminishing?

5. In the “Death of Liberal Arts” article, it is stated that “the number of liberal arts colleges dwindled from 212 in 1990 to 136 in 2009.” At this rate, there will soon be only a handful of liberal arts colleges in America. What can these colleges do in order to attract more applicants and keep their doors open?

6. Consider a scenario where a student graduates with a degree in the liberal arts. She later decides that she wants to pursue a career which needs a lot of technical know-how, a career where she would have needed to take many an appropriate class while in college. In this case, can the liberal arts be seen as an obstacle to her success? For a person like this, what are the benefits of the liberal arts?

1. What would happen if the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action? How would higher education in America change?

2. Why is it that certain universities place a person’s race above another’s merit? In this regard, can affirmative action be seen as reverse discrimination?

3. Why is affirmative action steeped solely in race, and not in income? Shouldn’t poor white people who couldn’t afford good secondary education also have a chance at getting into a school not based solely on merit?

4. Why do colleges today feel that a student population’s diversity is the most important aspect of their image? Shouldn’t other factors play a larger role than race? Why is race seen as more important than merit by many institutions today?

5. With affirmative action (and other methods) being a way for people to easily get into a school (sans merit), does this effectively diminish the reputation of an undergraduate degree? Can this be seen as one of the reasons for the recent notion that a person needs a graduate degree to succeed in contemporary America?

1. Kirschner states that it “is easier to wash your hands than it is to design a first-rate online course.” One of the criticisms of online courses is that students fail to complete them, or wind up learning little to nothing from them. Can this criticism be attributed not only to the students, but to the fact that many professors teaching online courses do not know how to adequately design, structure, or teach them?

2. Could contemporary institutions of higher education benefit from MOOAs? Is this one of the ways that public HE can combat the problem of budget cuts, little to no funding, etc?

3. Polley Ann McClure (Cornell CIO) states that “students need to feel that they can plot their own academic path. If a student wants to come, they should be allowed to take the final exam on the first day of school, and get credit for the portion of the course they’ve passed. If they answer 80% of the test correctly, for example, testing software would identify the issues behind the 20% of wrong answers and focus student attention on those areas instead.” Does this make sense in HE today? Why should a student have to take 12 weeks of a class that she knows perfectly, when she needs only to take the last 3 weeks of the same class? Will this become a trend in online education in the years to come, and will it be commonplace in most technologically advanced universities?

4. Stokes describes the different classifications of online learning: traditional, web-enhanced, hybrid, and fully online. (All of these variations are offered here at BC.) Which do you feel is the best way to take a class? Should traditional classes be the only classes offered? Do the hybrid classes offer “the best of both worlds?” Does the fully online class lose some of the “university appeal” that traditional classes have?

5. One of the times articles blames online learning for the students’ failures stating that students who took online courses were more likely to fail or withdraw and that these students failed to master basics of math and English. Should these students’ failures be blamed on the online courses? Could it just be that the students who failed the online course most likely would have failed the traditional counterpart? Why do certain people feel as if traditional “brick-and-mortar” courses offer a superior learning environment?

6. In regards to the Times article on cheating: Is it probably true that those students who wish to cheat on online courses would probably be cheating anyway in her traditional courses, as well? Would cheating students go out of their way to take an online course only to cheat if they could still manage to cheat in traditional courses? Isn’t it also true that most likely, if a student makes it all the way to the end of a rigorous online course, she is probably a student who wouldn’t cheat anyway?

7. This is just a general question about BC: In one of the first readings for the class, we were told that there are three main types of institutions of HE today, in regards to technological advancement: brick, click, or brick-and-click. Here at BC, there are some online classes (even though they’re the same 10 classes every semester). Should we classify ourselves as a brick-and-click university? Do you think that the professors here are adequate enough to handle online classes? Should we really classify ourselves with the word ‘click’ at all? (If you can’t see this last question because you’re on campus and BC-WiFi isn’t working, as usual, I’ll take that as a NO!)