A former professor speaketh

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Think about that.

The person who articulated that for all of us? 

e.e. cummings.

I doubt that most of us are born with the courage to grow up to be who we really are.  Most of us are the cowardly lions of the Wizard of Oz.  Somewhere we have to pick up that courage.

Where?

Education.

In a real education, institutions and educators will emphasize “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”

I wish!

Increasingly, it does not work that way though.

Even we individuals apparently do not care to become better people.  We are most fascinated with those who have built "better mousetrap" who are also the ones who have made money from those mousetraps.  We are making it increasingly clear that a moneyed person is much more important and valuable than a better person.

Such an attitude gets reflected in education too.  In college, it is all about the better mousetrap.  College has stopped being the place where students gain the courage to find out who they really are and to then live that life with happiness and contentment.

Is it any wonder then why students are unhappy.  There is a growing body of evidence that students are unhappy.  And in the adult world, anxiety and angst seem to dominate over happiness and contentment.  Yet, we have a lot more educated population today than ever before.  The two sides of the ledger don't balance well.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Of course they are looking for meaning.  But, apparently most educators don't care.

Increasingly, we run into graduates feeling intense burnout only a few years into their "real" lives outside college.  They begin to wonder, and worry, if what they do is not fulfilling, then what?

If only we had equipped them with the ability to prepare for life with a meaning, that provided them with happiness that is intangible!

Oh well ... I tried to do the best that I could.  Now, the countdown to the end date has been set by my managers.  In a matter of months, I will be referred to as "a former professor."

Such is life!

So, what is college?

As I understand it, neither the state's elected officials nor my university have clearly articulated to the public what it means to be college educated, especially in the 21st century.  The looming layoff makes it evident that my understanding of what it means to be college educated is worlds away from what the university's managers think.

The following commentary was published in April 2015.
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What is Oregon’s definition of a college education?

I am delighted that Oregon’s Legislature is discussing higher education via the many bills that have been introduced.

There is urgency as well. College education is rapidly becoming a must-have for the young to be economically successful, though I am personally frustrated with the marginalization of vocational education. While a ninth-grade level education would have been good enough a century ago (hence, the tradition of celebrating high school graduation as an achievement in life), the worry now is that a person without a college degree might not even get an interview for an entry-level job.

Further, many students earn college credits from community colleges, for-profit institutions or colleges in other states, and we want to help them with putting all those credits to use toward a degree and not waste that investment. All these matter, especially when a typical college graduate exits the system with more than $20,000 in debt.

I understand, therefore, the legislators’ interest in making higher education more efficient. The bills being considered include accelerated college credits programs that begin even from the high school years, to making transferring credits across institutions easier, to funding that will be tied to outcomes.

However, these also have the potential to make the current situation even worse for a single reason that we do not seem to appreciate and recognize. Investing in, and growing, “intellectual capital” via higher education is not the same as patching together college credits gained from different institutions starting with the high school.

Such a patchwork would add up to a college diploma, yes. However, that piece of paper is not by itself any measure of the intellectual capital that is vital for a vibrant economy and democracy.

If lawmakers believe that higher education is merely a collection of college credits, then their efforts — and the resulting investment of taxpayer dollars — will be wasted. As Aristotle observed centuries ago, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. A mere collection of credits from different places, or even from the same institution, will only rarely add up to what it means to be college-educated.

If it is more than collection of credits, then what exactly is a college education?

Unfortunately, that is the discussion that is sorely lacking. “What does it mean to be college educated in the 21st century?” is a question that is neglected and increasingly, even discredited.

Higher education institutions in particular deserve to be blamed for not articulating a clear idea of what it means to be college educated. Colleges and universities, instead, typically offer a cafeteria menu-like format of classes to take toward graduation. It is such a checklist system that has also led lawmakers, and students and their families, to think of higher education as nothing but a crazy patchwork of credits.

On the other hand, a committed and sustained discussion on what it means to be college educated in the 21st century will lead to a clear definition of how we ought to prepare students for “a world of unscripted problems,” to borrow a phrase from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Now, if only the lawmakers can force us to think about that question!

Layoff is the price for overselling college?

The second in the series in which I think about the real possibility of losing my job. (Click here for the first entry.)

In different ways, I have always been worried that college is being oversold.  Anytime such a commentary was published, while I received appreciatory emails from the general public, it was not the case with the people employed in higher education.

It is not a surprise that the dollars and cents aren't adding up anymore.  Maybe it is a surprise that I had a job this long!

The following is my commentary that was published in the summer of 2007.
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Does U.S. oversell college?

A new school year begins soon. I look forward excitedly to meeting new students and re-establishing connections with those who return. But once again, I start the year with the nagging question: Are we overselling higher education?

Growing up in India, it was quite common to run into people with advanced degrees working in unrelated jobs essentially because, well, there were very few positions to match their educational qualifications. Most of the bank clerks I have met in India have degrees in literature or the sciences. During our trip last December, the telephone salesman my father was talking to was happy that he was able to get that job soon after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Selling phones or working as a bank teller do not require four years of college. So, why the degree?

Two reasons stand out.

First, there's the faith that college is the path toward prosperity, and that therefore everyone needs to go to college. Thus, parents do all they can to ensure that their children attend college. Second, college education serves as a filter for employers who are faced with the daunting task of selecting from among the many, many applicants for jobs. This further reinforces the notion that college degree is important.

Against such a background, I can't help but wonder whether our drive to get more high school students to college is a variation of the Indian blind faith that college degree will lead to economic prosperity. Déjà vu all over again!

Ironically, while we "elders" are focused on getting more high school graduates to college, it appears that practically every student I meet in my university is familiar with the joke about college degrees and jobs - you know, with the punch line, "Would you like fries with that?"

Students are aware that a college degree might not get them a job after all. This reality that students see is a total contrast to, and disconnected from, our focus on college.

Perhaps employers here in the United States use the college degree as a sorting tool just as employers in India do. By demonstrating that they successfully negotiated hazards like me, students implicitly tell prospective employers that they have the requisite skills to do the job. But then all we have done is unnecessarily raise the entry-level educational requirement, when in reality a degree is not really required and a high school diploma would have sufficed.

Studies show that the average life-time earnings of college graduates are significantly higher than those of high school graduates. But the studies do not seem to account for the possibility of inflated requirements of educational qualifications.

