A Market Fable

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As most economists recognize (sort of) markets are not bastions of “perfect reason.” They are human institutions and like all human insinuations they are full of all sorts of nonsense if for no other reason than that cognition cannot be separated from emotion. We can try to be objective and emotionless, but there’s a limit. We love a good yarn and that means we get into trouble much too easily.

That’s why I enjoyed the story of the failure of the Founders College so much. It’s a good example of how absurdly faithful people can be to the idea of the market– the all too visible hand that makes everything work– perhaps especially when they’ve been ideologically seduced by a faux philosophy, especially a faux market philosophy. I sometimes think unreal ideas have a special attraction.

If you can believe Ayn Rand, in other words, and you can be convinced that “Objectivism” is a legitimate form of philosophical inquiry, then I think you can really be convinced of anything. Why not start your own college? Sometimes this persistent credulousness is just silly, as when someone made millions selling pet rocks. But it can be dangerous, too, as the continuing financial crisis shows.

This story is irony all the way down. There’s the irony of the silliness of Rand’s ideas, the irony that grown men and women believed them and then tired to found a college based on them, and then the irony that the scheme went largely undiscovered becuase the prevelant pro-market fever precludes substantive regulations. A perfect storm of objective market nonsense.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Pyrrhic Victory

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It might be surprising, at least to some, to find that as someone who teaches in the proprietary education system, I am generally in favor of more regulations. And while it’s theoretically possible to imagine regulations that go too far and kill the goose that laid the golden egg, that seems unlikely in the extreme in the current political climate. It looks like a loose-loose situation.

In fact, the recent election debacle suggests that the already weak regulations may be weakened even further. I don’t think this is a victory for anyone. On the other hand, I think writers like Allen Singer go too far when they try to paint the for-profit sector with the charter school brush. He also seems to ignore the abuses in the so-called not for profit sector, further undermining his case.

It seems bizarre, for example, to complain about the student debt problem without also mentioning that student debt is a chronic, deeply destructive problem in all of higher education. Clearly the rules about recruitment need to be tightened so that students are not fooled about what they are getting into when they try to get a degree from a proprietary school.

Just as clearly the so-called non profits’ marketing programs deserve further scrutiny. The large football and basketball programs are essentially multti-million dollar corporations run in part on public money. Why should any school that gets federal money– for profit or otherwise– be allowed to waste millions of dollars in administrative salaries, either for coaches or for presidents?

The proposed regulations leave out a wide variety of other issues that need attention in every sector of the higher education system. What about the ratio of full-time to part-time professors and academic freedom of speech? None of these things are mentioned either in Singer’s piece or in the proposed regulations. Neither political party seems willing to add real teeth to the rules.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional, Writing

Slow Learning

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The not-so-secret secret behind the standardized test is that it is in effect the fast-food of learning and assessment. Everything from the SAT to the “Race to the Top” tests have their roots in the same economic and social desire to deliver a product as cheaply and efficiently as possible to as many people as possible. In the food industry it can only be called successful if you ignore the resulting obesity epidemic. In education, it can only be called successful if you ignore the deepening social inequities.

One solution to fast food, to keep the metaphor alive, is called the slow food movement. The idea seems simple: try not to do much to your food before you eat it. Don’t cook it too much; don’t raise it too far away. It’s an old-fashioned, almost pre-modern idea: don’t eat too much meat and do eat lots of fruit and vegetables grown nearby. If we had a government willing to pass laws and regulations to encourage it, it would engender a slow revolution in just about every part of our lives.

As it turns out, as at least one high school has shown, writing can be thought of as a kind of slow learning analogous to slow food that can replace the empty calories of the standardized test. The key is to integrate writing thoroughly into the curriculum, using it both as way to tie seeming disparate subjects together and to reinforce knowledge. Just like slow food, the idea is old-fashioned, if not pre-modern. It’s a much more individualized, personal process, a richer, and so more effective non-standardized assessment.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional

The Common Application

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Given our nominal democratic ideals of ever-expanding college access, we ought to be a more and more reason-based society. As the recent elections shows, nothing could be farther from the truth. I think one good reason that our politics have become so profoundly anti-intellectual– often counter-factual if not paranoid– is that our higher education system is so focused on what a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article called “institutional self-interest.”

It’s the all too visible hand of the market. Decades of attacks on federal funding in general, and on higher education in particular, have helped to produce a hyper-competitive administrative culture bent on a cutting costs by shrinking full time employment and increasing revenues through expanded marketing. Whatever the drawback of the traditional liberal arts system, and there were many, it at least promoted the ideal of substantive learning.

Mass-marketing can’t focus on the personally transformative, difficult work of learning. It promotes the “college lifestyle”– a sentimentalized image more directed at parents than students. Perhaps this baby-boomer nostalgia is inescapable. The real damage is deeper: the undermining of full time employment and resulting loss of academic freedom of speech. If we don’t promote challenging thinking, we don’t get it, especially in elections.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing