Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student’s parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so’s son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid … English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn’t it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he’s actually going to do?
My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students’ intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, “Aren’t these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?” Also, he says, “The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don’t want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice.”
Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.
“Well,” I sometimes say, “what are they going to do?”
The answer, at least according to a recent article in the New York Times, is rather bleak. Employment rates for college graduates have declined steeply in the last two years, and perhaps even more disheartening, those who find jobs are more likely to be steaming lattes or walking dogs than doing anything even peripherally related to their college curriculum. While the scale and severity of this post-graduation letdown may be an unavoidable consequence of an awful recession, I do wonder if all those lofty institutions of higher learning, with their noble-sounding mission statements and soft-focused brochure photos of campus greens, may be glossing over the serious, at-times-crippling obstacles a B.A. holder must overcome to achieve professional and financial stability. I’m not asking if a college education has inherent value, if it makes students more thoughtful, more informed, more enlightened and critical-minded human beings. These are all interesting questions that don’t pay the rent. What I’m asking is far more banal and far more pressing. What I’m asking is: Why do even the best colleges fail so often at preparing kids for the world?
When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors and mentors reinforced this complacency. I was smart, they told me. I’d spent four years at a rigorous institution honing my writing, research and critical-thinking skills. I’d written an impressive senior thesis, gathered recommendations from professors, completed summer internships in various journalistic endeavors. They had no doubt at all that I would land on my feet. And I did (kind of), about a decade after graduating.
In the interim, I floundered. I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa. I mooched off friends and boyfriends and slept on couches. One dreary night in San Francisco, I went on an interview to tend bar at a strip club, but left demoralized when I realized I’d have to walk around in stilettos. I went back to school to complete the pre-medical requirements I’d shunned the first time through, then, a week into physics, I applied to nursing school, then withdrew from that program after a month when I realized nursing would be an environment where my habit of spacing out might actually kill someone. I landed a $12-an-hour job as a paralegal at an asbestos-related litigation firm. I got an MFA in fiction.
Depending on how you look at it, I either spent a long time finding myself, or wasted seven years. And while all these efforts hardly add up to a tragedy (largely because I had the luxury of supportive parents willing to supplement my income for a time), I do have to admit feeling disillusioned as I moved from one gig to another, feeling as though my undergraduate education, far from preparing me for any kind of meaningful and remunerative work, had in some ways deprepared me, nurturing my natural strengths and predilections — writing, reading, analysis — and sweeping my weaknesses in organization, pragmatic problem-solving, decision-making under the proverbial rug.
Of course, there are certainly plenty of B.A. holders out there who, wielding the magic combination of competency, credentials and luck, are able to land themselves a respectable, entry-level job that requires neither name tag nor apron. But for every person I know who parlayed a degree in English or anthropology into a career-track gig, I know two others who weren’t so lucky, who, in that awful, post-college year or two or three or four, unemployed and uninsured and uncommitted to any particular field, racked up credit card debt or got married to the wrong person or went to law school for no particular reason or made one of a dozen other time- and money-wasting mistakes.
And the common thread in all these stories seems to be how surprised these graduates were by their utter unemployability, a feeling of having been misled into complacency, issued reassurances about how the pedigree or prestige of the institution they’d attended would save them. This narrative holds true whether their course of study was humanities or social sciences. My baby sitter, for example, who earned a degree in psychology from a Big Ten university, now makes $15 an hour watching my kids.
“I was not the most serious student,” she admits. “But I do wonder, why was I allowed to decide on a major without ever sitting down with my advisor and talking about what I might do with that major after graduating? I mean, I had to write out a plan for how I’d fit all my required courses into my schedule, but no one seemed to care if I had a plan once I left there. I graduated not knowing how to use Excel, write out a business plan, do basic accounting. With room and board and tuition, my time there cost $120,000.”
I asked Sarah Isham, the director of career services of the College of Arts and Sciences at my alma mater about this discrepancy between curriculum and career planning, and she repeats the same reassurances I heard 10 years ago: “What we do is help students see how the patterns and themes of their interests, skills and values, might relate to particular arenas. We do offer a few self-assessment tests, as well as many other resources to help them do this.”
When I ask how well the current services are working — that is, how may recent graduates are finding jobs, real jobs that require a degree — she can only say that, “The College of Arts and Sciences does not collect statistics on post-graduation plans. I could not give you any idea of where these students are going or what they are doing. Regrettably, it’s not something in place at this time.”
I went on to ask her how the college’s curriculum was adapting to meet the demands of the recession and the realities of the job market, and she directed me to a dean who asked not to be identified, and who expressed, in no uncertain terms, how tired he was of articles like mine that question the rationale, rigor or usefulness of a liberal arts education. He insisted that while he had no suggestions regarding how a 22-year-old should weather a recession, the university was achieving its goal of creating citizens of the world.
