Only The 1% Can Afford to Teach in Higher Education, part 2

By Professor Doom

      Last time I discussed a serious change in higher education: the replacement of the faculty by part-time, minimally paid, no benefit “adjuncts”. Such adjuncts now teach the majority of classes in our colleges and universities, and represent a serious savings, costing only 25% (often, much less) of having full time faculty teach the course. 

     For lowering the costs of teaching, administrators get much, much, higher pay, so much more that tuition still needs to go up far more quickly than any other consumer good.

     The abuse of our nation’s most highly educated people by administration in higher education has gone mostly unnoticed in mainstream media; if students only knew that their teachers generally got less pay and respect than a fast food cashier, they might begin to ask why their education is so expensive…or even ask, if education were so valuable, why it didn’t translate into a decent job for their educator.

     Or maybe not, since many students in higher education are just there for the loans; I’ll be discussing how this works soon.

     In the meantime, the question arises: where is administration getting all these highly educated people to teach for peanuts?

About 213,000,000 results

--a Google search of “online Education degrees”, no quotes, reveals this many links, close to 1 for every adult American citizen. A search of “pornography” only gives 45,700,000 results, to put this in perspective. Usually, when you add words to a search, the number of results goes down…and not a lot folks think the internet is a running short on pornography. Anyone think maybe the online education thing is a little overdone?

     To become an adjunct in higher education, you need to have at least a Master’s degree in the subject you’re going to teach. Alternatively, you can have a Master’s Education degree, and within that Education degree you can rationalize that you specialized in the subject. There are History Education, Art Education, Math Education, Physics Education, and a host of other such questionable degrees.

Math Education “teacher”: “Yes, I know the syllabus says we’re covering the first six chapters, but we’re only going to go into detail in the first chapter, and a little of the second.”

(the class cheers)

--often when I get a glimpse of what goes on in an Educationist run course, I see that they’re not even close to covering what they claim they’re covering, or what is reported to accreditation. Thus I must assume the above announcement must come at some point in the class. The students are happy, but then get destroyed in the next class, unless it also is taught by an educationist. It often is, leading to college graduates that know nothing more than when they entered college.

     In terms of actual knowledge of the subject matter, these degrees are bogus, as I’ve demonstrated and illustrated many times on this blog, even to the point of taking a graduate Education course so I could see with my own eyes why there were so many frauds teaching. These feeble Education degrees are being used as jokers, and greatly watering down the quality of the education.

The following problems were noted in the five minute sample lecture (the candidate chose the topic, “Roots of Third Degree Polynomials):

1)    Candidate could not define “polynomial” (a basic term in the algebra course he would teach, and one he used in his lecture).

2)    Candidate tried to demonstrate vertical multiplication, but did so horizontally (defeating the entire purpose of “multiplying vertically”).

3)    Candidate used “FOIL” to multiply a binomial by a trinomial (he called it FOIL, but, that mnemonic only applies for multiplying binomial by a binomial).

4)     Candidate was unaware of the rational root theorem (curious, since the syllabus of the courses he claimed to have taught included this theorem).

--on a committee I was on, we interviewed 5 different Math Education graduate degree holders for a faculty position. These are my notes on the presentation given by one of the candidates. This particular candidate, with a decade of experience teaching in higher education, was the second best. The best was not offered the position; admin overruled us, picking a completely unsuitable candidate.

      Because these graduate education degrees are content free, anyone can get them…and that’s a big part of where the flood of adjuncts are coming from. Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of legitimate graduate degree holders in higher education…but there are so many bogus degree holders just as desperate. Administration, with degrees every bit as bogus, can’t distinguish the legitimate from the fake, either.

