Cornell Sociology faculty and director of Cornell's Institute for Social Sciences Dan Lichter weighed in on a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Forum.
The forum addresses the lack of a college degree as a public health crisis and asks what higher education can do about it.
Lichter proposes to stop ignoring the needs of rural America.
"Unfortunately, rural people and places have been largely ignored or forgotten in today’s increasingly urban society. The public — and most politicians and the news media — have little if any real connection to rural people and their problems. This also is arguably the case for much of higher education.
America’s colleges and universities offer few courses on topics of rural social problems and little research on rural matters in the social sciences or humanities, or, for that matter, in business or law or medicine. Rural-infused curricula in higher education have been eliminated or relegated to backwater programs or majors. Departments of rural sociology or agricultural economics have been renamed to reflect changes in instructional priorities. Or, worse, they have been eliminated altogether or have experienced drastic budget reductions or big cuts in faculty size."
Read the entire Chronicle of Higher Education article here.
