
Ivory Tower
(0.00 / 0 votes)I've always felt,
when I step onto a college campus,
a slight element of melancholy in the air.
If you're a teacher,
you arrive every fall semester
for the new year,
and you know
that you've gotten a year older,
but the students
are the same age as they always were.
They keep replenishing themselves.
College is a way of trying
It is an effort to cheat death,
so it's a kind of struggle
against time and mortality.
The United States has managed to
provide a postsecondary education
to a larger percentage of its
population than any society in history.
But a lot of forces
are converging
at the present moment to create anxiety.
Is college overrated?
I'm saying it's a myth.
It's become a race
for credentialism.
Has college
become too expensive?
tum into the foreclosure situation.
Students are gonna default...
Every parent who tries
to pay for their child's education
and access and completion of college
are more challenging in our time.
Of all the time
bombs in the American economy
set to explode,
student loan debt
in this country has reached $1 trillion.
We may see
a tsunami of student loan defaults.
There are problems
in all the sectors of higher education,
and it's a perfectly fair expectation
for students and their families
to want to know
that when they leave college,
they're going to have some skills
that somebody's going to be
willing to compensate them for.
We've got a lot of people
with college degrees waiting tables,
cleaning toilets, you know, driving taxis.
Nearly half of all students are showing
no significant gains in learning.
But there's
an apocalyptic dimension to this as well.
And that is the idea
that the very concept of the institution
of higher learning is about to be broken.
And only a very,
very small handful of colleges
will survive intact
on the other side of this tidal wave.
We're at the point
where people are saying,
"Maybe you don't have to go to college."
REPORTER 7:
Is college worth it?There have been
moments in human history
when those who said the future's
gonna look a lot different very soon
have been right.
This might be one of them.
This is the
John Harvard statue.
Now, people come
from all over the world
to take pictures with this statue.
In education, there are
these very powerful social forces at work
where people just imitate
without reflecting on why they're doing it.
Things like,
"How do you get into the right college?
"How does your kid
get on the right track?"
College has been sold and
over-sold as the key to a better future.
And somethings gone very wrong with it
over the last few decades.
Higher education has had
the privilege for a very long time
It created this prestige
but we've never really
examined very closely
the ingredients on the box.
We need to really rethink,
"What are the specific things
that people are learning,
"and why are they valuable?"
Welcome, Class of 2016.
You may have sensed that some of us
are expecting you to save the world,
preferably by the time you graduate.
But just remember,
a key part of any success
is the part of you that is willing to fail.
We at Harvard
believe that the best
Kind of education for undergraduates
is a liberal arts education.
And that means a broad education
across the fields of human inquiry.
We aren't educating students
for a first job.
We want to give them
Translation
Translate and read this script in other languages:
Select another language:
- - Select -
- 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
- 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto (Esperanto)
- 日本語 (Japanese)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Deutsch (German)
- العربية (Arabic)
- Français (French)
- Русский (Russian)
- ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
- 한국어 (Korean)
- עברית (Hebrew)
- Gaeilge (Irish)
- Українська (Ukrainian)
- اردو (Urdu)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
- Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Italiano (Italian)
- தமிழ் (Tamil)
- Türkçe (Turkish)
- తెలుగు (Telugu)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
- Čeština (Czech)
- Polski (Polish)
- Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Românește (Romanian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Ελληνικά (Greek)
- Latinum (Latin)
- Svenska (Swedish)
- Dansk (Danish)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- فارسی (Persian)
- ייִדיש (Yiddish)
- հայերեն (Armenian)
- Norsk (Norwegian)
- English (English)
Citation
Use the citation below to add this screenplay to your bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"Ivory Tower" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2023. Web. 6 Feb. 2023. <https://www.scripts.com/script/ivory_tower_11075>.
Discuss this script with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In