Why I Believe I Must Leave

I've tried to keep this blog from becoming a wailing wall about my woes as an adjunct instructor.  However, I'll ask you to indulge me for today.  Some of what I'll say in this post may be relevant to some of you who aren't adjuncts.


I have all but decided to stop teaching at the end of this academic year.  In fact, I've even told a few adjunct colleagues, and one full-timer, that I might not be working with them this fall.  


If I don't teach, I have absolutely no idea of what I'll do to make up for the lost income--which, at this point, is all of my income.  I have practically no savings and no spouse or other "significant other" to support me financially.  


So why am I contemplating the proverbial leap into the dark? Ironically, being at two schools in which I'm treated better than I was at York (even when I was a full-timer there) has made me think even more about quitting.


Now, I'm not one of those narcissistic characters in a Woody Allen movie who thrives on some fashionable parody (however unintentional) of despair.  Had I started my life as a college instructor at one of the schools (especially one in particular) in which I now work, I might feel differently about the work I do and the academic world than I do now.  Indeed, I just might have gone for a PhD or gotten more of my stuff published, and gotten tenure someplace.


At that school, most of the full-timers began teaching immediately, or within a year or two, after finishing graduate school.  As it is a community college--one I believe to be more focused on teaching than others I've seen--one doesn't see the preciousness, intellectual pretentiousness and sheer pettiness one finds in other schools in which I've taught.  As an aside, I'll mention that I've noticed these things most at lower-ranked four-year colleges in which people have degrees from respectable institutions and want to become one of the major authorities in their field, but know they're not going to be taken as seriously as those who teach at more "prestigious" colleges and universities.


Most of the adjuncts are young.  Those who aren't as young have been there for some time.  There is generally mutual support among the adjuncts and between the adjuncts and full-timers.  Much of that, it seems, had to do with the leadership of a long-serving chair who retired the semester after I started.  The long-timers still talk about her in reverential tones.


Plus, I must say that they all have been pleasant toward me. I am the first member of one particular minority group to teach in that department, and that fact really doesn't seem to color my relationships with other faculty members and administrators as it did at York College.


So why do I feel less like teaching and being in academia than I did before I started teaching at that school?  Well, it has much to do with the experiences I had at York and other colleges.  In particular, I think of the dealings I had with other full-time faculty members when I was a full-timer at York.


Whatever full-timers might say about their respect for the work adjuncts do, and whatever pity they might express for our working conditions and low pay, they look down on us and express our disdain for us to each other.  I witnessed such things at departmental meetings and other functions.  The funny thing is that they'd talk disparagingly about adjuncts right in front of me, forgetting that not much earlier, I had been one.  Or, perhaps, they were trying to remind me of that fact.


One York full-timer in particular was an insufferable snob and had one of the worst cases of class psychosis I have ever seen.  She missed no opportunity to show her disdain for people whom she deemed to be lower on the socio-economic ladder than herself.  Of course, she never brought race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression into her remarks--at least, not directly, anyway.  She was just smart enough to realize that doing so would probably get her in trouble.  


I recall one meeting in particular in which she lamented the fact that full-timers like herself had to share office space with adjuncts.  Worst of all, she said, they were using her computer--and "bringing viruses."  Another time, the department tried to come up with ways to get more adjuncts to come to workshops and such.  "Well, you know those adjuncts," she sneered. "They won't do anything unless you pay them."


She also took every opportunity she could to emphasize that she had once been an adjunct.  Of course, the part she didn't tell people was that her husband had a well-paying job and her kids were grown when she started graduate school.


She's not the only one who flashed the "I was an adjunct, too!" credential.  In fact, the more power and privilege a faculty members brought to, and gained from, the academic world, the more they are likely to remind you that, like you, they toiled away in large sections of introductory and remedial courses for a risible pittance.  Such  faculty members never tell you is that their "adjunct" experiences consisted of moonlighting while they were graduate or teaching assistants. Or, like the prof I mentioned, their spouses, partners, family members or friends housed and fed them while they were working in the academic sweatshops.  They may also have had family money in their pockets and purses, or waiting for them in trusts.


These days, it's a joke to say, "Some of my best friends are..."  The academic world hasn't caught up.  Some profs still say things like that.  Or, if you're on the LGBT spectrum, they simply must let you now that they have brothers or sisters who are, too.  What that means, of course, is that they will use it against you.


But back to their former status as adjuncts:  When they become chairs and coordinators, they carry on the dirty work of their administrations by employing adjuncts.  In other words, they are participating in an exploitative system.  Nearly all chairs and coordinators have tenure.  So why don't they speak up against the way this system wastes the talent and lives of so many people?  


Really, I get tired of hearing them express faux sympathy for adjuncts.  I also get sick of them talking about their support for Occupy Wall Street or a student uprising in Myanamar or some such place when they refuse to acknowledge their own complicity in maintaining,and profiting from, an underclass they have helped to create.


That is what adjuncts are:  the underclass of education.   You can't improve your lot in life by remaining in an underclass; the only hope you have is to get out of, and away from, it.  That, I believe, is what I will do at the end of this academic year.  It may well mean, at least for a time, more hardship than I have now. But, as best as I can tell, there simply is, if you'll indulge me a cliche, no light at the end of this tunnel.


One of the adjunct colleagues with whom I shared my thoughts about quitting had a temporary (for two years) full-time position much like the one I had at York.  She says things like, "You shouldn't give up!" and "You never know what will happen."  What she doesn't understand is that she is an a much better position than I am to continue in academia:  She is much younger and her mother recently retired as a professor at the college.  As for the full-timer, she is on tenure track, has never worked as an adjunct, and therefore simply does not understand my situation.  I hope she never has to be in anything like it.

Some Ways Of Getting What You Pay For

I'm guessing that thousands of high-school seniors (and adults who want to return to school) have received, or will soon receive, letters of acceptance from one college or another.  Still others are registering for classes in schools where they may or may not stay until they complete degrees.  

