Consequences of the Utilitarian View of College

"Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls: The Tyranny of Being Practical"

By William Astore (a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught for six years at the Air Force Academy and now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology)

Excerpt:

What is education for? At so many of today's so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today's collapsing job market.
Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life -- 20 years' service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level -- I'm convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It's simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)


And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job -- if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods -- you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

Outsourcing College Courses

I work for SMARTHINKING, which is the parent company of StraighterLine, so I have mixed feelings about the issue raised in this article about outsourcing basic college-level courses to private corporations that offer online instruction in subjects like composition, math, etc. In some ways, giving students the opportunity to finish coursework for cheaper prices seems like a plus, especially with the ever-rising costs of university tuition and fees, and as a colleague and friend of teachers who work at StraighterLine, I am not as apt to question the quality of the education received by these students as I normally might--I know that these instructors have graduate degrees in their subject areas, have years of tutoring and teaching experience, and are both trained and evaluated periodically by other experts in these disciplines. But as always, the corporate model raises question marks and eyebrows. And although I of course support giving students whatever resources they need to supplement their educations, such as tutoring (either online or on-campus), I have always had difficulties with the idea of one's primary learning occurring over the Web--I have always thought that classroom face-time between student and teacher as well as individual conferences and office hours are major factors in increasing student mastery of course materials and skills. I suppose, however, that technology (including video conferencing, chat/IM, email) can afford the necessary accommodations of this faculty-pupil interaction.

But this still leaves the question of whether outsourcing college courses to for-profit corporations is a viable option for the future of higher education--one that will not jeopardize the standards of teaching and learning while also giving students the skills and knowledge they need as citizens, (future) workers, and educated human beings.

Recent College Grads Find Unemployment Awaits Them

It seems that graduating from college at this particular moment of the continuing economic crisis is leading recent alumni to welfare. I'm not sure the student who says majoring in economics means he did not learn about the economy is quite correct, and using graduate school as a means of deferring the job search only leads to greater debt and seems like a particularly dangerous route. But I'm guessing the students whose situations are described in this article were certainly not bargaining on having to rely on food stamps or living with family members as they crossed the stage to receive their university diplomas.

Given that colleges are no longer facilitating the American Dream (whatever that means at this point in history), perhaps more students need to consider alternatives to universities once they graduate from high school. Here are some resources that argue the same:

John Stossel, "Don't Go to College, Seriously"

April Narhanian, College Is for Suckers (the book) and College Is for Suckers (the blog)

Wasting Time and Money to "Enhance Learning"

I have nothing against Apple, Inc., believe me. But for a university to require students to purchase an iPhone or iTouch seems to be just another way that institutions of higher education are endorsing and forming partnerships with major corporations in a way that can affect student learning (e.g., Dell furnishing computer labs, Barnes & Noble running the bookstores). But it also suggests another way to bar access to education to those who come from lower-income families: those little items happen to cost a pretty penny, which not everyone who attends a university can necessarily afford after tuition, fees, room and board, textbooks, and basic living expenses. Also, why is the University of Missouri likely spending money and energy to have students install a program/application on such equipment? Also, why is the School of Journalism encouraging students to simply record lectures--making this format of teaching even more passive--rather than facilitating good notetaking habits, such as one might expect a journalist-in-training should learn and practice? I mean, recording an interview is certainly a norm, but recording professors' lectures? This smacks of laziness and gives students the idea that they don't really need to pay attention in class. One also wonders about the notion of academic integrity: what if students were to record and then sell their instructors' lectures to other students or other interested parties? I'm not assuming there's even an audience for this kind of thing, but given that some students have had the gall to keep in order to sell their exams, essays, etc., isn't the lecture-recording issue a problem of intellectual property as well? I would guess the professors at the University of Missouri subscribe to some principle that their students are welcome to record their lectures, but I know of quite a few faculty who might be rather uncomfortable with such an arrangement--for all the reasons I've mentioned and more.

Review of Books on the Financial Crisis and Higher Education

Andrew Delbanco reviews a number of recent books on money, spending, endowments, reforming student aid, socioeconomic class, and the American Dream as they relate to higher education in "The Universities in Trouble."

"Doctoral Downsizing"

Naomi Schaefer Riley's recent article "So You Want to Be a Professor" discusses the oversupply of PhDs, the recent trend of certain graduate programs reducing the incoming classes of doctoral students (bravo!), and the way that overmanufacture of PhDs results in "ruined lives" through the relegation of bright teachers and researchers to adjunct status. Certainly this is a move in the right direction: graduate programs should be downsizing in order to prevent overproduction of degrees that will not lead to productive employment; to accept more students than can be eventually placed in a career is part of the current unethical character of academia. But this is also reiterative: we've known about these issues for a long while now, such as the effect on teaching quality and student learning or the skewing of the purpose of higher education. We also read again about William Bowen, who gets named in most of these articles concerning the miasma that is the academic job market: one almost pities the former Princeton president who predicted twenty years ago that there would eventually be a shortfall of humanities PhDs (big whoops)--almost. So Riley's article may not really say anything new . . . but perhaps with continued publication of articles of a range of venues generating greater awareness, policies can be implemented that will actually start to change the system, hopefully for the better?

Of course, in addition to reading about scaling back graduate departments, one longs to read more about such programs that also support students who do not necessarily plan on staying in academia but would rather like to apply their skills in research and teaching to other careers. These programs would do well to provide jobseeking help directed toward professions beyond just "professing," especially since the number of doctoral students who end up in tenure-stream academic positions continues to dwindle. Of course, this would mean that these departments would need to have access to and welcome professionals who have made the transition out of the ivory tower instead of vilifying those with master's and doctoral degrees who end up following an alternate track, either purposely or not, for "wasting their time" ("their" is an intentionally ambiguous pronoun). Many (most?) graduate departments currently fail to offer jobseeking resources to students leaving academia because the faculty staffing such departments usually have no "real world" experience. But perhaps one way of rectifying the situation of graduate study and the horrendous job market is to, say, encourage more diverse opportunities rather than limiting them even more. And if we were to convert graduate work into an effective conduit to a wider range of nonacademic careers, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much trouble fortifying and defending the walls of academe from the onslaught of outside criticism since the distinction between "inside" and "outside" would be more fluid, the relationship between them more mutually cooperative and collaborative than miscommunicative and adversarial.