

How The American University Was Killed, in Five Easy Steps - dsil
http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/

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tokenadult
I pondered posting this link to Hacker News, after seeing it on my Facebook
feed from a friend's wall. The Hacker News welcome message distills the basic
rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't
post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

Well, maybe it's a bit harsh to describe the link kindly submitted here (which
I almost submitted myself) as a "crap link," but at least it is fair to say
that the link submitted here is a rant, not a carefully reasoned analysis of
the history of the issue. Nor is the link a prescription for building a
sustainable model for higher education in the United States that benefits all
citizens in general.

Let's look at the propositions implicit in the submitted article's five easy
steps for killing American universities.

"First, you defund public higher education."

But actually the funding of higher education around the world has been the
subject of much study by many economists of education of many nationalities,
and the consistent finding is that the greatest access to the greatest quality
of higher education for the greatest number of young people is to have a mixed
system of some universities being wholly privately operated, perhaps with some
public subsidies for students to attend them, along with some universities
being government-operated, usually with substantial revenue from student
tuition fees and research grants, and a variety of list prices from high to
low, with a variety of subsidies from high to low. The United States model, by
comparison with some other high-access, high-quality countries in higher
education, has tended historically to be too high on the taxpayer-funded
subsidy side. That takes money (as taxes) from the families of the working
poor who will never attend college and transfers it to the families of
college-educated parents whose children then enjoy leisure while pursuing
higher education. Higher education that really makes a difference for the
learner can be privately financed by the learner making use of
creditworthiness (of either the learner personally or of the learner's family)
to shift spending on education to the present while paying back the spending
in the future from an increased income.

"Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to
create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)"

I challenge the statement that any professor is genuinely "impoverished." This
is at best hyperbole, not description. Professors are well off people compared
to most adults. If Ph.D. holders are unemployed, it can only be because they
are clueless about the private sector job market,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373983>

which is where most of the jobs are, and if the Ph.D. holders are that
clueless, how well can they be providing education to the callow youth in
their care?

"Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over
governance of the university."

To date, most university administrators in all universities of the land
continue to be academics, the kind of people who have the postgraduate degrees
needed to be professors. If some of those people in addition have acumen in
organizing academic programs, raising funds for the university, convincing
bright students to apply to and enroll in the university, and so on, what is
the problem? How can an academic, on the one hand, say that specialized
knowledge of teaching in higher education is important (as most do) and that
specialized knowledge of [insert academic subject here] is important for
professors in each of their particular cases, and not say that specialized
knowledge of university administration is important for university
administrators?

"Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money"

A certain amount of money from business corporations has been flowing into
universities for a long time. To date, I see no evidence that many
universities have a culture just like that of a business corporation. Academia
and the private for-profit sector still have rather different approaches to
problem-solving (and problem IDENTIFICATION) and different internal incentives
for workers. Students in a free country will choose universities on the basis
of what culture best serves the students, just as donors will choose
recipients of donations on the basis of what recipient behavior best makes
them feel good for donating. The submitted article's claim that corporate
money makes a receiving university a "whore of corporatism," but that claim
could be legitimately rephrased to say that accepting some corporate
donations, from each of many corporations, puts universities in touch with the
real world and helps students have employment opportunities throughout the
economy. Companies in competition with one another frequently have to keep a
sharper focus on reality than ivory towers protected from meaningful
competition.

"Step Five – Destroy the Students"

Well, cry me a river. Come on now, I have lived in the Third World, soon after
being a college student who worked my way through my state university in the
1970s, and the life of today's university student in the United States is
LAVISH compared to the life of most young people around the world. Here I'll
excerpt my longest direct quotation from the submitted article:

"This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb down and destroy
the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to
think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to
withstand “tests” and “exams”, to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse.
Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to
develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each
semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more
universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course
of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common
syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model
that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast food
restaurant than an institution of higher learning."

My response to the first prong is that a well educated student who has
received only SECONDARY schooling ought to be able to "think, to question, to
reason." If students are entering university unable to do those things (and
the submitted article's claim appears to be that they are) at adult age, then
perhaps there is a problem in United States education, but it is a problem
K-12 education, not in university education. Anyone admitted to university
education ought to be able to "think, to question, to reason."

"The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the
wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the
school debt free."

College is eminently affordable to a great many students in the United States.
There is still to this day a large taxpayer-funded public sector of higher
education with amazingly low list prices. Work opportunities for college
students still abound, even in a high-unemployment economy. Of course not
everyone obtains a higher education degree without going into debt (as I took
care to do decades ago). But, again, borrowing money for higher education is a
good idea if higher education provides value to the student. The problem here
really seems to be a shopping problem. If students are not taking care to
match the cost of college to their means of paying for college (as I did in my
day), they should look for college majors that have positive economic return.
(My oldest son was able to put money in the bank each semester of college
enrollment, even in the current college cost environment, because he learned a
lot as a secondary school student and was able to gain academic scholarships.
Then he found he could gain a lot of part-time and summer work during college
because of the skills he had already developed. College need not impose debt
on students.)

