“Teachable Moments To Be Acquired by Not Enrolling at UNO” – Includes Response From UNO

October 24, 2012 9

http://youtu.be/7O4vaNcpCpM

UNO Response After Transcript

Teachable Moments To Be Acquired by Not Enrolling at UNO

The Who Dat City’s media is all abuzz over the news that UNO’s enrollment is down by 800 students1. LSU, LA Lafayette and LA Tech were also affected by the state legislature’s wise decision to drop, as in cold turkey, remedial courses for freshman from the state’s “Institutions of higher learning”.

It used to be that the “higher” part of that phrase assumed that some serious “lower” learning had already taken place with the student but in our legislators zeal to seize our share of “federal” student loan funds, borrowed from China, we opted for the ol’ “warm bodies in the lecture stands” as opposed to the “brightest minds” standard.

Of course when you are offering bachelors degrees in things like Hotel & Restaurant Management2 one must wonder what a remedial course would be composed of: introductory linen change 101 or answering the front desk bell for dummies? Now before folks in restaurant management reach for the complaint button hear me out. Did the citizens of Louisiana really found LSU to train Woody from Cheers how to do a credit card batch report? Isn’t that something that Cheers ought to pay for and can’t it be done while on the job, earning a living at a lower station of the management chain?

Consider that J. Willard Marriott, the founder of the Marriott Hotel chain’s education resume includes herding 3,000 sheep from Utah to San Francisco and doing missionary work for the Mormon Church. That knowledge might come in handy when pondering that 2/3 of the “college graduating” class of 2011 are heavily in debt. That doesn’t even include what their parents and state taxpayers have lost on their “educations”.

All this is done to basically assist employers in screening future employees meaning that “colleges” today are being used to subsidize job training that business should pay for.

This is not to say that higher education as a program of strict disciplines should be discouraged but we do a grave disservice to our yewts by forcing them into what amounts to glorified, overpriced job training. Steve Jobs3, that most famous of all college dropouts said the only worthwhile thing he learned in college was calligraphy. That’s something the 800 students “denied” admission to UNO can learn with materials purchased at amazon.

1 http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2012/10/uno_loses_800_students_on_stri.html
2 http://registrar.uno.edu/catalog/1213catalog/courses_of_instruction/HRT.cfm
3 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451648537/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=mikechurchdot-20

THE UNIVERSITY of NEW ORLEANS (via News With a Twist)

11:25 a.m. CDT, October 23, 2012

UNO’s Lester E. Kabacoff School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Administration is a highly regarded program that is well known for producing leaders in the hospitality industry. Our graduates hold management positions in hotels, restaurants, and tourism and destination management organizations. Over the past 10 years, graduates in the Kabacoff master’s program have a 100 percent job placement rate. The Kabacoff School is located within UNO’s College of Business Administration and, accordingly, students must complete highly rigorous coursework that includes finance, accounting, mathematics and human resources. One out of seven jobs in the greater New Orleans area is in hospitality and tourism. There is an enormous demand for high caliber professionals, and it’s a need that UNO is proud to fulfill.

Additionally we consider UNO to be an excellent value. For the second straight year, UNO made U.S. News & World Report’s “Least Debt” list in 2012. UNO ranked first among national universities in percentage of graduates with debt.