
Is This Higher Education’s Golden Age? - barry-cotter
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/golden-age?cid=wsinglestory_41_1
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barry-cotter
Univetsities work to ensure that their qualifications are necessary at every
level to get a job, when we have decades, sometimes centuries of experience to
tell us that practically they are not. It might be worthwhile if the
quintupling, dectupling of costs were accompanied by more teaching and
research faculty but instead their numbers have held steady while useless
administrators and exploited adjuncts grow and grow.

> Professional master’s-degree subjects like accounting, business, education,
> engineering, and public administration have seen phenomenal growth. The
> number of master’s degrees conferred in all fields went up by 60 percent
> from 2000 to 2014. Universities developed these programs not only in
> response to student and employer demand, but also because they could price
> them at rates that made them self-supporting. Rapidly growing master’s
> fields include biology, computer science, homeland security, and health
> science.

> Students pursue master’s degrees to delay entry into the labor market, to
> gain new knowledge or make new contacts, to raise their salaries, to qualify
> for doctoral programs, or just to try out a field that they think aligns
> with their interests. Universities, sensitized to market opportunities,
> deploy battalions of planners to establish footholds in up-and-coming
> master’s fields before competitors are able to do so. Some of these efforts
> are simply avaricious, but most speak to the agility and responsiveness of
> universities under the influence of market logic.

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barry-cotter
> The humanities have also made important advances: for instance, in our
> understanding of the culture and history of areas outside Europe and North
> America. They have made breakthroughs in text analysis, such as
> demonstrating that the Old Testament was composed in multiple layers, and
> they have given us an entirely new way of looking at the world as
> constructed by “epistemic regimes.”

We’ve known the Old Testament was composed in multiple layers since well
before anyone currently alive was born. Philology as born out of biblical
criticism so that understated the case if anything.

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PaulHoule
It's definitely the Golden Age for university administrators, whose viewpoint
the Chronicle represents.

Is it a golden age for teachers or students? That's another question.