If you are among those I've just mentioned--or if you are a parent or someone else who's paying the tuition for someone who's about to enroll-- I want to offer some advice.

1.) You should question any "fees" you see on any bill you receive from a school.  Among the most common are "student activity fees" and "technology fees."

I have taught many night classes. Few, if any, students in them participate in the activities--which usually include clubs and sports--that are supposedly paid for with the fees.  Understandably, those students resent paying those fees. If you or your kid plans to live at home (or in any off-campus location) and is working his or her way through school, he or she is also unlikely to have much time, or inclination, for such activities.  Why should you or they pay for them?

Sometimes, counselors and administrators will tell you that you can't enroll in the college or register for classes if you don't pay the fee.  In most schools, particularly government-funded ones, that is not the case.  But you must insist on not paying the fees.  You might be told to pay them and that you will receive a refund at the end of the semester.  If you do so, nag the bursar, financial aid and administrative offices until you get that refund.

In many states, Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) and similar organizations can help you to find out what your rights are in these matters, and will sometimes help you deal with officials who drag heels when it comes to refunding your money. 

2.)  Most schools now charge a "technology fee."  Now, it's true that colleges have to spend considerable amounts of money to update and maintain computers and other technological devices.  However, given what colleges charge, and given the administrative bloat that's found in nearly all of them, it's obscene that those schools charge an additional fee for devices found in classrooms and libraries.  The college doesn't charge extra for the use of desks and seats in a classroom or lecture hall, so why should it charge you extra for the computers, overhead projectors and such that are found in those rooms?

Refuse to pay the fee.  If you have paid your tuition, the school cannot prevent you from attending classes unless you have a contagious disease or are shown to pose a threat of physical harm to others in the school.

3.)  Find out who is teaching your courses.  If you see the word "Staff" or a blank space for the faculty member's name next to a course listing, an adjunct instructor is likely to teach the course.  In fact, the school or department may not hire that instructor until the day of the course.

Now, having spent many years as an adjunct, I am not unbiased (ha, ha) when I say that whether you get an adjunct or full-time instructor has little or no bearing on the quality of instruction you will get in the course.  (Believe it or not, a few tenured profs actually have told me that in some cases, the adjuncts do a better job, particularly in introductory or remedial courses.)  But, whether the course is taught by an adjunct or a full tenured prof, you will pay the same tuition.  

In some colleges, adjuncts are paid as little as $15 an hour for their classroom time.  And, as many of you know, instructors, typically those in writing-intensive areas like English, spend three to five hours in preparation, grading and other tasks related to their courses for every hour they spend in the classroom.  So, in effect, they are making $3-4 an hour for their work.  The US minimum wage, the last time I checked, was $7.25 an hour.

Try to take all of your courses with full-time, preferably tenured, instructors.  It may be difficult to find sections taught by those instructors in the introductory and general education courses freshman typically take.  Look for them; if they're not available, insist that the college and department staff the courses with such instructors.  Otherwise, find another school.  


You have to pay a lot of money to go to school.  Make sure the school is paying the instructor of the course a decent wage, and make sure the school is spending money on things that will actually enhance your or your child's education, not on salaries for meaningless administrative positions or programs.  And don't let your school's administration stonewall or speak condescendingly to you, or hide behind phrases like "We are not at liberty to release that information."

For Recent Grads And Veterans

While Subprime JD's post du jour has some great advice for law-school graduates of 2011 who still haven't found jobs, his wisdom is also valuable for anyone who graduated last year, or in any other recent year, and still doesn't have the job for which he or she trained.

He tells unemployed law graduates not to give up hope and to keep on working to get the jobs they want.  Those pearls of encouragement are equally valuable to unemployed recent graduates from other kinds of schools and programs.  And, his recommendation that unemployed law graduates go to court and watch trials is priceless:  He is, in essence telling law graduates to go and see how the work of their profession is actually done.  That is something, he says, law schools don't teach.

Perhaps that bit of advice can also be re-envisioned for other recent graduates:  If you can do volunteer work or an internship, or take a different position from the one you wanted, in the profession or industry in which you want to work, you can gain practical skills you don't get in school.

There is one other aspect of being nearly a year (or more) out of school, and without a job, that JD mentions:  the feelings of hopelessness and despair.  They, of course, have sucked many a graduate into a downward spiral.  What makes it all the more difficult to avoid is that, even in times of widespread unemployment, you are still judged if you're almost a year out of school and you don't have work--or, say, if you're working as a barista at Starbuck's after you've passed the bar exam.  Would-be employers in the profession or industry for which you've trained start to see you as "damaged goods"; even friends and family wonder what you've done wrong.  I suspect that military personnel who don't find jobs after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have similar experiences:  In fact, things might be worse for them as military training inculcates many of them with the belief of their own self-sufficiency and overall competence.

In the end, Subprime JD might be offering the best advice to all of the people I've mentioned:  Don't be discouraged. Stay focused.  And, educate yourself. 

A Proto-Scamblogger From 1975

"Law schools are already graduating twice as many lawyers every year as the Department of Labor thinks will be needed, and the oversupply will grow every year."

"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in time, money and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young.  We ought to make it possible for these reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up and realistic preparation for the years ahead."

You might ask yourself, "From which scamblogs did she take those quotes?"  The truth is, I didn't take them from a scamblog.  In fact, when those passages were written, scamblogs--or, for that matter, blogs themselves--didn't exist. 

In fact, at the time those nuggets of truth were written, the Internet wasn't yet called the Internet, and nearly all computers were found in government agencies, very large corporations, the military and universities.

Those observations were writtten in 1975 by the late Caroline Bird.  They are from College Is A Waste Of Time And Money.   That essay was excerpted from her book, The Case Against College, which was both a best-seller and reviled after it was published.

