Turtle v. Rabbit
There’s a kind of race going on in Higher Education, between that swift proprietary rabbit and the slow public turtles. So far the race has been to the swift, but no one should write off the slower public universities. In the first stage of the race the public institutions stumbled badly, in part becuase they are big bumbling animals and in part over feats about the effectiveness of online education. It’s the economy, stupid.
Depending on your point of view online education has either proven itself or simply proven that it won’t go away. Either way, the old ‘under-served markets’ and ‘economies of scale’ arguments really starts to make sense in a time of shrinking budgets. The potential for growth in online education in the California system alone is enormous (“California Dreaming: Remaking Online Learning at the U. of California“). The race may get interesting.
The key, though, is going to the competition over teachers in higher education. If the system continues to reflexively rely on graduate students and adjuncts as cheap labor, the expanded role of online education will just be more of the same. The new online system, just as the old, requires well paid teachers with secure jobs. It can’t become another “race to the bottom.”
Speaking Greek
Just the other day came news that the University of Illinois had hired a new president at a new, higher salary of $620,000, $170,000 more than his predecessor. Somehow this escaped the attention of the right-populist crowd now scrambling to find ways to criticize the Obama administration for the malfeasance of British Petroleum. In fact, it hardly seemed to merit much comment at all, despite Illinois’ ongoing budget crunch. It’s just business as usual.
In the midst of economic crisis, the wealthy always find ways to better themselves, even in so-called service professions. The other side of that coin is that the rest of us have to pay the bills and when there are a lot of big bills then suddenly lots of things that we took for granted become much too expensive. It’s in that spirit that I read a recent piece in the New York Times suggesting that maybe we don’t need that many college graduates (Plan B: Skip College.) It’s a hint that Greek style austerity measures might be coming to a town near you.
The problem is those costly liberal arts based undergraduate degrees. Do we need to put students through all that when all we want is more nurses to take care of us as we grow old? Interesting, the writers quote business people who emphasize the need for the sorts of people skills the liberal arts teaches so well. You can’t help but wonder if the real problem is that we’ve decimated the arts curriculum in the public schools and minimized learning, like writing, that isn’t easily quantified.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.