Monday, August 6, 2018
Ocasio-Cortez Style Progressive Running In WA 9th District
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm4z7zyi4b0
The Battle for Control of the Democratic Party Heats up in Arizona (Pt 1/3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-qpxnekZy8
Sunday, August 5, 2018
The Corporatization of Higher Education
September 2005
Zwi Reznik, Educational
Policies Committee 2004-05
Bob Grill, Chair, Technology
Committee 2004-05
Leon Marzillier, Area C
Representative
Recent concerns over
corporatization of education led to resolutions adopted by the Academic Senate
for California Community Colleges. Those resolutions called for more, in-depth
information about this issue. The process of developing a position paper
started with researching available literature in the field. In doing so, it
became apparent that much valuable work has already been done in that area,
particularly the recent publication Academic Values, Market Values: The
Shifting Balance (American Federation of Teachers [AFT], 2004). Rather
than reproducing the work already done, this article is intended to provide an
overview and point you in the direction of the substantial information
available.
Over the past few years, there
has been pressure to adopt corporate management structures due to the drop in
public support for institutions of higher education -note the drop in per fte
funding over the last several years when measured in real dollars.
Even if we put aside the need
for securing funding, what other motivations may there be for this trend to
corporatization? One of these is the idea, strongly disputed by many including
us, that the marketplace is more efficient. Governor Schwarzenegger's call for
merit pay is a recent example. Our salary structures are often attacked as
being unfair in that compensation is based only on seniority. The assumption
seems to be that there are clear quantitative measures that can be used to
provide compensation models. In the early 80s, during an oil boom, one of the
authors of this article was employed in oil and gas exploration and was
rewarded with company cars, minimally monitored expense accounts and bonuses.
Corporations had to decide how much individual professional employees should
receive as a bonus. The "bean-counters" who ran things felt that an
objective measure, such as how many barrels of oil reserves one had discovered,
would provide a useful measure. The exploration managers were able to point out
that no one individual could be given credit for major discoveries. In
addition, the most skilled exploration professionals would often be assigned to
previously unexplored frontier areas where there was the least likelihood of a
discovery. So the decision was made to determine the bonus amounts entirely on
the basis of total years of exploration experience-i.e., a seniority formula.
Just as where you explore for oil is as much a factor as one's skill as an
explorer, so it is in teaching: the backgrounds, motivations, and time on task
of one's students are as much factors in the successes of our students as are
the skills of the professoriate. Basing pay on seniority, provided that
instructors are regularly and meaningfully evaluated by their peers, is the
fairest method of compensation.
Legitimate community needs for
job training must also be taken into account. However, how do we deal with the
student, now being viewed as a customer, who comes to us for a specific product
-e.g., learning how to be a nurse, welder, auto technician or preparing for
transfer. How do you tell your customer that he/she does not merit the desired
"product"-the Degree, Diploma or Certificate. This is clearly a major
concern for us as the maintenance of academic rigor motivates us all.
In October 1997, Digital
Diploma Mills, Part I, The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble,
was widely disseminated over the internet and brought new attention to trends
that were brewing among academics and those connected with academia and politics.
Examples given illustrate partnerships between top university administrations
and private corporations resulting in requirements that faculty use technology
in one way or another. To quote noble, "universities are not simply
undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged
by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education. For here as
elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise."
One trend was corporate and
political leaders recognizing the value of knowledge and
"knowledgebased" industries (space, electronics, computers,
materials, telecommunications, and bioengineering) with a focus upon
"intellectual capital."
As patent holders,
universities assume the characteristics of companies, and as such set about at
once to codify their intellectual property policies, develop the infrastructure
necessary to conduct commercially-viable research, cultivate their corporate
ties, and create the mechanisms for marketing their new commodities, including
exclusive licenses to their patents.
The result of this first phase
of university commoditization was a reallocation of university resources toward
research desired by the university administration's corporate partners.
Universities are educational institutions with two primary functions: research
and student instruction. Decisions about how an institution's budget is
allocated to these functions, and decisions about what is researched and what
is taught, should be made in an atmosphere of academic freedom, and not
dictated by outside entities, especially if they stand ultimately to gain from
whatever is decided.