Now, I grant that some of what she says to make her case is improbable.  For example, she talks about what would happen if someone's rich uncle gave him the $34,181 (!) it would have cost for four years of Princeton and, instead of attending that august institution, invested the money.  As we know, few people have rich uncles (or aunts) who would do such a thing.  Also, how many 18-year-olds have the mentality to invest the money in the way of the young man Bird invents?

However, her larger points are even more true today than they were three and a half decades ago.  First of all, as she says, far more young people go to college than have the aptitude or desire for it.  Second, parents and high-school guidance counselors (as well as other adults, like teachers, clergy members and counselors, who are significant in young people's lives) still, for a variety of reasons, preach the dogma that young people really should--no, must--attend college.  And, finally, she recognizes that college administrators as well as some faculty members exploit young people's insecurity about themselves, and their parents' and mentors' misconceptions and anxieties, to recruit said young people, not only into colleges and graduate and professional schools, but into particular programs in which placement and employment statistics are particularly grim.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, by the time Bird wrote her book, the job market for professors had already been in the tank for more than half a decade (and it's only gotten worse since then).  And the situation for lawyers was almost exactly as it is today.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of her essay, though, is her revelation that colleges market themselves as "fun" and "uplifting" experiences for students.  That, of course, is a tacit admission that most students wouldn't go to college if they didn't feel they "had" to go.

Another parallel between then and now is that the jobs students most often hoped to get after going to college (and, in many cases, graduate or professional school) are the ones for which demand has been shrinking or in industries that are collapsing.  And, then as now, there is surprisingly little difference in pay between those and the more routine, physically draining, jobs.  To be fair, some of the latter jobs--like those of assembly-line workers in automobile plants--are disappearing, at least in this country.  But the demand for tradespeople like plumbers was and is strong.

The only difference between the situation now and the one she describes is that the numbers--of students, tuition dollars and loan indebtedness, among other things--has grown exponentially larger. There are few, if any, signs that those trends will change, as those who are making money from them are making too much money to give up things as they are.  To be sure, the number of students taking the Law School Admissions test has dropped 25 percent in the past two years.  But it remains to be seen whether that drop will become a long-term trend that shrinks the number of law-school applicants and lawyers significantly.  And, even though some undergraduate institutions reported significant decreases in the number of applications they received, no one really knows whether that phenomenon will spread to other schools, or whether it will be sustained.


One can only hope that today's prospective college, law and graduate students are finally catching on to what Caroline Bird noted long before most of them were born.  Otherwise, as George Santayana said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  That, unfortunately, is what too many of us did.

Forty Years In The Desert And No Way Out

In 1964, the late Allan Murray Cartter, then the Chancellor of New York University, predicted that the market would be glutted with PhDs by 1969.  His prediction was uncanny:  students who had just completed their PhDs were having difficulty finding full-time faculty positions in higher education that year.

However, he initially predicted that the PhD glut would happen in the sciences.  Later--before 1969--he revised his prediction to include the humanities and social sciences. 

Cartter wasn't a gloom-and-doom prophet; he was a trained economist.  He could see the trends and warn of their consequences; however, it would take another researcher to explain exactly how those trends worked. 

In 1970, the University of California-Berkeley accepted a dissertation with this title:  The Ph.D. Production Process:  A Study of Departmental Behavior.   Its author, David Breneman, later became the Dean of the Curry School of Education in the University of Virginia.  In his dissertation, Brennan shows how academic departments act in accordance with Parkinson's Law, which posits growth as an institutional imperative.  In accordance with this principle, administrators advance their careers by increasing the number of their subordinates.

The academic world has its own unique version of this process, which Breneman described.  Most universities allocate resources--including full-time faculty positions-- among departments by something called Full-Time Enrollment.  However, for the purposes of calculating FTE, not all students are created equal.  Depending on the institution, a graduate student counts twice as much as an undergraduate.  So, the system rewards administrators for achieving the highest possible FTE with the lowest numbers of actual students.

Now you know why schools and departments try so hard to persuade undergraduates to pursue Master's degrees and Master's students to earn their PhDs.  This situation also means much smaller classes in graduate programs than in undergraduate programs.  And each of those graduate students in those smaller classes is easier to teach than a typical undergraduate, let alone a freshman in an introductory or remedial class who has no business being in college.

Another side-effect of this system that professors of graduate programs like is that they can get their better students to do unpaid or grant-paid research for them, which they then incorporate into their own work or publish outright under their own names.  All of this, of course, further advances the careers of those professors and the administrators of their institutions.

Add to this unholy mess the naive optimism of those young students who believe that their hard work will make them the ones to beat the odds and become full professors in some prestigious college, and you have a recipe for exploitation. 

Everything I've mentioned, by the way, contributes to another phenomenon of academia:  Professors hold on to their positions long past retirement age, even if they can easily afford to retire.  Hey, if I had a deal like theirs, I don't think I'd give it up, either!  Unfortunately, William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa didn't think of that when they prepared their 1989 report which predicted "severe" faculty shortages as professors hired during the 1960's began to retire.

Meantime, a market that has been depressed for more than four decades will not improve any time in the foreseeable future.  In fact, even if graduate programs close and fewer students enroll in those that remain, the situation will continue to deteriorate because when professors retire, their positions are often eliminated and their courses (if they're continued) are taught by adjuncts or non-tenure-track full-timers who make much less, and have fewer benefits, than the older professors. 

The next time someone you know expresses interest in doing a PhD in Philosophy, English, History or some related field, tell him or her about Cartter and Breneman.  Or, at least, show that person this post before he or she sits down with some "advisor" who will him or her some version of "the good ones always get jobs."

What's Happening To The Graduates?

