Climbing Walls are Higher Education?

By Professor Doom

     While most  of the big building boom of higher education goes to administrative palaces, another conspicuous construction site is student recreation (classrooms are way down the list, with parking at the bottom; as long as cars have trunks, faculty offices won’t even make the list).

     Now, I’ve spent my share of time in student recreational centers (one doesn’t get to be an academic without spending years as a student, after all). All the centers I’ve seen have struck me as filled with the things students, and people in general, like. So, there’s pizza, and beer, and pinball machines, and pool tables, along with a few other forms of cheaply provided but decent entertainment good for killing a few minutes.

     Yes, times have changed, and pinball machines aren’t so common, and their replacement, video games, are likewise rare…but still around, at least a little. But student recreation seems to have taken a strange, strange, turn:

A decade ago Texas Tech University spent more than $8 million on its 700-foot lazy river, and raised student fees by $10 a semester to pay for it. The University of Iowa spent $53 million on new recreational facilities that includes a competitive swimming pool as well as a lazy river. Ohio State University completed a $140 million overhaul to its recreational facilities that included a 250-foot hot tub.

     Student recreational centers have gone overboard in recent years, and now climbing walls, lazy rivers, massive gyms, and multi-mile walking paths are more common. Funny thing, though: unlike the pizza/pool/beer halls of years ago, these places are nearly abandoned, beyond a few fitness buffs…even as the commercial equivalents (bars) off campus still seem to do well.

     $100,000 for a climbing wall? Oh, dear. That's going to break the bank. As I posted the other day on this site, a large swimming pool, which many colleges have had for decades, will cost much more than a climbing wall.

--I’ll be quoting an Inside Higher Education article here.

     The above is a common, and valid response to complaints about spending on rock walls and other strange new amenities. Considering the billions administration is spending on administration, a few bucks for a rock wall is harmless enough in comparison. Compared to the money being wasted on administrative salaries, this is nothing.

     But, wait a second. If I want to climb a rock wall, why don’t I just go down to the local Rock Wall Emporium at the strip mall and do just that? Oh yeah, there’s no such place. I know some folks like rock walls, but even the rock walls at amusement parks usually don’t have a line. It really begs the question: why are these things built at all on campus?

      Now, tuition technically doesn’t pay for rock walls. Instead, student fees do:

Students now pay $200 a semester in a recreational fee, or $1,080 more over four years than they would have paid under the old fee structure. The fee increase was approved by an 84 percent vote.

--that’s a big increase in fees, to a total of $1600 over 4 years. Not that students graduate in 4 years anymore anyway. Using a more realistic average of 5.5 years, we’re talking $2200 for the privilege of using these facilities. Ouch!

     People are showing real resistance to the ever-skyrocketing-tuition, and people now look at tuition costs when choosing a school. So, instead of raising tuition, student fees are raised, misleading people into thinking the cost of higher education is lower than it is. Students are paying an extra $1,000 or more for their 4 years of access to a lazy river, rock wall, and other amenities that they could just as easily get by visiting an amusement park for a dozen times (a dozen visits would cost less than $1,000, and most students won’t be using these amenities more than a couple times at best). Please realize these fees are not optional…every student must pay these fees, even if he has no intention (or possibly even capability) of ever using whatever the fee is supposedly paying for. So, tuition doesn’t rise so much…but your cost of education still rises in a way that you cannot avoid. These costs are ultimately paid for by the student loan scam, I promise you.

     Now, it’s advanced that since students are voting for, and paying for, these things, it really shouldn’t count as a sign of what’s going on in higher education.

     That’s crap, and still doesn’t answer the question of why these things are being constructed.

     Student politics are even less participated in than state politics. Rarely does more than 10% of the student base vote in anything, and 5% or less is quite common. The 84% approval vote quoted above means little here: a few people that want the thing are just making all the students that don’t care, pay for it. 

     Ultimately, however, these are not student based initiatives.

In 2012, the latest data available from advocacy group NIRSA: Leaders in Collegiate Recreation, there were at least 157 recreational projects in progress at 92 U.S. colleges, representing more than $1.7 billion in new constructions and renovation.

     Did all these student governments just wake up one morning and randomly decide they needed rock climbing walls? Far more likely, someone’s been whispering in the student president’s ear:

University leaders argue that the amenities like the lazy river and climbing wall will attract students and ultimately bring in revenue. 

--if you think that revenue will help the students, and not just go into administrative pockets, you need to read my blog more often.

     Ah, here we go. An administration with integrity, upon being approached by a student government wanting to build things for more partying, would respond with “No, you’re here to get an education, not to party on campus. You can do that off campus. Go away now, and study.” You don’t even need integrity to say this, you just need to be an adult. That’s still, obviously, a problem for administration.

