By Professor
Doom
A recent article on Inside Higher Education lists, supposedly, 7 seriously bad
ideas in higher education today. The article starts off well with an awesome
quote from an expert:
"Seriously bad ideas, I’d argue, have a life of their own. And they rule our world.”
Paul
Krugman, from Seriously
Bad Ideas. Considering this guy’s kooky
economic ideas seem to rule the world today, it’s safe to say he knows exactly
what he’s doing.
Past this point, alas, the article misses
mark after mark, often missing the point entirely of each bad idea.
Seriously
Bad Idea #1 - Institutional Sustainability Requires That Faculty Costs Be
Minimized
I’m a little ambivalent about this being a
bad idea. Yeah, sure, I’d like more money, but I honestly don’t feel that I
should become fabulously wealthy doing my job.
The important thing is to consider how
this bad idea came into place. The only reason “minimize faculty costs” is
prevalent on campuses today is because administration costs have been so
heavily maximized. Every penny goes to administration first, with leftovers
going to everything else on campus. If you can’t get more money coming in by
attracting more students, then the next best thing is cutting down on the money
going out that you’re paying to faculty.
The student loan scam means that you don’t
need good faculty to attract students, because everyone can get the money to go
to college now—it’s not the students’ money, so they’re not picky about
spending it. This led to an era of great growth in higher education. That era
is coming to a close, as a large majority of high school
graduates eventually go on to college. With no further growth possible, minimizing faculty costs
is the next option for administration to take.
So, yes, this is a bad idea, but whether faculty
are forced to work for nothing, or paid fabulous amounts, is irrelevant as it
won’t address the real issue in higher education.
Seriously
Bad Idea #2 - Quality Education Can Be Scaled:
Yes, this is a bad idea, but it’s not the
actual idea in higher education today. First, minimizing faculty costs
motivated trying to scale education, this is just a consequence of the first
bad idea. Second, “quality” is irrelevant. Accreditation today is completely
bogus (and the endless academic scandals, with no penalty from accreditation,
illustrate this well), and accreditation facilitates the student loans.
Since student loans are not based on
quality education, only on “education” as laughably defined by accreditation,
the people trying to scale education don’t care in the least about quality. To
even assert “quality” is a factor in today’s higher education is naïve, deeply
naïve. It’s about saving a few bucks. If administration were presented with
research showing that class sizes over 30 were guaranteed in all ways to do
absolutely nothing for students…administration would still order class sizes of
a thousand students or more, because those classes are immensely profitable.
The gentle reader should ask himself: if
you wanted to learn something, would you like private access to your teacher,
or would you like to share your teacher with 500 people simultaneously? For
thousands of years, humans have learned best by having teachers with a small
class (optimally, a single student). We all know this, so any assertion that
some large class offers quality education is a lie on the face of it.
Seriously
Bad Idea #3 - Technology Is the Answer to Every Problem in Higher
Education:
This, too, is a bad idea in higher
education, but some questions really need to be asked about how it got into
place. I remember one department head, an administrative hachet-person, would
also stress the word “technology” and really wanted us to use it. It didn’t
matter how irrelevant the technology, as long as it was being used, we were
doing well in her eyes.
When I asked for a computer with a
CD-ROM drive, she had no idea what such a drive was. When I was building a
website for an online course, she sent me an e-mail asking to see it. I sent
her a link. She sent me another e-mail asking to see the website. I sent her
another link, explaining that she needed to click on the underlined words and
she could see the site. Eventually I had to come to her office and show her
what I was talking about.
It’s clear admin has a fixation on
technology, but the previous paragraph shows that they don’t really understand
what they’re doing. So why the fixation on technology as a solution to everything?
I suspect the massive potential for kickbacks, but I must concede I’m not
conversant with every form of fraud in higher education today (I do not concede
lack of effort on my part in this regard, it’s just that there’s so much fraud…). Technology can solve
many problems, but problems are, indeed, not necessarily solved by the use of
technology. Most administrators have no capacity to understand exactly what I
just said in the previous sentence, and having this type of leadership is the
real bad idea.
Seriously
Bad Idea #4 - Faculty Are Impediments to Innovation in Higher Education:
The author of the article proposes this as a bad idea, but again
obvious questions present themselves. Who is making the judgement that faculty
are the impediment? What are the innovations being advanced that faculty are
impeding? How are the incredibly disposable and quickly replaced faculty an
impediment? Is turning our universities into boiler rooms really an “innovation”? Is increasing faculty workloads to extreme levels really going to improve higher education? Any investigation into the
answers to such questions leads to the real problem in higher education.
Now we come to a really bizarre claim:
Seriously
Bad Idea #5 - Staff Growth Is the Underlying Problem to What Plagues
Higher Education:
The author has yet to mention the ridiculous
growth of administration and staff (and their huge pay). I just assumed it was
ignorance, but here the author is saying this growth, a cancerous tumor larger
than the size of the host, isn’t a problem.
I beg
to differ.
A
generation ago, when most campus employees were faculty, students graduated in
around 4 years, and these graduates didn’t start life deep in debt.