Further, if the recent preoccupation with outsourcing is what is driving us to focus on college, that is all the more the reason why we ought to focus on jobs that cannot be outsourced, many of which do not require a degree. Plumbing, auto repair and caring for the elderly cannot be outsourced to India. Here again, we are all too familiar with the complaints about how expensive plumbers are, or how difficult it is to find people who can help with the rapidly growing elderly population. Yet we choose not to steer more youngsters into such lucrative careers because we are fixated on college degrees that don't always guarantee jobs.

In India, too, there are boundless opportunities for people interested in plumbing, caring for the elderly and other occupations that don't require college diplomas. Urban India is increasingly short of such help. Samad, the plumber on whose services my parents rely, has become so successful that he has made a career change and is now a real estate agent. Samad did not even complete the eighth grade, a total contrast to the newly graduated mechanical engineer selling telephones.

Of course, university education is not merely about economic productivity. It is also to develop a culture of learning and an appreciation of various aspects of life. Personally, I am immensely thankful for the opportunity that I have to pursue learning as my vocation. But at a huge cost to the youth, are we incorrectly advocating that college education is the only avenue for individuals to be economically productive?

Income inequality and the artist

The old belief was that college was the ticket to the fabled middle class American Dream. In this belief system, a four-year college diploma was worth more than a diploma from a two-year college.

The belief did deliver for a while. A great number attended state schools in their regions, graduated, and went on to own homes in the suburbs.

Over the recent years, however, this belief system has stopped delivering.

Students are now graduating with debts that are beyond most of our imaginations, and graduates often end up in jobs for which it seems like college degrees are not required and the pay isn't great either. The dream of owning a home and having kids gets postponed. Sometimes the dreams are simply that.

It is not that the "value" of college education itself has changed. The political economy in the world outside the college campus has changed--radically. Average wages have not kept up with the times. There is plenty of money being made by a few, while the vast middle struggles. Increasingly, the money is made by a very few in the rapidly shape-shifting technology world, while the rest are left behind in the silicon dust.

In this structure, it has become a nightmare for those who majored in order to become writers, musicians, dancers, painters, playwrights, and anything else in such a grouping. In The Death of the Artist, William Deresiewicz writes in detail about how conditions have changed in this group that interprets the human condition through their creative talents. And it is one hell of a depressing portrayal of how much things have changed for the worse.

Based on an intuitive understanding derived from reading about the changing trends, I have cautioned many students, like "R" who was passionate about a career in dancing, about the kinds of red flags that Deresiewicz writes about. I have always warned them about the myth of the "starving artist" who does "not sell out." Of course, money is not everything, but the lack of money is one awful existence. Should more students like "R" approach me, I now have a better approach: I will tell them to first read The Death of the Artist.

As Deresiewicz writes, it is not that there is no money in the arts "industry." Consider, for instance, that "Salvator Mundi," a 600-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for almost half-a-billion dollars. There are people who are THAT wealthy in order to afford to buy paintings valued at multiple millions. The fact that there are such ultra-wealthy is the real problem. Deresiewicz writes:

The devastation of the arts economy, like the degradation of the college experience, is rooted in the great besetting sin of contemporary American society: extreme and growing inequality.

Why does this matter?

The growing inequality leaves very little in the bank accounts of the middle class. This then means that the middle class is less able to spend on non-essentials. They then do not spend money on the local community theatre; the local indie band; the local writers' books; etc. Meanwhile, the tech world continues its brainwashing that you, too, can become a music millionaire right from your basement. You fall for it, and the tech giants add a few more billion dollars in market capitalization.

So, what can be done?

You as a consumer have a choice. For example, you could stop patronizing the algorithm-driven services like Pandora and Spotify. Instead, spend that money on art and the artists in your own community.

You as a citizen have a choice. You could vote for candidates and parties that promise to address the growing income and wealth inequality, and who truly want to make the American Dream possible for many more.

You don't have to take my word for it--read William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist.

What does it mean to be college educated anyway?

COVID-19 has upended our lives in so many different ways that most of us would never have ever imagined.  How many among us imagined a situation, for instance, when students of all ages would be forced to be in their homes because of closure of all schools and colleges?  And on top of that, they would learn remotely?

In higher education, remote learning has compelled teachers to think about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it.

Now, pause for a minute and forget the coronavirus.  Shouldn't teachers have always been thinking about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it?  Isn't that fundamental to teaching?

I think so. I believe so.

But, not all teachers did.

I even tried to engage in discussions on what exactly it means to be college educated in the 21st century and, therefore, what does it mean to be a faculty in the 21st century.  It was a disaster, with most colleagues pooh-poohing it all.  Of course, it could be that the messenger was the problem, but I think it was more than that.

When I became a full-time academic, within a couple of years it became clear to me that the traditional approach to college was not working.  In fact, it was often counter-productive.  I have even blogged in plenty about it here in this blog.

I wrote in this post, for instance, "One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated."  And that was in April 2013.  Seven years ago, to the date, almost. The missed opportunities; what a shame!

The following is from April 27, 2013, unedited:
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Even if I am a total dud in helping students in my classes understand and appreciate the materials, I bet there are very few who doubt my commitment to liberal education.  If they paid attention to me, then they also know that even as they go through a rigorous liberal education, they have to keep thinking about their career plans as well.

In this structure, problems are in plenty.  Universities offer such a diluted and distorted version of liberal education that we insiders are the ones giving liberal education that awful stink.  Here is an example: at my university, a student can major in the social sciences and minor in geography, and successfully graduate with not even a tenth of the requirements coming from the sciences.  This is merely one of the gazillion possibilities of students legitimately avoiding being liberally educated even as they earn their diplomas at the colleges and universities all over the country.  Not the well-rounded liberal education at all.

My point has always been that such an education is a waste of time and money.  We might as well merely offer professional training.  We should stop referring to what we do as liberal education.  Why call it liberal education and offer something else?

At the same time, we have been completely marginalizing professional education too.  Instead of providing career and technical education to those students who might prefer that, we put that down as some kind of an inferior option and we force all students to go through the hoops of whatever that is we do at four-year schools anymore.

