I Still Believe – Frank Turner
The Bloom is off the Rose
I think one of my favorite more or less recent ideas is Allan Greenspan’s ‘s “irrational exuberance.” It sums up both the era of Regan inspirited market craziness and the blooming of the internet. Hyperbole has been the order of the day. More and more, though, the bloom is off that rose. One sign might be the defeat of the “personhood” amendment in Mississippi and the striking down of the anti-union laws in Ohio.
Maybe I am being over optimistic but I suspect that the worst of the decades long right-wing storm has passed. Another sign, I think, that the age of irrational exuberance is over is the increasing awareness of class privilege in education, especially as it relates to online education. It’s still happening on the margins, but it is happening. One good example is the comments on “Why I No Longer Teach Online.”
The author, Nancy Bunge, makes a simple point: she’s stopping teaching online because students don’t like it. There’s no mention of class at all. The comments, however, suggest a more complex if still inchoate picture of how the internet has been integrated into the higher education system, given the traditional systems’ profound neglect of its historical role as a means of social mobility. The private system filled that gap.
Working students are not “warehoused” in online education; students are more than passive vessels and most don’t have the privilege of opting out of online classes. Still, online education has not yet realized the scope of the cultural capital (at least ideally) provided by a traditional education, and so has not created a robust system of class mobility. That’s our task if we are going to do more than serve a niche market.
Golden Eggs and Geese
My school, and my superiors particularly, have got some bad press recently (“A Chain of For-Profit Art Institutes Comes Under Scrutiny“). I think, as I have said before, that we in the for-profit industry ought to welcome increased scrutiny and regulation. We’ve grown quickly in the last 15 years because we filled a gap in the education system that the public institutions ignored. The next 15 years will be different.
I think that the age of Reagan– characterized by a freakish worship of markets and profits– is rapidly coming to a close. Not all markets are going to be equally regulated and no doubt some insidious ideology of the Reagan kind will always be with us. But the free wheeling days are over. I also think online for-profit eduction is likely to be one of the poster kids for the new age of regulation. That’s one major change.
Another change is that the public institutions are, at least in some cases, returning to their historical mission of proving an affordable education to a wide audience. That too will happen only unevenly and inconsistently but it will happen. In the next 15 years, then, for-profits won’t be able to recruit as aggressively and its claims about results will come under increasing scrutiny. Soon enough, too, we’ll have real public competition.
If we are going to survive in this new environment, and keep our geese alive, we need to be the poster child for long-term thinking in capitalism. A good analogy might be to the for-profit medical systems’ (admittedly uneven) embrace of preventive medicine. We need to invest in teachers– that means full-time faculty with job security– and in developing the professional networks that will add substance to our claims.
Romi Mayes Band: Bible