Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

from The Nation:




Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education
William Deresiewicz


A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”

The policy may be extreme, but the feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it. (William Pannapacker, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education as Thomas Benton, has been making this argument for years. See “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” among other essays.) My own advice was never that categorical. Go if you feel that your happiness depends on it—it can be a great experience in many ways—but be aware of what you’re in for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.

At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education

Depressing, but accurate.
Thanks for posting this.

And I'm not criticizing my decision. I'm criticizing the system that doesn't value the extra study and the intellectual insight that it provides.

I received a liberal arts degree for my undergraduate. Three foreign languages, European History 1600 to the 20th Century, art history, music history, theatre history, performance arts, literature (English, American, and German authors and poets). I enrolled in a graduate program to become an elementary school teacher. I was taught an intense and rigorous program of pedagogy, various theories of how children learn at different levels from different backgrounds. Two student teaching gigs as a protegee.

I thought I was really going to be marketable between what I learned for subject matter and how to teach. Four years in college or university wouldn't have given me that opportunity.

Yet upon graduation, I found I was entirely unmarketable in the public school system. Unmarketable because my education demanded a higher compensation. While I had no problem with that, the administration did. Crunching numbers, a teacher with an undergraduate degree who taught from the textbook and rarely from the imagination got the classroom, not me.

It's a pity due to the investment of time and money put into my masters and more of a pity as I really enjoy teaching.

And no, I'm not marketable in private schools either.

A PhD in a research & teaching area of psych, a string of limited-term & part-time teaching & research gigs, so I finally gave up on my dreams of the academic life & retreaded as a clinician.

while working full time in industry. I gave up on that ten years ago, and I am happier for the decision.

I guess I would challenge the assumption that those in more vocational majors like engineering do not think about the liberal arts and the "soft" sciences. While our education in engineering is very application intensive, we do learn how to think. When I was at Purdue the engineers typically had the highest grades in the Freshman and Sophomore humanities classes when compared to humanities majors. I was only a mid range engineering student, but I had the highest score as a Freshman in my sophomore Communications class and the third highest score in my junior Communications class (the two highest scores were obtained by upper level engineering students).

Engineers have an ethics course. We are required to take a number of humanities courses (I took Freshman Comp, Freshman Communication, World History I, Science Fiction as Literature, Debate, Principles of Persuasion, Logic, Macroeconomics, and Microeconomics). We explore concepts like Cost Benefit Analysis and the impact of technology on society in our design courses. We learn to solve problems, and I would put our education up against any other major at the college.

At least at my college engineering and science majors were the most serious students. We spent the most hours studying. I guess that I would challenge the assumption that society is obligated to pick up the tab for 18 and 19 year olds to find themselves. The rich can be dilettantes but society cannot afford a nation of dilettantes.

Our public universities in this state have gone to pricing the "vocational" majors (ie Engineering, Nursing, and Business) at a higher tuition than other majors. The stated reason is that these majors cost more to educate, but is that really true? Another reason that was given early on was that students in these majors can more easily pay the extra tuition.

I would never advise a B.S. in Engineering to go on for a Masters degree while staying in college. Go out and work a few years and get your M.S. paid for by your company. If you enjoyed the effort, then go back to the university for your PhD.