When I asked him how a 22-year-old with no job, no income, no health insurance and, in some cases, six figures of college debt to pay off is supposed to be a citizen of the world, he said he had no comment, that he was the wrong person to talk to, and he directed me to another dean, who was also unable to comment.
The chilliness of this response was a bit disheartening, but not terribly surprising. When I was an undergrad, it seemed whenever I mentioned my job-search anxieties, my professors and advisors would get a glassy look in their eyes and mutter something about the career center. Their gazes would drift toward their bookshelves or a folder of ungraded papers. And at the time, I could hardly blame them. These were people who’d published dissertations on Freud, written definitive volumes on Virginia Woolf. The language of real-world career preparation was a language they simply didn’t speak.
And if they did say anything at all, it was usually a reiteration of the typical liberal arts defense, that graduating with a humanities degree, I could do anything: I could go on to earn a master’s or a law degree or become an editor or a teacher. I could go into journalism or nonprofit work, apply to medical school or the foreign service. I could write books or learn to illustrate or bind them. I could start my own business, work as a consultant, get a job editing pamphlets for an alumni association or raise money for public radio. The possibilities were literally limitless. It was a like being 6 years old again and trying to decide if I’d become an astronaut or a ballerina. The advantage to a humanities degree, one professor insisted, was its versatility. In retrospect, though, I wonder if perhaps this was part of the problem, as well; freedom can promote growth, but it can also cause paralysis. Faced with limitless possibilities, a certain number of people will just stand still.
“So let me ask you something,” my husband says, my wonderfully incisive husband who will let me get away with only so much bitterness. “If your school had forced you to declare a career plan or take an accounting class or study Web programming instead of contemporary lit, how would you have felt about it at the time, without the benefit of hindsight?”
It’s a good question, and the answer is, I probably would have transferred.
There were courses I took in college, courses in Renaissance literature and the anthropology of social progress and international relations of the Middle East and, of course, writing, that will, in all likelihood, never earn me a steady paycheck or a 401K, but which I would not trade for anything; there were lectures on Shakespeare and Twain and Joyce that I still remember, that I’ve dreamt about and that define my sensibility as a writer and a reader and a human being. Even now, knowing the lost years that followed, I still wouldn’t trade them in.
A new Harvard study suggests that it’s not an abandonment of the college curriculum that’s needed, but a re-envisioning and better preparation. The study compares the U.S. system unfavorably to its European counterparts where students begin thinking about what sort of career they’ll pursue and the sort of preparation they’ll need for it in middle school. Could that be the answer?
At the end of my interview with Sarah Isham, she asks me if I might come back to Charlottesville to participate in an alumni career panel. “We always have a lot of students interested in media and writing and the arts. It would be wonderful,” she says “to have you come and talk to them.” She asks me this, and I can’t help but laugh.
“I don’t think I’d be much of a role model,” I say. “I don’t have what you’d call a high-powered career. I mostly do freelance work. Adjunct teaching. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” she insists. “Our students will love that. So many of them are terrified of sitting in a cubicle all day.”
They should be so lucky, I think. But I would never say that — not to them and not to my own students. They’ll have plenty of time later to find out just what a degree is and isn’t good for. Right now, they’re in those four extraordinary, exceptional years where ideas matter; and there’s not a thing I’d do to change that.
You’ve got to hand it to Mitt Romney. For someone who’s usually as steadfast as a “perfectly lubricated weathervane,” in the words of former foe Jon Huntsman, sometimes he’s got a lot of brass. This week he released an ad blaming the student debt crisis on President Obama, when in fact out-of-control student loans were gobbling up graduates’ paychecks by the time Obama took office in 2009. In fact, Romney himself played a starring role in the crisis, cutting higher-education funding and hiking tuition back when he was Massachusetts governor (or, as he’d rather put it, during the lost years).
Broadcast in New Hampshire, the swing state that also leads the nation in per capita student debt, the ad highlighted “the fact that the president has not been able to help students deal with this crushing debt,” according to Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. Unfortunately, the ad used footage of New Hampshire students complaining about their loan burden without their permission, and one of them happens to plan to vote for Obama. “Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me,” said Southern New Hampshire University sophomore Matt Raso. The campaign pulled the footage when a local television station objected, but Ryan Williams told the Associated Press that the campaign plans to run ads blaming the student loan crisis on Obama in other swing states.
That takes a kind of chutzpah Romney rarely exhibits. He won’t stand up to birther bully Donald Trump or the misogynist Rush Limbaugh, but he apparently has the cojones to blame student debt on Obama. We’ll see how it goes. In fact, American student debt is a scandal in which state and national lawmakers in both parties share some blame. But by far the lion’s share of responsibility for the debacle belongs to Republicans. The roots of the crisis go back to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who imposed the first “fees” on the formerly free University of California system in 1968, declaring “the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” As president, Reagan helped nationalize that disdain for well-funded public higher education in the 1980s.
But it took a long roster of Republican governors to turn the problem into a crisis, and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way a decade ago, dramatically slashing public higher-education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, from 2003 to 2007, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’s once-stellar system of public higher education as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community college, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.