The second trend toward the
commercialization of academia was the commoditization of instruction.
The initial champions of
computer-based instruction focused their attention on increasing the
efficiencies of already overextended teachers. Rather than focusing attention
on the content of our courses, these "champions" wanted to find ways
of disseminating the information more "efficiently," i.e. getting
instructors, without increased compensation, to service more and more students,
the presumed beneficiaries of "improved" education. These champions
are not really motivated to improve education at all. That's just the name of
this particular market.
Olivier Frayss, a professor of
american studies at the sorbonne in Paris, France, presented an address to the
California Federation of Teachers Convention March 10, 2001 in which he
presented five characteristics common among international assaults on higher
education:
1. Education is considered as
a market rather than a public duty, knowledge as a commodity rather than a
means to become more human, students as consumers rather than citizens or
future citizens.
2. Institutions try to
appropriate the intellectual property rights of faculty and plan to sell their
courses to other institutions, firms, and the public at large.
3. Huge investments of public
money are made to fund efforts to develop on-line education.
4. The promise of high-tech
education is used as an excuse to reject claims for the building of needed
schools and colleges and the hiring of new teachers and classified workers.
5. As in other "service
industries," technology is used by management to cut labor costs, deskill
a majority of workers, improve productivity and monitor compliance with
employer-made rules. The implication is that the "information age" is
different from the "industrial age" mainly in that industrial methods
are applied to the so-called "knowledge workers," which means us.
Yet, even today, major
corporations all over the world are planning to invest huge sums of money to
corner what they call the education market, and governments give them
encouragement in many ways that include inducing universities to behave like
corporations, which then enables government to cut public funding for higher
education as the institutions of higher learning are turned into profit
centers.
This is becoming increasingly
true of community colleges as well. In California, Governor Schwarzenegger
refuses to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations while at the
same time robbing K-12 and community college education of $2-3 billion
"guaranteed" by Proposition 98, a proposition that was overwhelmingly
approved by the "people" that he is so fond of threatening to take
his policies to!
As public funding for
community colleges dries up, the colleges in turn must beat the bushes for
alternative funding. These alternative funds very rarely, if ever, come without
strings.
The history of health-care in
this country in the last ten years shows that such "knowledge
workers" including doctors and nurses are now experiencing vastly modified
working conditions as a result of the commoditization of medicine: the
high-tech, hyperwired, network-modeled way to cut expenditures on people's
healthcare and to increase corporate profits. If you do not believe that
commoditization can happen to us, ask your doctor if he diagnosed the
development of HMO's ten years ago.
Any discussion of
corporatization can quickly degenerate into a collection of dilbert like
anecdotes. While these visual aids may be useful for setting a mood, a more
substantive way of defining the discussion is needed. To that end the
introduction to the above noted AFT journal (Scheuerman and Kriger, 2004) offer
us two useful definitions in the introduction to the AFT Journal:
Exchange value
Companies produce goods and
services only as a means to an end. The purpose is to exchange them for money,
to make a profit-the only reason for a business to exist. Quality attracts
customers. In the marketplace circumstances may force a company to reduce costs
to a point where quality suffers. "When this occurs, as it frequently
does, the tension between the primary drive for profit and the secondary need
for quality is exposed as a contradiction inherent in the production of
exchange values." (p. 12),br> Use value
Idealized, the purpose of
higher education is to teach the values associated with the pursuit of
knowledge or the pursuit of truth.