So there you are, eventually -- semesters, years, decades later (although it seems like no time at all) -- 40 or 50 years old, still doing the temporary academic gig, even though it's not "really" temporary, since the department rehires you consistently,

--an article by a lucky one to advance from adjunct to full-timer, though still with a minimal contract and no respect. Written, of course, under a pseudonym, due to the culture of fear in higher education. Keep in mind, change one line in accreditation, so that “a position lasting more than 2 years cannot be classified as temporary”, and this abuse could be fixed. Wonder why that change has not been made…

      I concede it’s not all Joker-Education degrees, however, but accreditation being such a joke makes it easy to setup bogus graduate Education degree programs. In addition, semi-legitimate institutions have increased the number of grad students they take, while simultaneously lowering standards, adding more warm bodies desperate to get a job to pay off the loans they took out for their degrees.

Adjunct No Longer, Jill Biden Earned $82,022 as a Community-College Professor in 2011

--one way to get a real job is to be married to the vice president of the united states. Her pay is way over the average, and her duties are somewhat below average, for a community college professor. Many professorial positions are patronage, where connections, not caliber, are key. No connections? Adjuncthood for you!

      Soon, outside of patronage positions, being a professor in college will have all the status and pay of being a fast-food cashier. Perhaps it should be, but I feel the need to point out: administration tells everyone to take out loans and go to college, because education can lead to better jobs, simultaneously treating people with advanced education as chattel and giving them jobs with less security and pay than barista or janitor.

      Why would you want people of such hypocrisy and ruthlessness anywhere near your children? Why would you want them responsible for what your children learn?

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Another aspect of faculty's role in the decay of higher education..."Math Education"

 

Faculty’s Role in Higher Education, part 2

By Professor Doom

 

     Last time around, I discussed how administrative control of hiring contributed to the decay of higher education: they tend to hire only faculty that will help in that decay. That’s only half the story, however, because this could only work as long as some faculty in every discipline could be found to contribute to the decay.

 

     Administrator: “It’s algebra without the algebra.”

--All we could do is sit there and look slack-jawed as our course content was literally being deleted without discourse.

 

     Some disciplines, especially math and sciences, were short on such faculty.  These types of disciplines are all about rules, fundamental rules (like how gravity works) that can’t be changed via administrative fiat, and these disciplines devoutly believe that words have meaning. Thus, a course called “calculus” is supposed to have calculus in it, not book reports, group projects, and eighth-grade arithmetic.

     In the previous essay I identified that to become a faculty member, one first had to get a graduate degree, only acquired after 6 to 10 years of a successful academic career. Next, one had to usually suffer through years of poverty as an adjunct, demonstrating a willingness to accede to administrative demands; the latter is for most disciplines, but not so much for the technical disciplines, which have so few graduates that there’s no glut that would put up with adjuncthood. When it came time to get hired, admin couldn’t abuse people in these disciplines so easily.

     Administration found a way to get around the issue of disciplines whose followers had at least a tendency of have spines, by undermining the “small population problem” in degrees that required specific skills, an even more efficient method than simply removing course content, which could only be done on a per-campus basis: Education degrees, which could count for any subject.

 

A candidate for a position is demonstrating her ability to teach the material:

“Consider the system:

 2x + 3y = 7

4x + 5y = 6

The best way to solve this system is substitution, first by solving for y:

y = (-2/3)x + 7/3

y = (-4/5)x + 6/5

Now that we’ve solved the system, let’s move on to a different type of problem common to College Algebra…”

--Discussion given as part of a sample lecture presented by a candidate for a permanent position in the math department. No math faculty were on the hiring committee, but this part was passed on to me by a committee member who knew an easier way to solve the system, and knew that the candidate had not, in fact, solved the system, only done the first steps on solving it in a confusing way. Most of the committee thought the candidate unsuitable for the position, but was hired all the same. The candidate had a Master’s Degree in Math Education, and was hired by an administrator also on the committee (and not capable of realizing the issues in the above discussion).                       

