Category: Higher Education

This post first appeared on Higheredlifecoach.com.

This is it. What you have been working towards for four long years in high school, why you studied long and hard for your SATs or ACTs, why you gave up evenings and weekends in order to perfect your college application. Your Fall semester is about to get underway. But after all that hard work, are you ready for your college academic career?

One of the first things you need to ask yourself is “why am I going to college?” To get a degree? To get into business/law/medical/graduate school? To get a job? Or is it to get an education? You need to be clear about your goals. Write them down so that when the number of distractions outnumber the hours in your day, you can remind yourself the reason why you’re in college to begin with.

The second thing you need to decide is how you are going to approach your classes. You will be required to take a number of courses that are outside of your major or interest, especially your Freshman and Sophomore years. Are you going to see these courses as a burden or an opportunity? Each class presents a chance for you to improve your skills, expand your knowledge and practice critical thinking. But if you decide ahead of time the class is a waste of time, then it will be.

Which brings me to what is probably the most important class of your Freshman year: Freshman Writing. Most students don’t see it that way. But remember, no matter your major, from science to sociology, pre-med to pre-law, engineering to English, you will be required to write, and write well. A professor can’t evaluate your ideas if they can’t understand them, or are distracted by mistakes. Freshman Writing classes have been developed specifically to help you transition from high school to college-level writing.

Improving your reading, writing, and critical thinking skills takes practice; Freshman Writing invites you to practice and concentrate on these three important areas. But a student’s freshman year is full of new challenges and responsibilities: a full course load, a job, roommates, social life, homework, extra-curricular activities … the list goes on and on. Courses such as Freshman Writing often end up getting pushed aside, or lost in the chaos and excitement of the freshman experience.

And please, remember that what you learn in Freshman Writing isn’t just for your English classes; it’s for all your classes. If you have to write, then you should be applying what you learned in Freshman Writing. Your college education should be about taking what you learn in all of your classes and applying them elsewhere. This will help you succeed on your path towards your degree, career and beyond.

But you don’t have to do this alone. Learn about all of the programs and services that are available on your campus, often at no charge to you as a full-time student. Is there a writing center, a peer tutoring service, college literacy program, or other student support groups? You never know when you will assistance of one kind or another, be it academic or something else. If you know where to go if your money runs out, or if you have problems with a roommate, or if your computer breaks, then if something does happen, or you need help, you can get it in a minimum amount of time and stress.

And, finally, learn how to relax in a healthy way. University can be stressful, not to mention full of distractions. Without proper sleep and rest, you won’t be able to learn. Living off of energy drinks and all-nighters will wreck your health, your immune system, and your GPA. But lying in bed, mind racing, will do exactly the same thing. Find a way to unwind, calm your mind, and get the sleep that you need to stay healthy and keep your mind sharp. This is often something we ignore, the least of our worries. Or “stress-relief” involves lots of alcohol. There are lots of different services and programs available on campus, so explore what works best for you. Your body and brain will thank you.

For my brief, positive review, see here.
For Part I, on how much a professor is worth, see here.
For Part II, on the issue of administrative bloat, see here.
For Part III, on college athletics, see here.
For Part IV on tenure, see here.

The question that shapes the book, Higher Education?, is: what is higher ed? What is it for? Who is it for? According to the authors, it is for basically a liberal arts education, not training for specific careers (engineering, medicine, fashion merchandising, etc) and should be for everyone. Cut away all of the bells, whistles, sports teams, rankings, research dollars, and students services, university should primarily be about education, learning to learn, and not training.

I am very sympathetic to this idea. I often get into arguments on Twitter when we talk about higher ed and the “training” of graduates for the future, giving them the “skills” they need to succeed. Often, these skills involve technical know-how, not knowledge and idea production. To me, students should have all the “skills” they need by the time they graduate high school: reading, writing, basic math. In higher ed, I firmly believe it is our job to refine these skills further and integrate them into knowledge and idea production. When I teach writing, part of what I am teaching them is how to move from a high school report to a university-level essay that has an idea that it tries to communicate. I do often wonder why many programs are a) even in the university and b) require a four-year degree (and increasingly, a two-year masters). 

The authors call for all research institutes, hospitals, engineering and medical colleges, and any other branch of the university that isn’t directly related to the basic, liberal arts education of the student to be spun off into their own, independent entities. They call for the faculty to abandon most, if not all, research if they are to be employed as professors (another reason to do away with tenure; over-reliance on the research part of the equation). And, of course, to end the prestige and rankings race that takes place every year, blinding parents to the realities of the campus as well as fueling much of the growth in cost of a Bachelors degree.

But wait.

At the end of the book, the authors point to several large, multiversities as they are referred to, that a student can thrive in. One example that stands out to me is Arizona State University, with two (TWO!) engineering colleges and a smaller, liberal arts college. The authors really think everyone should do a liberal arts degree before a more technical, career oriented degree. But one of the advantages of the multiversity is that a student does just that: just about every bachelors degree requires the student to take a set of core required courses, usually outside of their major. Instead of calling for the destruction of the multiversity (which I don’t even think would be possible) why not instead call for the strengthening of core requirements (a movement that is already taking root across the country)?

One of the greatest strengths of the American system of higher ed is the ability to offer choices to students, from going to a flagship state university campus to a small, liberal arts college and everything in between. Yes, they are getting more and more expensive and it is getting harder and harder to gain admissions to the “prestige” universities (although, man, Harvard really doesn’t come off too well in the book). But why not celebrate the choice that is out there for students, and the opportunities even a degree in fashion merchandising presents if the student is on a large campus and required to take many different courses, rather than at a smaller, highly-specialized (and increasingly private) institution?

Another aspect that the authors tend to forget is that even the specialized, highly technical degrees are intellectually demanding. More and more engineering programs are about creating and not just recreating, problem solving, and communication (can’t get that venture capital if you can’t communicate your million-dollar idea!). My younger brother did a specialized certification in welding (after getting a degree in photography and doing that for a few years).  He was required to do math (but with no official math course) in order to interpret or modify blueprints. He was also required to learn about aesthetics, because often the project he designed needed to look as good as it was functional. People won’t readily buy something that is ugly. A recent article quite rightly indicates that students in technical programs are looking for more than “just a paycheck,” but an education.

So I come away conflicted in my feeling about the university and the book Higher Education? On the one hand, I still strongly recommend it because it gets so much right about what’s wrong with the university. If I have written a few thousand words here in discussion or disagreement with them, it does nothing to nullify the tens of thousands of words they have devoted to the problem (and there are problems) of the way higher education runs today. But I worry about some of their recommendations to throw the baby out with the bath water: professors don’t really have academic freedom, so let’s get rid of tenure; students should have a broader base in the liberal arts, so let’s get rid of the more technical programs on campus. Have we gone too far in terms of publish-or-perish at the expense of the classroom setting? Yes, in many cases, but then is that a reason to do away with research institutes on campus, especially in the humanities or social science, where the work done there would never be recreated anywhere else?

Perhaps we need a new kind of university, one that will push the old ones in new and different directions. The authors are indeed correct when they call for presidents and university leaders who are brave and bold and innovative in their approach to the job of reshaping the university. I think even the biggest R1 institution can give a strong, broad-based core education to all students on campus, even though it will never match the experience at a small, liberal arts college. Read the book, think about the book, and speak up with ideas on how to make the university a better (and more affordable) place for our children.

For my brief, positive review, see here.
For Part I, on how much a professor is worth, see here.
For Part II, on the issue of administrative bloat, see here.
For Part III, on college athletics, see here.

Possibly one of the most controversial recommendations that the authors of Higher Education? makes is that tenure is outdated, expensive, and should be abolished, replaced instead with renewable multi-year contracts. Hacker and Dreifus show that tenure does nothing to protect professors when political or other pressure really insists that someone be fired or removed from their position. They seem to resent professors being granted lifetime employment and then hanging around well past their expiry date. And they quite rightly point out that tenure doesn’t all of a sudden make a scholar more radical or controversial in their research, writing, or teaching; the road to tenure has been so carefully planned that, seven years in, the newly-minted associate professor isn’t likely to change course.

