By Professor Doom
“An Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
--Plato
Studying higher
education as much as I do, I have no choice but to question what I am doing. I
see the massively rising student debt, I see the Poo Bahs raking in ever more
money, see them
crying about the lack of money in the system…and I ask myself if I can perform honorable work
in a system run by so many (not all) dishonorable people.
I believe I can,
for now, though I concede in the past I’ve worked for schools where I could not
say as much. When I knew wasn’t doing honorable work, I still did the best I
can, while seeking to move on.
The title above,
then, isn’t from me, but from someone who, finally, is starting to see that
there may be a problem with higher education today. The title to his article is
not much different from my fake quote:
How does this guy
sleep at night? I mean, it’s one thing to sell terrible hamburgers or the like,
but a college degree represents a major commitment, and the tales of people
who’ve been destroyed by “the college experience” are legion…how does this guy
sleep at night, I again ask?
But the devil that
sits on my shoulder is whispering “fees and loans, fees and loans”. Students
who borrow the full whack to cover their tuition and living costs will end up
£45,000 in debt.
As is often the
case, I’m looking at things in the UK…or some reason, the media in the US just
ain’t got the time to look at what we’re doing in higher education here. I’ve
been following higher ed “across the pond” and basically the UK is adapting to
the US model. They’re only a few years behind…I can’t help but worry for the
youth over there, they’re about to get some hard core raking over the coals
soon.
Independent predictions estimate that only 5% will repay their loans in full
and nearly three quarters won’t. The loans get written off after 30 years
(although if they’re sold to private investors, this might change), but they’ll be paying monthly
until then, and struggling to deal with low wage growth [pdf] and rising rents.
Again, the UK is
early in the game. Around 27%
of student loans in the US is in default, but that’s realistically an
under-estimate. The huge default rate is mostly covered up because there
are so many ways to put off paying the loans. I see people in their 40s and
older “going back to school” because they haven’t paid off their loans from
when they were 18. You don’t have to make payments if you’re in college, you
see.
It really is nuts:
the first bout of college didn’t pay off and left the victim with debts. Why
would the second round be any better? But that’s why the default rate is “only”
27%.
They might
get middle-class jobs but not necessarily middle-class lifestyles.
This is the
problem I keep coming to, myself. We’re indebting these students so deeply for
“high paying jobs.” Most students won’t get those jobs, that’s just the facts.
The students that get the jobs, still aren’t being helped by their college education,
as the loan payments eat up the “higher pay” the job provides.
This is not
honorable. We should not be doing this, in general.
How does this guy
sleep at night? Not so soundly, I reckon:
All of this
circulates like sharks in my head when I speak to prospective students. It’s
like I’m trying to sell a car that could well turn out to have a faulty engine.
The next question,
of course, is why does he do
this?
Emails from
management regularly remind us that recruitment numbers aren’t as healthy as
they could be,
And this was the
problem I had when I was at a skeezy school. “Recruitment numbers,” goodness I
remember having to go to meeting after meeting about this. I’ll help the guy
out with some advice: recruitment numbers are never good enough for admin.
My skeezy school
set a record for growth for one year, across the country. Did admin say “ok,
now we can focus on quality”? Heck no, the only thing admin ever wants is
MOAR, and so I still went to mandatory meetings to learn the next plan to
sacrifice quality in return for ever more quantity (more accurately, ever more
checks from students).
The plague
destroying (much of) high ed in the US has infected the UK: the schools have
come under the control of people who are not educators. I remember recruiting,
years ago, much like this guy. Professors don’t do that much anymore in the US,
and it’s taken over by admin here.
Part of the
takeover is the corporate-speak, and the professor here knows what he’s hearing
may as well be native language of demons:
We’re
encouraged to improve our “conversion rate” – the percentage of people who come
to an open day and then actually study with us. I have no idea how (and they
don’t tell us), but this is developing into our collective sales target.
Conversion
rates, sales targets, retention rates, ROI per students, full time enrollment…these
are the things you hear all the time at a school that has lost its way. There’s
no discussion of helping students, job placement, improving education, or
anything that won’t directly add to the administrative salary.
As I mentioned
before, recruiting isn’t done so much by faculty in the US, admin took it over.
The professor explains why:
If I was a
well-informed and calculating student, I’d study elsewhere, but my job partly
depends on persuading people not to. I just hope (for my sake, not theirs) that
our prospective applicants can’t see it in my eyes.
The
professor is an educator, a scholar…he’ll ask himself if he’s doing honorable
work, and will understand when the answer is “no.” That makes it hard for him
to hurt other human beings.
Thus,
the need for administrators to take over recruiting. Admin will never examine if what they
are doing is honorable work, because that might lead to the poor kid coming right out
of high school having a chance of avoiding a lifetime of debt slavery.
Admin can’t allow
that.
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