No wonder then we are finding ourselves all twisted trying to figure out the "real payoff of a college degree." To a large extent, Ronnie L. Booth, president of Tri-County Technical College, near Greenville, S.C., articulates the points that I try to get across to people:

A vocational degree is not for everyone, he readily admits, but many of his students are arriving with four-year degrees in hand, looking for something practical. In coming months, he will direct Tri-County's academic counselors to more aggressively steer students away from fields and majors that might prove a bad fit. Don't like the sight of blood or the smell of bodily fluids? Nursing might not be for you. Interested in engineering? Let's have a serious talk about your grades in algebra.
"Better to find out on the front end," he says. "I believe in truth in advertising."
More parents and students, he says, need to "understand that someone has to pay the bills." In his region, he frequently meets waiters and waitresses who have four-year degrees, and he has a friend whose daughter went to college to study dance. She is working in retail.
"That is not what Daddy had anticipated," Mr. Booth says in a Southern drawl. "I believe in a broad educational program, things that make you a good citizen, but I am not sure that it is necessary to rack up $50,000 or $100,000 in debt to get that—and then not to be able to get employment. I have told my children that one of Daddy's goals is to get you off my payroll."

In healthcare, which has been one of the fastest growing sectors, ""It looks like B.A. is now entry-level, or it's becoming that way."  The jobs that didn't require a four-year degree are rapidly evaporating:

The erosion of midlevel jobs goes beyond nursing. Experts say several forces are at work. Automation has eliminated many transcription and clerical jobs. Cost pressures have led hospitals and other health-care providers to push many routine tasks onto medical assistants and other lower-paid workers.
Pharmacies, for example, increasingly employ a mix of licensed pharmacists—who now often need a doctorate—and technicians who fill prescriptions with only limited training.
The shift to electronic medical records, meanwhile, has eliminated many traditional jobs maintaining patient records but has created a wealth of new opportunities for those with coding skills.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of medicine, along with an increased focus on measuring and improving patient care, has raised the bar on educational requirements for some jobs. An Institute of Medicine committee in 2010, for example, recommended that 80% of registered nurses have bachelor's degrees by 2020, meaning nurses with associate's degrees may soon find themselves in the position LPNs face today.

The system is so rigged that the youth seem to have no choice but to get a college degree, even if it means that they will be underemployed:

In the short term, we're still obviously digging out of the jobs hole left by the recession. Unemployment for college graduates is higher than normal. Underemployment is more prevalent, though it's less severe than college critics portray, and perhaps no worse than during the Reagan days. It's the long view that's cloudier. Maybe, as the recession's impact fades, the economy will naturally go back to quickly churning out more jobs for high skill workers, and academics like Beaudry and his colleagues will be proven wrong. Or, perhaps they're right, and we'll need to wait for another great tech revolution before the market for educated workers goes back to growing the way it did 15 years ago.We can't say for sure. But we do know that young people are safer with a degree than without one.

One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated.  Here is an example: how much math should we require that students do?  Or, even if we think that the math will do them good for critical thinking skills, which I believe it does, should we reconsider how we teach math?  We need to look into such questions because "less than a quarter of U.S. workers report using math any more complicated than basic fractions and percentages during the course of their jobs.":

And, here is the interesting aspect of it all.  Remember how we systematically treat technical training as some kind of a second-class option that the young should be discouraged from?  Ahem, they need math!

Upper level blue collar, e.g. craft and repair workers like skilled construction trades and mechanics

Lower level blue collar, e.g. factory workers and truck drivers

So, quo vadis?

Learn. Think. Repeat.

Engaged students in my intro class have often told me that my class almost always overturned many of the ideas that they had.  And they had believed many of those ideas to be established truths.  Some of my favorites include these:

• Students came into class believing that human population growth would continue forever and lead to huge problems, and in my class they had to think through the fact that women are having fewer children than ever before and, therefore, population growth is slowing down.
• Students would passionately defend the importance of buying locally, and then through the materials they had to think through the complex global interdependence and how we benefit from trade.

The second one--buying locally--is one that I had to even explicitly explain to, and argue with, a few Berniacs, who, like tRump supporters, parroted the rhetoric of how we in the US do not manufacture stuff anymore and how we, therefore, need to do something.

Both the examples clearly conveyed the link between content knowledge and critical thinking.  One has to know something in order to think through that content.  Critical thinking is not something as a standalone skill.  Critical thinking requires asking a lot of questions, which we cannot intelligently do unless we know about the content to even phrase a question or two.  I often tell students that in this age of access to information right from the small little device that fits into the palm of one's hands, we are only as smart as how smart we are in asking questions.  The ability to ask interesting and meaningful questions is, I believe, more important than before.

Typically, some time in the term, when a context comes up, I quickly slip in my advice to students that they need to seriously think about what they want from their four or five or six years of college.  I suggest to them that a broad introduction to as many ways of understanding the world will serve them well.  And, if they combined that with thinking and communication skills, they will be set for the rest of their lives.  Content plus skills.  Never about the skills alone.  And never about the content alone.

Johann Neem writes along these lines in his essay.

Cognitive science demonstrates that if we want critical thinkers, we need to ensure that they have knowledge. Thinking cannot be separated from knowledge. Instead, critical thinking is learning to use our knowledge.

Neem adds:

We can only think critically about things about which we have knowledge, and we can only make use of facts if we know how to think about them. As James Lang writes in Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, “knowledge is foundational: we won’t have the structures in place to do deep thinking if we haven’t spent time mastering a body of knowledge related to that thinking.”

Indeed!

Neem echoes my thoughts here:

One has to know things to answer things. This is true even in the age of Google. If one looks up something online, one needs to know a lot of background information to make sense of the definition and explanation—and given how unreliable many online sources are, without that background knowledge, one might be led astray. But perhaps most surprising, those with more knowledge can learn more when they look something up on Google. That’s because if they already have background knowledge, they can add to it the new information and insights from what they are learning. This means that someone who understands political science and has some knowledge of how parties function will learn more from an online news story about elections than someone lacking that knowledge. Those who know more learn more than those who do not.
In other words, intellectual skills and knowledge are not two distinct things. They must work together to produce critical thinkers.

A mighty challenge it will be to get these ideas across when we live in an era of a President who prides himself on his gut instinct and with his party on an anti-intellectual crusade.  Think about that, too!