Romney also wanted to spin off the flagship UMass-Amherst and privatize three other colleges, including the medical school, a harbinger of what he says he’ll do as president. That agenda failed in Massachusetts, but it would be a shame to give him a second chance as president.
It’s tragic that Republicans have become the dismantlers of public universities, since it was Abraham Lincoln who signed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating the system of land-grant colleges that made the U.S. a country of unusually broad opportunity. (Of course, today’s GOP has betrayed Lincoln in many other ways.) “Abraham Lincoln is weeping today,” university president Graham Spanier told reporters when Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett slashed Penn State funding by $182 million last year. It was the aggressive expansion of college education access after World War II that helped create the vast American middle class. In 1946, only one in eight college-aged student got higher education; by 1970, one in three did. And the balance of enrollment shifted to public institutions: In the 1940s, most students attended private colleges; by 1970 three-quarters were enrolled in public ones.
Presidents from Truman through Eisenhower and Nixon to Carter continued to endorse and enable broad college access, but the tide began to turn in the 1960s as universities became hotbeds of political protest and the new educated generation began to use its college smarts to question society rather than become cogs in the corporate machine. But we can make too much of Reagan’s resentment of Berkeley radicals as a factor in his push to end free UC tuition. He and his backers were anxious to dismantle the public sector and the tax structure that made it possible as well as to privatize all sorts of formerly public institutions, creating lucrative new money-making opportunities for their wealthy friends.
The result: University tuition is up 128 percent nationwide since 1980, the year Reagan became president (and coincidentally, the year I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, when I paid less than $400 a semester). Public university tuition has tripled since then. In that same period, the middle class has shrunk, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. Is it all connected to our breaking our promises to our kids about higher education? Not entirely, but it’s not a random coincidence, either.
The Romney-Reagan approach to higher education has a lot in common with their overall approach to the economy. Let’s take jobs as an example. Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall – but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding and then let their banker friends “help” students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it. Now, of course, the nation’s student loan debt is larger than its credit card debt, and graduates leave college carrying about $25,000 in loans. It’s like a mortgage, but without the house.
Andrew Leonard wrote a great piece Tuesday about Romney’s ties to the for-profit education industry and his commitment to relax Obama administration regulations on that high-profit, low-student-success sector. That’s the other key to Romney’s higher education agenda: slash public funding, increase the student loan burden and privatize the whole system as much as possible. Leonard explains what’s wrong with Romney’s priorities more succinctly than I could:
The biggest for-profit schools generate 80 to 90 percent of their revenue from federally guaranteed student loans. Only one out of every ten American college students attends a for-profit institution, but these students account for a quarter of all student debt and almost half of all student loan dollars in default. There’s no sugar-coating it: The booming for-profit industry is one of the worst possible examples of the “free market” in action that one can find in the entire U.S. educational sector. For-profits charge higher tuition rates than their public school competitors, graduation rates are lower, and the entire business would not exist without massive government subsidization in the form of cheap student loans.
Romney is also pledging to undo one of Obama’s most progressive reforms: his overhaul of the student loan system, taking banks (and their gouging) out of the middle of the government-guaranteed loan relationship.
It’s against that backdrop that Romney is trying to blame Obama for the student loan crisis. It won’t work. Democrats need to pay much more attention to Romney’s higher education record in Massachusetts. It’s no wonder he doesn’t like to talk about those years.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
We students have become morbid about our future. On campuses nationwide, it has become commonplace to see activists holding mock funerals for public higher education. At Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, we too held a funeral procession: out on the quad, in front of a coffin filled to the brim with diplomas, students were able to stand up in front of their peers and share what the death of higher education meant to them. One student, bravely holding back tears, shared how her troubles with financial aid, in addition to the death of her father, had made it impossible for her to continue her degree this semester.
For the majority of us seeking degrees, higher education is indeed dying a slow and painful death. Too little considered, however, is the role we as students are playing in its demise. The combination of tuition hikes, a lack of democratic governance in our schools, ballooning student debt, and the intimate relationship between our financial institutions and our academic ones are certainly killing higher education – but what is killing the student movement is our own complacency with these policies. While here in America, students on many campuses have limited themselves to mourning, elsewhere in the world they have taken to the streets – and there is much we can learn from their activism, in order to better our own.
What We Learned from the Maple Spring
Over spring break this year, we were privileged to travel to Montreal, Quebec, where we witnessed their 200,000-person-strong student strike. In the city of Montreal, francophone students have effectively shut down universities in response to a $1,625 tuition hike, proposed to be implemented incrementally over a five-year period. Since February, they have filled the streets en masse in protest, and as of this writing, they remain on strike (despite some injunctions by fellow students), having refused a set of “concessions” recently proffered by the Quebec government. (The government’s new proposal actually amounted to an increase of the previously proposed tuition hike, though it would have spread the increase out over an extended period of time – seven years, rather than the originally proposed five.)
