By Professor Doom
There’s this nice video from Prager
U, from a young person explaining how she learned more at McDonald’s than
at college. The key idea of the video is when she went to college, she was
coddled and given the following advice from the college administrators:
1)
Ask for
help when you need it
2)
Speak up
when you feel uncomfortable
3)
Place your
own well being above all other concerns
For what it’s worth, the first piece of
advice above is good: there are many lonely professors, sitting in their
offices, wishing students would come for help. It probably was the advice
faculty gave incoming students, decades ago. When administration took over,
they followed the faculty advice, and then added two more pieces of advice to
it. The new pieces of advice are questionable at best. The college made the new
student know that what was important was for her to feel good, and the
institution would do whatever it takes to keep her from feeling offended (and
she gets to define what offends her!).
The student
realizes this is ridiculous advice, advice that, if she followed, would not
make it possible for her to work at McDonald’s…which she needed to do to go to
the college which was teaching her “skills” that would make her unemployable,
even at McDonald’s.
Obviously to her
(but not to higher education administrators) this is ridiculous advice. She
explains McDonald’s advice to be more practical:
“The most important thing to McDonald’s
was not how I felt, but how my customers felt…”
“It strengthened my character, my work
ethic, and my sense of my own resilience…”
The strengthening
she received working at McDonalds is simply not possible in college, where such
goals have long since been abandoned (they used to exist, as anyone who reviews
campus mission statements from a century ago can see). It’s a
good video, but it doesn’t address why McDonald’s—not exactly an employer held
in high esteem—is now doing the job higher education used to do. The video
dances around the answer.
Let me highlight
the answer the video doesn’t, by summarizing the video:
The student
mentions that at McDonald’s, she’s told to coddle the customers in every way, do
whatever it takes to make the customer happy…even if the customer is being
ridiculous. At the college, the student is reassured that she will be coddled
in every way, that administration will do whatever it takes to make her happy…no
matter how ridiculous her concerns.
The realization
of what’s going on is thus made clear: she’s the customer of the college. I’ve written before of the “student as
customer” idiocy that has warped higher education…but seeing as so
few commenters on the video see what’s going on, it’s worth going over again,
at least lightly:
The student loan
scam warped higher education. Successful institutions of higher education no
longer needed to focus on education, and instead just needed to focus on
getting people to sign up for student loans. It’s why for-profit schools spend
as little money as possible on education, and a great
amount of money on advertising to pull in more suckers
students.
The kids on campus
today aren’t simply customers…they’re high
paying customers, and you better believe admin is very motivated to keep
these customers on campus as long as possible. The comparisons between
McDonald’s and higher education don’t just end at how they treat their
customers, however.
McDonald’s
cashiers are trained to say “would you like fries with that?” This tactic is
called “cross selling” (selling to an established customer) and is very
successful, adding millions of dollars of sales. Higher education does the
same, bloating out the course offerings with classes on Game of Thrones,
Gilligan’s Island, and other topics. Regularly indulging in these courses is just
as bad for your education as extra orders of fries are for your waistline.
The cross selling
doesn’t end with fluff courses, however. Open admissions policies extended the
user base to people holding little interest in education, and the real money
came in offering remedial coursework, based around 9th grade, 7th
grade, 5th grade, and, I promise you, even 3rd grade
material, greatly increasing sales. More insidiously, courses needed for a
degree can be offered sparsely, making it difficult if not impossible for
students to graduate on time—this is a double bonus, as it traps students on
campus even longer, and keeps the costs of hiring educators with real skills
low. Win-win for admin!
This last part
touches on a difference between McDonald’s and higher education. See,
McDonald’s actually cares about its employees, to the point that it warns
them away from eating McDonald’s food. On the other hand, higher
education seems determined to screw over the teachers as brutally as it screws
over the students.
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Getting back to
comparisons, one of the major selling points of McDonald’s is convenience (and
please understand, in no way am I
encouraging the gentle reader to eat here, I’m simply discussing a selling
point). In the same vein, higher education sells its wares regularly as “convenient.”
A great number of education degrees are available fully online—isn’t that what
you want to hear from the teacher of your child, that she became a teacher
because it’s convenient? It’s
positively ridiculous on the face of it that people are pursuing knowledge as
convenience…this whole corrupted system is due to the student loan scam. Get rid
of that, and all the other corruptions will decrease greatly.
Now, I’m not
criticizing McDonald’s for the things they do, at least not vociferously.
They’re a business, they’re supposed to give the customer what he wants.
On the other
hand, higher education is supposed to act with integrity. Every institution, as
part of its accreditation affirming that it is a legitimate institution, promises to act with integrity, and puts
that promise in writing. And so, yes, I have a real problem with higher
education being difficult to distinguish from a fast food joint, even a
successful one, and it doesn’t help that the most significant difference
between higher education and McDonald’s is McDonald’s actually cares about its
employees.
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