I will soon be teaching a math course. Kind of.

Looking back at events from nearly thirty years ago, I am pleasantly surprised at the decisions that I made.  One of those was to walk away from all things math, and I am all the happier.

Math came easily to me; not only did I not have anxieties, I enjoyed learning and doing math.  In school, I routinely did the classwork way ahead of the rest and then used up the remaining time to finish the assigned homework. (Which explains why my mother claims, and rightfully so, that she has never ever seen me do homework or study.)  I understood  the abstraction when in engineering too, though by then I knew for certain that my heart was not in math.

When I switched out of engineering to study the subjects that I wanted to know more about, it was clear that most faculty in the graduate program expected me to put my math and engineering background to use.  The social sciences were getting heavily into math and statistics and those who could play with numbers had an easier time publishing papers, which was all that mattered.

But, I couldn't care.  Because, I could not be convinced that mathematical and statistical modeling would explain the human and social dynamics that I was interested in and, I was even more confident that those models could never predict anything into the future.  Instead, I chose to transition into the methods that have been used for centuries--thinking and writing.  It was a difficult struggle because the years of schooling in India had screwed up my thinking abilities and had not given me any sense of how to write.

I even made fun of the articles in journals.  They were all gobbledygook.  Plenty of data but minutiae. Greek symbols expressing statistical modeling of social issues.  And sentences that rarely made sense.

As if a bunch of laws can explain quite a few things about the human condition.  The crazies who wanted to study the problems that humans and societies face decided to develop models to explain the problems.  And to develop laws and theories.  Madness, I say, madness!

The net result of all that?  I was a loser out of graduate school!  A loser I continue to be.  At least, I am a loser on my own terms, eh! ;)

Despite the losses, I am confident that all it will take is one look around the world in order to understand that developing mathematical and statistical models will do nothing to help us with the problems all around.  Oh well.  Losers don't get to write history! ;)

But, I will soon get to teach math to incoming college freshman students.  Details in another post; stay tuned!

The pursuit of madness!

March Madness has ended!  More on the Madness here.

It is time then to re-post this from April 2017 ;)
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Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to cut philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers. This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness.”

Barbarians at the gates of the ivory tower

You've come across the following quote, right?

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair phrased it so well for all of us.

It does not have to be literally the salary, but can also be other aspects of life. 

I often think about that statement when trying to sort out the troubling aspects of higher education.  For instance, the massive spending on athletics in higher education.  There are a number of people whose literal salaries depend on not understanding how much this is ruining higher education.  Or, the stale curriculum and pedagogy that faculty continue to practice--our salaries depend on the status quo and, therefore, it is difficult for us to understand why we need to change our ways!

Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our societies. But, given impressive and ongoing advances in technology and artificial intelligence, it is hard to see how they can continue playing this role without reinventing themselves over the next two decades. Education innovation will disrupt academic employment, but the benefits to jobs everywhere else could be enormous. If there were more disruption within the ivory tower, economies just might become more resilient to disruption outside it.1

Ahem, try explaining that to university faculty!

You can also, therefore, understand why I love the GBS quote so much that I made it the title of my blog: Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.  Honest professionals are rare, and honest professional organizations do not even exist.

In fact, the current zeitgeist is all about dishonesty.  trump and his minions make it a point every single day to remind us that lying pays off.  The more outrageous the lies, the higher the payoffs.  In this, they attack honest professionals wherever they might be--in Congress, or in the FBI, or in colleges, or ...

Tragically, these outright dishonest psychopaths are effective in their attacks on higher education.  It is bizarre that two-thirds of Republicans think college is a waste!

A June Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Republicans believe colleges and universities have a “negative effect on the way things are going in the country.” Democrats overwhelmingly said the opposite.
In an August Gallup survey, two-thirds of Republicans likewise said they have just some or very little confidence in colleges. The chief complaints: Schools are too liberal, they don’t allow students to think for themselves and students are learning the wrong things.
Or as Donald Trump Jr. put it in a campus speech last fall: “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange we’ll train your children to hate our country.”  

The implications are far-reaching, and makes for a deadly destructive combination: The insiders have steadfastly refused to change, and the barbarians are the gate tearing everything down.

No college and all sports is the Republican dream

The other day, I told the friend that I doubt if there is even one Prius in the US with a confederate flag bumper sticker on it.  We might make fun of the liberals, yes, but at least they don't drive around with symbols of hate.

The stereotype of Prius owners exists because it reflects a great deal of the reality about them.  Similar is the stereotype of Republicans as military-loving and anti-intellectual types.  In those deep red states, the irony is their passion for college sports.  Yep, those very folks who aim their guns on colleges love, love, love football and basketball so much that they seem to tolerate the academic aspects of it because, well, without college there is no sport!

And with trump and his minions now in charge, hey, I am not at all surprised with this latest survey results:

A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

Fifty-eight percent of the Republicans say that colleges have a negative effect on the country.  58!  These are the same idiots who gladly voted for trump!

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, younger adults have much more positive views of colleges and universities than older adults. About half (52%) of Republicans ages 18 to 29 say colleges and universities have a positive impact on the country, compared with just 27% of those 65 and older. By contrast, there are no significant differences in views among Democrats by age, with comparable majorities of all age groups saying colleges and universities have a positive impact.

"just 27% of those 65 and older" Republican leaners think that college does good.  I wonder who these people voted for in the November election!

These anti-college Republicans elected a guy with no plans for the future of the country.

Trump’s innovation maybe wasn’t to bash college so much as to ignore it. Previous candidates, in both parties, paid at least lip service to the idea of expanding educational opportunities and retraining workers whose jobs were eliminated by changes in the U.S. economy. The first indications that that was changing came in the 2012 GOP primary, when Rick Santorum (B.A., Penn State; M.B.A, Pitt; J.D., Dickinson Law) accused Barack Obama of being a “snob” for trying to expand access to education. Trump didn’t bother to make the case for retraining or education; he simply promised dispossessed blue-collar workers that their jobs in mills, factories, and especially coal mines were going to come back.

As simple as that.  Just ignore higher education.  After all, nothing good ever comes from that, right?  Further, colleges are nothing but full of those damn liberals and it is better to shut them all down!