The position Quebec’s students find themselves in is not unique: at CUNY, we too are facing a tuition hike of $1,500 over the next five years. What has been unique is their ability to build a powerful movement in response to these increases. Here at home, our response has come nowhere close to matching what we saw in Montreal.
When tuition has gone up at CUNY over the past few years we have responded with a rally here and there; it has been decades since students have been able to effectively shut down the university. The 1960s was the last time we saw mass student protests and building occupations at CUNY; the result was the opening of the university’s doors to students of color – and unfortunately, the transformation of what had once been called the “free academy” (where state funding once fully covered the cost of education) into an institution where tuition became a mandatory part of enrollment.
What allowed our counterparts in Quebec to mobilize so quickly and with such numbers, when our own student response to similar increases has been so subdued? We realized that the main difference lies in their movement’s ability to obtain real, institutionalized student power – something we do not yet have in the United States.
In Quebec, student organizing bodies on campuses have equal seats at decision-making tables alongside faculty and the administration. In the United States, we have nothing like this. Just as unions have been on a steep decline in this nation for decades, so too have campus organizations that answer to students (rather than the whims of the administration) and that hold real power. We believe that if students in the United States hope to have the kind of impact on our universities that we witnessed in Montreal, we will need to first establish radical, federated student unions here at home, organizations capable of replacing our currently weak systems of student participation. Without this shift, our struggle will be long, indeed.
Still, there are aspects of the Maple Spring we must refuse to replicate. For instance, the Quebec strike has not yet adopted anti-racist analysis regarding what true access to higher education might look like. Many of the students of color we spoke with offered mixed reviews of the student associations and the representation of racialized people in the movement. While they all clearly asserted they were anti-tuition hike, they also said they would feel more comfortable voicing and expressing solidarity if the movement adopted an anti-racism platform as a component of the strike.
Though anti-racism is and always has been a part of the analysis of the CUNY student struggle – from the 1969 occupations of City College and Brooklyn College by Puerto Rican and African-American students, to the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) at Hunter College in the mid-1990s – not every campus has been so thoughtful about the role race plays in access to higher ed. As we build a national movement for student power we must maintain our vigilance in keeping these issues at the center of our work.
How do we begin to establish the structures of power we need? The task may seem daunting, but at the Edufactory’s University is Ours! Conference we attended in Toronto at the end of April, we gained even more insight from our comrades to the North about how we might start. For instance, building toward a new student unionism from within departments – where we and our classmates are already organized into majors and similar academic interests – could be an effective way to gain momentum and generate collective buy-in from communities that already exist. These departmental unions would then become part of a larger, university-wide student union, would bridge the interests of many separate groups, and join them into an organized and non-hierarchical governing body. This is a model of organizing student unionism that has roots stretching back to the 1960s – and has been used to great effective in Quebec.
As Jasper Conner points out in his treatise, Towards a New Student Unionism,
“In Quebec, University unions take action when department unions put forward proposals to the rest of the campus. University unions are where students coordinate on things that affect all students, but again, don’t make decisions on issues that don’t affect all students. [Student] unions would follow this pattern, federating outward to the state level where most issues of funding are decided, at least for state schools.”
It isn’t nearly as hierarchical as it sounds; in fact, the larger bodies proposed here would be made up of delegates, as well as assemblies much like the spokescouncil institutionalized by Occupy Wall Street last fall. Furthermore, student unionism structured in this way also addresses important feminist and anti-racist critiques around lack of accountability in our movement leadership, which often leads to the reproduction of social hierarchy and the continuation of organizational practices that exclude women and people of color from the decision making process.
Alongside strategic unionizing, it seems to us self-evident that occupation of physical spaces must play a larger part in student organizing in the future. Occupy Wall Street was not the first movement to emphasize occupations as a key tactic; the US student movement has a rich history of reclaiming administrative offices in order to achieve our goals. At CUNY, the student movement has begun to move in this direction: in recent weeks, we at Brooklyn College launched a mass student day of action to protest tuition hikes, which included a rally and sit-in at Boylan Hall — right outside the office of the president. Street protests in other parts of the city are now taking place as well. It is a good beginning, but it is only that. We need so much more.
Given how profoundly US students have been cut off from channels of power at universities, the road before us may be long. But if we hope to achieve our goals, we first must realize, collectively, that the social conditions we face as students are not inevitable. We can’t just erect tents in the middle of our campuses and expect the world to change around us. We need to take control of our own minds, as well as take space. Only then will we breathe new life into our educational system.
Biola Jeje is an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College studying political science. Last year she helped form New York Students Rising, a statewide network of student groups organizing in defense of public higher education.
Isabelle Nastasia is an undergraduate student in the CUNY Baccalaureatte Program studying critical pedagogy and intersectionality. She is a co-founder of the New York to New Orleans Coalition, a youth-led service-learning organization.
