Remember Sunrise Semester?

By Professor Doom

 

Admin: “Utilization of Online Education will change the interface of higher education! We need to position ourselves to take advantage of these learners by installing dashboards and establishing metrics to strategically enhance our retention plan for growth in the 21^st century…”

--I’m kidding here, completely making up the usual administrative gibberish…I bet I fooled a few.

 

Online education is all the rave now, since supposedly it’s the wave of the future, the One True Way that will make higher education available to all (but what about public libraries, haven’t they been around for many decades?). I can’t even begin to estimate the number of hours I’ve had administrators lecture me on how important it is to maximize this revenue stream, the better to enhance their administrative salaries.

 

At my alma mater, a small, private college, there are 350 faculty members, 67% of whom are contingent labor and 4% of whom are tenured. There are 2200 students and--wait for it!--1300 administrative positions. What in the world can ever explain those numbers?

--part of the advantage of online work is faculty become basically irrelevant to higher education. There is a book on this.

 

I’ll grant I have the resistance to change that all “old folks” have, but allow me to inject some sanity into this mad rush to onlinedness for everyone.

There has always been an interest in using newfangled technology for education. Over a century ago, reliable mail service made “correspondence courses” a possibility. You could sit in your farmhouse with a kerosene lamp and take college courses, reading books on your own time and demonstrating skills. Back then, institutions of higher education had integrity, and, realizing that correspondence courses required very little effort on the part of the institution, charged a much reduced fee for this type of course. You can still find that now, and every few years I get a student taking such a course looking to hire a tutor to help with the concepts. “Cheap” correspondence courses didn’t have much prestige, and were pretty vulnerable to scammers, but never really caught on.

This is no surprise.

For most of human existence, the key way humans learned a skill was to be physically near a human demonstrating the skill, one willing to explain exactly what he’s doing. This is what most “apprenticeship” programs are, after all, and it’s little different in higher education, where the skills are far more arcane than necessary for almost all human beings. A hardworking student could nevertheless learn a skill from a book (I even learned how to juggle just from reading a book, and, of course, with much dedicated practice) if no other option was available.

Radio next became the hot new technology for education. There were radio courses—talk about available to everyone!—which admittedly weren’t so effective, since you had to actually tune in at the right time to catch the lecture, and humans really benefit from seeing a skill in action.

Then came television. The hot new technology was exploited via “Sunrise Semester,” where the university would broadcast taped lectures very early in the morning. The student could wake up early, and watch, or just use the Betamax machine (I might still have a few such tapes in a box somewhere) or VHS to record the lecture, for later consumption. These were offered at my institution when I was an undergraduate, and I imagine other major schools had something similar. Although these courses are not much different than long YouTube videos, they never caught on enough to really matter. It worked for a few students, but most folks really needed the “old school” way of direct learning in the presence of someone who knew the material.

Now, we have the newfangled technology of the internet…and it’s wildly successful, despite being little different from Sunrise Semester. Now, absolutely, much of that success is both obviously and completely bogus, but even so it’s still more successful than previous techno-offerings of delivery.

Admin won’t think about the origin of the success of online coursework, instead being content to suck up all the student loan money despite the blatant fraud. Allow me to explain the difference why videos today are so much more popular than videos 20 years ago. Next time.

 

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

What Administrators Think of Faculty, part 2

By Professor Doom

 

A couple posts back I examined why administrators don’t want to give faculty even a crumb: administrators are trained to think that way in their graduate level administration courses. The reasoning as given in the course is simple—the administrator is terrified that the faculty’s knowledge will become worthless, and thus faculty are a waste of money, money that is far better spent going into the administrator’s pockets.

 But how exactly does that knowledge become worthless?

 

Admin: “Graduating students must take at least six hours of a foreign language (French, Russian, or Chinese/Mandarin).

--Part of my graduation requirements in the 80s…I studied Spanish for 2 years in high school, only to find out that, what with all the native speakers in Florida, that I’d have to learn a different language once I got to college. D’oh—back then, education was about learning new things, so you couldn’t take courses filled with stuff you already knew.