This pursuit is intended to
encourage dissent and tolerance for other opinions. While this process
frequently results in objectively useful results it is the not the primary goal
of the institution. "Nevertheless, the fact remains-the goal of
higher education institutions is education. Or to say it another way,
educational institutions produce use values, intangible and abstract goods that
are ends in themselves." (p. 12)
This attitude is most obvious
in considering the substantial pressure to provide a larger proportion of a
college's offerings through distance education. If we evaluate distance
education in terms of its exchange or use values, we have a tool that separates
the appropriate use of an innovative delivery method, under the design and
control of the faculty, from the corporate model that treats the student as a
consumer, renames deans as vice presidents and presidents as CEO's and is
pushed as a productivity tool. When the faculty loses control, the result can
be educational Taylorism1-i.e., treating teaching the same way products
are manufactured on an assembly line-breaking down the process to a series of
lower skilled tasks and adding strict management control. The result may well
be: online institutions with no counseling, a small group of developers who
create a course and instructors hired to send out pre-packaged email and grade
submissions with no customization of content allowed!
Exchange value has its place
in a capital driven model.
Our problem is that teaching
is not about delivering a product. Education is not a commodity.
"Academic Institutions
exist for the transmission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the development
of students, and the general well-being of society," (American Association
of University Professors, 1992) not for profit.
These trends toward exchange
value were also seen in a report delivered several years ago at the annual
meeting of the California Conference of the american association of university
professors:
We now have CEOs and CFOs
drawn increasingly from management backgrounds of one sort or another, instead
of presidents or provosts promoted up from the faculty. As a corollary to this,
the pay of senior administrators has become almost entirely disentangled from
the pay of faculty and the cult of the Ceo has taken hold at many
not-for-profit institutions. We see institutions devoting inordinate staff fte
to public relations, fund raising, and patent management while professing to
have insufficient resources to fill desperately needed tenure lines.
The speaker went on to note
that studies conducted by a statewide bargaining unit showed that student
enrollment, full-time faculty hiring, and administrative costs are out of sync,
with administrative hiring and salaries far outpacing those of faculty. The
presentation also noted that work now done by highly paid administrators is
work that faculty could-and once did-produce under the auspices of
participatory governance.
While many of us have no
problem with the ideas inherent in the use of alternative means of delivery,
our "managers" are more focused on a product that can be sold.
Increasingly the managers of our institutions are concerned with securing the
copyrights to our work. This is one of the reasons our unions have become so
heavily involved in this discussion. Without contract language to address
intellectual property rights the "work for hire" doctrine inherent in
the Copyright Act of 1976 can be applied to anything we produce.
Potentially this doctrine can be extended to those items which have always been
considered yours-e.g., notes, exams etc.
It would be simple to condemn
the proponents of corporatization as lacking any understanding of what we do in
producing goods with "use value."
However, just as the
motivation for distance education includes faculty who are eager to teach
courses online, we must acknowledge that there are managers who view what they
are doing as being for the benefit of the institution. As examples consider how
college bookstores or cafeterias operate. Are they profit centers for our
colleges?
Technology can be a great aid
in the teaching/learning process, but it can never substitute entirely for
teachers and students coming together.
However, it is a fact that
80-90% of a community college's budget goes for the salary and benefits of its
faculty. That shouldn't be surprising, since it is in the classroom that the
central raison d'etre for the colleges resides. Since the passage of
AB 1725 and the strengthening of the role of academic senates, curriculum
decisions are firmly in the hands of community college faculty. We must be
careful that we are not seduced by that which has seduced some higher education
administrators, and use our control and influence to ensure that academia
remains a path to humanization, not corporatization.
References
American Association of
University Professors (1992). Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of
Students. Author: Washington, D.C.
Fraysee, O. (2001, March 10).
Address to California Teachers' Association Convention, Santa Monica, CA. Retrieved
February 21, 2005, from http://smccd.net/accounts/brenner/advo/frasse.html
Noble, D. (1997 October). Part
I: The Automation of Higher Education. Retrieved August 30, 2005, from http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl.
See also at that site by the same author:
Part II: The Coming Battle
Over Online Instruction, March, 1998
Part III: The Bloom Is Off The
Rose, November, 1998
Part IV: Rehearsal For The
Revolution, November, 1999.
Part V: Fool's Gold, March,
2001
Steck, H. (2003 January).
Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity.
Annuals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 585, 66-83.
