Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

i'm not quite sure how to work it so that 'area studies' get to be saved but lately i've been feelin the crazy idea that academics should start pushing back hard against usefulness in schools, anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

i guess this would solve nothing tho, since aside from STEM-related fields needed to get the engineers out the door it would mean universities' revenue streams would vanish

I worry that we'd end up with a lot of musicologists who can't play.

The jump in the number of students between 1980 and now, and particularly over the last ten years, has been extraordinary and I'd guess mostly driven by people who were the first in their families to go to college or the children of first generation immigrants. Usefulness isn't just built into the political agenda, it's in the agenda of millions of families where the risk of fronting up college fees needs to be tied to demonstrable increases in conventional employment prospects. Obviously there are questions over how demonstrable those prospects remain but I can't really see much of a way back from here. Business / marketing / finance are also absolutely crucial to the international student demographic, who'll be increasingly important in the the U.S. in the future.

actually i was partly thinking of uselessness as a proxy for (the freedom for) rigorousness and student motivation (perhaps again in the freedom from certain occluding motivations). in my adjuncting adventures i've kicked around to a pretty representative range of the levels of institution in my region, had traditionally/untraditionally good/bad students at all of them, but it seems like the most poisonous combination, pedagogically, has been the ones who are only at college because they (economically) have to be, pursuing a practical major (in that mid range of the ones housed in universities, never traditionally in vocational schools) which has no real or even speculative need for anything like scientific/systematic knowledge, and are fundamentally incurious. it seems as if the traditional disciplines, trying to play the administrative numbers games, just cannot win with those students, thus just cannot win with the administrators.

this is a serious question, but, like, what do marketing majors even study

Every marketing course I've ever seen has been a combination of business fundamentals (intro to business statistics, management theory, finance, business ethics, etc), psych modules and more specific content (retail marketing, digital marketing, etc). As an undergraduate course it does often look like it has been cobbled together but there is also a fairly serious academic discipline behind it that gets fleshed out more at post-grad level and does cross over with the more traditional ideas of applied social science research.

There clearly needs to be viable, respected alternative routes for people who fundamentally don't want to be at university but feel they have no other options though. Whether that is vocational study, apprenticeships or something else, I don't know. Germany is an interesting example of a country that is arguably more 'over credentialed' than even the U.S. but still retains a strong alternative path for less academic students.

it's mean the way vocational schools and the like are under-emphasized in secondary schools. kids who aren't great at school are made to feel like society has no use for them.

even though i agree about incurious marketing students i feel like explicitly railing against 'usefulness' backfires in practice

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig

uh, those are all perfectly respectable. Those aren't at all the types of "wouldn't stoop to x" jobs.

It's a supply and demand problem, as has been mentioned by others in the past dozen posts. Should "we" create more economic opportunities for all the MFAs etc or should there just be less of them? And what hasn't been discussed is education for education's sake. If someone wants a Master's in Music Composition or an MFA in visual art, because it will make them a more emotionally/intellectually fulfilled person, then why shouldn't they? Why should they have to reproduce the means of production by becoming a professor or a professional artist or musician?

This is definitely tied to socioeconomic class, but, this pressure to have a career in what you studied in college feels more pronounced now than when I was in college.

given the cost of college in america, degrees are either 'investments' or luxury goods and if you get a job in your field then you avoid feeling like you bought a luxury good.

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

*Samsung

at regional public schools in the u.s. there is a LOT of talk about partnerships between business—often quite local—and universities/colleges, at i know not what levels of remove in terms of money and influence. naturally businesses prefer to offload their training costs onto the taxpayers as much as possible, and lawmakers love to service business interests in politically and ideologically mutually-beneficial ways, but given how savagely lawmakers have been imposing austerity conditions on public schools i wonder just how long this can carry on before they turn things around and start letting business credential its own people to meet its needs directly, rather than using business needs serve as the standard against which supposed failures to (efficiently) educate are occurring.

London Met, one of the most commercially-focused of the new UK universities, is cutting 400 jobs, getting rid of two campus sites and aiming to reduce student numbers to 10,000.

They currently have a student to staff ratio of about 4 to 1, which seems pretty low.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/may/31/london-university-scraps-400-jobs-and-two-campuses

Also looking to move some of their courses to blended learning.

“What we’re doing is being on the front foot responding to the policy context,” Raftery said. “We’ve got to be way more digital, have way more blended learning... that is built around complex lives, whether students are working or raising kids. This is the reality of our demographic, they’re working their way through university.”

