Category Archives: Writing

Talking about U.S. Higher Education in the U.S. is challenging.  We have a federal system, for example, and just about every state has it own peculiar system. It’ tempting, then, to start drawing lines, just to make discussion manageable. In that sense, Senator Harkin’s recent report on for-profit education (“Senate Committee Report on For-Profit Colleges Condemns Costs and Practices“) can be forgiven for leaving out the public universities.

There are some dramatic problems with the strategy, however, insofar as the public universities can hide behind it. The more we vilify the for-profits as corporate ne’er-do-wells, the more we risk creating the false impression that the public universities are paradigms of  education and service. Worse, we create the impression that there is an absolute distinction between private  business practises and the practises of  public universities.

We want to think that a state university is more like a group of firefighters than Apple Computer. The distinction is more figurative than real.  Public universities are run on the same dysfunctional business principles that have shaped the economy at large. Harkin’s report also emphasizes that all for-profit schools depend on public money. In effect, the for-profits are public institutions; perhaps more so than many state universities.

Any public or private university has to be placed on the same (market) spectrum. Harkin’s report, then, should be seen as pointing the way towards a reform of the entire system, private or otherwise.  Two areas deserve special attention, one emphasized in the report and one neglected.  One problem in unregulated capitalism is that money  flows towards administration and marketing (and lobbying). Harkin’s report rightly argues that this has to be curtailed.

The Affordable Care Act requires that 80% of  corporate health insurance budgets is spent “on quality health care, not administrative costs … CEO salaries and marketing.”  I prefer Medicare for all, but a similar rule in higher education makes sense.  Let’s start with 80% and then push for 8%5 or 90%  a few years later.  The “marketing” program, of course, has to be defined to include university sports programs.

Harkin’s notes the high level of adjunct teachers– up to 90%- in the private sector. The private universities have accelerated a long-standing trend.  As Harkin’s report emphasizes, the for profits experience in online education illustrates the importance of student support services. That, in turn, emphasizes the need for a system dominated by full-time teachers protected by tenure. We can start at 50 or 60% but our goal should be 90% full timers.

We can’t serve our students if we are always looking over our shoulders, worried that we might lose our jobs either to administrators seeking to cut costs or to disgruntled consumers, aka our students. We can’t offer the help our students need, either, help that more and more research suggests is doubly necessary in an online setting, unless our working conditions are humane. That won’t happen until we start draining the administrative pool.

For generations, most college-bound Americans paid reasonable fees to attend publicly financed state universities.But the bedrock of that system is fracturing as cash-strapped states slash funding to these schools just as attendance has soared. Places like Ohio State, Penn State and the University of Michigan now receive less than 7 percent of their budgets from state appropriations. … The upshot of it all? Students face greater competition for admission, significantly higher tuition bills and bigger debt loads upon graduation.

“U.S. recession’s other victim: public universities” Jilian Mincer

As of 2009, 75.5% of instructional staff members were employed in contingent positions either as part-time or adjunct faculty members, full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, or graduate student teaching assistants.

A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members: A Summary of Findings on Part-Time Faculty Respondents to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors

The professional background of half (49.4 percent) of board members of public colleges and universities in 2010 was business. Other occupations of board members (in the workforce and retired), included: 24.1 percent professional service (such as accountant, attorney/law, dentist, physician/medicine, and psychologist/mental health), 15.5 percent education, 9.3 percent other occupations (nonprofit executives, clergy, homemakers, artists, government officials, and others), and 1.7 percent agriculture or ranching.

2010 Policies, Practices, and Composition of Higher Education Coordinating Boards and Commissions

I am sometimes (perhaps unfairly) driven batty by people who say, as if by reflex, that education– and educators– need to pay more attention to the workplace and to business. This can mean one of several things. Sometimes people say this because they want a college education, which is after all an expensive investment, to be relevant to a student’s professional future. We can’t afford the old liberal arts model anymore; higher education must be primarily vocational. Who do they think is responsible?

Sometimes, perhaps even more often, I hear people– even other teachers–argue that universities ought to learn from business. Universities, like any business, can only benefit from more market competition; universities need to learn to treat students as customers. Government is wasteful; business efficient. This is said as it were a totally new idea, representing a break with the institutional past and the birth of a more efficient education system. The university has to come out from behind its ivy curtain.

As the data on the boards suggests, business people are by far the largest influence on university and college governing boards. This is not a new phenomena by any means. Depending on how you define business, these boards might include as high as 70% or more business people. They’ve created a system that grows more expensive daily and that has precious few full-time teachers. We need a more public minded system, not more of the same business logic that caused the current mess.