Today, faculty are a minority on campuses, due to that staff growth. Even
on good campuses, most students don’t ever graduate, graduates
typically take 6 years to get their 4 year degree, and these graduates now start life around $35,000 in debt.
Now, the reason for all the staff is…what, exactly? They’re not
educators, and they’re not researchers. They justify their existence by
claiming to help students. But the students are less likely to graduate now,
and are more likely to graduate with considerable debt. Thus, they’re not
helping students, either. They’re not helping anyone but themselves.
So, yeah, maybe we should look into getting rid of staff, since,
empirically, they are hurting our students. Universities got along fine
without all the little fiefdoms filled with staff they have today, and not
having to pay all those huge salaries would go a long way to reducing tuition,
which would help students. Hey, aren’t we supposed to help students?
I
haven’t been quoting the author, but I do want to give one quote to demonstrate
the writing style here:
Colleges and universities need more
non-faculty educators able to partner with faculty on redesigning large
enrollment classes to encourage more active learning, and on partnering with
faculty to create new blended and low-residency degree programs. Where the work
can be sourced, and it is not a core competency that differentiates the
institution, then it probably should be.
Seriously, we need more staff to make it easier to run larger courses? Do
note the vocabulary here: partner (as a verb!), blended, sourced, competency,
etc. Hmm, who writes with such consistent edu-speak?
I
get the feeling the author is one of those staff, because there’s no way to
objectively look at what’s going on in higher education and not suspect the
increase in staff is part of the problem.
No,
we don’t need more of these staff. Even if we did, they should be contingency,
right? Hire them to redesign the course, then fire them…like we should with
most of the non-faculty on campus.
The
next bad idea also has some issues:
Seriously
Bad Idea #6 - The Trends Toward Public Disinvestment to Higher Education
Is Inevitable:
It’s rather debatable that there’s public disinvestment in higher
education, as I’ve discussed before. While
this “bad idea” isn’t even accurate, it’s quite possible that, at some point,
it will be valid.
In
fact, I concede it is inevitable. States don’t have access to the
money-printing machines, the Federal government does; one only has to look at
Greece to see what happens to a printing machine-less state in a fiat system.
The primary purpose of fiat money creation is the transfer of wealth away from
the people that don’t have the money-printing machines. As Krugman’s hero
Keynes pointed out, not one person in a million understands when his wealth is
being taken away in this manner.
So,
states are steadily having their wealth extracted, and with the national debt
soaring ever higher, at some point states won’t be able to create wealth as
quickly as the money printing machines can take it away.
Saying this is inevitable isn’t so much a bad idea as just acknowledging
the mathematics of our exponentially increasing national debt. But…what of it?
The author quotes some uncited numbers giving current support levels:
Connecticut spends over $12,000 per
full-time equivalent student, Wyoming spends $16,000, and Hawaii spends about
$14,000. In comparison, in 2012 Arizona spent on $3,425, New Hampshire $2,795,
and Wisconsin $4,439.
Even
with a “paltry” $3,000 of support per student, this suggests serious fiscal
mismanagement of our institutions. Assuming faculty teaches a mere 200 students
a semester, the faculty thus brings in $1,200,000 a year. Over a million bucks
a year, and the faculty would be quite lucky to get $50,000…most get less than
half of that.
And that’s support from the taxpayer, many students also have to pay tuition
on top of that.
Every single time someone starts looking at the money going into higher
education, I have to wonder where does all that money go? If there were
only as many adminstrators/staff as faculty, and all were paid about the same,
I suspect we could get a huge surplus in higher education, instead of always
being told how cash-strapped our universities are.
Now we come to the last, worst, bad idea:
Seriously Bad Idea #7 - U.S. Higher Education
Is In Crisis:
Wait, what? Saying higher education is in crisis is a bad idea? Higher
education is in a crisis, that’s the simple truth. Please, gentle
reader, allow me to present some facts:
Student loan debt is over 1.2 trillion dollars now. If higher education were legitimate, this level of debt would be questionable.
But is it legitimate? Let’s take a look:
Whole swaths of coursework across all campuses in the country are
openly fraudulent. Students are indebting themselves for
useless coursework.
18 year long frauds take place at our universities…and there are no
arrests, no penalties, no firings. This
type of fraud goes on at many universities, because the ones committing the
fraud know there will be no penalty.
Our community colleges operate in open violation of Federal law. There is nothing to stop this.
About half of our college graduates can demonstrate no measurable
improvement in knowledge or skill from high school. How much longer will people indebt themselves
for useless education?
Our college graduates are often useless after graduating college. How much longer will people indebt themselves
for entirely useless degrees?
How
can anyone look at the above issues and deny that our higher education system
is in crisis? Every single one of the above issues affects thousands, if not
millions, of students (well, the UNC fraud only affected a few thousand, but
similar frauds go on at many institutions).
There are some bad ideas governing higher education right now. Things
are far simpler than what the author of the article claims, and
soon I’ll go over, again, the truly bad ideas that are destroying higher
education.
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