Higher learning

Higher education is such a rip-off. Yesterday I received a notice that I'm being billed over a grand for a class that I attended for one week and then dropped early on in the semester. I basically have no recourse.

Anyway, here's a column from The New Republic written by a professor who thinks that the charade can't continue for much longer and that pretty soon our universities will be in the same boat as GM:

If undergraduate education is too often an afterthought, graduate education is too often a con game. A sizeable percentage of PhDs will never get tenure-track teaching jobs, which are the only jobs for which their education trains them. Since no jobs await them, they hang around longer getting their degrees, all the while teaching classes and doing research for their academic sponsors. It's a great deal--for the sponsors. For the grad students, it's akin to buying a daily lottery ticket as a retirement plan. The grad students keep coming, but eventually that well will dry up; the quality of the talent pool will decline. No system that depends on systematic irrationality can long survive, much less succeed.

The problems go beyond education to the production of knowledge itself. Universities compartmentalize knowledge, chopping it up into ever more and smaller pieces. I teach and write about American criminal justice. Scholarship on crime and criminal justice is divided among a half-dozen different schools and departments: law, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and public health. Scholars in each of those areas know next to nothing about scholarship in all the others. (I'm no better than anyone else on this score.) No wonder our work is ignored by policymakers; each of us can elaborately describe his own piece of the elephant but none sees the beast whole. One could tell the same story with respect to dozens of other fields of study.

...The health of any single university is no large matter. But in this market, the top players set the terms for everyone else. If the Ivies and Stanford and the top state universities continue to do things the old-fashioned way, schools farther down the food chain have to do the same, or risk losing their best faculty members. It's a little like the early stages of a Ponzi scheme: Everyone wants to keep it going as long as possible, and the odds are it won't end just yet. My generation of academics (I'm 47) will get ours and then, probably, get out before the crash--just as GM's managers in the 1950s got theirs, then went on to rich retirements. But woe to those who come after us.

I have to agree that there has to be a better way of doing things. I really don't understand the set-up of our universities. Where does all of the money go? Professors plead that they don't get paid very much (and from what I have been told they have a good case) while students pay out the nose.

Consider this: My classes cost a little less than $3K a pop. Now, take this professor for example. He's adjunct and makes most of his money through his day job I imagine. I have no idea what GWU pays him, but given that some of the senior guys in the international trade dept. make less than $100K or just over it, I doubt he's making out like a bandit. But what if I paid him $1,500 for my class? That means for one class with 15 students he'd make $22,500. If he teaches just one class per semester without any summer work that's $45,000 per year. Not a bad deal. I'd get my education for half off and he'd probably make out better than he is now as well. His only expenses as far as I can tell would be paying to rent out a room where everyone could meet.

And the rest of the money goes for what? Administrative costs? There are probably a lot of factors I'm leaving out and I don't pretend to know all of the ends and outs of education, but I can see why there is a growing attraction to distance learning programs and other education alternatives.