Dear Cary,
There is a lecturer in my faculty whom I find devastatingly attractive. I find him so attractive that I have to actively control myself in his presence. I think about him nonstop. I am a graduate student and he is a lecturer. He is probably about double my age, and I am 22. I took one of his classes a few semesters back but won’t be in any of his classes in the future.
I am sure I have made my attraction as painfully obvious as possible. Should I try to proposition him? What do you think of this sort of age gap? And how do I handle the possible (probable) rejection? I am aware of the imbalances of power, experience and maturity, as well as the conflicts of interest and possible repercussions that may ensue.
Unsure
Dear Unsure,
You may have thought and read about conflicts of interest and imbalances of power but are you ready to find, in the agonizing grip of an affair, a visceral unhappiness unlike anything you have ever known? Can you handle wanting to scream or grab a crowbar while also wanting to weep and beg forgiveness?
Are you ready to find yourself, as if living in a pre-feminist era, driven to a gradual, crippling compromise by your desire for some man who for all his fine words still seems to secretly enjoy unassailable privilege? Are you ready to be emptying ashtrays and making tea and realize, holy shit! You secretly expected his prestige and power to rub off on you but nothing has really changed! Are you ready to realize you allowed yourself to indulge in some 19th-century claptrap and did it with your eyes open and your finger on the page in this book right here where it says women are powerful and things have changed and you control your own destiny, which is sort of true in lots of ways except for the ones that really matter?
Except where actual privilege lives its actual life?
Actual privilege is nice and attractive. It just doesn’t have much of a heart.
I’m not saying be a good girl and never act on your impulses. And I’m not setting it up for I Told You So And Now Don’t Come Crying to Me or some such. I’m saying, do some research on him. Does he have a girlfriend? Is he married? Does he spend time with lots of students, or mainly with his peers? Watch him. Study him.
You are vulnerable here. Maybe you are capable of handling this. But maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time someone thought she knew what she was doing.
So do some courageous self-assessment. Share your dilemma with your women friends. Don’t just walk in there with your eyes shut and open up for him. Power and privilege still break women’s hearts and psychotherapy is expensive especially if you didn’t get that tenure-track job even though he promised to go to bat for you in the committee and now that you think about it, weirdly enough, he didn’t really support you as energetically as you thought he would.
I mean, Are you ready to want what you didn’t think you wanted, and want it more strongly than you thought you could want anything, and then find out that no matter how much you want it you’re never going to get it because somebody else already took it and she wears weird eye shadow?
That is what happens when your lust is only a thin covering over a deeper, global longing that you don’t even know you have until after it’s driven you crazy.
Are you ready to realize that you’re the one who said all these empowered, knowing, independent-sounding words and now all you want is for this man to just stay right here and not go teach his next class while you embody your desire in the form of another cup of green tea and an omelet, which he consumes but does not appear to taste, and when you ask him a question about his work he waves it away as if it were not phrased properly and when you see him with other students, you notice a pretty young woman student who has this adoring look on her face that seems eerily familiar …
And if it comes to that will you be able to accept that he has another young student who finds him as irresistible as you do and he may be seeing her tonight, and he may lie to you about it or not tell you anything, or disappear for weeks at a time with no notice, or break a date with you without warning or explanation, or suddenly seem distant and petty and not at all interested in you and what you have to say, or become critical of you and your life choices or not want to meet your friends and family or find fault with your apartment, which is too small, or the color of your toenails, which is too bright, all of which makes you scream at him but you don’t because you don’t want him to see your juvenile, screamer-bitch side, which you only so recently thought you’d completely left behind.
Because you are a graduate student at a distinguished university and it wouldn’t be right … after he fails to show up yet again and you are left sitting at the bar wondering why you didn’t heed the warning signs.
You could have read about this in a book. You don’t have to actually fall off a cliff to know why it’s good to stand back from the edge.
Maybe you are very tough and self-reliant and just want an adventure. I don’t know you. But if you are so tough and self-reliant, why are you sharing this with me?
I think you know there is something dangerous about this and what you really need is for someone to say, Slow down. Examine your motives. Examine your hungers. What are you really looking for?
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Here’s what happens when corporations begin to control education.
“When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer’s markets, the first one told me that ‘no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer’s markets were stocked with ‘black market vegetables’ that ‘are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.’ It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket.”
Unfortunately, she’s not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today’s research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.
A report just released by Food and Water Watch examines the role of corporate funding of agricultural research at land grant universities, of which there are more than 100. “You hear again and again Congress and regulators clamoring for science-based rules, policies, regulations,” says Food and Water Watch researcher Tim
Schwab, explaining why he began investigating corporate influence in agricultural research. “So if the rules and regulations and policies are based on science that is industry-biased, then the fallout goes beyond academic articles. It really trickles down to farmer livelihoods and consumer choice.”