Vogel, M. (Ed.). (2004, June),
American Values, Market Values: The Shifting Balance, (1) 1. washington, DC:
American Federation of Teachers. Retrieved August 30, 2005, from http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_academic/issues/june04/index.htm
Recent Additional Resources:
Bowen, R. (2005 May-June).
Book reviews
Academe, Washington, DC:
American University of University Professors
Rhoades, G. (2005 May-June).
Capitalism, Academic Style and Shared Governance.
1. Frederick Taylor wrote the
principles of scientific management in 1911. Some of the principles of
taylorism include: develop a "science" for every job, including rules
motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions. Carefully
select workers with the right abilities for the job. Carefully train these
workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the
job science. Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the
way as they go about their jobs.
The articles published in the
Rostrum do not necessarily represent the adopted positions of the academic
senate. For adopted positions and recommendations, please browse this website.
The Corporatization of the American University
NOVEMBER 21, 2011
by STEVEN HIGGS
Peter Seybold traces the
pernicious influence corporatization has had on the American campus back almost
a decade before the Reagan Revolution of 1980, to a memo written by Richmond,
Va., attorney Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in late
summer 1971.
Powell, who would be nominated
for Supreme Court justice by President Richard Nixon just two months later,
said American business had to take the offensive to counter the social
movements of the 1960s and early ’70s, said Seybold, a sociology professor at
Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). Among the
institutions Powell said the business world had to recapture was the American
campus.
“Part of this was a cultural
and political attack on the university,” Seybold said.
Powell’s clarion call for the
eradication of the American Left on campus and throughout society is credited
with “inspiring the founding of many conservative think tanks, including the
Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute,” according
to the PBS
website on the Supreme Court that republishes the memo.
Titled “Attack of American
Free Enterprise System,” the memo listed the university first on Powell’s list
of attack sources. “The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism
come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus,
the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and
sciences, and from politicians,” he wrote.
In addition to the right-wing
think tanks, the memo has inspired to action the former New Left radical David
Horowitz, among an army of others. The one-time editor of Ramparts magazine
“now is nicely funded by the right wing to do all these things like eradicating
the Left from the academy,” Seybold said.
***
Seybold is the former director
of the Indiana University division of labor studies, which, by the time he left
in 2001, had been decimated by the Right’s campus offensive. Fifteen years
after joining what is now the IU Labor Studies Program, the Bloomington
resident left and has served since as an associate professor at IUPUI in
downtown Indianapolis.
Since joining academia in
1978, Seybold has focused on “political sociology, inequality, sociology of
work and the labor movement” and explored the impact money has on higher
education since he did a study of the Ford Foundation early in his career.
“In 1984 I was asked to give a
talk at a university in Pennsylvania, and I titled the talk ‘Toward a Corporate
Service Station,'” the New Jersey native said.
“That was sort of the
beginnings of my interest in this subject, because even then I saw the
influence of money was changing the culture of the university.”
In recent years, Seybold has
been increasingly interested in how universities mimic the corporate world and
how they are adopting the corporate model for how they run themselves.
“I’m especially concerned
about what this means for the culture of the university and just generally the
degradation of the environment that faculty, staff, students and administrators
work in because of the onslaught of the corporate model,” he said.
***
Quality of scholarship, for
example, does not have nearly the importance on hiring in the corporate
university that it has historically, Seybold said. “Now most departments, when
they hire new professors, they look at how many grants they bring in and their
potential to bring in even bigger grants in the future. When I started out in
academe, grantsmanship was not a significant factor in hiring decisions.”
The results, he said, are
professors who teach as little as possible, who use grants to buy themselves
out of teaching and concentrate their research on ideas that potentially can be
turned into products.
“I describe this as the commodification
of the university,” he said. “And I would say this has effects on all aspects
of the culture of the university.”
Among those aspects are the
way students are treated, the number of adjuncts used as “basically part-time
labor to replace full-time faculty,” the now-franchised bookstores and food
service, and the outsourcing of work like campus maintenance, Seybold said.
“You can follow this logic
through all the parts of the university and see the way it is being
implemented,” he said.
For example, certain subject
areas and departments that are worthwhile and should be supported are unable to
make money, he said.