 

Admin: “In lieu of the foreign language requirement, graduating students can take a 3 hour introductory computer course.”

--It seems harmless enough, but removing the foreign language requirements effectively annihilated such departments on campus, causing tenured faculty to be fired. Students complained about taking Mickey Mouse courses with information they already knew (sample test question: “Identify the monitor in the picture of a set up computer”), but admin had the stranglehold on by this point.

 

Admin: “We’re removing the computer course requirements.”

--because it was impossible to find people to teach the (very basic) computer course for the miserable pay being offered (even for Mickey Mouse courses, faculty need graduate degrees), admin, rather than do their job of trying to find people or make the resources available, just got rid of the requirement. Keep this in mind when you meet a college graduate that knows nothing besides skills taught by otherwise unemployable people (eg, multiculturalists). It’s not his fault, the system is designed to teach people the cheapest possible skills, and learning to say “it’s not my responsibility because of [insert whatever reason you’d like, especially one involving white males]” is a cheap skill to learn, indeed.

 

 

Part of the reason faculty can be “no longer useful” in administration’s eyes is because administration has changed accreditation. It used to be, accredited schools had to teach “the classics.” There were no “fad” subjects, so a professor of, say, History, could be comfortable knowing that his subject was secure, as history is a “classic” subject. Now, an administrative pen can say history is irrelevant, and the professor is out of a job. Then admin can say mathematics past basic arithmetic is irrelevant…and admin can just keep doing this until students have no course options except gender studies, multiculturalism, and, well, whatever subject has so little market value that instructors can be rented for it, very cheaply. There are many reasons why degrees are so worthless nowadays, but one of the biggest is the elimination of serious coursework.

Curiously, the titan of industry running the course doesn’t seem to hate tenure much (it was probably handed to him as part of his package for running an institution), but he hardly has anything good to say of it. While faculty think tenure is for granting protection and insuring academic freedom from administrative whimsy, the administrative view of tenure is far different:

The test of optimal use is whether, using the same amount of money invested in a current faculty member, you could get a better faculty member in the market. Positive tenure decisions represent a bet by the guild and the institution that the capital investment in faculty members will deliver a high value over their professional lifetimes, a value that is as good or better than any other investment in faculty members that the institution could make.

Tenure is purely a financial investment, to be made only if there’s no better investment available. It is not a reward for years of successful research, or honest work, or anything like that. That first line bears repetition:

 

The test of optimal use is whether, using the same amount of money invested in a current faculty member, you could get a better faculty member in the market.

 

This is why tenure is dying—admin certainly sees no value in academic freedom, naturally sees no value in giving any sort of faculty protection against administrative abuse and, heck, it cuts into the ability of administration to just go buy another faculty member from the auction block when the time is right. Uppity faculty with integrity should be discarded as quickly as possible.

 

The significance of this investment and the risks it entails often encourage universities to rent faculty rather than incur the risk and future costs of tenured faculty.

And finally, the Poo-Bah addresses “rental” faculty, in other words, those minimally paid, no benefit, part time, adjuncts that teach the majority of classes in higher education. Again, the administrator shows ignorance here; when you “rent” something for a long time, you normally pay more than if you “bought” it. Rented slaves faculty actually cost much less, even when they’re rented for years on end.

 

Contingent faculty have many different perspectives on this issue. For some, the freedom from having to meet tenure requirements in the up-or-out atmosphere of most university tenure processes is an advantage

 

(Pause for laughter…but the administrator/professor of the course is not joking)

Wow, seriously? “Many different perspectives” is a hysterical way to put it, comparable to the “many different perspectives” slaves viewed their own situation, I suppose. I guess somewhere on the ‘Net there’s an adjunct saying how great it is to have no benefits, no job security, and to be paid $2000 to teach a class with 50 students (representing perhaps $100,000 or more of revenue to the institution in the form of tuition), basically doing the exact same job of the permanent faculty (those that remain) for a small fraction of the price. This theoretical adjunct is probably thrilled to see the money saved go to huge administrative salaries, too.