On a similar theme:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/futurelearn-launches-first-moocs-offering-academic-credits

The courses will be free to take, but to collect the credits students will have to purchase a new form of accreditation called a certificate of achievement for each module, costing between £39 and £59 each. They would then have to complete a final assessment, costing several hundred pounds.

Sir Alan Langlands, Leeds’ vice-chancellor, argued that offering credit online could prove to be a valuable recruitment tool for campus-based courses.

“We are very conscious of the fact that, when we start recruiting next for students for 2018, many of them will have been born after the year 2000,” said Sir Alan. “I think young people are going to take a different attitude: they will want high quality, but they will also want flexibility as learners, and maybe some of them won’t want all this to be restricted by geography.

“Developing this longer-term position on digital learning seems very timely from our point of view.”

"digital learning" can significantly lower operation and commuting costs but it's beneath the dignity of many of the privileged who've succeeded as faculty and their younger cohort at prestigious schools *there, in person* to network, make career connections, "have fun", and evaluate lifetime mating and investment opportunities, so implementation could lag. ultimately though perhaps the underclasses can happily be kept out of the "good" schools altogether, by dangling the convenience of online learning?

something that bugs me about this "there are too many graduates in X" arguments is like... ok, there aren't professorships waiting for everyone, but, its nonetheless actually possible to not treat people that are just instructors and not on tenure track like actual professionals and not just disposable faces, even if there are a fair supply of people potentially willing to adjunct.

and if you pay people properly to do professional development you'll probably get much better instructors over the long haul -- so partly i feel like somehow academia has actually devalued the teaching aspect very drastically even as you have a huge influx of students, and thats weird to me.

teaching is for suckers. successful academics are researchers, first, last, and always

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/want-to-know-why-professors-dont-teach/article1202892/

One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Margaret Wente = the worst

xps, Pearson, validated by Royal Holloway.

I kind of want to become a stockbroker.

xp to tomboto

these two links give a (somewhat conflicting) overview of the data about private/for-profite ed and earnings

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/11/the-obama-administrations-claim-that-72-percent-of-for-profits-programs-have-graduates-making-less-than-high-school-dropouts/

http://blog.ed.gov/2014/04/fact-too-many-career-training-programs-lead-to-low-wages-high-debt/

xp - plenty of stockbrokers went to my college and got essentially "sports car" degrees, in that what they majored in had nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of being a stockbroker

that's what i am thinking.... i have no love for finance, but i have other (more pro-social) small business ideas that i wouldn't want to pursue until i built up some savings and (lol) knew about business.

so like, not necessarily being a stock broker, but i am increasingly considering trying to find a place in the private sector workforce that is not related to writing or teaching, the things i always thought of as "my things." still researching this stuff -- maybe not so fruitful to discuss on ilx.

you don't learn how to run a small business by becoming a stockbroker. you do so by working for one, though it definitely varies by business type, but a lot of stuff is the same, ... or you just start one and learn by trial and error.

yeah that's a good point. i think i mostly want to just be financially solvent so i can think about taking risks.

i definitely get the sense that us small business ppl are definitely a minority on ilx

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Again, it comes back to a massive failure of regulation and i don't think tightening the rules around funding and applying a 'gainful employment' metric that just looks at elevated earning potential comes close to solving it.

For-profit colleges probably do increase earnings potential, simply by virtue of people being able to apply to jobs that require college degrees, but if billions in federal funding is going to be ploughed into for-profit colleges, there has to be a much stronger regulatory framework for checking whether they're actually providing educational value as well. A lot of them are very good but clearly many that could meet the new criteria are still basically a waste of time and money. Stopping the GI bill funding courses with a 13% graduation rate is the easy part, tackling 'quality' in the for-profit and not-for-profit sector is much harder but absolutely essential in the long term if a degree is going to maintain any inherent value.

pro-tip - don't steal code :(

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/report-at-least-two-shot-on-ucla-campus.html

i read that the professor didn't steal code and the shooter was delusional

any murderer is delusional imho

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

Even when you aren't filling out forms, most of professional communication is an indirect form filling activity. You write justifications that become decision memoranda which are realized as a signature on a form. You give people directions that become the population of a form and the receipt of the form by some other processing entity, which turns completed forms into travel visas, work orders, bills of materials, etc. Information and communication tailored to make it possible for complete strangers to efficiently work "together."

I forget how I found it but we have a copy of this and it's neat: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/The_Form_Book/9780500515082

graduation rate is a shitty metric! all that does is penalize schools that let in the people with high school degrees who aren't prepared for college work. there's this enormous gap between "having a high school degree" and "being prepared for college".