A week and a half ago, I sliced my finger instead of a piece of meat.  As it was late at night and there is an annex of Mount Sinai Hospital only a block and a half from my apartment, I went to the emergency room for stitches.  Today I returned to that same emergency room to have the sutures removed.


As I was filling out paperwork, the Registrar and I got to talking.  He's British--a Londoner, as I noted from his accent.  I haven't been there in some time, but I've spent enough time there to be able to discern regional accents.  Plus, one of my aunts hails from the North (near Manchester) and returned there after my uncle died.


He's young, handsome and--as it turns out--a graduate of the London School of Economics.  I've known un- and under-employed graduates of Ivy League and near-Ivy schools, but somehow seeing an LSE graduate working the counter of a hospital annex really shocked me.  But then he reminded me of something my cousin has told me:  the employment situation overall, and for university graduates, is even worse in the UK than it is in the US.  And, for various reasons, it may have an even harder time rebounding in Albion than in America.


For one thing, British manufacturing industries are older and therefore have more outmoded technologies than their American counterparts.  So, many British jobs have been outsourced or eliminated outright.  Also, some experts argue that since Margaret Thatcher began her reign as Prime Minister,the country's economy was even more dominated by one sector (financial services) and section of the country (London and the Southeast) than America ever was.  Plus, English society is still, in many ways, bound by class structure (At least the Brits admit as much!) and other bureaucracy that doesn't exist to the same degree in the United States.


Anyone who wonders why there were riots last summer needs only to walk the streets of Tottenham, Brixton, Leicester, Birmingham, Salford and much of Aberdeen, and see the throngs of unemployed young people.  Many have never had jobs; unless things change, some never will, and many more feel they have no hope of getting a job.  Among the jobless and those who have no hope are a number of university graduates.


The situation might be even worse in France.  From the 1980's, French policy-makers repeated one of the biggest mistakes their American counterparts made:  encouraging as many people as possible to go to university.  Even so, France has had one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the industrialized world for at least the past two decades.  To be fair, the situation probably has as much to do with French laws about hiring as it does with a glut of university graduates.  Some experts say that it costs more to hire or fire a worker in France than in any other country.  That cannot be of help to all of those graduates coming into the market every year. 


You might say that England and France are declining, or at least stable, economies.  That may be true; still, they are the sixth- and fifth-largest economies, respectively, in the world.  They're still attractive to all of those who emigrate from the Middle East and North Africa (mainly, from former colonies) in the hope of a better life.  Some, mainly the young, end up as students in the universities and face even worse prospects at graduation than their paler counterparts.


So do members of the "Ant Tribes."  They are China's recent university graduates, who have been having a difficult time finding jobs, even in the recent boom times.  Perhaps even more shocking is that graduates in STEM fields, for which China has become renowned, are having just as difficult a time as graduates in other fields.


And, as I mentioned in a previous post, university graduates in Korea (which has one of the highest rates of university attendance and graduation) are not getting the jobs for which they trained and are staying with their parents.  That, in another "booming" export-driven economy.  


Unless things change, new under- and un-employed graduates won't have the option of going to other places that have shortages of skilled and educated workers:  those countries will either develop their own problems with keeping their graduates home.


At least the British, French, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese don't have non-dischargable student loans to pay  off.

NYU Uber Alles (Or The Village, Anyway)

The other day, the New York Times published an article  from its architecture critic Michael Kimmelman about New York University's plans to expand.  


Now, some--like some of those who left comments in response to the article--might dismiss Kimmelman as a snob or someone who just doesn't want his neighborhood to change.  However, he makes it clear that it is indeed possible for NYU to build without "destroying" the character of the neighborhood.  For one thing, the amount of money NYU is spending should enable it to hire some of the best architects and planners available.  For another, although some of what NYU has built in Greenwich Village is really ugly, some other things they've built are actually rather nice, and make parts of the neighborhood (especially around Washington Square Village) more tranquil. And, finally--this is the part people don't like to admit--much of the "character" of The Village is mythical.  It hasn't been the "bohemian capital" of anything for at least three decades.  Heck, it's hasn't even been the gay "capital" of the city for at least two decades.  There are probably as many One Percenters living in The Village as there are on the Upper East Side.


Still, though, it's hard not to feel concern about what NYU wants to do, simply because it's almost never a good thing when a large institution is allowed to overrun a community.  While it's true that institutions like NYU bring lots of business for everyone from book sellers to pizza makers, that business doesn't really benefit local residents, or even residents of the New York Metropolitan Area. That is because much of the property from which those businesses operate is owned by NYU, which does about as much to hold the line on rent as it does on tuition.  So, increasingly, those quirky little coffee and book shops are being replaced by Starbuck's and Barnes and Noble.


The worst part, though, is that NYU doesn't pay real estate taxes on the extensive properties it owns in the neighborhood, and throughout the city.  Somehow a corporation organization that can undertake a multi-billion dollar expansion that will take two decades to complete is also deemed worthy of tax-exempt status.  I am one of the last people in the world who would ever speak in defense of Donald Trump, but I don't think he would ever get an arrangement like that.  So why should NYU, or any other mega-university?

Why They Abuse Their Students

Lately, there has been a lot of news about teachers and school employees having sexual relations with their students.  

I'm going to do something risky:  I'm going to my own ideas as to why, it seems, we're hearing about more and more of those relationships.  As I am not a researcher in any field related to the phenomenon, please take what I am about to say as opinion that has been shaped by my own observations and experience, and nothing more--or less.

Some people say that we're hearing more about such cases because they're being reported more frequently.  That's probably true, and some people who were sexually exploited years, or even decades, ago are coming forward, much as many men who, as boys, were sexually abused by priests are now speaking out.  However, I don't think increasing openness about the topic and reporting of incidents can account for all of the sad cases we're hearing about.