Educationist trying to teach trigonometry: “How come I can’t get the cotangent of 90 degrees by taking the reciprocal of tangent of 90 degrees? My calculator keeps saying ‘error’!”

--Because they can be rented very cheaply, educationists, people with bogus “Math Education” degrees, now teach mathematics courses. I respect that, sometimes, they ask for help about topics they’re utterly clueless about but…students paying many thousands of dollars for their courses probably shouldn’t be given the cheapest possible teachers. Alas, that’s what admin thinks students deserve. Curiously, getting cheap admin is never an option…

 

I really appreciate the candor of the Poo-Bah to reveal his real thoughts. We need more of this. When I tell people the truth of what’s going on higher education, how a clueless administrative caste is plundering the system and destroying everything that made the higher education system the best in the world in the 20^th century…the tales come out so farfetched that I can appreciate if someone finds it all hard to believe.

But when a high grand administrator backs up what I say, and doesn’t even realize it? That’s priceless. I encourage anyone who thinks I’m being thin-skinned about this to take the above, direct quotes, in this and the previous essay on this topic and substitute all references to “faculty” or “faculty members” with “Negro.” Hilarity will ensue. I’ll start with my favorite:

 

faculty who no longer serve an economic purpose can only be reconstructed at such a high cost that it is often more efficient to buy a new faculty member rather than reconstruct an old one.

 

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

Another disconnect article...

I don't want to come across as a gold bug (honest, it's just a shiny rock, but do keep in mind paper only beats rock in children's games), but it is funny all these "cash for gold" places springing up...none of them have any to sell, and a nearby pawn shop "Gold and Guns" has plenty of guns. Yes, they have gold, but "none to sell."




Now, when you do the math on a shopping mall "cash for gold" place, you realize they must buy up about a pound of gold a month just to break even...that's an awful lot of gold just from jewelry, so I'm very puzzled. They sell no gold, just buy.




I know, they theoretically sell the gold they buy to refineries, but it just doesn't add up. The mainstream media, as always, seems clueless on the matter.




Take this recent article:




http://www.cnbc.com/id/101163824




The web page title is "India turn from gold to silver" but the original title remains (for now): "India forced to take its eyes off gold". You can't guess that's the real title, as the article makes it sound like people in India aren't buying as much gold as usual. Going against centuries of tradition, the people of India (a country that's real big on following tradition) just up and decided to buy less gold. So, gold must be a bad investment.




What's missing? The fact that, indeed, Indians are being forced to not buy gold.  See, the Indian government, in order to protect people from buying shiny rocks as gifts, have banned gold imports:


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-15/india-bans-all-gold-coin-imports-increases-capital-controls


Now, CNBC isn't some one-man news operation that might miss a major fact like this, so it's pretty inexplicable.


The comments section, of course, hints at once again a disconnect between reality and mainstream news. Indian citizens aren't just "choosing" not to buy gold...their government is protecting them from buying shiny rocks that would help them not have their money inflated away for some reason that would only be a guess.


Why the disconnect, indeed?

What Administrators Think of Faculty

By Professor Doom

 

      Many times I’ve given some indication how faculty feel about administrators, but perhaps it’s time to hear from a chief administrator how he views faculty. A former Poo-Bah of a major university is teaching an 8000-level graduate administration course, and has generously allowed much of the material online. As is so often the case in administration graduate work, the requirements are minimal (the student need do as much writing in over three months as I do for my blog in less than two weeks, and there are no exams or quizzes to verify any knowledge). Still, there is plenty of reading the student is invited to do, not that he’ll have to demonstrate he read or understood any of it.

     Faculty are well-advised to read much of what’s in this course, as I’m certain what is said, is said with all sincerity. Some highlights and commentary:

“Faculty represent the capital stock of the university.”