The report found that nearly one quarter of research funding at land grant universities now comes from corporations, compared to less than 15 percent from the USDA. Although corporate funding of research surpassed USDA funding at these universities in the mid-1990s, the gap is now larger than ever. What’s more, a broader look at all corporate agricultural research, $7.4 billion in 2006, dwarfs the mere $5.7 billion in all public funding of agricultural research spent the same year.
Influence does not end with research funding, however. In 2005, nearly one third of agricultural scientists reported consulting for private industry. Corporations endow professorships and donate money to universities in return for having buildings, labs and wings named for them. Purdue University’s Department of Nutrition Science blatantly offers corporate affiliates “corporate visibility with students and faculty” and “commitment by faculty and administration to address [corporate] members’ needs,” in return for the $6,000 each corporate affiliate pays annually.
In perhaps the most egregious cases, corporate boards and college leadership overlap. In 2009, South Dakota State’s president, for example, joined the board of directors of Monsanto, where he earns six figures each year. Bruce Rastetter is simultaneously the co-founder and managing director of a company called AgriSol Energy and a member of the Iowa Board of Regents. Under his influence, Iowa State joined AgriSol in a venture in Tanzania that would have forcefully removed 162,000 people from their land, but the university later pulled out of the project after public outcry.
What is the impact of the flood of corporate cash? “We know from a number of meta-analyses, that corporate funding leads to results that are favorable to the corporate funder,” says Schwab. For example, one peer-reviewed study found that corporate-funded nutrition research on soft drinks, juice and milk were four to eight times more likely to reach conclusions in line with the sponsors’ interests. And when a scrupulous scientist publishes research that is unfavorable to the study’s funder, he or she should be prepared to look for a new source of funding.
That’s what happened to a team of researchers at University of Illinois who were funded by a statewide fertilizer “checkoff” after they published a finding that nitrogen fertilizer depletes organic matter in the soil. Checkoffs are a common method used to market agricultural products, and they are funded by a small amount from each sale of a product – in this case, fertilizer. Richard Mulvaney, one of the U of I researchers, feels it is twisted that, in this way, farmers fund research intended to promote fertilizer use with their own fertilizer purchases.
But often the industry influence may be more subtle. Joyce Lok, a graduate student at Iowa State University, said, “If a corporation funds your research, they want you to look at certain research questions that they want answered. So if that happens it’s not like you can explore other things they don’t want you to look at… I think they direct the research in that way.”
John Henry Wells, who spent several decades as a student, professor and administrator at land grant universities sees it a different way. As an academic, he hopes that his research is relevant to real world problems that agriculture faces at the time. “When you ask the question, did I ever outline a research plan with the explicit notion of is this going to be fundable, I would say no. But I thought very deeply about whether my research plan was going to be relevant, and one of the indicators of relevancy would be if the ideas I put forward would get the attention of trade associations, private industry, benefactors, etc.”
If scientists use fundability as an important criteria of selecting research topics, research intended to serve the needs of the poor and the powerless will be at a disadvantage. However, Wells says that this is hardly a new phenomenon: land grants have existed to serve the elites since their creation in the 19th century.
“As its basis, the land-grant university was intended to cater to a narrow political interest of landowners and homesteaders – individuals who had the right to vote and participate in the political structure of a representative democracy.” he says. “Contemporarily, it is not so much that the land-grant university has been corrupted by modern agro-industrial influence, as it has been historically successful in focusing on its mission in the context of our Constitutional framework of governance. For the land-grant university, its greatest strength – a political collaboration spanning the top-to-bottom echelons of influence – has been its greatest weakness.”
Land grant universities and the USDA itself first came into being at a time when the academic view of agriculture was fundamentally changing – even if most farmers at the time ignored the advice of academics, dismissing them as “book farmers” who knew little about actually working the land. Will Allen writes about this period in his book ”The War on Bugs,” telling the story of Justus von Liebig, a prominent agricultural chemist in Germany.
“In the 1830s, Liebig began asserting that the most essential plant nutrients were nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. His theories fueled the development of chemical fertilizers and ushered in a new age of agricultural science and soil chemistry in the 1840s and 1850s. Though many of Liebig’s theories were wrong, he was the first great propagandist for chemistry and for chemical-industrial agriculture.” Perhaps the most significant of his mistakes was his belief that organic matter in the soil was unimportant.
Dozens of Americans studied under Liebig and returned to the U.S. to continue their work. Two of these students established labs at Harvard and Yale, and soon “all agricultural schools and experiment stations in the country followed their lead.” Thus, practically from the start, the elites in this country served the interests of those who peddled chemical fertilizers and other agricultural inputs – even if that wasn’t their intent. No doubt many were enticed by the prospect of founding a new, modern, scientific form of agriculture, as they felt they were doing.
The unholy trinity of industry, government and academics promoting industrial agriculture and de-emphasizing or dismissing sustainable methods has a long history and it continues today. In its report, Food and Water Watch advocates a return to robust federal funding of research at land grant universities. But government is hardly immune from serving the corporate agenda either.
