True, that very eye- opening film doesn’t pretend to cover more than public schools. Sorry if I implied that it does.
And yes, fuck Harvard and their ilk for the parts they still play in entrenching and furthering inequality.
7 Likes
I’m not doubting that there is an absolutely insane rise in the cost of college education.
I have no idea where that money’s going, but I can assure you that not much of it goes to the professors. The adjuncts and staff see even less.
If there’s anti-intellectualism because of this, it’s sorely misdirected, because the tenure track people are breaking even and the non-TT folks are getting absolutely fucked.
I don’t get that mindset at all. I’ve always been under the impression that getting a college degree wouldn’t even entitle me to a job stacking jeans at the mall. Seriously, who are these kids who think that a PhD would 1) entitle them to a job 2) that they don’t actually want 3) in tenure-track academia 4) as a rock-star academic, and 5) if they didn’t get the job they pack it up and become anti-intellectual? SMGDH.
http://i.imgur.com/O2KHoLl.gif
Hence the vitriol toward the mythologized Women’s Studies Majors that every 21-year-old engineering student on the internet seems to be spouting.
The New York plan needs a fuckton of work before it’s viable.
In my case, scholarships covered all of it.
There need to be more need-based scholarships available. I say “need-based” because the more well-off kids have private tutors, come from better educated parents, can devote more time to school/extracurriculars because they don’t have to have jobs, etc.
We can afford this, so I don’t know why it doesn’t happen.
Of course, the people who don’t want this to happen are trying to spin it as saying these programs get unqualified kids into college while denying a spot to qualified white(did I say that?) students, when that is not nearly the case.
It is a huge problem, but nobody becomes anti-intellectual because of it. Also, nobody goes into academia expecting to become rich and famous and a rock star academic. There’s like five of those guys total.
100% this. Academia is far from the only employment opportunity for those with advanced degrees.
It really shouldn’t be.
Not every field should require a four-year college education. There should be more emphasis on the skilled trades than there is, and college should be less like learning a trade.
That plan seems a little flawed as well. Last I heard, it sounded almost as if the graduates had to go to college afterward.
3 Likes
I’d say it was more of a partnership, but yes, the banks certainly don’t come out of this smelling like roses either.
All that I’m saying is that one of the biggest factors which limits how much money a bank is willing to lend is the amount of risk that they’re taking on, and the “student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy” rule lowers that risk down to nearly zero. With the risk that low, there’s nothing to prevent them from loaning $100K to someone who will spend decades repaying it, which, in turn, allows the colleges to set their fees higher.
On the other hand, if the student can choose seven years of bad credit (etc.) over repaying the $100K, the risk goes up for the bank, the bank won’t be willing to loan as much, and the fees will have to come down. And, with the loans either dischargeable or able to be paid off, maybe the student will be able to afford a house someday.
7 Likes
At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
Part of the problem is us, the people who have been brainwashed into believing the hype about the elite schools. I was idiotically disappointed when my son decided to go to an Honors program at an excellent out of state State University that gave him merit scholarship to make them par with in-state Rutgers. It would have been a struggle to pay for an elite school had he gotten in (he withdrew his apps), but I felt “no, you’ve got to go to the best school you can!!”.
I took a deep breath and realized times have changed, and those schools are no longer for middle class Jewish kids from the NY metro area, unless they’re breathtakingly smart. One of my son’s classmates got into Harvard, but not only was he a finalist in the Regeneron (ne Intel) Science Talent Search, but both his parents are Alum. That’s the kind of swing you need these days, but they’re likely looking at a struggle to pay. A Wisconsin born relative who went to an Ivy says there’s no way she would have gotten in today. Back then Wisconsin was “diversity”.
3 Likes
And I bet that most of their core classes are being taught by either grad students (which is a necessary part of our training, but still) or by adjuncts or visiting lecturers. Or people who aren’t full time, long term employees of the universities. Of course, they can do great teaching work as well, but they are more likely to be teaching at least a 4/4 load (if not more, 5/5 or 6/6!) and in some cases are probably pretty bitter. But tenure track profs teach less and have more mental energy to be sharing their knowledge base with the students (and more time for mentoring students in upper division courses). And of course, the growth of bureaucracies at universities, which goes hand in hand with attempts to take power out of the hands of individual departments (like centralizing advising and not letting a prof stay in as chair for more than a few years).
There are of course other economic issues at play - the general cost of living in many places has risen across the board.
Good luck with navigating this landscape. The kids will need it!
7 Likes
What’s your field, may I ask. I find history to still be more male dominated, but it’s more even then it used to be.
What jerks!
8 Likes
You’d be surprised. Most of us aren’t, but there are those 5 guys. I know one of them, who came in just wanting something to do and to get a local museum job or some such, and came out an entitled asshole. He became that guy, sadly. [quote=“LearnedCoward, post:22, topic:100202”]
Not every field should require a four-year college education.