It’s good to understand that faculty are not human beings…we’re like little buildings, to be knocked over if we get in the administration’s way.

“Moreover, faculty drive the largest part of the cost of any institution of higher education.”

This is, of course, a non-fact. There are more administrators than faculty, and administrators are paid far more than faculty. I can’t even begin to understand how a chief administrator could not know this.

Faculty, in this business view, simply represent some form of knowledge worker, and in response to economic difficulties many faculty take advantage of this misconception to construct labor unions and other structures that reinforce this mistaken notion.

I simply love the matter-of-fact speaking here. Seriously, unions are the result of a “mistaken notion.” I’ve detailed abuse after abuse of faculty by administration on this blog…it’s not a mistaken notion to construct a labor union, it’s an act of desperation. The American Association of University Professors, the most successful such union, has been in existence for 99 years, and is still going. This makes the AAUP one of the longer lived misconceptions; curiously, the administrator knows the AAUP exists (he mentions it elsewhere in this course). Unfortunately, institutions aren’t obligated to honor unions, and with the glut of academics far too desperate for work to quibble about working conditions, it’s been pretty hard for the AAUP or other unions to gain much traction.

The reason capital is the best way to regard faculty is that tenured faculty represent a long term investment not easily transferred, sold, or otherwise liquidated.

I’m not sure faculty like the idea of being transferred, sold, or, jeez, “liquidated.” But we often feel like chattel. As per those “it’s not complicated” commercials, the reason we feel like chattel is because we’re treated like chattel, but I digress. There’s a tremendous hypocrisy here—admin drives up the cost of higher education to stratospheric levels, justifying it because “knowledge is valuable”…but knowledge workers are worth nothing.

faculty who no longer serve an economic purpose can only be reconstructed at such a high cost that it is often more efficient to buy a new faculty member rather than reconstruct an old one.

 

I’ve added the boldface. At the risk of being patronizing, it occurs to me that “chattel” is something of an obscure word. Here’s the definition:

Chattel: something (such as a slave, piece of furniture, tool, etc.) that a person owns other than land or buildings.

So, go ahead and read that line again about buying new faculty members…faculty really are regarded as slaves here. I again point out, I’m not making this up. The only reason anyone knows the truth now is I bothered to see with my own eyes, but anyone who looked can see this.

Imagine if, instead of being appointed by other administrators, administrators were drawn from faculty, chosen by faculty, and had to return to faculty after only a few years of administration. How likely would it be that administrators would pontificate about how faculty should be treated no differently than the garbage cans on campus, to be taken away once they serve no purpose?

I will cover this in more detail next time, but consider how well this course demonstrates what’s happening in higher education: the rulers at the top care nothing for education, and consider educators simply chattel, to be liquidated when they no longer serve administration’s foul purposes.

 

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

NYT Is Clueless on Education

By Professor Doom

 

      Last time I wrote how there’s so often a disconnect between a mainstream media article and reality, a disconnect that is painfully revealed in the comments section. People that know what’s really going on can’t help but speak up in the comments against the lies errors in the article.

     A recent editorial in the New York Times, “A Solution for Bad Teaching” is amazing both for its matter-of-fact style…and the firm corrections from readers that actually know the facts. One would really think the NYT would know a thing or two, but the stuff being said here is, well, weak. Let’s get it on:

“IT’S no secret that tenured professors cause problems in universities.”

      What the heck? The article says this in the sense that tenure is bad for teaching, but this is just pure silly. Tenure is dead. This has been known for years. Yes, there are faculty with tenure, but every year, the average age of a tenured faculty member goes up very nearly 1 year—there’s little new blood going into tenure. Most college courses are not taught by tenured faculty…in fact, most courses aren’t even taught by permanent instructors. Instead, minimally paid, poorly treated, no-benefits adjuncts now make up the majority of teaching. These are well known, public, much discussed facts in higher education. The article is roundly laughed at in the comments for even implying the presence of tenure is the problem.

