As I
recover from a 40 hour week of chemo, I’ll take the lazy route and just look at a picture,
explaining how every single one of the bars is somewhat mis-representative, and
how they all represent failure, often on an obvious level.
The first bar,
full time faculty, requires the second bar to think there might be a
problem—faculty have not increased relative to students. One might think the
failure to increase might not be so bad (particularly with that last bar so
high), but there’s deception here.
Admin have taken
to awarding themselves faculty positions, even when they clearly do not teach
or do research. The most outstanding example of this would be the president of
Penn State, who received
a 600k a year tenured faculty position as part of overseeing the Sandusky
affair, but many colleges classify all the library staff as faculty,
and even some fiefdoms, even if, at best, all they ever do is run a few
workshops, still grant faculty status to all the royalty there. In terms of
teaching, the number of actual “full time faculty” in the sense most people
outside the industry think of them, has dropped off, particularly in relation
to students.
This is a dated
chart, but as of 2011 enrollments were likely up 91% (probably down from that
in 2018). This huge push to slam everyone into college has been most
detrimental. College really was intended for people that could handle serious
work, and the only way to accommodate the extra students was to lower
standards, to the point that college
graduate IQ is in free fall today. That 91% increase is a testament
to the massive failure of our “leaders” in higher ed to restrain their greed. Despite the dated-ness here, keep in mind the loans of students in this chart are mostly still unpaid.
Full time
administrative numbers are up, way up, far past faculty and even students. The
whole point of good administration is to do so effectively and at low cost.
That one bar demonstrates clearly how badly our leaders have failed, all the
more so since they’ve done nothing for the students any more than they’ve done
for higher ed.
The fourth bar
reinforces the point. In every other industry, there’s an economy of scale…all
those extra students should have brought the cost per student, i.e., the
tuition, down, and yet tuition nearly tripled. Yet another demonstration of the
tremendous failure of our leaders in higher ed.
And now the
fifth bar, which reveals the reality of education. While “real” faculty numbers
have dropped in a way that’s difficult to measure, the soaring numbers of
part-time faculty, generally paid so little they qualify for welfare and get no
benefits, reveal that most courses are now taught by these minimum wage (at
best) workers in higher ed. The people at the top of higher ed are making
fortunes, but the actual teachers make nothing, being at
the bottom of a Ponzi scheme.
But it’s even
worse than that. Our kids are being shoveled into higher ed with the premise
that “education” means “money,” but they’re being taught by the most educated
members of our society…who are getting no money.
I assure the
gentle reader, though this chart is from 2011, very little is different today,
except possibly tuition being much higher. All this failure has been purchased
at great expense via the student loan scam. Just shut it down already.
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