Over the past decade or more, we have seen and heard a lot of duplicitous rhetoric about rhetoric: we have heard politicians speak about the importance of education as they cut the budget and increase class size and slash the jobs of teachers, librarians, social workers, and others. We have learned to live with cognitive dissonance as our “thought leaders” say one thing but mean something else, often the opposite..
Now it is happening to higher education. We hear that U.S. higher education is the best in the world, but the state and federal governments are demanding cuts that will affect the quality of education.
Timothy Pratt writes that “We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education.”
He writes:
“Universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, and other states have cut the number of credits students need to graduate. A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process. A California legislator introduced a measure that would have substituted online courses for some of the brick-and-mortar kind at public universities.
“Some campuses of the University of North Carolina system are mulling getting rid of history, political science, and various others of more than 20 “low productive” programs. The University of Southern Maine may drop physics. And governors in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin have questioned whether taxpayers should continue subsidizing public universities for teaching the humanities.
“Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.”
AAAHHHHH!, The beauty of credentialing substituting for learning!! The smell* of burnt credentials gets the mind aflowing in the morning!
*and it smells of porcine excrement.
I think they’ll retain a couple of “flagship” public universities and turn the rest into job training academies.
I heard this from college professors when ed reformers backed the law in Ohio that would have barred collective bargaining rights from public employees, and I think it’s probably a good insight. Isn’t that what happened in Chile when public ed was “reformed” and privatized? They retained the elite public colleges and gutted and privatized the colleges “the masses” attend.
The law banning collective bargaining by public employees in Ohio was absolutely trounced at the polls, and part of the reason it went down to defeat was employees at public colleges joined public schools (K-12) and opposed it.
Perhaps ed reform in higher ed will result in a national alliance like that which occurred in Ohio.
They’re next on the privatization list! No one could have predicted that, right ? 🙂
This is where we are going – same model, different level:
Creating a Race to the Top for college affordability and completion
The President has proposed incentives for states to maintain their commitments to higher education through a new $1 billion investment. The Race to the Top: College Affordability and Completion challenge aims to increase the number of college graduates and contain the cost of tuition by rewarding states that are willing to systematically change their higher education policies and practices.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education
The commentators on this blog leave institutions of higher education in a difficult position. There are cries to cut costs so that students are not left with “ruinous debt”, yet in this post institutions of higher learning are condemned for trying to cut costs so that students are not left with “ruinous debt”. What would you have a Dean Yossarian do?
My institution also cut the number of hours needed to graduate from 124 to 120. Given that the vast majority of our classes are 3 hour classes the thought was that it makes more sense to have students take 40 classes to graduate rather than to take 41 1/3 classes. I was only required to take 32 classes to graduate from my highly thought of liberal arts college.
Specifically, IMO, Duncan has a credibility problem with student debt. He hasn’t been at all aggressive with protecting the interests of borrowers:
http://www.universityherald.com/articles/6043/20131206/elizabeth-warren-calls-out-education-department-calls-agency-lapdogs-for-student-loan-companies.htm
In addition, the regulations on for-profit colleges that Congress passed were gutted when they got to his agency, as a result of pressure from some very well-connected lobbyists AND Mr. Duncan has a problem with regulation and oversight of the non-profit entity that determines the “hardship exemption” in bankruptcy re: student loans.
He hasn’t been good on student debt at all, so any reforms he puts in should be examined, I think. Is this really to benefit students?
TE, sounds like reducing from 124 to 120 hours made sense. Also, sounds like you agree (given previous comments you’ve made) that for some students it makes sense to take Dual (HIgh school/college) credit courses.
Research we’ve seen from Teachers College at Columbia suggests that these courses can have the twin advantages of helping students develop “academic momentum” – a belief that they can succeed in some form of higher education, and help them develop skills & knowledge so they don’t have to take remedial courses on entering a college or university.
Does this make sense to you?
Would you care for a gross amount of delectable pommes frites with your frugal yet scrumptious meal?
There is undoubtedly a problem that colleges are overspending on things like fancy infra structure and that “cheap debt” for students fuels them taking more students and being able to charge them more for it with no strings attached regardless of whether the student graduates.
That’s the problem – they do have an incentive to take students but not one to help students evaluate their possibility of graduating based on consideration for faculty needs.
This is an administrative problem that falls in the faculty’s laps since they’re not the ones doing admissions but they are the ones doing the teaching. The question is how do you make administration accountable without it impacting the quality of the classroom?
We also need to decide if universities are still places of higher research and what that means in regards to their productivity and their faculty teaching. Are we going to end up splitting the research from the university because that’s more productive? If professors are going to be educators, should they be required to learn about how to teach? Is just emulating how you were taught really the best way to make academic fields accessible to students with new learning styles and tools?
In my state admissions policies are not determined by the administrators at the state institutions, but by the governing board. When I fist started teaching it was the state legislators who set admission policy.
Policies are not admissions officers. The only way there is no pressure on them to not admit as many students as possible is based on demand and whether funding is divorced from the number of admissions (which creates the opposite disincentive).