     Of course, asking for integrity from administration is pure fantasy. Instead, administration brings up the idea of rock walls to student government, and facilitates ways students can have fun because, hey, ultimately such expenses will lead to growth (i.e., more revenue), the only thing administration cares about.

      While rock walls and such are just a tiny piece of expenditures in higher education, the gentle reader needs to understand: you can get $84,000,000 to build a lazy river, because an administrator thinks a lazy river will help with growth. You can’t get classes of only 25 students anymore, because “small class size” does nothing for growth. Small classes help with education mind you, but administration doesn’t care about that.

      Ignore the distracting arguments such as climbing walls don’t cost much and are paid for by students. Growth, not education, is the only priority of the rulers of higher education now, and that, gentle reader, is the takeaway from the “rock wall and lazy river” phenomenon.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

Higher Education as Ponzi Scheme

By Professor Doom

     I’ve often written of the plight of the adjunct professor in higher education. I’m most fortunate to not have been in this boat (although it may be my future), one doesn’t have to walk a mile in an adjunct’s shoes to see there’s a problem. Nevertheless, someone who’s actually lived as an adjunct will have a better perspective.

     An adjunct writes of his experiences, and tries to explain a Ponzi scheme aspect of higher education in Doing the Math: Student Loan Debt and the Adjunct Equation. Let’s look at what he has to say, and I’ll clarify some points:

One of my friends calls working in higher education a “Ponzi Scheme.”

This is how it works:

You put years of your life on a shelf in the name of higher education. You work hard, delay gratification and play the game to obtain the advanced degree.  Unless you have wealthy parents, you take out student loans which you plan to pay back after landing the dream job as a full time tenured track professor…The university is no different than other corporations: full time, tenured track positions with benefits have been eradicated around the country and chopped up into part time work in the name of profit even if the university professes to be “non-profit.”

For those of you who do not know, part time professors are called “adjunct professors.”  After we receive our low paychecks, many adjuncts then turn the money earned  from the education system to the Department of Education to pay a portion of our whopping student loan debt.

     The basic structure of the Ponzi scheme is people on the bottom pay in, but only the people on the top make actual money. The only way people on the bottom make money is if they get people to come in under them. At some point, there are no more people willing to come in, and the scheme collapses. Generally, only the people that were there first actually do well in a Ponzi scheme.

     Part of what happened in higher education was accreditation turned into a completely bogus operation, and no longer cared if the institutions it was accrediting actually offered legitimate education. Since accreditation was necessary for an institution to receive Federal student loan/grant money, it just made more sense for accreditors to take checks from the institutions to become accredited.

     The proliferation of educational institutions led to the proliferation of degrees, even advanced degrees, especially in online institutions, which were particularly cheap to start up. There are many sites selling “online education degrees,” of very little content. Students enroll, blow their student loan money, and get their degree.

      The flood of education degrees means there is a flood of people holding advanced degrees…this depressed the job market to the point that bogus institutions can indeed pay basically nothing to get someone to teach their courses, especially in social science and education fields. There’s just so much money in this that legitimate institutions followed suit. I’ve covered this in more careful detail elsewhere, but that’s the basic idea of what happened.

     So, not exactly a Ponzi scheme…but the people at the top make all the money, while everyone else is impoverished.

Like other corporations, the university system makes a killing off part time workers and in turn, we are in debt for life.  We are indentured servants.

     In a Ponzi scheme, the suckers can walk away, but the adjunct has debt payments to make, so usually not an option. It’s a hard thing to walk away when you’ve got your shiny degree, even when it’s very clear that degree isn’t worth anything.

“…it is academia’s dirty little secret that approximately 74% of college professors are adjunct professors.   We are exploited and abused.  We have no job security, no retirement, we usually do not have health insurance, we are paid low wages, we have no power individually, and we often have enormous student loan debt because we believed in the myth that obtaining an advanced degree would open up new doors to meaningful work and a good quality of life…”

     The author doesn’t cite his statistic, but it’s clear over 50% of college faculty are adjuncts now. It’s also clear that many faculty are being played for suckers. Not just by paying a fortune for a huge degree (that may or may not be legitimate—keep in mind, neither institutions  nor accreditation care about legitimacy).

The same is true for the part time professor.  As one recent example, full time faculty at Kalamazoo Community College in Michigan, in solidarity with part timers, had a food drive for the part time faculty as they were running out of food because of an inability to make ends meet during a break.

  

     I’ve covered the starving college faculty in Colorado, but this really is a country-wide problem.

     I totally get “supply and demand” might well justify not paying faculty much, and please understand that I’m not saying adjuncts should necessarily be paid more. The gentle reader needs to understand the real issue here:

     The ridiculous expense of a degree is justified because the very highly paid administration claims the degree is valuable.

