The Cost of Class

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College teachers, such as myself, are always telling our students that whatever else they get out of college, (and I hope they get a lot more) they can be confident that their investment of time and energy will underwrite a lifetime of relative economic prosperity. (Last night’s passage of the health reform bill may make an equally important contribution to the financial security of the middle class.) Doug Henwood’s recent costs and benefits analysis of education (“I’m borrowing my way through college…“) shows that this is still true.

Someone who doesn’t finish high school will on average earn only half as much as a high school graduate; if you earn a graduate degree, you can earn 2 to 3 times the income of a high school graduate. The caveat, and it’s a big caveat, is that students are leaving college with more and more debt. One reason is that college costs have risen dramatically, outpacing even medicine. And while there are grants available, the prohibitive costs have helped to ensure that class reproduction rather than class mobility is the new normal.

I see other limits to access in my classes, which are dominated by working class students; it’s particularly dramatic at the end of each session, when I’m thinking once more about the students who give up or, more mysteriously, sign up for the class but never show up, much less participate. There seems to be two main kinds of problems. One one side are students who don’t have the skills. Maybe they dropped out, or are non-native speakers, or just slipped through school without learning to write. They often mistrust teachers.

On the other side are students whose lives seem to be so chaotic and difficult that they can’t quite muster the discipline and focus. This is hard to judge accurately, of course; in any class there are always an alarming number of family deaths and catastrophes. (It’s more effective than “the dog ate my paper.”) But I know from my own family that too many of these stories are true and that if you don’t have much help (or money) to begin with, then every sort of problem is that much more draining and difficult and time consuming.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional, Writing

A Sentimental Education

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Americans are most sentimental about two things: children and small towns. You’d think, then, that we’d protect them as carefully as the French protect baguettes and cheese. Not even close. Our education system is a shambles, we don’t have universal health care, even for children, and we long ago destroyed the agricultural system that underwrote the iconic Midwestern small town. Who needs enemies when we’ve got sentimentality like this?

In online education, which is so far a largely adult realm, this sentimentality revolves– encrusts?– the idea of community, symbolically linked to that small-town ideal in which everyone knows their neighbor and everyone looks out for one another. Crime rates are low, teenagers don’t have sex, the church is full on Sundays, mom’s in the kitchen and dad’s at work. What’s missing from these ideas of online community, in other words, is the real world, full of conflict and contention and change.

What’s fascinating, then, about Computer World’s report on the Career Education Corporation’s award winning Virtual Campus (“Online learning meets online community”) is it’s emphasis on the physical infrastructure rather than the relationships among people. I suppose that this might simply reflect the natural bias of the source, but I think the danger of sentimentality is very real, maybe especially in online education, which has an uphill battle to fight against dehumanization.

The central trope here is the idea of student experience, usually described in an active voice: “The resulting Virtual Campus lets students attend … visit … meet … access … and participate…” It’s always interesting the way these descriptions minimize the role of teachers and staff; there’s no parallel paragraph on what the software allows them to do. If this is a community, it’s one in which the servants are expected to be as invisible as they are efficient.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional

Tenure and Violence

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I’m more than a little hesitant to write about the shootings at Alabama. It sounds like an incident that we can use as an occasion to talk about the horrors of the current academic status system, which too often licenses the worst sorts of pettiness and nepotism. My sense, though, is that while tenure is involved, the real story at Alabama is the more familiar tale of our cultural embrace of violence, our cowardly gun control laws, and especially our terrible mental health care system.

It makes us look bad enough, in other words, even without thinking about tenure. (In any case, “The Trouble with Tenure” gives it a good shot.) Still, I could not help but think about this incident, and about tenure, when I was reading about something that on the surface is totally unrelated: the emerging “Free Culture” movement, which recently held it’s first conference in Washington, D.C. It’s not as media-sexy as Tea Bagging, but in the long run Free Culture is much more important.

The students complain that their promotion of “free software and open standards, open access scholarship, open educational resources, network neutrality, and university patent policy” faces ambivalence on the part of some professors. I think that to a student, a tenured professor at a large research school or a small literal arts college, seems privileged beyond all imagining. They teach a few classes, and write a few articles (on a subject of their choice), get paid well, and can’t be fired.

In fact, most don’t have tenure, are not on the so-called tenure track, don’t have time to write much of anything, have too many students, and don’t get paid well. With certain exceptions, the ever-shrinking groups of privileged professors (as the tenure story reminds us)– are more and more interested in protecting their own material and social interests. It’s not surprising that students would find some professors ambivalent about the political risks– and material losses– of Free Culture.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional, Writing

History Repeated, this Time as Farce

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“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”-Margaret Thatcher.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable and they are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation or they will bankrupt us.

Health Care Reform, by John Mackey, August 14, 2009

I am not sure what to think about John Mackey, health-food billionaire, starting his piece with a quote from Margaret Thatcher. Either he is utterly ignorant of Thatcher’s violent regime or he means to call up an image of her reactionary politics, a kind of mindless mean-spiritedness, as the guiding spirit of his vision of the future. Who needs enemies if this is our friend?

I remember Mackey’s Whole Foods Market from its earliest days in Austin, Texas. Mackey’s genius, if you want to call it that, was to privatize the ideas of the local food cooperatives. The best known of these coops was Wheatsville Coop. (It still exists.) What Mackey did was to remove the democratic structures of these coops and replace them with individual greed.

Even more cleverly, he used the dietary philosophy of the coops as a kind of combination smoke-screen/ rationalization for this personal aggrandizement. He wasn’t just getting rich, he was helping to build a better world. Mackey was and is a master of this sort of new age euphemism. Like Wal-Mart, he doesn’t hire ’employees’ he hires ‘team members.’ He gets rich; ‘team members don’t need unions.’

Mackey rehearses all of his long-standing themes here, too, especially the notion that government should just get out of the way and let the health care industry fix itself. He also repeats the myths of shortages and long lines supposedly attributable to socialized medicine. I think anyone interested in education ought to pay close attention to this kind of argument.

It’s not just a good teaching moment for talking about the way market ideas become market fanaticism, and the way market fanatics often feel the need to falsify information in order to defend the indefensible. It’s also an good example of the arguments we will surely see as we try to defend the public school system against continued privatization. It’s just not funny anymore.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places