The article sums up by saying, "Within one generation, in five easy steps, not
only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and
nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated
as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished,
indebted and silenced." I call baloney on this statement. The scholars and
intellectuals of the country HAVE NOT been silenced--indeed, changing the mix
of funding of higher education in the United States so that more payment comes
from the families of college students and less from taxpayers in general who
will never attend college is a social justice GAIN over the system that
existed when I was in college. With the Internet to serve as a reader's guide,
anyone who is serious about LEARNING about any subject can be directed to
books and articles of higher quality

<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=economics+of+education>

[http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION...](http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:20264769~menuPK:613701~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:282386,00.html)

<http://www.nber.org/programs/ed/ed.html>

<http://cee.lse.ac.uk/>

to help develop a deeper understanding of complicated public policy issues
that get beyond blog post slogans to serious analysis of public policy trade-
offs.

~~~
keithnoizu
Depends on the degree. While phds in mathematics of physics may be able to
find employment as qountas at goldman and sachs what is the private sector
market for degrees in the humanities, logic, philosophy, the arts, etc.

Simply because these disciplines don't directly impact the ability of apple to
produce new iphones doesn't mean they are with out value and shouldn't be
compensated accordingly by society at some level.

~~~
taylodl
Humanities have always been the pursuit of the idle rich. Those without a
hefty trust fund have found that they need to work to support themselves, and
to find work they need skills. For those people we can only hope that their
required electives provide them opportunity to expand their minds.

By the way, what did you have in mind for the means for society to compensate
these non-productive people? I say non-productive because they have no jobs,
thus requiring some form of compensation from society. How do you seriously
propose this be done?

~~~
philwelch
It's always possible to create more jobs for full-time academics. In some
fields this would be a good thing--permanently employing a few hundred
thousand extra physicists means we get more physics done, and physics is damn
useful. In others, like philosophy, we might be reaching diminishing returns.

------
sirmarksalot
The problem with this article, irrespective of the truth or falseness of its
allegations, is that it tries to make its point in the complete wrong
direction.

Instead of starting with indisputable facts and building them into a case
against the current system, it starts by making broad, ill-defined accusations
against an similarly undefined aggressor, namely "the corporations." Before it
even starts talking about what "they" have done, it speculates about their
motivations.

It's not enough to give arguments for why somebody with power would want to
dismantle education, and show how it _could_ happen. If you want to make that
sort of case, you need to outline how it _did_ happen. Give us laws and
sponsors. Name names. Give us debate about those specific laws, and relevant
arguments made by the alleged aggressors.

All this article does is confirm people's biases, without providing any actual
information outside of the author's opinion.

------
philwelch
Interesting, but essentially a conspiracy theory, where perfectly reasonable,
non-nutjob explanations exist:

> Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors...At latest
> count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million
> of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-
> term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security
> whatsoever

We have a decades-long bubble in higher education. The end result is that we
have many times more PhD's than there could ever be tenure-track faculty
positions. Keep in mind, we don't have _fewer_ tenure-track professorships; it
just hasn't grown as quickly as the supply of PhDs. As a result, there is
additional growth in adjunct positions in order to service the even greater
additional growth in undergraduate students.

That, or it's a vast right-wing conspiracy against academia.

> Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over
> governance of the university.

Most institutions grow a parasitic bureaucratic class eventually, especially
public institutions, as conservatives love to point out. The author compares
them to HMO's, claiming that in both cases it was due to a right-wing
conspiracy (Nixon's in the case of HMO's), somehow not realizing that the HMO
was enthusiastically supported by members of both parties at the time,
including arch-Democrat Ted Kennedy.

> The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the
> wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the
> school debt free.

Bubble.

> BUT these are victors who will never declare victory — because the
> carefully-maintained capitalist illusion of the “university education” still
> benefits them. Never, ever, admit that the university is dead. No, no. Quite
> the opposite. Instead, continue to insist that the university is the ONLY
> way to gain a successful, middle class life.

Oh nice, now the bubble itself is a vast right-wing capitalist conspiracy.
Even Marxism is a more sophisticated theory than this.

------
mc32
Reading thru that article quickly it came across as conspiratorial and
convenient. It does not jibe with industry's clamor for better higher Ed nor
does it make sense in the face of the resources one has at one's disposal with
the Internet. It also seems to ignore that these issues are the same in many
other leering economies where much of non secondary Ed is supplemented with
"cram schools".

------
rdl
Wow, I think this article is actually a troll.

#3 (professional admins vs. faculty administrators) and #5 (dumbing down
students, taking away responsibility and objectivity in evaluation) were
legitimate, the others BS. (#1 "Too little funding", #2 "Professors not paid
enough", #4 "Excessive corporate involvement").

#1 is clearly false, #2 is false in general (the rise of adjuncts in third-
tier schools, yes), and #4 is actually a good thing to the extent it happens.

------
fecklessyouth
It sounds like the author simply took a few trends in the last 50 years of
higher ed and designated them casual "steps."