     Administration pays almost nothing for people with degrees to teach their very expensive courses, because administration knows the degrees are worthless.

     You can’t have it both ways: either make higher education cheap and pay the faculty very little, or keep higher education expensive and pay the faculty appropriately for their “expensive” product.

     Administration is having it both ways, to the detriment of students and faculty. Huge money pours into higher education, but ultimately does nothing for education.

One of the colleges I work for asked me not to tell anyone how much we make as it is “embarrassing” and “unprofessional” to mention, even when I was teaching a course on social class inequality, and the issue fit in with the ideas in the reading materials.

     “Unprofessional” indeed; I’ve been at a college where the lack of professionalism was stellar. Imagine if students learned that their highly educated professor needed to go to the food bank to eat because his pay is so minimal. Would that hammer home the idea into the student’s head that education isn’t a golden ticket?

     Even better, imagine if, in addition to this information, students were informed just how much of their tuition is going into administration’s pockets? Again, I’ve been on a campus where the admin accounted for more than the total tuition of all the students put together (a state community college, of course).

     Students comparing the money going to faculty, and the money going to admin, are going to ask questions. First question would be “Why is this campus loaded down with all these worthless social science courses?” Easily answered, of course, since admin can hire faculty for those, very cheaply.

     The next question doesn’t have an easy answer: “Why can’t I take courses in becoming a higher education administrator?” I invite the reader to check the course offerings, especially at a community college, and see with his own eyes the distribution of coursework seems designed to funnel students into worthless fields of study.

      Don’t get me wrong, social fields have value, but students are coming to campus to get jobs. It’s only fair to tell them that advanced degrees in the fields the institutions are pushing only merit jobs that pay $15,000 or less a year (when you factor in the interest on the student loan).

      Now we come to my favorite part of the essay:

This same college pays me $2,700 for the entire semester which involves 15 weeks of work.  Yet, students are billed over $3,000 a class in tuition.  So that means one student pays more in tuition than I receive for my total wage.  Since most of the work I do is online, the college does not have to pay much overhead. I buy my own computer equipment; I pay all my own expenses.   And in return, when I tell the truth, I am told that I can no longer speak about this topic as it is “embarrassing.”  Let it be known that I am embarrassed to work for an institution that makes a sickening profit off of me while claiming to care about social justice and equality.

Let’s do a little math. Say I have 30 students in the class, and they each pay $3,000 in tuition.  The total amount of money brought in to the college is $90,000.  Then, take that $90,000 and subtract my salary of $2,700. This equals $87,300.  This is pretty standard per tuition rates and the wages of adjuncts at many colleges and universities across the country.

--realize that this calculation means every single class pulls in this kind of money for the online institution. Does it become a bit more clear how institutions get the money to have a hugely paid administrator for every class on campus, in addition to the faculty that does the actual work?

     Time, and time, and time again faculty do the math and realize something is titanically wrong in higher education. The exploitation of adjuncts is just the tip of the huge iceberg of failure in today’s higher education system.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Colleges Scam the Working Class

By Professor Doom

     I maintain that much of higher education today is a scam, fleecing the young in particular, but affecting all who have been raised from early childhood to believe that college is the only path to achieve a life of riches and respectability.

     An article advances the case that colleges are particularly scamming the working class, and while it makes many valid points, I don’t buy that the points made necessarily only apply to victims in the working class.

In their new book, “Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality,” professors Elizabeth Armstrong (U. Michigan) and Laura Hamilton (UC-Merced) present depressing results from a five-year study that tracked the women from one freshman dorm at a Midwestern flagship university: Not a single one of the working-class women they’d monitored had managed to graduate.

--emphasis added.

     While this does seem to target the “working class,” that’s a pretty broad group. Graduation rates in general at many institutions are abysmal. When a school has a 0.6% graduation rate, there will be plenty of sub-groups of students that have no graduates. The article, unfortunately, doesn’t do a thorough job of asking why graduation rates are so low. It at least makes a start:

Part of it is that colleges are regularly admitting students who aren’t ready for college-level work. In 2012, for instance, of the 250,000 who took the ACT (the main alternative to the SAT), only 52 percent scored as college-ready in reading, only a quarter as ready in reading, English, math and science. Yet many started school anyway.

     Again, the article neglects to ask “why are these people allowed to get into schools?” 75% of incoming college students documented as “should not be in college” really begs the question of “what are they doing in college?” If 75% of players on your 100-player basketball team are short and obese, you should look to see how they got on the team and why the team has so many members, right? 

     Again, this isn’t a working class issue, it’s an issue affecting everyone paying for college. Since most college payment comes through tax dollars, that’s basically everyone.