I have long believed that most elementary- and high-school teachers begin their careers much too young.  Typically, they start when they finish their bachelor's or master's degrees, depending on where and what they're teaching.  If they have followed the conventional trajectory, they are in their early- to mid- 20's when they finish their bachelor's degrees, and their mid- to late- 20's when they finish their masters'. Therefore, they are--especially if they are teaching high school--not that much older than the kids they're teaching.

Now, some would argue that young people are more knowledgeable about sex and relationships than earlier generations (which include yours truly) were at a similar age.  More information is available more readily, to be sure.  But more information doesn't necessarily translate into more emotional development.  Nor does hormonal activity which, according to some reports, is occurring at earlier ages than it has in the past.

These neophyte teachers, who are just barely out of adolescence, spend their days among adolescents and young children.  That can be a trap for young teachers who haven't fully learned what's appropriate, much less nurturing, behavior with teenagers and children.  Some of those teachers were, like many of their peers, engaging in indiscriminate sex (along with binge drinking and other kinds of reckless behavior) only months, or even weeks, earlier, when they were in college.

Of course, being among other teachers and school employees and administrators who haven't matured emotionally doesn't help them, either.

These problems have existed for a long time, you say.  So why are there more cases of children who are sexually exploited at school?, you might ask.

Well, I think that as families and other structures that were supposed to protect kids are breaking down, more new teachers are coming from what might be called "dysfunctional" families and communities.  A kid is more likely to be abused in such an environment.  Even if he or she is not abused at home or by a family member, he or she is more likely to experience sexual exploitation, or other forms of violence, elsewhere. 

While what I've described may be more common among the poorer and less-educated, no economic or social class is immune to breakdown and dysfunction.   Even in so-called intact families, kids may not spend very much time with their parents, or other responsible adults who have their best interests at heart.  Hence, important lessons about social and sexual mores, not to mention the ability to know when one is in danger, is not passed down.


Furthermore, most young teachers have never been in any kind of professional environment but school.  Therefore, they do not learn, as they might in other environments, that they are responsible for their actions and that those actions have repercussions.  That is why some teachers and school employees who are caught having sexual relationships with kids--and, worse, exclaiming that those kids are the loves of their lives on Facebook--don't understand what's wrong about what they've done.  And some, like Mary Kay LeTourneau, think that they are being deprived of their "right" to make their livings as teachers when they are imprisoned and banished from the profession.

In brief, I think we are going to hear about more  teachers having sexual relations with their students because they are less stable and emotionally mature than teachers of previous generations.  And even those teachers were too young, spiritually and emotionally, to be teaching kids.

Down The Garden Path In The Garden State

New Jersey, particularly in its largest cities, has long had a reputation for corrupt administration.  So it's no surprise that its school boards can teach mobsters a thing or to about lining their pockets.

One of the most egregious examples of such a board is the one in Elizabeth, the state's fourth-largest city.  The arrest of the the school board's president didn't surprise very many people.  Neither did the subpoena of a senior board member or, for that matter, the hiring of friends and relatives of school officials, much less the cheating that allowed the kids of said officials to get free lunches.  Or much of anything else that was revealed by the federal, state and county investigations after The Star-Ledger, the state's largest newspaper (and, to their credit, one of the few in this country that still does anything like investigative journalism), reported on the corruption.

Perhaps the least surprising thing of all was that an internal report said there was no evidence of nepotism, shakedowns and patronage.  Uh-huh, and the American Bar Association finds no misreporting of placement and salary statistics in the schools it accredits.  And George Lincoln Rockwell could find no evidence of racism or anti-Semitism. 

And the $500,000 paid to former State Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein for his work on the "investigation" did nothing to influence the content of that report.  Having spent more than a decade of my life in the Garden State, I absolutely believe him, just as I believe no election fraud was committed in 2000.  And, yes, a single bullet killed JFK.

On Their Way Down

For the second year in a row, fewer Law School Admission Tests were administered than in the year before.  In fact, about 25 percent fewer LSATs were administered in 2011-2012 than in 2009-2010, the peak year for the test.

Since people, generally, take the LSAT only if they plan on applying to law school, a drop in the number of people taking the test means fewer law school applications.  So, the number of law school applications has dropped just as precipitously.

While two years of decline isn't normally seen as a long-term trend, it's hard not to see the past two years as a harbinger of things to come.  Thanks to people like Nando, Professor Campos and Subprime JD, some who might have applied to law school in previous years now realize that the legal profession and industry are in serious, possibly irreversible, decline.  For too long, too many law schools have been graduating too many people into an economy that has far too few jobs for them.  Not only is law not the ticket to wealth, or even a middle-class life, that people had previously envisioned; going to law school can also be financial suicide, as there are essentially no law schools that charge fewer than five figures in tuition, and a few schools are in the 50G range.  Worst of all, those debts are not dischargable.

If you've been reading this or other blogs, as well as articles in the New York Times and a few other mainstream media outlets, you already know about the situation I've described. 

You have also read the scenarios of what could happen if the trend continues.  Some expect that fourth-tier, and possibly third-tier (and even lower second-tier), schools will admit applicants with lower LSAT scores and GPAs.  That could send their reputations and rankings spiraling even further downward, which would dry up their applicant pools and lead some of them to close up shop.

On the other hand, some argue that most of those who opt not to take the test would have scored lower than those who take it.  That argument has merit, and, interestingly, could also lead to a shrinkage in the applicant pool, which could cause some schools to close.

Those who have observed the situation agree that fewer people going to law school won't necessarily lead to more or better opportunities for those who go.  For one thing, many of the jobs that have been lost won't come back, no matter how much the economy improves.  As an example, much discovery work is now being done in India and other places.  Plus, the law profession and industry are undergoing all sorts of changes that will render certain skills--and lawyers-- obsolete.  Finally, many of the industries that used to hire lawyers or use legal services have been hit hard by the recession and, if they recover, they will be different (in some cases, dramatically so) from the way they were before crises  that began around 2007.