Take, for example, Roger Beachy, the former head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the agency in the USDA that doles out research grants. Beachy spent much of his career as an academic, collaborating with Monsanto to produce the world’s first genetically engineered tomato. He later became the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Monsanto’s non-profit arm, before President Obama appointed him to lead NIFA.
As Schwab noted, policy is often based on research, but good policy requires a basis in unbiased, objective research. In a system in which corporations and government both fund research, but due to the revolving door, the same people switch between positions within industry, lobbying for industry, and within government, what is the solution?
College students in California received another dreary report card on Wednesday. Unless the state boosts its funding support for the public university system, warned school administrators, another 6 percent tuition hike could be on the way as soon as next year.
The officials may have been indulging in some good old-fashioned political grandstanding, hoping to whip up support for a November vote on a tax hike endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But in a state where tuition fees have already doubled in just five years, another 6 percent hike is hardly unthinkable. And as a symbol of rising costs in higher education nationwide, California’s example is more than apt. Since 2001, tuition fees at four-year public colleges in the United States have risen at an annual average of 5.6 percent.
For three decades the cost of attending college anywhere — public, private nonprofit, or for-profit, Ivy League school or community college — has risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation. But the sharp acceleration over the last 10 years — and particularly since the onset of the Great Recession — has stoked a new wave of widespread anxiety over an impending “crisis” in higher education. The unrelenting cost hikes also explain why government aid for college students has become such a hot topic in this presidential campaign year. Even as the government continues to print money and throw it into the breach, the hole just seems to gets bigger. Total student debt is now over $1 trillion and rising.
In fact, for some critics, access to “easy government money” is the real problem, not the solution. No less an authority than House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, explaining why he wants to cut Pell Grants and reduce the availability of government-backed student loans, claims “there is evidence that subsidized lending contributes to tuition inflation.” Just last month, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Associated Press that government loans and subsidies don’t work because “universities and colleges just raise their tuition. It doesn’t improve affordability and it doesn’t make it easier to go to college.’’
For some of these critics, the solution to higher tuition costs is to take government out of the education equation altogether; to allow the market to provide “innovative,” cost-effective alternatives to old-school brick-and-mortar-style higher education. Online learning, for example, could theoretically provide students with a cheap end-around to the existing establishment. There’s an intuitive attraction to this approach that crosses party lines. We’ve already seen the Internet wreak havoc on the music business and publishing industry by fundamentally changing the economics of content delivery. Why can’t it do the same for education?
Maybe it can, and will, in the long run. But before signaling a full-scale retreat of government from the higher education fray, it’s important to look a little more closely at the simplistic claim that “easy government money” is fueling higher costs. While there are certainly some sectors of higher education in which there is a clear relationship between student loans and higher tuitions, for the great majority of college students the problem isn’t that the government is giving them too much money. Quite the opposite: It’s the collapse of direct government support for higher education that is the main driver of higher tuition costs.
“The reality is that student debt is not rising because the government is putting more money into higher education,” says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “It’s rising because the government is putting less money into higher education.”
The first step in grappling with the rise in the cost of higher education requires understanding where students go to school. There are three main categories — public schools (which include both four-year public universities and two-year community colleges), private nonprofits (the Ivys, most liberal arts colleges, etc.), and the for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, aka “career schools”). Here’s the key statistic: Fully 70 percent of the 19 million undergraduates and 3 million graduate students enrolled in post-secondary education in 2010 attended schools considered to be in the public sector — by which it is meant that some portion of their funding comes directly from government.
The problem: The word “public” doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Direct state support for public colleges has cratered over the past 10 years, and really fell off the cliff after the financial crisis. Yes, tuitions have risen, but not by as much as state and local appropriations for higher education have fallen. Just between 2008 and 2009, for example, average tuition revenue at public research institutions increased by $369 per student, but the loss in state and local appropriations per student was $751. Similarly, at public community colleges, tuition revenue rose by $113 per student, while appropriations fell by $488. Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support.
The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants. What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs of students, in the form of crippling debt.
The picture becomes a bit more complicated when one considers private nonprofits, which don’t get government support, but where tuitions have also been rising, if at a slower pace than at public schools. There’s an argument to be made that one explanation for why college costs have consistently risen faster than inflation over many decades has to do with the built-in resistance that the education sector has to the kind of productivity increases that result in lower prices in other industries. You can’t outsource teachers to China like you can iPhones or blue jeans. You need talent to operate a full-service college, and there’s a lot of competition for the talent, and so prices keep going up. While there are some problems with this argument — such as, do schools really need to have as many administrative personnel as teaching personnel? — the private nonprofit sector is where this argument seems to hold mostly true. Generally speaking, the private nonprofits are more or less immune to the same market forces that result in economies of scale elsewhere. This is particularly true for elite schools, where astoundingly high tuition gets tremendous public attention. So what? If you’re turning away 75 to 80 percent of your applicants, what possible reason do you have for lowering tuition? Quite the opposite: Keep hiking it! The kids will continue to apply!