[/quote]
You and several others made this point and I totally agree. Everyone should be able to get out of education what they want and need. But education for everyone shouldn’t just be about job training. Everyone should get the opportunity to think deeply and widely about the world, it’s problems, and it’s wonders, which a good liberal arts education does (or should do, at it’s best). That opportunity shouldn’t be restricted to just an elite few nor should the lack of it mean that a person can’t find a job that pays for their lives. But there isn’t any reason that a person learning a trade shouldn’t also have access to what a liberal arts education can offer.
11 Likes
So thanks, folks, for saving that shit show that was the star trek thread and making it into a rather productive conversation. This cheered me up immensely.
16 Likes
I’m in Clinical Psychology (scholar/practitioner PsyD rather than scholar/researcher PhD). It’s a field in transition (but what isn’t these days?), especially in acadamia.
8 Likes
Maybe I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe I’m just thinking as someone who’s been there but not someone who’s currently there.
Looking back, I think it’s silly to expect to get rich and famous doing academic research. When I was in school, however, there was a lot of competitive pettiness and ego conflicts. I had no idea it was physically possible to be ass kissing and backbiting at the same time.
Also what I meant by the five guys remark is that only like five guys total get to be rock star academics. The rest toil in drudgery, if we’re lucky.
I agree completely. Education should be about learning how to learn. Even the trade school stuff. Otherwise we’d all become obsolete when the widgets we’re trained with do.
However, people who just want to fix machines or build webpages should have that option too. A four year engineering degree is way overkill for that, and prohibitively expensive too.
3 Likes
Harvard does make some of its undergraduate places free for families on low income, apparently. I saw a study comparing US vs UK. Harvard have a scholarship programme linked to family income that means if a family makes below about £40K equivalent then the student from that family gets a free ride. In that sense it’s much better than the UK where everyone gets clobbered with ~£80K of debt irrespective of ability to pay it back. If you were smart enough to get into Cambridge UK or Harvard and from an average background (median household income in the UK is £33K, i.e. low enough to qualify for the free ride) then you’d be mad not to study at Harvard.
1 Like
I think there is a root conflict between those of us who do things that have some measurable value (of which teaching certainly qualifies), and people who do not.
1 Like
I encounter that attitude on the reg. Especially from APA-aligned people. God forbid we allow psychologists to be independent thinkers who can thrive in complex situations and are driven by their passion for mental health!
3 Likes
Anti-intellectualism has been part of the fabric of American society since at least the early 1800s. When Einstein first visited the US to lecture on relativity, people picketed his talks as un-American (since - apparently unlike Newtonian mechanics - not everyone could learn relativity).
I’ve been in higher ed for several decades, and I wouldn’t say that the attitude towards faculty is worse now than it was in 1980. One slight change - this probably due to the influence of Reagan and people like Horowitz in the early 1980s - is the spread of the idea that faculty are a dangerous entrenched left-wing orthodoxy. (In reality, we are probably exactly as lefty as we were in the 1960s, maybe even the 1950s.)
Attitudes between fields within the university is a different issue. Antagonism between departments has been around forever - Charles Dodgson loved to write about this at Oxford in the 1800s - but the allegiances have shifted, especially as new fields came into existence starting in the 60s.
The instructors who are older men openly lament the lack of white male students and refuse to sit on dissertation committees or mentor female or minority students.
Speaking as an old white male professor, that’s just bizarre. Why would I turn down the chance to advise or mentor the best students, regardless of their gender?
As for recent/sudden retirements, that’s probably more due to some kind of golden handshake, coupled with an awareness that faculty autonomy in universities is rapidly disappearing and the job is increasingly less fun.
University budgets: they’re complicated, and a little surprising even to people in the system… For anyone interested I suggest looking at the last couple of books by Chris Newfield to get a sense of how cash flows through universities, especially public research universities.
5 Likes
Sure, but there are different kinds of fame. I doubt Zizek is wealthy, but by god, everyone loves him and cites him, so that’s a kind of fame. Plus, he does indeed weight in as a public intellectual (especially in Europe and the ME). That’s what some guys aim for, I think. [quote=“LearnedCoward, post:31, topic:100202”]
The rest toil in drudgery, if we’re lucky.
[/quote]
11 Likes
But not all things have the same measurable value to the same people. You might not find value in women’s studies or queer studies, but you can sure as hell bet that women and queer people indeed do. Since a university is a public good, then reflecting and serving all of our diverse community matters, I think. Including allowing people to explore research interests which might seem unimportant and niche to some, but that empower a community that might have been historically marginalized. Because they are part of the community too.
12 Likes
Honestly, I was not even thinking in those terms. I was putting all teachers into the “produces something of value” column, along with janitors, machinists, surgeons, and even accountants.
3 Likes
Ah! I see. But even here, too, you hear plenty of noise about how teachers aren’t doing real work from some quarters.
7 Likes
As a person who grew up with both parents being public school teachers that is so goddam much bullshit. They do a hell of a lot of work you never see and they deserve the shorter than the kids get summer break.
13 Likes
I know. My aunt is a public school teacher and my sister taught in both public and private schools. They don’t care, they want to destroy public education and if they can make sure that teachers are punished for doing a good job, they can more easily do that.
6 Likes