I don't want to spend too much more time discussing the LSAT, law schools or the legal profession, as the bloggers and reporters I've mentioned, as well as others in and outside the industry, know more about it than I, most likely, ever will.  However, the drop in LSATs and law school applications is interesting in light of a parallel, and possibly related development.


It seems that some of the so-called elite undergraduate institutions have also been experiencing serious declines in their applications.   To be  sure, a few of the best schools have experienced surges. As an example, the University of Chicago has sixteen percent more applications than it had last year. However, applications to Columbia University decreased by nearly nine percent, and the University of Pennsylvania as well as other schools at or near the top of the rankings also reported significant drops in the number of applicants.


Some of the decrease in applications has been explained by the fact that Harvard, Princeton and a few other high-level schools have reinstated early action (a.k.a. early admissions) programs after scrapping them several years ago.  Such programs don't require students to enroll if they're admitted. However, they prohibit students from applying to like programs in other colleges.  Columbia and Penn retained their early-admissions programs during the years Harvard and Princeton abandoned theirs.  During that time, Columbia and Penn were among the schools with the highest percentage of early-admits in their freshman classes.


Even so, Harvard's applications decreased by two percent from last year's levels.  On the other hand, Chicago saw its number of applications skyrocket after instituting an early-admissions program for the first time in its history.


There are all sorts of explanations for the declines among some of the elite institutions.  All of them include equally stunning increases in applications to the best state universities like the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  However, those increases don't account for the increased popularity of Chicago and some other schools.


Could it be that part of the attraction of Chicago is that it has been seen as, arguably, even more "exclusive" than the Ivies or small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Amherst?  Or, could it be that Chicago is more of a "niche" school than the Ivies or some of the other "elite" schools?  If either perception is true, it might give graduates and edge when they apply to graduate, law or medical schools (as a large percentage of graduates do) or jobs.  Then, perhaps, degrees from other elite schools aren't quite as special, at least in some people's perceptions.


But I think there is still an even more important question to ask.  Will the decrease in the number of applications at "elite" schools trickle down to the less-expensive schools that don't have the status of UCLA, UVA or Michigan?  Might high-school seniors and their families realize--as some who, in earlier years, might have applied to law school are now realizing--that the degrees they'd earn simply won't cut much ice in today's tundra-like employment landscape?  If they do, then they just might realize that the costs simply aren't worth it, especially if student loan debt remains non-dischargable.

The Textbook Scandal

I love books about as much as anybody can.  So it pains me to say that one of the biggest scams in education involves books.

Anybody who has spent any amount of time in college knows how expensive textbooks are.  It's not unusual to see students spend over $1000 a year on required texts for courses, especially those in the STEM subjects and the visual arts.  The cost of textbooks has doubled, in real dollars, over the past two decades, which means that it's increased far more than prices generally.

One of the things I did before going to graduate school was to work for a publisher.  Some of its offerings were textbooks; others were used as texts for college courses even if they weren't textbooks per se.  One thing the executives of that company, and others in the industry knew--and occasionally voiced--was that their customers are a "captive market."  That is to say, you generally can't substitute another book for a college text in the way you might buy, say, a generic drug instead of one from a household-name manufacturer. 

Worse is the fact that most textbooks go through more than one edition, and instructors almost invariably specify the latest edition.  While I can understand why, say, a science or engineering professor would want the latest edition of a text, it's a bit harder to rationalize the same practice in other disciplines, especially when the content varies only minimally from a previous edition.  Still, those small changes are enough to make it difficult for a student to follow in a class discussion based on the text.  The professor might refer to page 137; the same passage might appear on page 125.  Also, these differences can present citation difficulties if the student has to write a paper.   While those difficulties seem trivial, they can be daunting for a student who has little or no experience of writing or following a discussion based on a text.

Of course, one reason why editions change, even when it seems the changes aren't necessary, is money.  It seems obvious that those who wrote or edited the books reap the benefits.  However, an even larger chunk of the revenue from new editions goes to the publishers.  That is the reason why the contracts textbook publishers draw up often include the stipulation that the book has to be "revised" into a "new" edition every three or four years, depending on the book and the publisher.  I can't begin to tell you how many times I assigned a book one semester only to see it "revised" in time for the following semester.

This, naturally, makes for inconvenience and expense, not only for college students, but for school districts.   For most, textbooks constitute one of the greatest expenses in their budgets. Making matters even worse in the schools, books are often chosen by which publisher or representative is offering the best "deal."  Of course, that doesn't always result in the best books for the students' needs.  What it does result in, often, is royalties for some member of the faculty or administration who wrote or edited the book, or for kickbacks to them and the schools from the companies that supply the textbooks.

At the college level, the biggest scam might be in the introductory or general-education courses with multiple sections.  Textbook selection is usually done by a small committee of faculty members, which usually includes the chair and coordinators of the department in which the course is offered.  Those professors force all of the professors--who, as often as not, are mainly adjuncts or graduate assistants--to "adopt" the text for the class, which is purchased as part of a "bundle" from the publisher.  That means lower per-unit cost for the school, but not for the student.  Also, as you may have guessed, the professors who chose the books are, as often as not, their authors or editors.  So they get royalties, while the adjuncts and graduate assistants who are forced to "adopt" them get complaints.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we do away with textbooks, although some schools are doing that.  (All of the required texts at DeVry University, for example, are electronic.)   Rather, I think that there should be fewer incentives, or more disincentives, for schools, administrators and professors to mandate texts and editions that will be only sparingly used and that mainly add to their own bank accounts. 

Could Gutenberg have had any idea of what scams his invention would enable?

Where My Old Profs Went

You have probably experienced this:  You hadn't thought about someone in years, perhaps decades.  Then that person's name pops into your head.

These days, you can type that person's name into Google or some other search engine. Even if that person has literally fallen off the face of the earth, you can probably find out his or her whereabouts.