“It is fundamentally changing
the culture of the university,” he said.
***
The logic extends to what
should be the most significant part of the university experience – the
classroom – where the corporate model incentivizes bigger classrooms, online
education and a movement away from face-to-face teaching, Seybold said.
“Corporations readily provide
materials to be incorporated in courses,” he said.
The corporate model also
negatively impacts students’ lives, Seybold said. Many have instructors who
don’t have offices where they can discuss their work in private. And due to the
high costs of education, they take more classes and frequently work multiple
jobs, degrading their campus and classroom experiences.
At urban campuses like IUPUI,
where up to 75 percent or more of students work, the rising cost of tuition and
campus life has spawned a phenomenon called stopping out. “They go to
school for a year, leave for a year and try and make some money, and then they
come back and take six credits, and they keep working,” he said.
Consequently, students show
increasing interest in parts of university study that are directly connected to
business, Seybold said. And the debt they accumulate for college also shapes
their career options.
“Six months after they get out
they have to start paying back that $50,000 or $60,000 loan bill,” he said. “So
they aren’t as open to say AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps or working for the
labor movement or a community group because they need to make money.”
Another example is the rise of
service learning, where students get credit for working in the communities they
study in, Seybold said.
“I think it’s service learning
basically in support of the status quo,” he said. “We’re not training people to
be community organizers or labor organizers. We’re not training people to help
ameliorate some of the problems that have been caused by moving toward a more
free-market economy, unfettered capitalism.”
If he had to identify one
signpost as the tipping point in the corporatization of the American
university, Seybold said it would be the decline in public funding of
universities.
“Once you do this, once you
renege on the commitment of a public university through public tax money, then
you set forth this whole marketization and corporatization,” he said.
This means that corporations
can in effect almost buy certain programs and that the logic of business will
be transferred to the university, he said, so it becomes all about head counts
and departments making money.
Indiana University
institutionalized corporate logic early on in with responsibility-centered
budgeting, which sought to make each school and even departments separate business
units that have to support themselves by taxing other departments for their
services and things like that, Seybold said.
“Once you buy into this logic,
it’s hard to stop,” he said.
***
In the broader social sense,
the Right’s attack on university culture reflects the elites’ concerns about
the counterculture and the movements of the ’60s and efforts to repudiate them,
Seybold said.
“That includes rewriting the
’60s and convincing generations after that that a lot of our problems stem from
the ’60s,” he said, “and that the ’60s were not as good as people who lived
through it said they were.”
So Seybold and others who hold
onto the liberal ideals of university purpose and culture – “Because it is a
public university, we should be serving our students” – are looked at basically
as dinosaurs, holding onto realities that have been transformed.
Coming from the labor movement
and as a sociologist interested in the organization of work, Seybold sees the
corporate campus as an attack on the craft of being a professor.
“I consider being a professor
a craft occupation,” he said. “And I see my craft being attacked.”
***
Over the past five years or
so, Seybold said, he has seen growing awareness across the campus about the
influence corporations have on campus life.
“I think there are examples,”
he said, citing a successful organizing effort this year by food-service
workers at IUPUI as one. “There’s been more activism on the part of
organizations like the AAUP (American Association of University Professors). I
think there is heightened awareness among graduate students now that their job
prospects are very uncertain in this corporate university.”
But the upshot is today’s
universities train rather than educate, Seybold said, and the repercussions
negatively impact all aspects of university life.
“I describe it as a
degradation of the culture of the university,” he said. “It affects students,
the staff, the faculty and the administration when the institution increasingly
serves as a handmaiden to corporations.”
America’s Decline in Education: Is Anyone Worrying About It?
Mariappan Jawaharlal, Contributor
Professor of Mechanical
Engineering
The story of education dates
to ancient civilization—but the story of modern public education begins in the
U.S. For over 100 years, the American university system has been the envy of
the world. Talented engineers, renowned scientists, and students from all over
the world come to the U.S. for higher education, especially in STEM education
fields, to get the best possible education so they can land great jobs and
support their families. In fact, international students often outnumber
Americans, now accounting for 70% of the graduate students in electrical engineering, 63%
in computer science, and 60% in industrial engineering.