     College administrators are paid, not by education, not by graduates, but by putting butts in seats: they wish to achieve growth, and growth alone. This is why schools with 0.6% graduation rates are rewarded for growth, at the risk of repeating myself.

     With growth the only measure of success, it’s no surprise that people who clearly are not interested in education are allowed to flood onto campus. Yes, it hurts the working class, but that’s just collateral damage.

The one working-class girl who did graduate in the Armstrong-Hamilton study was a young women who was put into a special program where she received “comprehensive advising.”
The authors explained, “That’s crucial. Advising matters.” More affluent students have parents who can help them figure out how to get through college — what courses to take, and when; how to manage time, get help or mercy from professors, etc. They can also use connections to get the kids jobs regardless of academic performance.

     Two issues here, I’ll cover the last one first, quickly. Yes, the wealthy are more able to get jobs for the children; I just don’t see how higher education is responsible for this.

     The advising issue, on the other hand, is critical. It used to be, and in some schools it still is, impossible to simply register for whatever classes you want. In schools with legitimate registration, students had to go to advisors, often faculty, that would see to it that the students registered for legitimate coursework, coursework that progressed the student towards the student goals (and, naturally, the faculty made certain the student had a goal!). A student literally could not register for classes without a faculty signature asserting that the schedule had been approved as progressing a student towards graduation.

     The problem with this sort of advising was faculty would honestly tell students that they needed to either leave college or start taking serious courses, and wouldn’t approve schedules filled with bogus coursework that kept students on campus accomplishing nothing but deeper debts.

    Administration, with the only goal of “butts in seats” has eliminated advising, especially mandatory advising, at many schools. Thus, many students have no chance of graduation in four years, due to mistakes they made their very first semester on campus.

Students today can choose courses on prostitutes or “queer gardens”; on brain science or ancient democracies. But how is a freshman supposed to figure out whether it’s better to take the class on women in the European Union or the one on the Korean War…

     Administrators have approved a wide array of bogus courses for students to sign up for. These courses are great about putting butts in seats, but do nothing for the student.

     Now, yes, students from wealthy families, families that know higher education isn’t about just signing up for a bare minimum of hours in courses that sound fun, do have an advantage…but administration still does what it can to trick the children of the wealthy as well as the working class.

     The article then misses a mark:

It’s “a catastrophe,” says Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. “On the one hand, colleges have abandoned any actual structure,” so kids need help figuring out how to put together a serious plan for graduating. “But the faculty aren’t there. They’re off studying ‘queer gardens…’”

     Yes, the structure of higher education has faded quite a bit. It’s still possible for a student to follow a rigorous course of study, even in many bogus schools that flood the higher education landscape. The problem is, the student is left to his own devices in this regard.

      I know I’ll be accused of conflict of interest when I say it, but I’ll say it all the same: don’t blame the faculty for this.

     In times past, faculty were invested in the institutions of higher education; they were actual employees of the institution, and devoted their lives to it. In return, they had a steady job that paid enough to raise a family, and they held respected positions. Those days are long over.

     Today, more than 75% of faculty are not tenure track, more than half are contingent, adjunct faculty, paid less than minimum wage. These faculty have teaching loads triple (or more) of the faculty of years ago, and have to teach on several campuses just to barely get by. They have no choice but to adhere to administrative butts-in-seats policies that do nothing for education.

     When most of the coursework is presented by disposable faculty that care as much for the institution as the institution cares for them (i.e., nothing), how is that coursework supposed to be coherent, to lead to a real education? Instead, most students get a mishmash of topics thrown at them, with no more depth than a newspaper. With no guidance, a student emerges after 4 years of this with, at best, enough courses to add up to a “General Studies” degree (almost no job market value), and no chance of any focused coursework leading to any real world  marketable skills.

     But faculty, the people that might actually care about education, have been evicted from campus. All that’s left are administrators, whose only goal is putting butts in seats.

      The article finishes off with another miss:

For all the lip service our colleges pay to giving the less-advantaged a leg up, the mission these schools seem more focused on is just raking the money in.

     Yes, the schools are raking the money in. But the schools are also perpetually cash strapped. So…what, or more accurately, who, is raking the money out? The gentle reader is encouraged to review the pay of college administrators of just a few years ago, and note how many them make great 6 figure salaries, salaries that I suspect many of my readers would find quite enviable. Then the reader can make an informed guess as to where the money being raked in by higher education is going.

     As an added bonus, while administration has no trouble adding courses on silly topics of no market or educational value, I’ve yet to see courses on “How to be a college administrator” offered on campus, rather striking considering just how many highly paid administrative positions are available. Hmm, wonder why that is…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com