By Professor Doom
For decades now,
every school in the country has focused on growth, growth over standards,
growth over reason, growth over need. It’s been easy to acquire such growth,
thanks to the student loan scam, and our rulers of higher education have
awarded themselves gargantuan salaries and magnificent golden parachutes due to
their “leadership” in signing every sucker they could scrape up for loans.
I’ve ranted
plenty about the robbery of the taxpayer by our leaders in higher education,
but an angry note from a reader has prompted me to address the failure of
higher education in a new way. The key line from the note:
“You’re
being very irresponsible discouraging people from education…”
I don’t have a
problem with education at all, in fact, I strongly encourage everyone to get
one. But I encourage an education to be acquired the proper way: freely (at
least in terms of money). Books served to provide an education in years past,
and today the internet provides massive amounts of material to anyone who wants
it, and knows what questions to ask. I grant that “knows what questions to ask”
is tough, but I still see no need to get into perpetual debt slavery just to
get some help in that regard.
It’s not I who has
been irresponsible, it’s higher education, because the insane focus of growth
has really cheated people in so, so, many ways.
“We’ve started a new program to create
more math and science teachers…”
--it seems
every year I read something like this from Admin.
Take the
apparently endless need for more math and science teachers. Gosh, it seems like
I’ve heard screaming about the shortage of these types of teachers for my
entire life. I grant I’ve never been unemployed but…I don’t get anything extra
for being a math teacher over, say, being a Women’s Studies teacher, if
anything I get less. To judge by pay, the biggest
shortage must be in college sportsball coaches…queer how
there are no programs for that (could you imagine a thousand sections of
“remedial sportsball coaching”?). But I digress.
Anyway, I’m told
there’s a massive shortage of teachers in my field, year after year. Other
fields with chronic shortages give their employees huge pay. Why doesn’t that
endless shortage seem to help teachers some? Instead, they just create programs
to churn out more, more, more.
I could also
point out that there’s no shortage of buffoons, and yet administrative pay
seems to only go up, and not once have I been at a school that’s pushed the
creation of more administrator degree programs, but I digress, again.
Higher education
today is more and more about jobs training, even at the university level. The
point I want to get to is that amidst the grotesque fetishization of growth in
higher education, nobody ever asks: Do we really need so many math teachers/deviant
sex specialists/psychology majors/communications majors or whatever?
Maybe this
question is unreasonable to ask at the undergraduate level, where much of the
coursework is “general studies” despite all the specialization, but what of graduate school?
It’s
irresponsible for a university system to create thousands of specialists in graduate
level deviant sexual practices, to name just one topic, when it knows full well
there are only a handful of positions open for the graduates.
A recent post on Academics Anonymous, a series
of posts from academics criticizing higher ed--if you criticize higher ed, you
need to be anonymous as administrative reprisals can be vicious--really
highlights how bad the system is today:
Whenever an
academic position opens up in my department, we get hundreds of applications.
In today’s demented system, there is a strong priority given to females and
other “protected minorities” as they’re
called…it’s an
open secret I’ve covered before.
There aren’t even
enough jobs to be filled just by the protected minorities. Hundreds of
applicants to fill the one position, and only one position opens up every few
years.
But then we accept 20 or so graduate students
every year. Admin pressures and
pressures and pressures for more, because more students means more growth, and
growth is everything in higher
education.
Do the math here.
Let’s just say
that one position opens up every 2 years.
In those two years
we get 40 students to train to fill that position.
Around 20 of those
students eventually graduate (and in many departments far more than half
graduate).
Bottom line, we
produce 20 times as many people as necessary to fill job positions.
It’s not just
math departments, every department on campus is run like this. If the
department head doesn’t accept an irresponsible number of students, admin will
fire that department head and replace her (going with the most likely pronoun
it seems) with someone who will push for more more more irresponsible growth.
The end result is
yes, the poor academic linked above, despite having a STEM degree, will receive
100 rejections, despite the graduate degree in a field we’re constantly being
told needs more graduates.
There’s nobody to
hire them, and in most technical fields, self-employment isn’t an option (gene
splicing in the ol’ garage just doesn’t work so well).
After 10
years of hunting for an academic post, I’m exhausted and seriously doubt my
choice of career. There must be a better system…
There are
so very few “real” jobs in academia, and the competition is fierce. I have to
consider if administration was really clever enough to plan this out: creating
a huge surplus of people in the job pool means administration can exploit
academics pitilessly while admin plunders the system.
But I have
my doubts about working in academia now. An old tutor of mine has advised me
not to on a number of occasions. He has warned me of an academic environment
that is increasingly exploitative. He says many colleagues feel trapped by it.
It is a stifling,
brutal system. When I was at a skeezy community college, I felt trapped. There
were few positions available elsewhere, and they might not even consider me
because of the black mark of the skeezy school on my resume (and yes, I was
asked about it at the job interview). If I quit, well, then I’m unemployed for
years, and even more desperate, and having to compete with “joker”
education degrees makes the system even more hostile to honest
educators.
It really is nuts
what’s going on in academia, and it forces me to be honest in my advice, even
at the risk of being called irresponsible:
“Remember kids, don’t stay in school!”
No comments:
Post a Comment