     I don’t know how it is in other fields, but there’s considerable confusion by administration between mathematics as a field, and “math education” as a, and I hesitate to use the same word, field. As near as I can tell, administration believes the two subjects are interchangeable, and since math education degree holders promise higher retention rates, there is an additional level of competition for mathematics positions, between those that actually know the material, and those that presumably know how to teach mathematics without knowing any mathematics.

 

“Is f(x) = |x| differentiable at x = 1? Let me look that up.”

--Holder of a Master’s in Math Education trying to answer a question at a student competition. She had taught Elementary Calculus 1 many times, and this question is comparable in difficulty to identifying an adjective in a sentence.

 

     I don’t mean to cast aspersions on what might be a legitimate area of study, but having personally met so many advanced degree holders in “math education” with a stunningly limited grasp of undergraduate mathematics, I’m hard pressed to take such degrees seriously, at least when it comes to teaching college level mathematics courses.

 

“A differentiable function is continuous, and a continuous function is differentiable. They mean the same thing.”

--A Math Educationist teaching calculus wrong. I don’t expect everyone to know how wrong this is, but it’s about as bad as a Historian saying in all seriousness that” George Washington conquered Japan before subduing Stalinist forces in Indonesia.” “I’ve been teaching it that way for years,” said the Educationist when I tried to explain that she was wrong…much like the book says explicitly with numerous examples.

     Nevertheless, I was puzzled why these “colleagues” of mine repeatedly demonstrated that they knew nothing of the material they were teaching. I sought to learn why.  Institutions that offer graduate degrees in math education put their entire curriculum online. Thus, it’s simple to see what you need to know to get a degree. Here are the course topics taken from one school, though all such schools require a similar curriculum for the degree:

 

  Foundations of Teaching

  Instructional Planning and Presentation

  Pre-Clinical Experiences

  Demonstration Teaching

  Research Fundamentals

  Mathematics Education

 

     Each topic covers 3 to 6 credit hours; get through them all, and you’ve got your degree. Now, there’s lots of education topics in there….but where’s the math? The first five clearly have no math in them, just educationist theory. The only topic that might have math in it is “Math Education”, which has two parts to it. Here’s the first:

 

Mathematics Learning and Teaching
In this course candidates will develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be an effective practicing mathematics educator. Candidates will learn principles and models of teaching for understanding, and gain familiarity with the standards and best practices of mathematics education. Candidates will learn how to select appropriate resources, use multiple teaching strategies, use assessment to guide instruction, and plan for all students. Emphasis will be on using research-based methods and problem solving.

 

      This is just one course, and there are certainly enough topics in there for a course…but how much of that is math? The only thing that looks like math comes at the end. “Problem solving” is about it….perhaps one week of something math related in this course, and that really won’t prepare the educationist to teach an entire college course of material.

     Maybe the other course is math:

 

Mathematics History and Technology
In this course candidates will learn how to effectively integrate mathematics history and technology into learning activities to motivate students and increase student learning. Candidates will analyze major historical developments and cultural contributions to modern mathematics, select and use a variety of technological tools to solve problems, and analyze emerging philosophies and research-based strategies for incorporating mathematics history and technology into learning activities.

        

     The history of mathematics is a fascinating topic, I admit…but not exactly mathematics. I’ve discussed earlier the games of technology, no math there whatsoever, just bogus tricks to increase retention without any learning going on with the students.

     So, a Mathematics Education degree holder will learn no mathematics to get a graduate degree. Perhaps the math will be learned as an undergraduate? It’s possible, but once again the schools that offer these graduate degrees make it clear that to enter the program, you don’t need a mathematics degree, an undergraduate degree in Education is just fine. When I applied for a graduate Math Education program, every single school accepted me, and not one asked what my degrees were in…if I had a credit card or was willing to write a check, that was all I needed.