Recently, the names of two of my undergraduate professors--who, perhaps I don't need to say, were among the better professors I had.  They were smart (almost frighteningly so!) and rigorous, and their lectures were challenging and engaging at the same time.  Needless to say, I learned quite a bit from both of them.

So, perhaps, I shouldn't have been surprised that they both left academic life long before they could have retired.  One of those profs, in fact, got tenure when he was 29 years old and became the director of a program of study at the university.  He left in 1989 and has been developing software and systems ever since.  In fact, he's the founder and CEO of a company in that line of work that lists Fortune 500 companies among its clients.

The other prof's history is a little more nebulous, as he's moved around (geographically) a bit more than the other.  But, from what I've gathered, he's been writing science fiction books under a nom de plume and has started at least one successful business I found.

Mind you, neither of these profs was in business, and the one who has been in software and IT was only peripherally involved with the technology as part of his studies.  In fact, both profs' main areas of academic research and teaching have little or nothing to do with the things they've done since leaving the academy.

I'll admit that I am disappointed, at least a little, because both were such assets to their students and the fields in which they worked.  On the other hand, they were smarter--both in academic and practical ways--than most of their colleagues.  The one who's in software knew it; I think the other one simply believed that, in spite of his success, he wasn't a "good fit."  Actually, I think the academic world wasn't a good fit for him--or that other prof.

I am tempted to write to them.  They probably don't remember me because I had their classes so long ago.  They also might want to forget that part of their lives.  As good as they were, they never seemed happy in the academic world.  If you've been reading this blog, you know that I can understand how they might have felt.  

They have both been successful outside the academic world.  And I know for sure that the one who went into technology is making lots more money than he ever would have made as a professor.  The other prof probably is, too.  I hope they are happy.  Somehow, I imagine they are.

Question Of The Day

"The United States spends more money than any other country on education.  Yet our students do worse and drop out more than kids in other countries.  And American teachers aren't even that well-paid.  So where is the money going?"


A friend asked me that question.   Given that she is a director of an organization that deals with government agencies, my answer came as no surprise to her.  "Fraud, waste, corruption and administrative bloat."  I thought for a moment and added, "And administrative bloat causes the other problems."


"So why don't they get rid of some of those administrators.  Then they could hire more teachers, and they'd probably still save money."


Mike-Ro Manager Bloomberg is never going to appoint her as Schools Chancellor.  Not that she'd want that job.

Turning Trades Into "Professions"

 A comment on today's Inside the Law School Scam post led me to this article.


Michael Lewis wrote it nearly two decades ago.  His criticisms of The Columbia School of Journalism are as relevant today as they were when he attended in 1992.  He derides the jargon and sheer abstruseness of much of the curriculum.  Being a journalist himself, and having contact with a number of the top editors of the time, he knew what a crock journalism schools actually were.  


Although the article made for some very entertaining reading, nothing in it surprised me.  When I was writing for a newspaper, I asked my editor whether I should get a journalism degree.  I could as well have asked him whether joining the circus would increase my chances of writing for The Times.  Then I asked whether I should take a journalism class.  "I guess we're paying you too much if you have that much money to waste," he said with mock indignation.  


Now, the reason I'm mentioning Lewis's article or my exchange with my editor is not merely to discuss the futility of going to journalism school: I already did that in an earlier post.  Rather, I want to mention another phenomenon I noticed upon finding Lewis's article in a comment on Professor Campos' blog.


In his article, Lewis quotes, among other people the writer Joseph Nocera, who called his journalism school a "glorified trade school."  Actually, in a way, it was even worse than a trade school because, he says, "it is impossible to recreate the journalism environment in the classroom."


What Nocera says about "j-school" is not so different from what many lawyers and other law school graduates say about law school.  Nearly all of the scambloggers say that people graduate law school unable to file a motion.  Worse, after spending six figures on tuition, they have to spend another thousand to take a class to help them pass the bar.  Many who pass say that the class was the only thing that helped them pass the bar; nearly everything they learned in law school courses was of no import.


At one time, law was considered a trade.  It still is in much of the world, including most European countries.  So, for that matter, are such "professions" as accounting and business management.  Not so long ago, medicine, engineering and teaching were in that category, too.  


It seems that colleges, universities and graduate programs started to turn trades into "professions" and became the gatekeepers of them about a century ago.  Before then, one didn't need to go to law school--or even college--to take the bar examination, or the licensing exams for most skilled trades.   Until about 1960, one also didn't need to go to college in order to become a librarian; one simply had to be interested in books.  Now it's all but impossible to get a job as a librarian without a Master of Library Science.


Now, of course, being a journalist and being a librarian are different from the other "professions" I've mentioned in that one doesn't have to take licensing exams for them as one must in, say, law, medicine or even teaching.  But those occupations were, as I mentioned previously, considered to be trades, albeit skilled ones.  One usually learns a trade through training with a practitioner and working in the trade. That, essentially, is how Abraham Lincoln learned how to be a lawyer.


Of course, I'm not foolish or naive enough to suggest that doctors should train entirely through such a method.  Given the complexity of the work done in that area, and the advances in technology, doctors really do need to know things they might not learn on the job.  And they need to know enough to understand what's in the medical journals.  One might also say that engineering is now too complex to be learned solely on the job.  


On the other hand, some trades/professions really can be lerarned only through practice.  Journalists, like other writers, learn how to write by writing and reading.   Also, no amount of training will turn someone who doesn't have an inquisitive mind into a worthwhile reporter.  If you can't get to the heart of a story--or the story, period--simply having a journalism degree won't do it for you. 


If anything, "j-school" will only make things worse, as so much of it, as Lewis points out, is predicated on complicating the simple and normal, just as so much of law school teaching is done with "hypotheticals" that have about as much chance of happening in the real world as I have of marrying Denzel Washington.