My concern isn’t so much state colleges though as private colleges as those are the ones that will most assuredly cripple students far more than subsidized state schools (even as subsidies slip).
Mine is a state school, and instate admission requirements at least leaves no room for admission officers. Private schools must attract students so they must be careful to limit class size.
This makes sense from a business standpoint. How in the world will they ever prove that charters, privatization, and RTTT are working if the number of college drop outs stays the same or rises? If they can somehow boost the number of college graduates, then they can claim their “reform” is working. Perhaps they are not really cutting costs to save students from “ruinous debt.” Maybe they are foreseeing a large increase in the number of students able to attend/graduate their dumbed down colleges…which means they will make more money in the end.
The cuts to the humanities are what worry me most. The humanities have been dwindling for years (the number of English majors has dropped precipitously, for example). But this is what happens when we worship the idol Efficiency and think like economists. Economists are blind to many values, but they don’t know it. In the economist’s mind, a Walmart’s gutting of a small downtown is a beautiful thing. If Efficiency is God, Walmart is the new Jerusalem.
At my institution we have some departments that have close to a faculty member for every undergraduate major, other departments with more than thirty undergraduate majors per faculty member. Do students in the more popular majors deserve to have upper level classes with fewer than 70 students? The only way for the institution to do that is to reallocate resources.
Ideally a state legislature would say, “Dammit, we’re not going to let our state university be reduced to a mill for cranking out business majors” and would insist that the school commit to offering a first-rate humanities education regardless of enrollment. Because having well-rounded minds and well-formed souls is a public good.
Regardless of enrollment? That would not seem to be good stewardship of public funds.
How many state schools have trouble with enrollment and yes, you’d think a society would want to maximize learning across the board.
The issue is not overall enrollment (though my institution is concerned with the drop in high school graduates regionally) but the number of students taking particular classes. At what enrollment level (the term is usually SCH per FTE) should the institution decide to close a department and allocate those resources to other departments?
So why not incorporate humanities into a business program per se and make it a requirement?
Cut that thought out, it’s so unbottomline like!
What’s your problem?
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
The New York Times last year gave some coverage to CA Congressman Miller’s investigation into how university administrations are hurting student learning with their abuse of using adjuncts. They asked students and faculty to submit what they have experienced. More sunshine is needed. Article ran in Dec or Nov.
The problem is that paying faculty more would require charging students more in the current climate at state institutions and it is always the case at private institutions.
For a very long time funding for higher education has been cut with the results seen now. Too, more and more funding for “science” has been by corporations who see the colleges and universities as “resources” for their interests. Basic research has been cut. The Supreme Court tells colleges, univeristies what they must do. Politicians usurp the academic freedoms such as here in Indiana when our “beloved” governor tried to impose his myopic views on higher education.
My battle cry for a very long time: who is going to be in charge of education: scholars and educators or politicians. It seems the latter is what we are getting with what should be foreseeable results.
No humanities, political science or history? That is scary. Without these, how can future
generations learn about America as we did in our history and literature classes? How will they learn about democracy? How will they be able to write for future generations as our generation has done for them and past generations have done for us? I guess that’s the plan; get rid of knowledge that leads to wisdom and have just an obedient working class.
No physics; what will happen when we no longer have inventors?
At my institution at least the humanities have a great deal of influence. The History Department is about twice the size of the Economics department, for example. History and English combined have almost 70 tenure stream faculty.
I find myself growing very cynical in these conversations as to how higher educational institutions may continue to thrive as I graduate 2 boys on my own dime & find how little their degrees mean in the current economic climate. I have friends whose kids were superlative in STEM & can find jobs, tho’ the engineering jobs are hardly what they were even 10 yrs ago; 1/2 of those kids have already been outsourced & are back to working for their family businesses at just over minimum wage, while saving for advanced degrees in hopes that they can jump back onto the fast track.
My kids god bless them are highly talented in the arts; they make money mostly under the table; we are in a networking-build-your-own-business mode. I find myself wishing they had mechanical talents that would have parlayed into plumber or electrician jobs.
I have to say that this experience has colored my view of collges: I really don’t care if you all are being downsized into adjunct jobs, because the product you are selling isn’t worth what it was.
It’s not the fault of colleges and universities that we have no jobs anymore. The education I received in the humanities, history, English, and fine arts has enriched my life. I was introduced to many of the things I now enjoy thanks to those classes. It encouraged me to travel the world to see the Mona Lisa myself, to identify different forms of architecture as I travel, to buy Bach and listen to classical music. I may not have a career in these fields, but they have enriched my life. As a blue-collar, lower-middle class kid I would have never had these experiences that have made me a better person otherwise. I am glad I had a balanced and complete liberal arts education.
Agree that the humanities can have great value in ways you described.
“A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process”
This worries me greatly. Imagine taking classes like this for your AA, and later finding they won’t transfer to another state where you plan to complete your degree. You are now trapped in FL to finish your degree. But could you get a grad degree later with these unaccredited classes? Or are we now heading to a future without accreditation? With TFA, it’s now the wild west in k-12 education. I guess we’re headed for that with post-k12 education.
Florida is giving Texas a run for its money in the stupid department.