International students are
doing the right thing. But it is so unfortunate that it is harder for American
citizens to go to American universities than it is for international
students—not because our students are not qualified, but because they don’t
even attempt to go to graduate school. American undergraduate students are not
on a level playing field with students from other countries, including
developing nations. It is heartbreaking to see our students becoming strangers
in their own country.
Young American graduates are
confused and in despair. I have worked with thousands of young men and women in
America, and I see highly talented students not planning to go to graduate
school because they are drowning in debt. After four years of undergraduate
education, our students are broke, in serious debt even before they get their
first job, and anxious to get a job so they can start paying back their loans.
The dirty truth is that they would be making loan payments well into their 40s
when they are raising a family, in addition to mortgage and car payments. Most
international students do not face this problem because education is either
free or affordable in their home countries.
Norway, Finland, Germany, and
Denmark offer free higher education for all. France charges tuition, but it is
almost free. The former Communist nations of Russia and the Czech Republic do
the same. Beyond Europe, developing nations such as Argentina and Brazil
provide free higher education. More than 300,000 Chinese students are attending university in
America, and 40% of them are pursuing graduate studies. In China, however, the
cost of college education is about $1,000 a year, which most families can
afford. More than 160,000 students from India are in the U.S., and about 85% of
them are pursuing either graduate studies or practical training. But in India,
tuition fees are affordable if a student is admitted to university through a
government selection process. If not, they pay higher tuition, but these fees
are still lower than ours and can be paid back faster when converted to
American dollars.
No one wants to be in debt.
When I was young, I used to think people got into debt due to unforeseen
situations such as job loss, disaster, and health issues. Little did I know
that college and university graduates starting their lives are in serious debt
in America. I sometimes hear the argument that a student won’t be a responsible
citizen if the education is free. This is a shallow argument. I have never
observed a single student from Germany, India or China to be irresponsible simply
because they got tuition-free education. Besides, we can implement a system in
which students can be held accountable for their education.
American students are becoming
second-class citizens in their own country by carrying a burden of debt before
starting their post-graduate lives. Being in debt affects them emotionally and
physically, and it limits their lifestyle choices and their ability to make
rational decisions. About 69% of students graduated from public universities in
the U.S. had a student loan debt of more than $30,000. Graduates of 2016 had
$37,172 in student-loan debt. A total of 44
million Americans are currently in debt due to student loans, and they owe
an astronomical $1.4 trillion. Consider this:
The total U.S. defense budget,
the largest in the world, is only $600 billion.
The total credit card debt of
all Americans together is $660 billion.
The student-loan debt in
America is higher than the GDP of Australia, the world’s 13th largest economy.
While our students don’t get a
break from their debts, bankers responsible for the financial crash of 2008
received over $700 billion in the bailout. On top of this, the government
has made a commitment for another $16 trillion. The cost of the Iraq war is estimated at $2.5 trillion as
of now and is forecast to be $6 trillion in a few decades, counting interest,
as we borrowed money for the war.
Our politicians have no
problem paying interest in trillions of dollars for a war of choice, but they
have no interest in investing in the future of our younger generation. Our
politicians are willing to lobby for big corporations and special interests but
are not interested in representing our students.
In the near future, a massive
number of students will likely default on their student loans, and a financial
crisis will erupt. Whether or not a bailout will occur, millions of lives will be
in financial and emotional disarray.
In 1862, the U.S. Congress
took an extraordinary step to create what is known as land-grant colleges,
which transformed America. The Morrill Act signed by Abraham Lincoln gave 30,000 acres
of public land to each representative and senator. No other nation took such
bold steps. We can still do it by making college education affordable and
providing debt relief to 44 million Americans. Otherwise, America’s decline in
education will seem unstoppable.
The Decline of American Education
BY Miha Vindis, LBJ School
Ph.D. student
This article originally
appeared in National Intelligence Council's blog "Global Trends 2030" on
July 25, 2012.