      From the very first sentence, the article is disconnected from reality. If you don’t read the comments, you might not know that. Alas, the article is more than one sentence. The article quotes some educationists:

“the relationship between teaching and research is zero.”

 

Again, the comments point out that reality is different. It turns out, no surprise, that researchers in a field are actually interested in that field, and generally are better teachers. Researchers tend to be innovators in a subject. Mussolini might not have been a great person, but I bet he would be an awesome teacher of what fascism is…as loathsome as I find communism, I would pay real money to sit in a classroom and have Karl Marx teach me about communism (and answer a few questions!). Researchers are creators, you *want* them teaching about what they’ve made, and that’s how it works in education, too. A great chemist is going to have great insights on chemistry. Now, yes, it’s certainly possible that some researchers are lousy teachers…but some teachers are lousy teachers, too.

The article goes on:

“In a recent landmark study at Northwestern, students learned more from professors who weren’t on the tenure track.”

Alas, the link (from the article) goes to a pay page, so I can’t see the study with my own eyes. It’s criticized in the comments, at least, and measures "success" in terms of passing rates--seeing as all it takes to get higher passing rates is a threat from admin, I don't find the study's results surprising. On the other hand, here’s an article showing that says the opposite, and you won’t have to pay to read it.

Ok, I grant that when studies conflict, it’s just a matter of opinion. But the article goes on to discuss student evaluations:

“students rarely favor teachers who grade leniently — and give higher ratings to teachers who assign heavier workloads.”

Now, this, seriously, is a joke. I’ve cited study after study after that this is not the case…and what the author says flies in the face of common sense. Yes, there are studies that give a very low (0.06) positive correlation with workload and evaluation…but a correlation that small is meaningless in every useable sense. Students totally favor teachers that grade leniently, although it may be more clear to say they punish teachers that grade harshly.

The article does discuss fixes for bad teaching, but when all the premises are demonstrably wrong, it seems pointless to consider the conclusions. An average reader of the article will merely pick up “tenure is bad” and a few other false statements.

Only by reading the comments can one now get some idea of the reality of information from mainstream media. But if reading random comments is more informative, more honest, than the “professional” news, why bother with professional news? I guess that’s why mainstream media outlets are losing viewers, and money, so precipitously.

A few choice comments highlight the level of disconnect between this article and reality:

my overall impression is that during my career, tenure was the most valuable bulwark against the dumbing-down that has been driven by administrators and schools of education.

--Sorry, I had to mention another shot at Education as a field. Again, everyone working in higher education knows what the problem is…

I do take issue with the claim that it is only a mistaken "popular belief" that students evaluations track with lenient courses. The study linked here in support of the authors claim is based on research from the 90s…In Academically Adrift, the authors cite Valen Johnson (2003), so not much more current, but reflecting just the opposite trend…

--I tried to get admin and my Educationist colleagues to consider what was said in Academically Adrift. I was punished for being “non-collegial,” and not one of these scholars (sic) even bothered to check out the book in the college library (I saw with my own eyes that the book’s only stamp came from when I checked it out months earlier).

 

As someone who spent 43 years in university research labs and classrooms before I retired, I beg to differ…

--Yet another direct observer that knows when he’s being lied to, because he’s seen it with his own eyes. For years I trusted what my “betters” told me, until the disconnects between what I was told and what I was seeing motivated me to commit myself to see with my own eyes a great many more things, and to blog what I now know to be the truth of the matter.

I’ll let the other comments stand on their own:

The assertion that there is zero relationship between teaching and research is nonsense. In the sciences, if you aren't doing research, your knowledge and teaching are going to be dated within 15 years.

Academia has a problem, but this proposal is surprisingly naïve

… the way you've described the "necessary evil" of tenure quite offensive and baffling…

This article is naive on several fronts…

This is all the same old neoliberal lies…(1) Most instructors now are poverty wage paid, "part time," non-tenured adjuncts. Tenure is already history….