I will borrow Paul Krugman's words to wrap up this post:

Republicans have changed in the age of Trump: what was already a strong strain of anti-intellectualism has become completely dominant. The notion that there was a golden age of conservative intellectuals is basically a myth. But there used to be at least some pretense of taking facts and hard thinking seriously. Now anyone pointing out awkward facts – immigrants haven’t brought a reign of terror, coal jobs can’t be brought back, Trump lost the popular vote – is the enemy. In fact, I’d argue that anti-intellectualism was, in its own way, as big a factor in the election as racism.
What this means for the future is grim. America basically invented the modern, educated society, leading the way on universal K-12 education, building the world’s finest and most comprehensive higher education system; this in turn was an important factor in how we became leader of the free world. Now a powerful political movement basically wants to make America ignorant again.

Sad!

Thus spake the market!

Think about this: Most kids and adults like to be entertained.  Most kids and adults alike do not care to invest time and energy into reading and thinking.  Are those fair enough generalizations?

Thus, if we had money to spend along with the time, then most of us would shell out our time and money on entertainment.  And what better entertainment than sports, right?

If we leave everything to the market, then that is the kind of an outcome we can expect.  Which is also what we see increasingly happening in higher education, where students spend their time and money.  And with plenty of help from taxpayers, sports rule.  The flashier and more exciting the sport is, the more is the money spent on it.

Which is why it is no surprise that this op-ed (in the NY Times!!!) author has taken it to the logical extreme: He (of course it is always a "he" when it comes to such nutcases!) says it is high time universities offered majors in football and basketball and ...: He cites how the market has already spoken in favor of this:

Last weekend, nearly 157,000 people packed Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee to see the University of Tennessee battle Virginia Tech, the largest crowd ever to turn out for a football game, college or professional.
With popularity comes money, and lots of it. In April, the N.C.A.A. signed a deal with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension of their March Madness basketball TV contract to 2032, while the college football bowl series brings in more than $500 million annually.

Exactly.  When was the last time a philosophy match brought in such money?

The author offers more:

Athletic budgets have swelled as a result. Texas A&M is on the verge of becoming the first campus to bring in more than $200 million a year from athletics. The University of Iowa just announced a 10-year, $45 million contract extension for its football coach. In 40 states the highest paid public employee is a college coach.

Oh, I get it now; the high salaries of coaches at colleges is to be lauded as the market speaking loudly.  What was I thinking!

 The $6.9 million annual salary of Nick Saban, the head football coach at the University of Alabama, is equal to the combined average salary for nearly 100 assistant professors at the school, according to the most recent data available.

Get rid of those faculty in geography and pay the football coach some more, I say.

Oh, wait, except that coaches earning gazillions, and the NCAA being an awesome cash machine, are not the results of the free market.  Click here, and in the table sort it out by the final column on "% Subsidy" if you want to puke all over the screen!

And, oh, while the coaches get paid gazillions, the worker-bees, also known as students, do not get paid.  Surely that is how the market works.  It does not?

It's wrong that taxpayers are forced to subsidize professional sports teams via stadium deals and the like. It's equally wrong that taxpayers and students see their bills jacked up to fund college sports teams, no matter how enjoyable the spectacle. I suspect that if and when the actual payouts to athletic departments for sports programs become better known, this worm will turn.

Nope, in this entertainment obsessed world, no worm will turn anywhere.  Who cares if 30-year old Johnny can't read and lives in mom's basement as long as he gets screens full of entertainment!

F*k College!

I have emailed the newspaper editor the following ...

In a presidential campaign season that has mostly been a farcical political theatre at best, and one that seems to be on track for a terribly tragic ending on November 8th, serious discussions of policies have been sorely lacking. Every once in a while, policy statements are uttered, but they are never engagingly discussed and debated by the wannabes nor their surrogates.

One of those statements was this: “College is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job.”

If only we had at least talked about that!

Over the past few years, the country’s political leaders and educators alike have been manically promoting—practically mandating—four years of college, for free, for everybody. But why this college conscription?

For productive employment, a four-year college is certainly not the only pathway. As my neighbors often like to remind me, their successful small business is not a product of any four-year degree. Among the owners and the employees, only one has a four-year degree. And, most employees earn more than what many recent college diploma holders can only dream of.

Perhaps the spectacular entertainment provided by NCAA football and basketball is what draws most to college. If the taxpayer-subsidized NCAA sports did not exist, most teens would flee from college, and from courses like the ones I teach, and towards the trades.

Even the very notion of a four-year college is an anachronism. More than ever before, the young will have to be lifelong learners if they want to succeed in the world of employment. They might have to regularly reinvent themselves in new careers, some of which are yet to be created. They will have to keep up with new ideas and technology—if they cannot do it on their own, then they will need formal training. This is applicable to those going to the trades as well.

The unhealthy fixation on four years of college triggers even more unhealthy policy approaches. We actively encourage high school students to begin to earn college credits even as they are worrying about their first pimples. We convey to students a horribly distorted idea that they need to be done with education at the earliest so that they can move on to the “real world.” We develop measures on how successful colleges are in moving students along in the pipeline—we critically examine the rates at which students graduate within four, five, or six years and longer.

I would rather have colleges and universities emphasizing to students the importance of lifelong learning. Taking six or seven years should be lauded, as long as students are simultaneously gaining valuable real world experiences. Perhaps we ought to even encourage the less interested students to take a break after a year or two in college, in order to experience the world—whether it is as baristas or as legal-aides or as farm workers—and then return to learn more, which will be an example of the continuous lifelong education that will characterize their lives.

We need to talk about this, instead of merely keeping up with the latest dramatic act in the political theatre.

Of course college guarantees jobs ... for academics and administrators!

In its editorial, the Editorial Board of the NY Times has a powerful sentence, which is consistent with what I have been writing here (and in op-eds) for years:

the familiar assumption — graduate from college and prosperity will follow — has been disproved in this century.

