Tag Archives: job training

Speaking of Education…

David Schultz–with whom I collaborated on a textbook a couple of years ago–has written a thought-provoking article on the coming decline of the “corporate” university.

The corporate university is being undone by the very forces that created it. The defining characteristic of higher education in the last forty years has been its corporatization, which has transformed the university from an educational community with shared governance into a top-down bureaucracy that is increasingly managed and operated like a traditional profit-seeking corporation.

David points out that–at least since World War II– there have been two very distinct “business models” that have characterized American higher education. The first model was based on public investment in education, and it lasted until the 1970s. “The second, a corporate model, flourished until the economic crash in 2008.”

Public institutions were central to the first model.

The business model was simple: tax dollars, federal aid, and an expanding population of often first-generation students attending state institutions at low tuition. Let us call this the Dewey model,after John Dewey, whose theories emphasized the democratic functions of education.

Beginning with the 1980s, support for all public institutions and programs–including but not limited to universities– began to diminish, and a near-religious belief in the power of markets to cure everything that ails us replaced it.

The corporate university took control of the curriculum in order to generate revenue. The new business model found its most powerful income stream in professional education, including programs in public or business administration and law school, which became the cash cow of colleges and universities. This was especially true with MBA programs, which rapidly multiplied. These programs were sold to applicants with the claim that the high tuition would be more than offset by future earnings.

This business model in part used tuition from professional programs to finance the rest of the university. Students in these programs were able to secure loans to finance their training. The model relied heavily on attracting foreign students, returning baby boomers in need of additional credentials, and recent “baby boomlet” graduates seeking professional degrees as a shortcut to professional advancement.

The consequences of this shift are all around us: ballooning student debt loads, the emphasis on narrow job/professional training and the corresponding neglect of the liberal arts curricula that taught students how to think, the ever-growing dependence on poorly-paid (okay, exploited) adjunct faculty, and the rise of for-profit institutions that promise quick credentialing without the inconvenience of an actual education, among others.

David pulls no punches: as he says, the corporate business model is an education Ponzi scheme, and like all Ponzi schemes, it is falling apart.

Those of us who care about education, who fear the consequences for self-governance of a credentialed but uneducated population, need to figure out how to go about restoring the university’s civic and intellectual mission.

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Economic Straw Men

A friend recently sent me one of those irritating articles purporting to lecture “liberals” about economic realities. This one was unusually smug. It was written by a self-styled “economist” and published by Forbes; titled “Ten Economic Truths Liberals Need to Learn,”   it mostly rebutted “straw man” positions that no one–liberal or not–actually takes.

I won’t go through the whole list, because you can read it for yourselves, and because we’ve all heard these “truths” before.

“Government cannot create jobs” is an oldie but goodie. Like many of the others, it is “true” only in a very limited sense; obviously, government can and does create jobs for teachers, police officers, and other government workers, and when it invests properly in infrastructure, those investments also generate jobs.

What that flip formulation also misses is the essential role government plays in providing the infrastructures that make private enterprise and private job creation possible.

Several other “truths” on the list are equally wrongheaded: the author claims that low wages are not exploitative, for example–among other things, conveniently overlooking the fact that taxpayers are making up the (enormous) difference between low wages and living costs, and thus effectively subsidizing corporate profits.

I guess it depends upon what your definition of “exploitative” is.

But the “truth” that sent me over the edge was this one:

Education is not a public good. We provide publicly funded K-12 education to all (even to non-citizens), but the education provided produces human capital that is privately owned by each person. This human capital means more work skills, more developed talent, and more potential productivity. People with more human capital generally get paid more, collecting the returns from their education in the form of higher earnings. One common defense of education as a public good is worth refuting here. Yes, education helps people invent things that benefit society. However, they will expect to be paid for those inventions, not give them away for free in return for their education.

This betrays an appalling lack of understanding of both education and the public good.

READ MY LIPS: Education is not synonymous with job training. There is nothing wrong with job training–it’s essential–but a genuine education is far more than a skill set that makes someone marketable in the dystopic society idealized by the (presumably trained but clearly uneducated) twit who wrote this.

Job training produces people who produce things. Education produces people who create art and music and literature, who develop philosophies and political systems, who innovate and imagine and beautify cities and civic environments.

Job training allows people to be productive economic units. Education allows people to be responsible citizens.

If a polity consisting of thoughtful and informed and genuinely educated citizens isn’t a public good, I don’t know what is.

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Defining Our Terms

These days, you can’t engage in cocktail party chatter or turn to a “serious” television program without finding yourself in a conversation about education reform. Everyone has a theory, and almost everyone has a culprit–the sad state of education is due to (choose one or more) teachers’ unions, poor parenting, bloated administrations, corporate privatizers, or the ACLU and its pesky insistence on fidelity to the Establishment Clause.