 

There were a very few (guardedly) positive comments, but otherwise the comments were many variations of “this is so wrong.” Even a minutes’ research by the author of the article would have told him what he was writing was wrong.

I haven’t asked many questions of the reader lately, but here goes: why are such disconnects so common nowadays?

I strongly encourage you to think long and hard about that question, because every answer I come up with is frightening.

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

The Disconnect of Higher Education

By Professor Doom

 

     Thank goodness for online news. There, it’s easy to find a major disconnect between what mainstream media presents, and reality: you just have to read the comments.

“a tall white guy wearing a ski mask and a skull cap”

--a line from a news article discussing the attackers at mall.

     For example, the above snippet is from a mainstream article about a swarm of teenagers that attacked a mall en masse. Reading the article, you’d get no idea there’s anything racial going on; there is one, and only one, reference to race, and I’ve quoted it, above…somehow the witness determined the race of this one attacker through a ski mask. It’s possible.

      You have to read the comments to find out the actual story:

“No mention that the howling mob was a pack of feral black teenagers. Yet, when some woman mentioned she saw a "white" it get immediately reported. I don't trust her version…”

     There are plenty of comments indicating the race of most of the attackers. Why doesn’t the article tell the whole story? Instead, the article insists that it was merely teenagers, and nothing else. Maybe it was all white teenagers, and this is a random, wrong, comment…but since the article has no problem mentioning one of the attackers was white, it’s curious to omit the other attackers. The comments reveal a disconnect between the article and reality. Another quick one, and then off to education:

 

The founder and CEO of American Title Services in Centennial was found dead in his home this week…from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

--from The Denver Post.

 

The above article doesn’t even question the possibility that this was NOT a suicide. Most folks don’t commit suicide via a very slow, very painful, very bloody, very unreliable method like this, and it just seems like a few details explaining why suicide is the only possibility should be given. Only in the comments section is the disconnect between what the article says, and reality, addressed.

Now, to education: consider the fundamental disconnect in an article by a Chief Innovation Officer in the University of Texas system, Marti Stein. A title of “Chief Innovation Officer” indicates “administrator”, as they love spiffy titles to go with monstrous salaries. The author is in the Institute for Transformational Learning—that sure sounds important, but it is just yet another administrative fiefdom. Much of the money in higher education gets soaked up by these fiefdoms, which do little beyond employing administrators who slurp up vast sums of money in make-work projects. I’ve written of the like before. Shut down these fiefdoms which do nothing but waste massive sums of money, and I bet institutions of higher education will have an easier time with their finances.

The article is Ready or Not, Change is Coming, and it’s filled with the edubabble that dominates administration in higher education. The title may as well be the whole article, as content is light. Instead of real discussion, the article is littered with lines and keywords like:

“…Not resigned to the passive receipt of knowledge, many are eager to interact with and utilize the world of content and experience around them. They have a firm belief in their own power to leverage networks of peers…”

--“utilize” and “peers” are important keywords, words that ever spew from bureaucratic mouths.

and

“…For these learners, the value proposition of traditional education…”

--“learners” is the blood-soaked upside-down flag, a sign that an educationist is speaking.

and

“…Inevitably, someone will implement the solutions that will pilot our next generation of learners...”

---if it’s inevitable, we sure don’t need to read this article, right?

Reading the article, it looks like a piece on something-or-other in Higher Education, and with all the big words, it’s easy to miss that not much is said here beyond “change is coming.” It’s only in the comments that, again, you see the disconnect between administration in higher education and that folks that actually know what’s going on:

 

“Old wine in new casks-the author should define "we". Are they college presidents who have shown little or no leadership in leading these recommended changes?”

--faculty and administrators read this article, and you can really tell which respondent is from the serf caste, or the ruling caste.

 

Hear, hear! [Author], you make excellent points, thank you!

--it isn’t just that administrators are all supportive in their comments. It’s that administrators can use their real names. Faculty must post under pseudonyms (much like me), because the penalty for not supporting admin is fast termination, without due process. The supportive comments say nothing (no surprise considering where they’re coming from), so I’ll focus on the many more negative comments:

 

“…higher ed as an industry? - right there i stop reading . . .”