The end result is that as academic institutions turn trades into professions, the relevance of the education to the trade is less and less.  And the costs and risks increase for students.  About the only ones who benefit are the administrators of those schools and programs.

My Defiant Hope

As you can see from my "handle", I am angry over the ways in which too many educational institutions, at every level of education, use their sacrosanct status to get away with things that would result in long prison sentences for people who tried similar things in other endeavors.  In that sense, they're not so different from so many store-front churches in inner-city neighborhoods or any number of non-profits I can think of.


And I reserve special contempt for those institutions and organizations that enable such abuses of public trust.  They, along with the educational institutions in question, have been referred to as the Education-Finance Complex in other blogs.


What tempers my anger, though, is my defiant streak.  I do what I can to keep my anger from festering into cynicism, which leads to despair.  When you think about it, the powers-that-be would love to see angry people so consumed by their rage that they simply give up hope.  Such people are putty to the scalpels wielded by the corporate and financial plutocrats who, essentially, are the puppeteers of most politicians.


Every once in a while, someone commits a courageous public act that makes it a little easier for me to keep up my defiant hope.  An example of such an act appeared in yesterday's New York Times op-ed column.  In it, Greg Smith  announced his resignation as a Goldman-Sachs executive director.  It may well be an act of career suicide, at least within that industry, for him.  


However, I have seen enough not to be merely dazzled by the sparks thrown off by Smith's public eclat.  Rather, I feel a renewal, however slight and momentary, when I read his explanation of what motivated him to leave his perch.  In particular, I was taken with this:  "I knew it was time to leave when I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them  what a great place this was to work."


I have pointed the article, and that sentence in particular, to my students.  One advantage to working in a community college in the CUNY system (which I also felt I had when I was at York College) is that many students realize, at least in some way, that the system is not designed for their benefit--or, more precisely, has evolved, through the machinations of those charged with it, into a pit from which the way out is longer, steeper and more fraught with perils than it has been in a very long time.


They do not understand what I've just described in the abstract ways that students in the more "prestigious" private colleges do (at least until they graduate and their loans come due), or in ways that tenured faculty members claim to understand.


Many of my students come from families in which people have worked long and hard and have little or nothing to show for their labors.  Or--particularly in the night classes--they themselves might be the ones who have been working harder and harder but have been just barely getting by--or are not getting by at all.  Those students, at least at some level, know that much of their effort does little more than to help enrich the sorts of people Smith denounces in the editorial in which he announced his resignation.


When you think about it, it's not surprising that someone like Smith would do what he's done at the same time that folks like Paul Campos, C. Cryn Johanssen and "Nando" are exposing the ways in which law schools, professional schools and other kinds of schools have manipulated employment and salary statistics--and how banks profit, and government entities benefit from such deception.  In this context, the Occupy Wall Street movement also shouldn't have surprised anyone, coming as it did in the wake of the exposure of the various kinds of fraud committed by FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate)-related companies.


I do whatever I can to raise my students' awareness of the developments I've described.  Some of them, at least, realize that lasting peace and prosperity, not to mention their own long-term success, cannot be built on fraud, lies, deception and theft--or on assisting or enabling those things.  And there are folks like Greg Smith who know that.    

Does He Want The US To Become Korea?

I wonder how much time Obama has spent in Korea--or even reading about it, or hearing about it from Koreans or other people who have spent a lot of time there.


I've never been there myself.  But I know a number of people who have lived and worked there for extended periods of time. Also, I have, and have had, a number of Korean students.


The Koreans have already done what Obama seems to want Americans to do.  Nearly everybody graduates from school; of them, about 80 percent go on to university.  And nearly all of them graduate, mainly with degrees in science and technology.  Most who don't attend university are poor people in rural areas.


You might think that those numbers reflect what you've always been told about Koreans' work ethic.  That is probably true, and it also is indicative of a culture in which educated children are a sign of a "good" family.  However, all of their striving for degrees masks a serious problem in the Korean economy.


You see, there employment picture for graduates is just as bad, if not worse, than it is in the United States.  Seoul National, acknowledged as the best university in the country, has only a 70 percent placement rate for its graduates.  The percentages at other universities are even lower.  


The problem, apparently, is that there aren't enough high-skill jobs for those graduates.  Yet, for the country's hard, dirty jobs, workers are brought in from China, Vietnam, the Phillipines and even Uzbekistan.  


It's not that the Koreans are "too lazy" to take those jobs.  Nearly all Koreans live with their parents until they are married; it's almost a "given" that unemployed graduates will do likewise.  Korean parents have a lot--including honor, as well as a financial investment--riding on their kids' success.  So they discourage their kids from taking lower-level, lower-paying jobs even to get a start in life.  Instead, they push their kids to make themselves "more qualified," whether by taking another degree, improving their English or studying abroad.  


However, even as many young people are so kept off the labor market, the number of professional and managerial openings--which are the ones most graduates seek--hasn't increased.  In fact, there are indications that the numbers of those jobs are declining.  So the country is faced with something that now faces the United States:  a glut of people with degrees and a shortage of suitable jobs for them.


The difference is, of course, that neither those students nor their families incur the massive debts too many of their American counterparts take on.  Still, the strain of not having jobs and of the cost of schooling takes a financial--and, often, emotional--toll on graduates and their families. 


Some European countries and Japan may be headed for the same fate.  In all of those countries, the percentage of graduates from high school (or its equivalents) who attend colleges and universities is increasing.  But the number of high-skill jobs that pay well isn't.


All of those countries could find themselves in a similar position to that of Ireland before its "boom" of the '90's, or of many of the former Soviet satellites (e.g., the Czech Republic, Poland and others) until recently: full of well-educated, well-qualified people but lacking in the kinds of jobs for which they were supposedly educated and qualified. Is that what Obama wants for the United States?