Immaculate Conceptions

November 28, 2020. Yes, conceptions, not just Immaculate Conception. I attended Immaculate Conception School from November of second grade until June of sixth grade, 1958 to 1963. The sterling Grey Nuns formed my conception of education and provided the foundation for later educational and academic career success.

Sixty years ago, I and most other people, had a very different conception of education, from elementary through postsecondary. There was no meaningful pre-K or after school programs. There were not many kids coming from single parent homes. Catholic elementary schools were very inexpensive if not free and the low-paid nuns provide much of the instruction. The pastor often passed out report cards. Even in the public schools, without uniforms, there was an expectation of appropriate dress for school. Jeans? Absolutely not. Skirts for girls? Absolutely! Boys had to wear socks and their Converse sneakers were prohibited other than on the basketball court or in gym class.

Classes were often relatively large, perhaps thirty students. While most of the elementary school teacher were women, many of the high school teachers were men. There were few athletic options for high school girls outside cheerleading. The young ladies had more opportunities with summer swim clubs than on high school fields. Few schools included a swimming pool. Athletic fields were grass, often imperfect, and usually fields of mud late in the fall season.

Attending college was not the standard. I'd estimate that the percent of college-bound high school graduates was perhaps 20% of the class in 1962, and more like 60% today. College was much less expensive but so were family and college financial aid budgets. Need-based aid barely existed, if at all, in public or private universities. The semester ran as many as eighteen weeks; today students are likely to see fourteen weeks of semester instruction.

Media, political and college administrator hype as to the 'value' of a college degree was never expressed in terms of earning more money. In many cases, a good factory job right out of high school could provide a better lifestyle than for many college graduates laboring in teaching, nursing, social work and other low-paid 'professional' fields. This was before teacher unions grew powerful. Today, six-figure teacher contracts with very generous retirement and medical plans are not uncommon, nor are poor performing teachers likely to be fired.

While I enjoyed most of my fifty years in the college classroom, it is difficult to adequately and fully describe the transformation of education across the board in those years. Having the 'life of the mind,' not having to meet a payroll or be concerned about if I'd have a contract next year, having flexibility in my schedule during the semester and over long summers, working with smart people, teaching and feeling that I had a profound influence on at least some of my students -- all of this made it a very rewarding life. For most of those fifty years I would highly endorse any good student's ambitions off going on to teach college, especially in a business school. But in the last ten years my attitude changed markedly and permanently.

For years, the petty politics and the arrogance of liberal arts faculty and the incompetence and political correctness of most academic administrators festered into the campus cesspools that we have today, where students complete courses, majors and degrees that are for the most part useless and a terrible waste of time, treasure and talent. College student debt is the result of predatory practices by universities with zero accountability for academic outcomes or for the success of their graduates in careers or in life, and that debt continues to fuel massive unrest among millennials and fatuous promises from progressive politicians to 'forgive' that debt, i.e., stick it to the taxpayers, including those who paid for college without debt.

I have significant concern for the future of higher education as well as for the basic values of personal responsibility, accountability, resilience, and other key elements of character, many of which Ed Lorenzi lectured to the graduates of his high school twenty years after his graduation, the same speech I gave to Loyola student leaders about forty years later, only for me, I think dad's words fell on deaf, 'woke' ears.