---this is the big disconnect between admin and reality. An administrator, using his name and picture, quickly responds to this comment to assert that yes, higher education is an industry, implying it needs titanic administrators.

 

“…Is it me, or are articles about the coming ed-tech rapture looking more and more like algorithm generated boilerplate?”

--the article really is written that poorly, and I must include a parody from the comments:

 

“…But have you considered that the metrics from institutional dashboards help to define the change agents who will propel student lifecycle management into a new platform to leverage the 21st century learner into a student centered space where they will flourish in the global knowledge economy through exposure to multiple instructional contexts?...”

--faculty are exposed to this gobbledygook nonstop, and so we often parody it…behind administrative backs, of course. This could easily have been an excerpt from the article, or from any of the last dozen administrative missives.

 

“…Methinks [the author is] part oft he problem.”

--The big disconnect reveal here. Faculty all know that administration is the issue. It’s like having pedophiles run day cares and operate ice cream trucks.

 

I certainly understand sites that don’t have comments—in my blog I have to delete comments from spammers regularly. That said, the comments on a story, especially unmoderated comments, give a much clearer picture of the reality of the situation.

I know, I tend to rant and rave about how bad things are, but I encourage the reader to see with his own eyes what administrators have to say, at least a few lines…much more than that might give eye cancer.

 

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

Life Skills As College?

By Professor Doom

 

“…100 level lessons will help you find resources to pay for college, understand the steps required to apply for financial aid and prepare to repay your student loans…”

---I’m serious, this is a college course, from a supposedly non-profit institution. Not only are students being loaned money, they’re now being billed to learn how to get the loans? Professors can make assignments from the lessons provided, but I suspect many students are quickly directed to learn how to get more loan money for the institution. There are many lessons…

 

      Higher education isn’t just a business for for-profit institutions, all institutions are grubbing for money as much as possible. Perhaps that’s the way of the world, but higher education is supposed to be about, well, knowledge. Now, absolutely, it can be argued that the knowledge of higher education is worthless, questionable, useless for getting a real job…I readily admit that no Shakespearean sonnet has helped me in any direct way, and memorizing the Hamlet soliloquy has likewise produced no monetary benefit to me. Even much of my obscure mathematical lore hasn’t really mattered all that much when it comes time to write a check to the IRS. I like knowing it, however, and I’m grateful to learn it in an era when learning didn’t mean a lifetime of endless debt.

     But, at least it is knowledge that takes effort to learn. Administrators in higher education are so hard pressed to grab money, any money, that they’re naturally inclined to offer courses that will sell. Until now, I’ve focused on questionable courses like third grade math or courses based around TV shows and recent movies…but at least these courses have knowledge (of a sort) in them that I can suppose is not everyday knowledge. These courses sell, and sales are good for business.

 

“…600 level lessons will help you survive and pay for graduate school, manage debt during school and prepare for life after graduate school…”

--Isn’t there at least a tiny conflict of interest in colleges selling coursework like this? It’s like the diamond council recommending you spend 2 month’s salary on a wedding ring, or the ice cream council recommending the ideal human weight to be 400 pounds. None of the lessons are of the form “the world is full of scammers that are dedicated to separating you from you money.” Go figure. Did I mention this school is fully accredited?

 

     Now, it certainly is important that our young people get useful advice about debt. Call me cynical, but I have my doubts college administration is really interested in telling students what a bad idea a loan for college education can be.

 

  300 level lessons will help you search for a job, prepare for an interview and understand the details related to life after graduation

  400 level lessons will help you manage your credit card debt, understand credit scores and reports and protect yourself from identity theft

--to be fair, this is good advice to give, although I’m not exactly sure waiting until the students are 20 years old (the usual age of students in 300 and 400 level courses) makes sense. We’ll teach kids about sex, years before they’re interested in sex, but teach them about credit cards a full 2 years after they get their first card? Is anyone in higher education thinking this through?

