SAU Honors College

The SAU Honors College was founded in 2003 by Dr. David Rankin, president of SAU. Dr. Lynne Belcher served as founding director and is retired from SAU. The Honors College seeks and admits qualified students who seek to pursue a serious academic program with equally gifted peers and committed teachers. Honors classes are small and provide academically enriching opportunities for students and the faculty who teach them. Currently, SAU enrolls nearly 170 honors students and graduates about 66% of admitees in four years or less. Anyone interested in applying to the Honors College or seeking further information should contact the director, Dr. Edward P. Kardas at epkardas@saumag.edu or at 870 904-8897.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Kennedy, Krystin: Credentialing


            Education has become a nearly universal requirement in today’s world in order to make a decent income. However, certain levels of education have become almost too easily achievable to the extent that too many people have a certain degree without enough jobs for them to fill. History shows a similar situation in the story of the Taiping Rebellion.
            Over the years, the bachelor’s degree has become democratized- too easy to receive. This makes the master’s degree almost mandatory for a well-paying job, because so many people have bachelor’s degrees that employees holding the few jobs available have the ability to pick higher-educated applicants over less qualified ones. Our system of education has become less a system of imparting knowledge and more a system of promoting stratification because how the original universities of the Western World viewed education. Their chief mission was not to produce learning but graduates instead, teaching always being subordinate to the process of certification. Artisans made apprenticeships last long in order to keep their numbers small and their services high in cost. For those looking for a job income and social position were required through affiliation with a cartel. People who wanted the jobs had to pay before they made any money and many could not afford the process.
            That old system is much the same as with student loans in America. In the U.S., student debt is now over one trillion dollars today because of the amount of money required to receive a decent education in order to get a decent job with a decent salary. Even then, many adults cannot crawl out from under the over-bearing weight of their student debt. For instance, if a student must pay $20,000 a year for tuition and takes it all out in student loans that makes a total of $80,000 over a four-year time span, and that is just for their bachelor’s degrees. To receive their master’s degree, which many must possess in today’s world for a high-end job, students will probably need approximately four more years of education at a more expensive institution. That leaves the student with about $200,000 in student loans to pay off, while starting a job search.
            Overall, the system of education has turned into a system of stratification not one that imparts knowledge, leading many far into debt. If this doesn’t change many will be left out of jobs and possibly houses and food as a consequence.

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