I’ve written about the issue of academic freedom; I agree that the concept of academic freedom is well-understood, much touted, but unevenly practiced. Even the idea of what is academically acceptable is problematic. We expect the freedom to be able to do the research that we want (as long as it fits into the hiring committees plan for us, the university’s over-all goals, the criteria for whatever external grant we want/need, what various rankings rate as being important, and what the tenure committee deems useful/impactful/groundbreaking) and the freedom from being fired for no good reason. Tenure is supposed to protect those freedoms. Today, we are protected for the most part from being fired, but certainly not granted the intellectual freedom tenure is supposed to provide.

At the end of the day, does getting rid of tenure make any of this better or is it just a way of throwing up our hands in defeat? Do we want to function in an institution where we are not intellectually free, as was originally intended? And will getting rid of tenure (and thus eternal, life-long, employment) suddenly open the floodgates to new tenure-track professors? And is it really tenure’s fault that professors never retire?

Age discrimination is illegal, and so are mandatory retirement ages. Most people look forward to leaving their jobs for the wonderful world of retirement; other are no longer able to perform their jobs. Many retired professionals keep working part-time or as consultants, either because they enjoy the work or out of necessity. People working past the historical retirement age of 65 is no longer an anomaly. Should it be something to disparage that people actually enjoy their work so much that they don’t want to retire? Many older professors at public institutions are vested in the defined benefits pension programs so their salaries don’t actually take that much of a hit. Rather than attacking tenure, why not celebrate that being a professor is a job that is so rewarding that people want (and can) keep working well past the age of 65?

The authors cite an example of a college that has effectively managed to entice professors to retire from their positions, without getting rid of tenure. So when this call to abolish? Of all of the cost-cutting methods the authors propose, I am most skeptical of this one. I am cynical about these things, and time after time, I’ve seen retirements go unfilled by new tenure-track faculty, instead hoarded by deans or provosts for whatever pet project/trend/opportunity they see fit to hire in order to increase the university’s prestige. Adjuncts, grad students, and increasingly upper-level undergraduates are instead shouldering the load. Perhaps professors, seeing the writing on the wall, are holding on to their positions in part because of the pressure to produce more graduate students, who can’t be off-loaded onto part-time faculty, and in part because they know that once they leave, no one will be brought in to replace them?

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus save a lot of vitriol for the athletics arms race, a billion-dollar industry that does little to pay for itself. The argument against college athletics is not new. How the authors present the arguments are new (to me, at least). While the NCAA and colleges boast about how sports like basketball and football increase opportunities for minorities, really, the authors argue, it is white, middle- to upper-class students who benefit because the majority of sports are things like rowing, gymnastics, swimming, fencing, hockey, wresting, bowling, etc. Not exactly hotbeds of racial, cultural, or economic diversity.

They also, rightly, attack the money spent on new athletics facilities such as stadiums, workout rooms, devoted study halls, tutors, etc. They question the sanity of expecting students to train full-time and study as well. They wonder why teams need to travel thousands of miles for games. They lament the exorbitant pay of coaches, even at lower-tier schools.  The authors do a truly excellent job of showing that football does not, in fact, increase alumni loyalty or giving rates. Title IX did not, in fact spell the doom of college wrestling teams (football did). For me, this chapter was really convincing that sports have to go. And I started college as a student-athlete, have coached student-athletes, and generally am very sympathetic to sports being available for everyone.

And there lies the rub: at these schools, sports isn’t available for everyone-only the chosen few. While many Division III schools have an open-door policy on team membership, often because of budget or league restrictions, only the truly best make the teams. And because of the intense focus on NCAA sports, inter-mural leagues falter for lack of funds. Those are places where students can, in fact, participate, meet new people, let off steam, and stay healthy. There’s another area where it is unclear if college sports really do more harm than good; uninsured students being injured playing sports and then cut lose.

I want to come back two hypocrisies to be found within the college athletics system. One of them deals with universities putting pressure on athletic apparel companies like Nike to end practices they deem to be exploitative lest they no longer be allowed to advertise their products on the universities’ athletes or have alumni and students spend millions on official gear. I’m not denying that Nike uses sweatshop labor. But I do have a problem with universities and students demanding better treatment for workers overseas while contingent faculty literally slave away and these same student-athletes are exploited as well. Indeed, let us end exploitation. Just please don’t look too closely in your own back yard.