 

     I don’t rule out the above coursework as useful, but it’s weird how much it’s been spread out. I took a course on personal finance as an elective (one of two electives I was allowed, unlike the near infinite amount granted students today—more sales!). The course I took basically covered every topic in all the above life skills lesson plans, and more. Now, of course, administrators determine what are useful life skills, and are inclined to think the things they know are important.

 

A former assistant dean–or perhaps deanlet or deanling might be a better title–at my university explained that students need to learn more than academic skills.12 They also must be taught, “the universal life skills that everyone needs to know.” And what might be an example of one of these all-important proficiencies? According to this deanling, a premier example is event planning. “For many students, the biggest event they’ve ever planned is a dinner at home.” But, planning an event on campus might require, “reserving the room, notifying Security, arranging transportation and lodging for out-of-town speakers, ordering food.” Armed with training in a subject as important and intellectually challenging as event planning, students would hardly need to know anything about physics or calculus or literature or any of those other inconsequential topics taught by the stodgy faculty.

--Ok, so a course on event planning. Hey, the deanling has to plan events on campus, so it seemed important to her. Just because everything you need to know can fit in one pamphlet doesn’t rule out it being higher education. Apparently.

     Now there are whole college degrees based around things that, frankly, used to be basic life skills, or at best job skills that one could learn in a long afternoon:

 

EVPL 240: Event Planning/Risk Management

Credits: 5.0

--I’m serious. Yes, 5 credit hours. There are serious, hard core courses on obscure topics in astrophysics that don’t get 4 hours of college credit. A look at the course objectives doesn’t explain why so much credit for this life skill. Sticking “risk management” in the title really just makes this course sound like quite a bit more than it is, or even possibly could be.

 

     The above course looks like they at least tried to make it as challenging as actual college courses, but other “life skills” courses look to be as accessible as a stack of feel-good brochures. There’s nothing wrong with brochures, mind you, they’re a great way to give “need to know” information about fairly thin topics. But why make courses out of brochures? The whole point of brochures is to put all the key information into the tiny packet it belongs, not spread it out over months.

 

The Life Skills Tool Box is a… accredited program…The Life Skills course is built around the practices of resilience, emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention.

---Seriously. Ok, I grant that “don’t down a bottle of sleeping pills” is a useful life skill…but how do you spend four or more hours learning how to not kill yourself?

 

     Back when educators controlled education, getting a new course approved for the course catalogue was not an easy thing. You had to convince your department head that there was a need for the course, and that, more importantly, the course would actually prepare students to learn more (recall, old accreditation mandated that education was about preparation). The validity and usefulness of the course is what allowed it to exist. Students could not be given the option to take worthless courses that didn’t do anything.

     Now, if you want a new course, you don’t have to talk to other experts in your field. Instead, you go to admin, say “hey, this will sell” and you’re set. It no longer matters if the course has any actual material in it. Students don’t just get the option to take bogus courses, catalogues are now minefields of uselessness.

     If higher education is going to stop being a joke, we’ll need to flush out those courses that are just money soaks. Higher education might well be a business, but there still needs to be integrity. McDonald’s is a business, too, and the stuff they sell is at least arguably food…too much of what is being peddled by higher education isn’t even arguably higher education.

       So that’s my two-pronged fix: trim down the bogus courses that don’t lead to degrees, and go back to the “old way” of creating college courses, where the justification for the course was more than “it will sell.”

 

     “Write down how you would write $17.49 on a personal check.”

--actual test question from a “College Algebra” course at an accredited institution, by a teacher that admin claims is far superior to me. Yes, the answer was “Seventeen and forty-nine/100.” Such coursework really helps with retention, but…this is not higher education.

 

     Should students go into debt to learn how to make an entry in a check? Should course catalogues be filled with dreck that offers no real education, and, often, no job skills? Why are the answers to these questions obvious to the reader, but not to administrators in higher education?

 

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