It is a discussion we have all the time as faculty. I would prefer not to accept any student into our grad program who was not supported by an assistantship and tuition waiver; the counter argument is that if a student is strong enough to be accepted into it, wants to enroll, and is willing to pay, who are we to make that decision for them?
The article’s assertion that this is a “gold mine for universities” is a little off the mark. It is certainly a gold mine for the student loan industry, but the money that comes into the school typically does go to cover actual costs, like facilities and salaries for faculty and administration.
Yep. (The only downside to this is that good paralegals are somewhat hard to find because they are pretty regularly either lifers whom nobody wants to give up or folks who are trying it out before going to law school.)
I’m a hiring partner at a major law firm and I didn’t go to a top tier school (but I was a top student at my school, which is still well-regarded) - and all of this would still be my advice to prospective law students. You are basically mortgaging at least 5 years of your post-law school life to a big law firm to pay your debts off, and that’s if you live relatively frugally during those 5 years. And if you don’t get that job, prospects for paying off your debt are much more dim. Law schools in particular are notorious liars when it comes to post-grad employment statistics.
It’s easy to see the salary numbers for starting associates in biglaw and think they are high, but you have to look at the overall economic picture of what debt those individuals tend to have ($200k+) and where they tend to live (expensive coastal cities) to get a full picture.
I went to grad school so I could have a career teaching in my field rather than to increase my earning potential, but it probably wouldn’t have made sense from a financial perspective.
The trades are important, but a society that has no intellectuals from the working classes being professionalized tends toward oligarchy, as the only people who can afford to get humanities degrees and produce new knowledge in those fields are the idle rich. That only reinforces the elite classes in power, because they just reproduce their own class values in how we understand the world.
We need trades people and we should very much fund education in the trades, I entirely agree. And it’s a great job. They are critical to society. But so are people who are producing various forms of knowledge, including in the humanities. We USED to understand that both are equally important to society in this country…
So, let’s fund both, so that both can have a diverse group of people in those critical jobs.
Another risk is graduating too many intellectuals who have increasingly slim prospects of finding gainful and secure employment in their fields, within or outside the academy. That’s basically the dictate of late-stage capitalism in America, which tops it off with crushing student debt for anyone who didn’t have their parents supporting their M.A. or M.F.A. degrees (or lower-tier MBA and JD degrees).
Lenin went to law school. Mao studied in a number of faculties before emerging with what was effectively a library science degree. Che Guevara went to medical school. The power structures of their societies offered them only unemployment or underemployment. When that becomes the norm and there are also a lot of immiserated non-intellectuals (especially ones running high on testosterone) a bad outcome is guaranteed.
If you could borrow up to $100,000 to buy a new Toyota, and the federal gov’t was standing by to guarantee that lenders would be made whole for anyone who defaulted, how long do you think it would take until new Toyotas cost $105,000?
When I got my BA, I was offered an assistantship to run computer labs (sleepytime work for tuition + stipend)…the suckers kept paying until I got my MS…while the courses did little to further my education, the letters did help me land my dream job.
Julie Kornfeld, Columbia’s vice provost for academic programs, said master’s degrees “can and should be a revenue source” subsidizing other parts of the university.
Universities shouldn’t have “revenue sources” at all
Just for color on this. Higher degrees in film are typically for academic/teaching roles. Particularly Columbia which tends to be a more theory focused school. There are exceptions, usually for people looking to be directors or screen writers.
So on that front you’re looking at a degree that probably made sense for the price before the adjunct crisis, for profit education, and absolute erosion of the job market in academia and university teaching.
I suspect you’d probably find the same with any film degree from any program or any level, though. There was a huge contraction in the US production market in the early 00’s. Part of the collapse in traditional media/web thing, along with the rise of reality TV, offshoring thanks to tax incentives abroad, studio consolidation, lack of public investment and a thousand other things.
That kind of came to a head when the ecconacylpse hit in 2008. Most East Coast TV and Film jobs disappeared, same with most places outside of LA. I know people who were doing editing work for major Hollywood films, or exhibiting shit at Cannes every year who woke up one day and found there was no work or no funding.
In it’s wake what was left was a lot of low paid, non-Union reality TV, corporate communications and web work.
So as an example what happened to me was when I started Film school there was a growing job market with high wages and a shortage of trained workers. It was considered nearly as good a bet as becoming a programmer, if only because fewer people were looking to be editors and audio techs.
By the time I finished film school it was a shrinking job market that paid less than bartending. Unless you were very lucky, and either lived in LA or knew some one at a NYC based news channel.
It’s starting to creep into other fields. Mechanical engineering for instance. Realistically that should be enough of a degree to get you into a decent job with just undergrad. But increasingly you need an expensive masters to get a foot in the door. Anecdotally out of four people I know who majored in that exactly zero are working in a related field at all.
You mean other than the government? I assume you’re not saying faculty should work for free.
Undergraduate education ought to be free, as educated people are a public good. Not everyone I know shares that opinion. I’m of two minds w/r to professional advanced degrees.
Kornfeld’s assertion is odd. On many campuses, including mine, professional schools charge differential tuition with the goal of being mainly self-supporting, but I doubt Columbia’s masters programs subsidize any other parts of campus except to the extent that all departments subsidize university commons (heating bill, library, Kornfeld’s salary, athletics). Many schools use a budget model called “responsibility (or resource)-centered management”, or RCM, which is structured to make units “self-sufficient”, but even then many essential costs of running a program are considered external to the program. I can’t tell if Columbia uses RCM in its budget, but if so she’s probably considering paying for those services as “subsidizing”.
Tradespeople will be needed to service the machines.
There’s an assumption that trades workers are anti-intellectual; far from it. They have 4 years of post-secondary schooling and paid practicums. Here in British Columbia some trades can earn a university degree in related disciplines as part of their apprenticeship credits.
