Category Archives: Economics

Standardized testing is, by definition, a product of large scale education, just as automobile is the product of mass production. The only way to produce a good car cheaply enough to be accessible to everyone, it was said, was to cut out all of the irregularities of the production process. You can only maximize profits if every McDonald’s fry is the same, every time, everywhere in the world.

We paid a certain cost in the qualities of our work lives for these profits, of course; all of those inconsistencies in the production process reflected the people making the cars or the fries. People always find small and large ways to put their individuality back into the process, but the push-back against alienation can only go so far before capital reasserts itself. Profit first, people second.

In education, people have pushing against the factory standardization model from the very start and in higher education, just as we seem on the verge of some sort of final victory against the S.A.T. and the A.C.T. and their ilk, capital is once again asserting itself. The new standardized test, according to a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed, will be called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).

Why do we need a new standardized test? The profit motive is obvious; standardized testing is a huge industry. By definition, too, it cannot be decentralized. The non-standardized alternative, roughly speaking, is a portfolio system which is by definition tailored to individual students. There’s some profit in these portfolios, but nothing approaching the money made in a standardized mass-market.

It’s no surprise that two co-authors of the piece are executives of the company selling the CLA. The aims of the CLA, assessing students on so-called real world competencies, seems fine, but we don’t need another illusory attempt to put learning into an objective box. The logical fallacy here, is an old one that equates learning with consumer products, but students aren’t fries or cars.

Here’s a piece so rare that I almost can’t believe I just read it: an academic- an administrator, no less- demanding that the education mass media and the education community address biases in class both in journalistic and financial priorities. It’s a response to a spate of stories of how elite institutions are handling the budget crisis precipitated by the recension. Drew A. Bennett (chancellor of Missouri State University-West Plains) says things have to change.

First, Bennett says, the media need to “stop drawing attention to the alleged sacrifice of doing without cookies [at Harvard] and ask what’s wrong with a system where some institutions have that much money in the first place.” This is a fact of life in education that’s almost never discussed. Yet, as Bennett notes, while ” a million-dollar gift to an institution like Harvard or Princeton is a drop in the bucket, while the same gift to a two-year, rural college is a tsunami.” As always, the poor and working people take the hits most often.

What’s so interesting is that so few people either feel the outrage that Bennett so nicely dramatizes or so few feel free to openly discuss these class discrepancies in higher education. Yet he’s only scratched the surface of these inequities. Material privileges of this sort are hidden right out in the open and so naturalized that they almost never generate critical examination. It’s as if at some level we believe that the well-off, in education and elsewhere, are well off for good reason. Who are we to question what they have?

I have to say that sometimes market-obsessed conservatives fascinate me with their strange subtleties. Here’s Neal McCluskey, writing recently in Forbes (“SRFA Stinks“) about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). “SAFRA would direct $47 billion to Pell grants and require that grant amounts rise annually at the rate of inflation-plus-one-point,” Mc Cluskey notes.

“SAFRA would send about $9.5 billion to community colleges; $2.5 billion would go toward improving facilities,” he says, “and the remainder toward grants intended to push schools to improve their program-completion and job-placement rates.” And “$8 billion is slated to go to early-childhood education and $4 billion to repairing and modernizing not just public college buildings, but elementary and secondary schools as well.”

What could more conservative than promoting education, that bastion of boot-strapping American individualism? It’s a very commonsensical kind of proposal: if you get rid of the middle-men, that is, the banks who “process” student loans, you can take the administrative savings and use it to expand educational opportunities. It shifts money from one place– the banks– to another, more useful place– students and schools.

Eventually the banks will get their money– this will not change the regressive nature of the economy. If we had a “pay as you go” rule, this bill would pass muster. So why does McCluskey object? Here’s where the subtly really kicks in. First, he says, can they really save all that money by taking out the middle-men? “The cost of quintupling the volume of direct lending is, at best,” he says, “tough to predict, and bureaucracies have a strong, inherent tendency to grow.”

The health care debate has taught us that government administration– with its civil service salaries and economies of scale– is often a cheaper alternative. So that’s not a strong argument. I don’t find the “another government take over” line persuasive, either, and even McCluskey seems hard pressed to lament the loss of other, “non-government lenders.” McCluskey also seems to think that the capital markets are less competitive when one of the competitors is the government. That doesn’t make much sense either.

No, I think the real reasons have nothing to do with these faux-economic ideals. “This is especially troubling,” McCluskey laments, “because too many people are pursuing degrees.” In other words, to his way of thinking, college is already too accessible. We’re letting the rabble into the temple, and it’s costing us. “About a third of college students take at least one remedial course, only 56% graduate within six years and 29% of Americans have bachelor’s degrees even though only a quarter of American jobs require them.”

I wonder what he calls “remedial”– writing classes? Doesn’t that say more about the public school system? It’s odd and sad that we still don’t have a majority of citizens with a college degree. Isn’t that good reason to expand access? Why can’t everyone have a college degree, if they want one? What would be the harm? Maybe we would create some sort of critical, educated tipping point and people would read these sorts of arguments and just laugh.

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need …

At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model…

It Is Us, by AndrewMc, 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM, Progressive Historian

College professors don’t like to talk about it but class cuts both ways. On the one hand, a college degree is one of the most basic ways we determine who goes where economically. The United States is a big, complicated social system, but in essence the message is simple: get an education or stay relatively poor and powerless the rest of your life.

At one point, of course, a certain percentage of the working class or poor could side-step this devil’s bargain by getting a job at a unionized work site. Setting aside the potential loss of power represented by the (missing) cultural capital of a college degree, this was a relatively good ideal. As Tecumseh said, “A single twig breaks but the bundle of twigs is strong.”

Outside of the public school system, and a few colleges, there are few of these union jobs left. Too often, now, though, even a good education ensures very little economic security, even among those long thought fully insulated from the vicissitudes of the labor market. Professors are a case in point. For most of the last fifty or sixty years they naively counted on the power of a single twig.

That individualist strategy stopped working at some point in the 1980s or so. The recession cuts in both directions, not just limiting the aspirations of students but also limiting the aspirations of college professors. Capital, as a vulgar Marxist might say, loves a contraction because it can use the opportunity to pursue all sorts of agendas that would be impossible in a functioning economy.