I have been warning students about that broken relationship ... for years.  The American Dream is not a guarantee, when all over the world people are working hard to achieve their own versions of the American Dream.  But, hey, nobody listens to me :(

The editorial continues with this:

The problem is that the economy does not produce enough jobs that require college degrees. Private-sector white-collar jobs can increasingly be moved offshore and automated, while public-sector jobs that require degrees, notably teaching, have been decimated by deep layoffs and feeble hiring. Business investment and consumer spending have suffered in the busts of recent decades, and government spending has not picked up the slack, leading to chronic shortfalls in demand for goods, services and employees. One sign of the downshift is that much of the recent job growth has been in lower-paying occupations. Worse, there is little evidence of a turnaround. In the past five years, postings for jobs that do not require a college degree have steadily outpaced postings for those that do.
The result is lower-quality jobs and lower pay for college graduates. Take, for example, the roughly one-third of college graduates who spend their work lives in jobs that do not require a degree. 

I have been worrying about this forever, it seems like.  As I noted recently, quoting from my op-ed from four years ago, "I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated."  But, who listens to me,  right?

In fact,  in the summer of 2007, I attacked the college hype itself--the first of my op-eds along these lines was published, and the title says it all: "Does U.S. oversell college?"  To which an academic in town authored in the same paper a knee-jerk response filled with cliches about the virtues of a college degree and while attacking me.  Oh well ...  Apparently he listened to me!

Reading those sentences in the NY Times convinces that me all the more that if I, a nobody at a podunk university, have been correctly reading the tea leaves for years, then certainly the truth was right there, staring at all of us.  Either we chose to ignore it--denial--or it was one heck of a conspiracy to hide the truth that is finally coming out into the open.  "I told you so" is of no use at this point!

I do a full-disclosure of sorts in classes and when talking with students.  I tell them that earning an A in my class would not even get them a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  It will not directly lead to a job, I tell them.  But, if they paid attention to my approach, which might seem like Mr. Miyagi's "wax on, wax off" instructions to the kid who wanted to learn karate, then it will all work out, I assure them.  But then--you know what is coming now--nobody listens to me!

Source

College is to prepare for a world of unscripted problems

I have sent a slightly edited version of this to the newspaper editor .. maybe it will be published, maybe not ;)

The price of crude oil and of gasoline at the pump have been tumbling down to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling in the global marketplace at $147 and experts predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric $200 per barrel. Yet, since the new year dawned, it has been a story of how low can you go, with experts wondering whether it might even get closer to $20, and when it eventually goes up if $50 might become the ceiling price.

A belief that oil prices would only climb forever also propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline. But, over the past few months, the news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who Will Hire a Petroleum Engineer Now?” The trade publication, Oil and Gas Investor, discussed enrollment declines in US petroleum engineering degree programs.

Of course, this is not new, but is a repetition. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As oil price rose, and as it stayed in the hundred-dollar range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But, with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come" said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil price and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted with any sense of accuracy. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown. It is not merely about the resource. We need to think about the technological changes that the future will bring, the geopolitical issues, the overall health of the global economy, and more, which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and, therefore, the implications for jobs, is not the best indicator to prepare for the economic conditions and jobs for a few years down the road. Even four years make a huge difference—the freshman students who started on petroleum engineering four years ago face a reality now that is very different, a reality where perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on current characteristics of the economy are betting against the only thing that we know for sure—the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the future years. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving them worrying about their futures.

What can the young do then, and what should the universities do for the young? As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) wonderfully put it, the challenge is “Educating for a World of Unscripted Problems.” Unscripted because we do not know what the future holds. But, we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future, by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet, contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely ever go into serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we incorrectly believe we need more engineers and material scientists, only to realize a few years later—as was the case with Hynix—that the entire factory could close down. We seem to only consider the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that the petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” then those students will have skill sets that they will be able to apply but in industries completely different from what they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is more than about a major and is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”

Did Mario Savio ever do stand-up comedy?

For a long time, I have been blogging about higher education, especially about:

The entire system treating students as if they are kids at a four-year camp;
The growth of bureaucracy to make sure students are happy and comfortable; and, thus,
Various kinds of "parental" disciplining of students; and, finally
Higher education being run more and more as a ponzi-kind of business scheme.

So, of course I was very happy to read this essay on how today's college students can't seem to take a joke.  The author, Caitlin Flanagan, has a track record of going after the contemporary variations of political correctness in education, and almost always I don't have too many disagreement with her takes.  In this essay, Flanagan reminds us about the context:

Two of the most respected American comedians, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, have discussed the unique problems that comics face on college campuses. In November, Rock told Frank Rich in an interview for New York magazine that he no longer plays colleges, because they’re “too conservative.” He didn’t necessarily mean that the students were Republican; he meant that they were far too eager “not to offend anybody.” In college gigs, he said, “you can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” Then, in June, Seinfeld reopened the debate—and set off a frenzied round of op-eds—when he said in a radio interview that comics warn him not to “go near colleges—they’re so PC.”

Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld are no Puritans and their politics are nowhere conservative.  One would think that these two comedians would be an ideal fit for college campuses, right?  But, when these mainstream comedians complain about the PC environment that straitjackets them, well, hey, to the PC crowd they might as well be Fox News anchors, eh! ;)

Perhaps you are thinking, "don't colleges have better things to do with the money than to invite comedians to campuses to entertain students?"  If you ask such a question, then that means you have forgotten that residential colleges are less about education and more about student affairs.  Colleges, big or small, make sure students are sufficiently entertained--should I remind you about football and basketball?  Comedians and music groups are part of the mix.  Why?  Flanagan writes about that too:

it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.

Resort is perhaps the best way to describe residential colleges anymore, with the fancy dorms, recreation facilities, fancy foods, and entertainment.  If I were being brutal, I would say that colleges are pimping out, but I would not say that; oops, did I write that? ;)

It seems so quaint that there was once a free speech movement on college campuses that pissed off the establishment.  Now, all those free speech students have all grown up and become the establishment.  And free speech is now harder to find in colleges than back then!  Comedy, and that too stand-up comedy, has always unsettled the audience.  Comedy is free speech.  If they were alive, George Carlin or Richard Pryor would not be allowed to perform on campuses

When you talk with college students outside of formal settings, many reveal nuanced opinions on the issues that NACA [National Association for Campus Activities] was so anxious to police. But almost all of them have internalized the code that you don’t laugh at politically incorrect statements; you complain about them. In part, this is because they are the inheritors of three decades of identity politics, which have come to be a central driver of attitudes on college campuses.

 All because the establishment wants to "protect" the "kids." Only in colleges will you hear adults being referred to as kids!

Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a “mouth full of blood”—the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not as a critique of some vile notion but as an endorsement of it. It’s the essential peril of comedy, as performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, Amy Schumer understand all too well. But to enroll in college and discover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand-up comics who tell jokes in the student union—great care has been taken to expose you to only the narrowest range of approved social and political opinions: that’s the mouth full of blood right there.

Oh well.  I need to first fight for my own right to free speech at my own college campus! ;)

Sugar-babies, too, are a part of capitalism :(

In graduate school, I was vaguely acquainted with a student from India, who was also of Tamil Brahmin stock and had come to America for higher education.  That common heritage aside, we had nothing in common other than a few friends.  Once, after a movie, my friend dropped her off first at her apartment before I got dropped off.  She lived in a much better neighborhood, way pricier than mine.  She could afford that because somebody else paid for it.  In exchange, she had to be available for that patron.

I never would have imagined such possibilities.  But, there it was.  She was brilliant, charming, beautiful, yet something offbeat like this.

A year ago, the Atlantic featured such arrangements that were apparently becoming more and more possible thanks the internet and smartphones.

In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for). Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies.

That graduate school acquaintance was a sugar-baby; a phrase that perhaps existed even back then.

But, I didn't think much about that Atlantic piece, until now.  Because, the Economist also has something to say about sugar-babies.  As I always comment, if the Economist and the Wall Street Journal report on such social aspects, then it means that it is not any fringe happening.

As the cost of university has risen, so has the number of “sugar babies” who pay for it by selling companionship and sex to wealthy older men. Monthly pay for this is typically about $3,000, though some “sugar daddies” offer much more. According to SeekingArrangement, a firm based in Las Vegas, two-thirds of sugar-baby graduates have no student debt.
Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago. Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder.

I suppose if we live long enough, we will get to witness quite a few strange things in life.

The boom is fuelled by increased acceptance of “sugaring” (dating for money), says Steven Pasternack, the owner of a Miami firm known as Sugardaddie. The company’s site gets more than 5,000 new profile uploads worldwide every day. A quarter are students. Astute marketing helps. Sugardaddie’s pitch notes that it does not “discriminate against people’s desires”. Sugar babies are increasingly advised to negotiate not an “allowance”, but rather a certain “lifestyle” in exchange for dates. These arrangements can remain discreet. New Yorker Keith and the younger woman he met online, seeking a sugar daddy to pay for college, both tell friends that they met in a bar. His weekly $500 deposits into her bank account will cease, he says, if she becomes unavailable.

You are probably thinking, "hey, this is prostitution."  And you run into legal trouble for prostitution.  Right?

Might any of this qualify as prostitution? The websites say no. A sugar daddy doesn’t want his sugar baby to leave, whereas no client of a prostitute “wants the hooker to stick around”, as SeekingArrangement puts it. This argument has prevailed in America’s courts. If a relationship exists, payment can be labelled as compensation for companionship, not sex.

As that Atlantic essay noted:

When we consider what it means to be a high-end prostitute, we generally think about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman—a desperate young person willing to trade some of her dignity for the chance to avoid working on curbs at two in the morning. A college education seems fundamentally at odds with that image. By actively seeking out college students, and publicizing the high numbers already in its ranks, Seeking Arrangement makes it easier for smart, young women with bright futures to rationalize the decision to join Seeking Arrangement: If so many college women are signing up for the site, it must be something different. It must be more socially acceptable somehow. It can’t really be prostitution.

Sugar-babies are yet another reason why we need to spend time thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humankind, and what our existence means in this universe that is a mystery; I have quoted the following before and is worth repeating:

we're living at a time when public moral deliberation is rapidly moving away from considerations of ultimate ends, ideals of human flourishing, in favor of a morality of rights that is largely indifferent to what individuals do with their freedom. As long as you refrain from harming others, you are free to pursue happiness however you like, no questions asked.
Politically speaking, this might be the best available strategy for people who disagree about the highest good to live together pluralistically in relative peace. But this doesn't mean that it's possible for individual human beings to forego the question of how to live, to bypass the question of human flourishing — what it consists in, and how to achieve it. In fact, with the retreat of institutions that once proposed compelling comprehensive visions of the good life, the burden of choosing among various ways of life falls more than ever on the shoulders of individuals.

Life!

Is the middle-class American Dream dead?

"How's the US economy?" asked an old high school friend.  That is one of the questions he asks me every time we meet.  I suppose there is a professional interest too for him--his executive career is tied to the outsourced back-office operations of a US-based financial firm.

"The economy has definitely picked up" I replied.  And added the commentary that is not new in this blog: "but, the middle-class jobs are not there, which is a big problem."

A couple of days later, it was a similar question from a couple and I replayed my reply.  I continued with "my favorite examples are Facebook and WhatsApp.  They have created billions of dollars, but next to nothing in terms of jobs."

The American model that dominates our thinking is the experience for two generations from the early 1940s.  With a high school diploma, one clocked in and clocked out at work and was assured of a successful middle-class life.  Now, the US and the world are full of வேலையில்லா பட்டதாரிகள் (unemployed college graduates,) as an autorickshaw driver commented two days ago.

What happened?

Offshoring and automation happened.  The old middle class model has been obliterated.

Yes, the stock market is soaring, the unemployment rate is finally retreating after the Great Recession and the economy added 321,000 jobs last month. But all that growth has done nothing to boost pay for the typical American worker. Average wages haven’t risen over the last year, after adjusting for inflation. Real household median income is still lower than it was when the recession ended.
Make no mistake: The American middle class is in trouble.

I have been delivering this bottom-line of the middle class in trouble for a number of years now.  But, hey, who cares about what I say, right?  So, will let some other person say that instead!

Millions of American jobs disappeared during the 1990, 2001 and 2008 recessions. That’s what happens in recessions. But for decades after World War II, lost jobs came back when the economy picked up again. These times, they didn’t. And it was a particular sort of job that disappeared permanently in those downturns, economists from Duke University and the University of British Columbia have found: jobs that companies could easily outsource overseas or replace with a machine.
Economists call those jobs “middle-skill” jobs. They include a lot of factory work — the country is down about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since 1990, according to the Labor Department — but also a lot of clerical and sales tasks that can be handled easily from a country where workers make a fraction of what they make here.