Of course, deserved or not, our culture places a lot of value on a degree from an elite institution, which further maintains their ability to charge as much as the market will bear. The same is not true for the rapidly growing for-profit sector, which has burgeoned in size over the last 15 years despite not delivering much that anyone values.
One out of every 10 American college students now attends a for-profit school. And there is absolutely no question that those schools’ entire business model is built on the availability of student loans. Eighty to 90 percent of for-profit revenue comes from government aid — and it would probably hit 100 percent if not for a government regulation capping the total percentage of revenue allowed to come from government aid at 90 percent.
“It’s very, very clear,” says Carey. “The for-profits set their prices to whatever the maximum federal loan limit is. They charge as much money as students can borrow. ”
As has been amply documented, the for-profit sector also does a horrible job of actually educating students. For-profit students are more likely to drop out and much more likely to default on the debt they accumulated while failing to get a degree.
The dependence of the for-profit sector on government money poses a bit of a conundrum for Republicans who decry “easy government money,” because ideologically, Republicans are big fans of the for-profit sector, and fight hard to keep it free of government regulation and oversight. Yet it is precisely here that the system is most screwed up. When profit is the goal, and government looks the other way, students are the losers.
One informative, market-based method for comparing public, private and for-profit schools, suggests Lauren Asher, the president of the Institute for College Access and Success, is to look at the “net price” charged by institutions. Posted tuition rates don’t actually give a very clear picture of what a college actually costs to the person writing the check. The “net price” subtracts whatever grants are provided to the student directly by the school or government from total tuition (but does not include student loans).
The most recent data is eye-opening. The net price of attending one year at a four-year public school in 2009-2010 was $10,175. At a private nonprofit: $16,672. And at a for-profit school? A whopping $23,771. In fact, says Asher, the data indicates that in the last couple of years, the net price of attending public schools has held even and in some cases declined slightly, despite tuition hikes. Asher says that even as state appropriations plummet, schools are finding ways to cut costs and plow whatever cash they have available back into aid for low-income students. The data seems clear: If you’re looking for a bargain, your best bet is still state-supported education.
So what does all this mean in the big picture? In a perfect world, the easy answer would simply be to restore direct government support for higher education. There are still clear economic rewards to getting a post-secondary school degree, making government support of education a good investment for future economic growth and prosperity.
Unfortunately, in the realpolitik of today’s revenue-constrained, tax-averse governments, that simply isn’t politically feasible. Way back in 1978, California pioneered the future that we all currently live in when voters passed Proposition 13 and severely restricted the ability of the state to raise taxes. As a nation, we’ve voted with our taxpayer wallets: We are no longer willing to fund massive direct investments in our future.
Carey holds out hope for alternative providers of education that leverage the Internet’s huge advantages to provide instruction at low cost. Although some of the for-profits, most famously the University of Phoenix, have already been conducting classes online for years, they aren’t doing so with the goal of lowering costs for students, but rather to maximize their own profits. They’re essentially exploiting the Internet to deliver product as cheaply as possible on their own bottom line, but charging top-line prices to consumers that force massive borrowing.
There’s a clear role for government to play here, says Carey, both in restricting the abuses rampaging through the for-profit sector and in realigning incentives that constrict student and educational facility flexibility. For example, he notes, you can’t get a student loan to take a single calculus course from whichever professor might specialize in delivering the best online calculus course in the world. There’s no current way to get government aid for mixing and matching credits from different educational providers that can ultimately be assembled into a full degree.
Carey points to new, free online education initiatives from MIT, Harvard and Stanford that promise to revolutionize the education business by offering high quality at extraordinary low costs. These elite institutions pose no threat to their own operating model — there will always be plenty of students seeking the validation of a brick-and-mortar degree from Harvard, but they carry massive potential to destroy, or at least severely constrain, the for-profit model of education. We may one day look back at the current era and wonder how in the world the for-profit schools ever got away with charging such huge fees. And of course you won’t need a student loan to pay for a free online circuit engineering course put together by MIT.
How close that future might be is anyone’s guess. For now, you can’t get a transferable college credit from the MIT/Harvard initiative — exactly the kind of problem government needs to help solve. But for now, as Republicans and Democrats continue to squabble over how to pay for low interest rates on student loans or how much money to put into the Pell Grant program, we should remember that the real story here isn’t how much students are borrowing, but how little government is doing to help.
(Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong) 
Students protesting against tuition hikes kneel in front of a line of Quebec Provincial Police at the Lionel Groulx college Tuesday, May 15, 2012 in Ste. Therese, Quebec, Canada. (Credit: AP Photo) 
(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon) 
More Cary Tennis.
In a Thursday, May 10, 2012 photo, a farm worker prepares a tomato field near Oneonta, Ala. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) (Credit: AP) 
(Credit: hxdbzxy via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock) 