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

― sarahell, Thursday, June 2, 2016 6:10 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this very david foster wallace esque

this is*

http://prospect.org/article/meanwhile-back-most-campuses

$$$$

less privileged undergraduates / graduates are gauche

good article, in sync with my ten-ish years teaching at public unis in the American Midwest.

Margaret Wente = the worst

Since I should back this up, I'll start by listing assertions that Wente does not back up in the article that reggie linked:
"student engagement is at an all-time low, according to numerous surveys.": none of which are listed
"Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.": supported by one anecdotal quotation
" as enrolment soared, teaching loads - with the help of strong faculty unions - went down": no figures provided
"Of course there's prep time and marking and so on. But it's still not much.": no figures provided re hours. A 2/3 load doesn't sound unreasonable to me at all, even if I am not sure most seasoned profs are spending as much time as this guy says he is.
" Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers - even if they are unread. "

and then just note how closely she followed this template in this piece. Maybe her professors should have taught her research and argumentative writing skills instead of getting high with undergrads?

She got caught plagiarizing again last month.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/inside-the-globe/public-editor-prose-must-be-attributed/article29749706/

Ugh.

I called you an Islamophobe because I've read your posts on other threads.

I never called *you* a useless shit, I wrote "IME the tenured profs are the most useless shits to ever breathe air." You included yourself in that equation, I did not.

I admit to being hyperbolic— I have great respect for some of my tenured colleagues and friends.

But at the institution where I've spent most of my time, the huge number of NTT-but-pulling-a-4/4 faculty and contingent faculty do the majority of the teaching. Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students. And many of them are terrified that showing a little solidarity with their non-tenured colleagues will get them in hot water, so they throw us under the bus on a regular basis.

Situations like the one I describe and those tenured folks who whinge endlessly about "having to read horrible poetry by dumb teenagers"— a complaint I've heard more than once from *tenured* creative writing/english profs— are evidence enough for me that many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs, and are bad human beings.

I don't necessarily think you're one of these people. I just don't like your weird support of obviously Islamophobic policies of the French state.

As a friend who recently defended said to me on the phone, "I am glad that I have a job at a local high school and editing a journal, because all the academics I've met in all my years in academia are sociopaths"

Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students.

many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs

I'd say most of the "good" academics I know - the well liked teachers and colleagues, tenured or otherwise, who do all sorts of above and beyond work for their students and are genuinely interested in doing work that benefits society and are terrified as being seen as ivory tower intellectuals - are absolutely convinced they're running a grift and suck at their jobs. Conversely a lot of the real assholes think they're amazing and talented and the world revolves around the fact that they're extremely familiar with Chaucer or 18th century british history or whatever.

And not trying to be BUT NOT ALL PARENTS!!! here but a lot of the academics I know without kids (or those with kids who are obviously not interested in parenting) are fucking terrible at teaching and any sort of administration where they deal with students (grad / undergrad directors, advising, committee work) because they're hyper-focused adult-children who devote all their energy to whatever their interest is and resent anything that dares intrude into that space. The academics I know with kids, for the most part, have to strongly compartmentalize their life and work and tend to have a much greater sense of empathy towards the needs of others because kids constantly need empathy and people to do shit for them.

But really, I don't understand why anyone would be surprised that academia is just like any other workplace with different strata of power and money, some number of people who are really great and caring and good at their jobs, and a number who are incredibly lazy / malicious / entitled assholes who have failed or scammed their way upward.

Oh wow I don’t think having kids has anything to do with it but this conversation is not going anywhere productive imo. Idk what the purpose of it is.

As of Dec I got RIFed and am no longer tied to the higher ed grind, at least not formally. It’s a huge relief!

What an asshole, and I feel doubly ashamed due to the fact that the instructor is Romanian. Surely he remembers December 1989?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/19/canada-lecturer-myanmar-student-exam-web-blackout

I looked at the York U. subreddit after this went viral and this guy has been a monumentally hated asshole on that campus for a long long time

I can totally picture the type, too. An old school authority figure with no regard whatsoever for students or anyone who isn't his hierarchical 'better'.

https://edsource.org/2021/mills-college-announces-plan-to-close-triggering-debate-about-other-schools-futures/651489

Amazing:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/26/experience-i-tracked-down-my-impostor

that's great, but the headline is a bit misleading! surely this guy will pop up in the news again somewhere in a couple of years?

i want to know who the imposter is!

Look for the flowers on the backs of his hands, with the words ‘know more’ and ‘artefact’ written across the fingers.

geeta wrote this article about the mills college closing vis a vis the music department

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/arts/music/mills-college-music.html

interesting article about the student athletes recruited to attend New College in Florida:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/new-college-desantis-florida.html