Finally, I want to address the well-worn justification that college sports increase opportunities for minorities in higher education. We all have heard wonderful anecdotes about how a basketball/football scholarship is a poor minority student’s only way of hardship. But is that a plus for college athletics or a strike against our entire education system where a system that focuses exclusively on wins and losses and not graduation rates? If sports in indeed the only way out, then we really need to take a hard look at education across all levels. College should be something that all students, regardless of race, color, or class, should reasonably be able to aspire to, not just those who can dribble, throw, run, or catch.

Shame on all of us for that.

Read my brief, mainly positive review, here.
Read Part I of my review, where I wonder what a professor is really worth, here.

Right on target in the book Higher Education? is its attack of the administrative bloat of the university.  in the chapter attacking professors and their pay vs work, the authors point to the fact that professors are serving on more and more committees, increasing their administrative duties and taking time away from teaching. The authors argue that the professors are to blame because they want to feel as though they are being heard and that the university is truly a world where shared governance rules.  But is this a case of the professors willingly giving up their time for committee work that they initiated or an increasing number of committees dictated from the top down in order to appease the masses?

The modern university has an administrator for everything: counseling of all sorts, admissions, advisers of all kinds, coordinators, associate this, assistant that, etc. Experts are brought in every year to advise and administer to newest program to increase enrollment, improve retention and completion, ensure effective teaching, technology integration, grants applications…the list goes on and on. We have textbook specialists who can overrule a professor in their choice of materials for their course! It seems to have become an arms race between the administration and the faculty: for every new administrator, there needs to be at least one committee to “advise” them in their job.

But how much impact do these faculty committees really have on the day-to-day decisions administrators make? How do professors know what student advisers are telling students in terms of majors, classes, etc?  Should this function be in the hands of an administrator or an academic who knows the programs and the students, not from a transcript, but from the work they’ve done in class? The question that needs to be asked, who is the “expert” in any situation when it comes to the students?

I think there are a number of factors that has lead to this administrative bloat. One, universities are running scared of liability. So much of the bloat comes down to worrying about complying with laws. Not just research laws or grant guidelines, but laws about student privacy balanced with the worry that any student (and their parents) could sue because of whatever reason strikes their deep feelings of injustice. Two, universities are playing too many games: accreditation, rankings, government funding, private funding. While the for-profit sector in being burnt to the ground, the universities pat themselves on the back because they fulfilled their accreditation requirements by forming another committee and hiring another “expert” administrator.

Three, there aren’t very many professors left. The majority of the classes in universities are taught by adjuncts, contingent faculty who are not well paid or (sometimes) well-informed about the university. Students used to go their faculty advisers (and some still do!) but when there are no longer any faculty to see, they are forced (or the university is forced) to provide some sort of guidance for them. And, another administrative layer is born. Faculty used to oversee all aspects of student life on campus. No more.

The authors deal with the issue of adjuncts in the book, making the connection between student success and the number of adjuncts they have in front of the classroom during their initial years. But they tend to lay the blame at the feet of over-paid professors who refuse to retire. Instead, they need to be looking at the administrative class, the ones who are making the decisions about hiring an increasing amount of adjuncts and an increasing number of themselves. More adjuncts have seem to have lead to more administrators.

Another unexamined phenomenon is that this administrator class is also highly educated. Browse job postings for administrative positions and the ideal applicant has at least a masters degree. This increase in administrators has lead to an increase in students seeking graduate degrees. The administrators wear the veil of an expert because they have a graduate degree. One wonders how the university used to run before there was a PhD in higher education administration or student services. Or how the university ran before these students were paying full-ride to get these graduate degrees.

And I think professors (at least some of them) secretly like the idea of the administrators. Because, at the end of the day, any failure can be put at the feet of whatever administrative unit was in charge. I would argue (or at least I think it should be examined as a possibility) that it was not the professors who threw away their responsibilities beyond their narrow job descriptions, but that administrators took those responsibilities away. Chicken-egg argument, but an important one. And as the demands from outside of the university kept increasing, the professors certainly weren’t lining up to get those roles back. Who wants to deal with accreditation boards, government representatives, and layer upon layer of regulation and laws?

I would say that parents should ask, when universities brag about all of the services/specialists/administrators who are there to “help” their child, ask a) does your child REALLY needs this and b) is an administrator really the best person for this job? As a professor, ask yourself, does my committee work really reflect an authentic opportunity to participate in university governance or is it keeping me happy so that business can go on as usual?