The sophistication in automation, which seems to have a Moore's Law equivalent of its own with the automation getting better and better every single day, means that there will be lesser and lesser demand for the "middle-skill" labor.  The American middle class model is doomed.  I don't see a way out of this at all.

Which is also why I increasingly find it very, very difficult to deal with students--at my university, they typically come from lower-middle-class and lower-income backgrounds, with the hope and promise that a college diploma will vault them into the prosperous lives promised to Americans.  If I give them my take along the lines of this and many other posts at this blog, I will not be even a little bit encouraging.  On the other hand, not telling them means wilful concealment of the truth as I see it.  Hopefully, some read this blog and the warning:

Even if they all earned degrees, who would hire them?

Kill the college. Now.

Over the past decades, the push for collegiate education has systematically led to a marginalization of career and technical education (CTE) programs in schools. More than a marginalization, there has been an unhealthy shift in attitudes that view college-preparatory programs as being superior to CTE programs. This atrocious attitude has resulted in many students at colleges and universities to attend college only because they fear being labeled a “loser” otherwise.

The existence of such a view about those who do not attend college is a tragic reflection of our own selves—us elders—who have cultivated and propagated such a grossly distorted view. These contrasting attitudes towards college-prep and CTE programs, with the latter suffering the proverbial stepchild treatment, do not serve the students and society well.

Thus, it was heart-warming to read that throughout Oregon “there has been an effort to expand CTE programs in middle and high schools.” It was even more encouraging to read that Oregon’s efforts to expand CTE has inspired Rep. Kurt Schrader to introduce a bill in Congress to expand funding for such programs throughout the country.  We need a lot more coverage of these programs, and a lot more public support for them as well.

But, at the same time, I hope we are promoting CTE for all the correct reasons of introducing children to the phenomenal range of opportunities that they can choose from and not because we want to track them on a vocational path. Because, more than anything else, we live in a world where careers are increasingly volatile, and this volatility can easily make a mockery of the decisions we make, especially when young.

It is possible that there is a renewed attention on CTE because of the anemic economic recovery with respect to the persistent unemployment rate. Here, we should keep in mind that the “jobless” recovery is not really about “skills mismatch”—the claim that we don’t have people with the skills needed for the jobs that are out there. While economists disagree on this as they always do on any topic, there is a strong evidence-based argument, such as the one from the Economic Policy Institute, that “the weak labor market recovery is not due to skills mismatch (or any other structural factors).” Instead, it is due to weakness in the aggregate demand in the economy.

CTE programs ought to be considered as important as college-prep programs for all the right reasons. My neighbors are successful self-employed business owners, who did not attend college, and are living the American Dream. They exemplify the old Mark Twain quip that he never let schooling get in the way of his education.

Whether it is via college-prep or career and technical education programs, I hope that teenagers are developing an understanding that the world is their oyster.

This is a slightly edited version of an op-ed that will soon be published in the Statesman Journal

Back to that nagging question ... is college worth it?

The answer is not as easy as one would like it to be.

For once, there is one commentary that I agree with without any qualifier at all:

The question “Is college worth it?” clearly can’t be answered unequivocally. So much depends on another question: “Worth it for whom?” Is college worth it for everyone? Worth it for an individual student? Worth it on average? Worth it for society? Each of those questions is likely to lead to a different answer.

Which is why when students or parents ask me about college or majors or graduate school, I don't tell them what I truly feel but, instead, I turn their question around and ask them what they want to get from that investment of time and money.  Because, it all depends.

For the most part, I criticize the current state of discussions because we do not take the effort to explain how the answer to "is college worth it?" will depend on so many issues that can easily vary across individuals.  Forget the elite schools--to those students, college is clearly worth it.  But the elite institutions are few, and the majority are places like the one where I teach.  It is at these places that answering the question is tricky and is not by any means a case of one answer fits all.

For one, economic class makes a huge difference in terms of college and earnings.

Suppose I got someone to make a chart showing the incomes of prime-age BMW drivers versus average Americans. It would reveal a large BMW earnings premium. I could even produce a chart showing that the children of BMW drivers grow up to earn more than the average American. But that wouldn't be evidence that BMWs cause high wages, and that the BMW Earnings Premiums extends across multiple generations. It would be evidence that high-income people buy expensive cars and that there's intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.

The question of whether college is worth it needs to tease out that  intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.  To disaggregate that data won't be easy, I would think.  Especially when the trend in terms of who attends college is clear:

Today, only about 7 percent of recent college graduates come from the bottom-income quartile, compared with 12 percent in 1970, when federal aid was scarce. From a liberal egalitarian point of view, we’re going in the wrong direction.

Even as we push college for all, we need to keep this bottom-line in mind:

unless the overall job market is booming, simply churning out more college graduates risks making everybody a bit poorer.

And the result will be a worsening of the very inequality that we hope college education will help narrow:

It’s also important to remember who would stand to lose the most if a surge of graduates did manage to bring down the college premium. Chances are, alums of elite schools wouldn’t be particularly affected, since any substantial growth would likely come from mid- and lower-tier schools. Graduate degree holders, the real winners of the educational race of the past 30 years, also wouldn’t be much affected. In the end, you’re essentially talking about an approach to inequality that involves bringing solidly, if unspectacularly, middle-class households a little closer to the bottom, while pushing down the bottom even deeper.

Depending on how we think through the question, our public policy suggestions will also differ.  If we take one route, we will then come to this public policy option:

Not so many decades ago, high school was considered the frontier of education. Some people even argued that it was a waste to encourage Americans from humble backgrounds to spend four years of life attending high school. Today, obviously, the notion that everyone should attend 13 years of school is indisputable.
But there is nothing magical about 13 years of education. As the economy becomes more technologically complex, the amount of education that people need will rise. At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal.
That point, in fact, has already arrived.

Now, 15 or 17 years of education as a universal goal is entirely different from claiming that college is worth it but then requiring the student to bear that cost, right?   

As always, it is America's Finest News Source that provides clarity via asking this:

According to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, though recent graduates often struggle to find work and student debt has passed the $1 trillion mark, a college education is more valuable than ever because the wage gap between grads and non-grads continues to grow. What do you think?

And the clear response is:

“Really? Well then, by all means, raise tuition.”

Yes, let them eat cakes!