inexorable trend

There will be a lot of lamentation and hand-wringing on this, just as there was when agricultural jobs started to dry up, the Rust Belt began its decline, and knowledge work began migrating to Asia.

Like it or not, Peter Drucker predicted this years ago.

Today’s universities are modeled on their medieval ancestors, and Appeals to Tradition will not save them. The future of education is practical and career-oriented.

While enrollment in Humanities and Liberal Arts programs decline, non-accredited programs like http://www.AnimationMentor.com are enjoying explosive growth.

DeVry, U. of Phoenix, Kaplan, et. al. — and the traditional schools, e.g. Northcentral, Nova Southeastern, etc., that behave like them — are the shape of things to come.

Is this terrible? From several standpoints, yes. Can you stop it? No.

Liberal education will not disappear completely. There always will be a niche.

One of the chief complaints that I hear from students is that they do not see the point in general education requirements. In my day, taking Creative Writing, 18th Century Satire, Abnormal Psychology, or any other non-technical course was an opportunity to earn a cheap and easy A. Today, my students complain that Literature, Psychology, and Speech are a big waste of tuition and time. If they could earn their degrees by taking only core classes, they would.

Complaining about this is about as useful as complaining about that noise that they call music nowadays.

Name Withheld, Dean at Wysocki College, at 6:34 am EST on December 28, 2005

Just Plain Silly

“Donoghue added that, as colleges have become more corporate and job oriented, many people “no longer trust college as a place for intellectual broadening.””

This is just plain silly, and a smug self-indulgent delusion. The fact that people no longer trust or respect colleges as places for intellectual broadening has precisely nothing to do with becoming “more corporate and job oriented.” People no longer trust colleges, especially humanities departments, because they have more or less wholly replaced the study of the humanities with political indoctrination that pointedly omits the great works and the education they have offered society for millennia. I have to wonder at people who actually indulge themselves in the weird fantasy that the destruction they have caused in the universities is due to financial aid (?!). I worry about the lack of analytical skills that such self-indulgence makes apparent: It takes a serious lack of understanding to blind oneself to what the schools have become over the last couple of decades.

Seen It, at 8:15 am EST on December 28, 2005

The issue is that, in the post-war and baby boom era, the humanities bought into the same myth that Madison Avenue sold to the general public: that it was possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.

That is, every humanities professor taught well more than one student, while simultaneously continuing to work into the later years. Moreover, universities found that tuition increases, rather than diminishing the number of students applying for admission, tended to increase it. Thus, the dangerous cycle began, where unsustainable behavior was rewarded for a time.

However, the unparalleled period of affluence is over. Students in debt up to their eyeballs — faced with a lender (the federal government) that insists on the right to garnish even social security income to repay student loans — graduate into a world where the post-war overhang of US dominance has been squandered by an elite who believed that it was ok to stop making things and to become a non-productive service economy, so long as your 401(k) went up.

Colleges graduate countless thousands of students who have no distinctive skills or abilities that are in demand in their society. The graduates thus face the overwhelming cognitive dissonance of being simultaneously loaded down with levels of debt once characteristic of medical students and being unemployed or greatly underemployed.

Dog pounds take responsibility for their charges by refusing to release an animal unless it has been neutered. Casinos maintain lists of problem gamblers who are not to be admitted. Colleges and universities, on the other hand, refuse to accept any responsibility whatsoever for saddling students with crushing debt while failing to provide them with more than the skills necessary to work in a bookstore or coffee shop. Instead, the elite attend meetings where they tut-tut about the loss of humane values and the dimishing appeal of a liberal education.

JMG, Infinite Growth in Finite World, at 10:08 am EST on December 28, 2005

“He [Williams] and others argued that the broad access to higher education spawned by the G.I. Bill is becoming a historical exception.”

Exactly! The university as we have experienced over the last 50 years is a historical exception.

Prof Williams, along with the vast, vast majority of academia, have mistaken their experiences as constituting the norm.

Not so; reality does, and is, biting.

I suspect we will see a hgher ed something like the late-19th or early-20th century: a few elite schools will select their graduates baed on race (preferrably not-white), ideology (generally paranoid Marxian, and religion (none, whatsoever)to become members of a professoriate caste, while most of the work in the liberal arts will be done outside of the universities.

kjm, at 3:31 pm EST on December 28, 2005

“A public [university] used to cost less than a laptop,” Williams said. “With less state aid, the universities have gone corporate, and so are the students” as they increasingly must manage private loans from banks.

The public university I attended was home to several huge sports facilities, multiple gyms, an ice arena, tennis courts, basketball courts—you name it. (It probably now has a rock-climbing wall.) We enjoyed the antics of hundreds of university-recognized and university-funded student organizations, which provided subsidized rock concerts, wilderness outings, and first-run movies and often built their papier-mache protest effigies on the university’s dime. Meanwhile, the school offered late-night weekend bus service to help get drunk kids back to their dorms, where they now enjoy the university’s licensing relationship with music providers to download mp3s on a high-speed Internet connection.

I won’t claim to know how a given university apportions funds in its budget. I do know that what I’ve descibed above is what students and an increasing number of parents see when they spend a little time on many public campuses. Given this emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment and the growing number of debt-laden university grads whose degrees qualify them to do exactly nothing, is it any wonder that the public isn’t up in arms about decreased state spending on college-level education when the typical university appears to spend a ton of money on so many things that have nothing to do with education?

Jeff, at 3:27 pm EST on December 29, 2005

Blame and Choices

There is a lot of blaming going on. When do we take responsibility for out own choices instead of blaming, in this case liberal arts oriented programs, for debt accrued for education? Lets get real here for a moment. Up until this point (where we face a congress who seeks to change the loan structure for higher ed) people who consolidated their loans either publicly or privately have gotten an amazing interest rate – mine being 2.8. Paying my $70,000 loan every month means 200.00 dollars of my pay check. I could put another $200.00 into savings at around one percentage point higher than this loan. Not bad.I would say my education loan is the smartest loan I have ever taken. By investing in my education, and making the choice to go back to grad school, I now, finally, do what I love. That $200.00 is easy to pay when I come home from work with a smile on my face feeling that I have made a difference for others. It took me 8 years, after finishing my undergraduate degree, to get this point. And I don’t regret any of the steps I took to get here, though sometime the road was very rough. It does mean that I have some of the worst debt, credit card debt, also hanging over my head. But these are all choices that I made. And I made them well and mindfully mainly because of my liberal arts undergraduate education. I went to a school that taught me how to think critically and assess the world around me. I am armed with an understanding of politics, literature, history and art. I saw, as I ended my undergrad education that I did not want to be part of this consumptive system because I saw how it continued to make people unhappy instead of happy. How it chose to harm for gain instead of help for smaller gain. I chose to not take the $60,000 jobs available to my peers after graduation. I chose not to go to law school and potentially make six figures my first year out. These are my choices, and I can blame no one but myself for any debt accrued because of these choices. I know and accept these choices. I don’t live my life based on the bottom line. To do so is a huge mistake that in the end does more harm than good for everyone. Unfortunately, because more professional programs are teaching people how to be cogs in a system for short term gain, instead of learning how to think broadly, expansively and critically (not bull shit), we are faced with less people understanding what their short term choices mean for the long run, mean for everyone. That is where the real problem lies. And it is a problem that is staring our nation squarely in the face.

Anne, at 11:45 am EST on December 31, 2005