The world has changed in many
ways since the Cold War ended. The internet and mobile communication have
opened up new possibilities across the world. As high-tech, high-value
generating industries are no longer bound by national borders or access to restricted
resources, a new world order has begun to emerge. In this new world education
has become even more important. The US – and the West as a whole – has seen its
advantage in economic, technological and defense arenas erode, because we are
beginning to fall behind the rest of the world. While the political
establishment debates, increasingly on ideological grounds, the future of
America is at risk.
The problem begins very early
in the national academic system. Beginning in elementary school many students
are already behind the nationally accepted standards. For example, one study
found that only 31 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading on the
NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and by eighth grade this
number is virtually the same (33 percent). If the average student is not an
efficient reader, how can we expect them to excel? One can find similarly
alarming statistics for math and the problems compound by the time students are
in high-school. In fact, according the Heritage Foundation about one in three
American students fail to graduate from high school. What is most worrying is
that the numbers are getting worse in relative and absolute terms. In 2008, the
US was the only developed country with a higher percentage of 55 to
64-year-olds with high school degrees than 25 to 34-year-olds.
The data for college level
education is also not positive. Just over 40 percent of American’s earn a
college a degree – a number which has not changed in decades – while other
nations have been catching up. Consider this fact: when the baby boomer
generation was completing college in the 70s, more than 30 percent of all
college graduates in the world were Americans, but today, that number is only
20 percent. While part of this can be explained by rapid population growth
rates in some countries (for example, China’s proportion of college graduates
tripled in the last two decades) data clearly shows that the US is beginning to
lag in higher education. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development) significant progress has been made in China,
Korea, Mexico and Brazil… countries often seen as up and coming geopolitical
competitors.
The problem is not necessarily
one of quality in higher education. Many foreigners (this author included)
still choose to come to the US because the value offered by American
universities is very high, despite very high costs (international students have
limited options in terms of funding or student employment). As a Slovenian
living in the US, I constantly contrast America with Europe. And while I am
willing to pay the extra cost for an American higher education, I see no such
incentive for primary or secondary education. Simply put, American college
education may be the most expensive in the world, but it also offers some of
the best employment and earnings opportunities. The problem, therefore, is not
quality or potential, but rather the small number of Americans earning degrees
in critical areas and the even smaller number who are prepared for rigorous
study in those fields.
The most serious problem is in
the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), where there are
almost 3 million unfilled jobs, but only about 300,000 graduates annually. This
shortage of US-born STEM workers gives companies two choices: import costly
foreign labor, or move operations abroad. In fact, according to the OECD the US
has less PhD STEM graduates (per million population) than many other developed
countries. The picture is even bleaker when one considers that many of those
advanced degrees are awarded to foreigners. For example, about half of all
engineering doctoral degrees are awarded to non-US nationals. The implications
of this shortfall are not only economic, but also a national security concern
as it will become increasingly difficult to fill sensitive security-related
jobs.
Most policy-makers would not
dispute these facts: education in the US is falling behind. Identifying the
problem and recommending a solution, however, is becoming increasingly
ideological. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are all too eager to turn
critical issues into an ideological battle rather than seek a realistic compromise.
The US desperately needs an overhaul of the education system, but given today’s
political reality it is not clear when that will happen.
It would be foolish to
pinpoint any one issue as the sole problem with education. The education system
doesn’t need tweaks and fixes, it needs a serious overhaul. The system needs to
be adjusted to attract qualified, motivated teachers through fair compensation;
national and state curriculums need to be updated to reflect the realities of
the post-Cold War era; school testing norms need to be redesigned; and
effective means of motivating students have to be implemented. What is at stake
is far more than just increasing reading or math test scores; without a well-educated
population the American advantage in just about every field will continue to
erode. The world may be in the hands of the current power elite, but the future
is in the hands of the next generation. No country serious about its future can
afford to forget that and no patriotic policy maker should ignore that.
Miha Vindis is a Slovenian
doctoral student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas
at Austin, and previously spent a decade in the international oil industry.
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