By Professor Doom
Parking
Minion: “We can’t sell you the parking tag until the semester starts.”
Me: “That’s
4 days from now. Why can’t I get this $250 tag now?”
Parking
Minion: “We’ll have them next week, sir.”
Me: “But
there’ll be huge crowds next week. Why not plan ahead?”
Parking
Minion: “I don’t know, please move along so I can help the next customer.”
--It’s merely
funny to have parking on campus cost more than tuition when I was a kid. It’s
outright bizarre that campuses can’t plan ahead to prevent long lines.
It’s so weird how
our campuses are ruled by people with degrees in Vision and Leadership, but
they can’t seem to look ahead even a little, the better to lead the way. The
post before this was the debacle of admin firing all the faculty the day before
classes start…none of the administrators felt the responsibility of leaders, to
take care of the students who paid for classes that now had no teachers.
It isn’t just at
the undergraduate level that our “leaders” are so clueless how to run things.
I’ve covered insane art school
shenanigans before, where an entire first year class resigned rather
than be cheated by administration. It goes both ways, as administration sees no
problem with cancelling a whole program when they wish:
Pursuing a
graduate degree is a major life choice; prospective students had to pack up and
move to come to this campus, had to sign rental contracts, and pay other
expenses. There should be some integrity here by the campus rulers, some
planning so that students don’t hurt themselves.
Hey, enrollments
are falling, and I can see that at some point you might have to close up. But couldn’t
the leaders with their degrees in Vision see there weren’t any students from a
mile away?
Oliver and
Sanders tell artnet News they had recruited a full cohort of 17 students; the
school says only five had actually enrolled and made deposits.
So, the faculty
running the program says they had enough students, admin says no…I’m hardly
inclined to trust admin, and I suspect regular readers of my blog aren’t,
either. Look, 5 students still represents well over $100,000 in tuition, and
the school had other programs (and around 500 other students). The smaller
program wouldn’t bankrupt the school. In fact, the school was paid in advance
to start this program, as well as others:
The CT+CR
program, though, was one of no fewer than a half-dozen new graduate programs
initiated at PNCA in the last several years. In 2007, the school received a
grant of $15 million from the Ford Foundation to found no fewer than six
graduate programs.
Wow, 15
million bucks, and they charge tuition on top of that. Seriously, admin is
wetting their beak just a little too much, and I don’t just mean at this
school. No matter that the money has been provided, there’s just not enough
profit for admin.
“…suspension
of the program is all part of a coordinated effort by the school to turn their
one-year program, created as such to make it relatively affordable, into a more
lucrative two-year program.”
It was just a 1 year program! But, admin,
dollar signs perpetually in their eyes, want to bloat out the program, to
increase profits. The professors, of course are protesting, not that it does
any good—this is a no-tenure school, and so faculty have no choice but be
subservient to administrative whims.
The calls
for fiscal responsibility ring hollow to some of the faculty, who feel they
have been the ones getting the squeeze. The latest uproar follows protests by students and
faculty this past
spring, over what they called the abrupt discontinuation of the employment of
many adjunct faculty. They complained of rising pay for school executives while
adjunct faculty members scrape to get by, and Ellen Lesperance, who teaches at
the school and has participated in the protests, points out that adjunct
instructors represent about three-quarters of the school’s faculty.
Now, for your
basic undergraduate degree, half or so of the coursework is “general
education”; it keeps kids in college a couple of extra years, but that’s the
price of education (well, it was the price, before the student loan scam also
added “be in debt forever”).
But graduate
school is different, it’s supposed to be focused. So, there’s no reason for
grad school programs to take 4 years, or 2 years, or any particular length of
time…the program is supposed to train the students in very specific skills, and
nothing more. If it only takes a few months to learn the particular skills,
then a few months is all the program should take…not years.
The student loan
scam, more accurately the plundering leaders who rule higher education now,
don’t like that at all.
I know, most
readers will blow this all off, saying “I’m not getting a graduate art degree
anyway, so who cares?” The gentle needs to understand that what’s happening
here is happening most everywhere else in higher education: even “specialized”
programs are being bloated beyond all reason, to increase profits and growth.
Faculty used to be able to stop this behavior, but 75% of the faculty at this school
are helpless adjuncts (and over 50% of professors in higher education today are
adjuncts) and can do nothing. The helplessness of faculty is a big reason our
schools are all too often scams, sucking student in and loading them down with
irrelevant coursework until the loan money runs out.
I again point out
how community colleges epitomize this scam, especially the “transfer
institution” which focuses just on semi-legitimate at best general education
courses, to the exclusion of any degree-related coursework. The majority of
students stumble out of those places after years, with no actual knowledge of
anything, as I’ve shown so many times.
So, watch these
art students being cheated, and be unconcerned by it if you must, but be fairly
warned: all of our kids are getting sucked into this kind of system.
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