I’m still waiting for one of those conversations to turn to a pretty basic question: just how are we defining education?

Make no mistake: in most of these conversations, we are talking past each other. There is a huge disconnect in what people mean when they criticize education or advocate for changes in education policy. All too often, parents view education as a consumer good–skills they want their children to learn so that they can compete successfully in the American economy. That parental concern is far more understandable than the obliviousness of legislators and educators who want to assess the adequacy of high schools and colleges by looking at how many graduates land jobs.

Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with job training. But job training is not the same thing as an education. 

An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times–The Decline and Fall of the English Major–detailed “a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college. As the American Academy report notes, this is the consequence of a number of things, including an overall decline in the experience of literacy, the kind of thing you absorbed, for instance, if your parents read aloud to you as a child. The result is that the number of students graduating in the humanities has fallen sharply.”

 What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.

Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth. Whenever I teach older students, whether they’re undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn’t acquire earlier in life. They don’t call that skill the humanities. They don’t call it literature. They call it writing — the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.

As a college professor, I can confirm the abysmal writing skills of most undergraduates. And as a former high-school English teacher, I can also confirm that an inability to express a thought clearly is usually a good indicator of an inability to think clearly. (When a student says “I know what I mean, I just can’t say it,” it’s a safe bet that student does not know what he means.)

People learn to communicate clearly from reading widely. Reading widely introduces students to the human condition, to different ways of understanding, to the importance of literature and history and science, to the meaning of citizenship, to the difference between fact and opinion. Such people–educated people–are also more likely to succeed at whatever they choose to do. But that greater likelihood of success is a byproduct of genuine education, not its end.

Unless the conversation about education reform begins with a discussion of what we mean by “education,” unless we can agree on our goals for our schools, we will be unable to measure our progress.

We will keep talking past each other, and looking for someone to blame.

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Battle for the Soul of Higher Education

In this morning’s New York Times, Frank Bruni has a must-read column on the purposes of higher education. He focuses upon a debate currently consuming Texas, but anyone who has listened to the rhetoric coming from the Indiana General Assembly will recognize it as an issue equally salient in Indiana.

As Bruni poses the central question:”Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?”

I would suggest an even more basic question: are we willing to value education?  Do our lawmakers even recognize that education is not the same thing as job training? Do they see any value in the liberal arts, or in research that adds to the sum of human understanding and knowledge? Evidently not.

Bruni quotes the new Governor of Virginia on the subject: “Pat McCrory, the new governor of North Carolina, recently advocated legislation to distribute funds to the state’s colleges based not on their enrollments — or, as he said on a radio show, on “butts in seats” — but instead on “how many of those butts can get jobs. If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

The current emphasis on what we used to call “vocational education” not only minimizes the value of education itself, it ignores the reality of today’s job market. Most college graduates will have several careers–not just jobs, but careers–and a significant number of those have yet to be invented. Students who emerge with “training” rather than an education that prepares them to think, to apply critical analytic skills to a rapidly changing economy and world, will soon need re-training.

Students who have been taught to think only instrumentally–who value only instruction that is immediately applicable economically, who are satisfied with the “how” and never ask “why”–are already at a considerable disadvantage. We have plenty of those students now, and I often want to invert the dismissive and ignorant statement made by Virginia’s Governor, and tell them: If you just want to learn how to manufacture widgets or push paper, fine.

Go to a trade school.

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When Does the University Stop Being Public?

The role and function of universities is increasingly a topic of discussion, and there is plenty to discuss. College costs have soared, student loan debt is at an all-time and dangerous high, and people are asking–reasonably–whether the product is worth the cost. The standards for making that determination are frequently misplaced; I’ve posted before my own frustration with those who see no difference between education and job training.

Meanwhile, state legislators routinely issue critiques and mandates. (This shouldn’t surprise those of us in higher education, since the General Assembly evidently considers itself a 150-person school board for K-12. This year it’s thou shalt teach cursive. A few years ago it was phonics.) Some of those legislative critiques are justified; most state universities could do with a leaner, meaner administrative structure. Many others betray an appalling lack of understanding of what a university is about.

One question that doesn’t seem to occur to these legislative overlords is: why should they have the ability to dictate university policies at all?

The assumed response to such a question is “because those institutions are supported by the state. It’s the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules.” But that assumption is getting thin indeed. State support is currently 11% of the budget at my university, and we are no anomaly. The vast majority of our funding comes from other sources: primarily tuition and fees, research grants, and fundraising.

This situation raises an interesting question: when do state universities cease being public? At what point does it make more sense for an institution of higher education to assess the considerable costs imposed by legislative mandates, compare those costs to the dwindling benefits of state financial support–and declare themselves private?

When children become self-supporting, they can declare themselves emancipated.

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