    

 

“The probability that the mean is in a 95% Confidence Interval is 0.95”

--An Educationist attempting to teach statistics, and doing it wrong. Again. If ‘probability’ and ‘confidence’ meant the same thing, we’d call them probability intervals. The probability is actually either 0 or 1. An expert would know this sort of thing…but this is what students in an educationist class learn. Now that I know how bad it is, it might well be better for Educationist-taught courses to have no content in them at all, since then the students would not be taught falsehoods.

 

     Think about that: a faculty member with a Master’s in Math Education might not have seen math since high school. And now I have no wonder, no wonder at all how it is that Math Education degree holders don’t know any math. There’s no reason whatsoever to expect someone with a graduate degree in Math Education to know any mathematics at all…and yet they easily get jobs teaching math in higher education. Again, I can’t make this stuff up.

     To be fair, these degree programs are really intended for high school teachers, but administrators in higher education don’t care, and hire them to teach college material, material they don’t know.

     On the other hand, enroll in a Master’s program in mathematics and every course is math, there won’t be a single course on “education” at all. Words have meaning.

 

The mathematics faculty are gathered around a machine that tracks how fast a person is moving.

Faculty: “Anyone want to try to move in a way that would make a non-differentiable function?”

A Math Education faculty member gets up, and tries…he can’t.

Another  Math Education faculty member gets up and tries….and can’t.

Another Math Education  faculty member gets up and tries…and can’t.

A faculty member with a mathematics degree: “Shouldn’t we already know that no single person can move in a non-differentiable way?”

Two faculty members move, crossing paths in front of the motion detector; the graph makes a sharp change in direction where the cross occurs, a change not possible for a single object in motion to make.

---Seriously, this happened. It was the beginning of my realization that Math Educationists don’t actually learn math. Before this, I just assumed the blunders I kept witnessing were just mistakes that could happen to anyone. Mistakes I just kept seeing over and over again.

 

     Many departments are now “mixed” with Educationists and mathematicians both teaching the courses, but the difference between the two is wide. I know of at least one college that has zero math teachers with mathematics degrees…all the teachers hold “Math Education” degrees. Since these teachers might never have taken calculus, statistics, or any college level course, they have no idea what’s supposed to be in the course, or what students will need to know to progress in useful skills, so don’t have any issue when admin tells them to take another chapter out. I’ve presented a few examples, above, of the wild cluelessness, but I fear to imagine how bad it would be in a department with literally no mathematicians to occasionally teach the material properly.

 

     Since there is no process by which an administrator could tell that such people aren’t qualified, people with this degree can go on for years teaching subjects they know little about…they get good retention, I’ll certainly grant, and that’s all administration cares about.

     There are graduate “Subject Education” (English Education, Music Education, etc) degrees in a variety of other subjects, so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that this problem is not unique to math. An administrator sees the degree requirements as close enough, not realizing or caring that such a degree really isn’t appropriate for teaching college courses. As long as retention rates are good, a Math Education degree holder can teach anything without interference from administration. Being barely qualified for the position, these types of degree holders are deeply unlikely to stand up to administration. I’ve certainly never seen one do so, or even approximate doing so. Graduate math education degrees are easier to get, greatly increasing the pool of spineless faculty for hire.

     I’ve seen many a legitimate complaint about courses that teach “bad” material like feminism or racial studies or whatever, giving very slanted views on history and the world. At least those courses could generously be called biased, but now that Educationists have created their own degrees giving them influence over any subject at all, they can now teach even technical subjects…this teaching can’t even be called biased, as, in many cases, it’s flat out wrong, literally setting back human knowledge in the process.

     What’s going to happen when there are Brain Surgeon Education and Airline Pilot Education degrees? I joke, but in the real world, brain surgery and piloting are taught by people that actually know brain surgery, actually know how to fly a plane. Does it even remotely make sense that real skills should be taught by people that don’t know the skills? How did it come to pass that institutions of higher education somehow decided that it did make sense? It’s a question that occurred to me, and I’ll be answering it soon, although “better retention” is certainly part of the answer.

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