Tag: education

I have previously calculated, on the basis of their SAT scores, that school teachers today have an average IQ of approximately 95.  And based on this email posted at Chaos Manor, it is clear that education majors have been the absolute dregs of academia for quite some time now:

I worked my way through college. The university I attended generously
provided jobs to many students. One job I held was that of Computer
Operator on the IBM 360/70 in the university computer center.

After my first semester working in the computer center, I worked the
wake-up shift, 0600 – 0900. Many of the universities administrative
computational jobs came to me to run because things were quiet at that
time, and, thus, the demands on the CPU were less.

The university faculty senate had expressed some concerns about the
school’s reputation, or rather the lack of it. They wanted to know why
this was. So they compiled years of grades, punched them onto 80-column
cards, and toted those cards down to the computer center where they
spilled those data onto a tape. That took the better part of a day and
all that evening which meant they did not have time to run the
statistics on those data and print them out. Problem was that the
computer center had promised Dr R, the president of the faculty senate,
the report the following morning.

Charlie, my boss, left it to me on the morning shift to run the stats
and print out the results. As soon as I woke the Beast, I ran the job.
It printed out half a box of fanfold paper. I tore off the last page,
picked up the printout, and took it to the counter to look through it.

Of course, I knew what this was and what it meant. I scanned to the
math department. As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs, a few incompletes ― all the grades
in the table. The distribution was normal but the mean was shifted
slightly toward the lower end; that is, the department gave fewer As
than expected and more Fs than expected.  I scanned to the physics department. Much the same story as with the
math department but shifted even more toward the lower end.

I scanned to the department of education, and I said to myself, said
I, “Oh, the shit’s gonna hit the fan.” ED gave 80% As, 20% Bs, and
nothing below a B.

This report exploded like a bomb in the faculty senate. Dr R, the
president of the senate, made a motion his own self to sever the
Department of Education from the rest of the university and another that
admission to the School of Education would not give admission to the
rest of the university. The recriminations were many and bitter. I heard
that the President of the University called in the campus cops to
restore order and prevent the threatened assaults.

I ran this report when I was a sophomore. When I graduated, the war was still on. So if you are an education major and you think I have no respect for you . . . you’re right. I don’t. Moreover, I won’t.

This also serves as a fitting response to those who ask how a mother can homeschool without a degree in physics, math, or womyn’s studies.  The correct answer is: why do you think your children can be adequately educated by a collection of women with a sub-normal IQs whose only education is in what is quite literally the easiest possible course of collegiate study.

The linked article on the destruction of the American university was mildly interesting, mostly for its complete wrongheadedness about what parties have been responsible for the drastic decline in higher education, but the discussion in the comments were considerably better, as one tenured PhD schooled an untenured one. In doing so, he illustrated that at least part of the problem is an intellectually-challenged higher education faculty that simply does not understand economics and supports the very immigration that has rendered them permanently poor.

The amazing thing is that these maleducated wretches are STILL spouting Marxist nonsense, blaming the conservatives they hate instead of the progressive elite responsible, and failing to realize that a modicum of basic Adam Smith is all that is necessary to understand why their expensive degrees are almost completely worthless and why their employment prospects are so dim:

There seems to be a highly questionable premise running throughout
the discussion on this blog — that people have ever been able to make a
decent liviing working as adjuncts, or that they will ever be able to do
so in the future. Given the economics of the situation, and the
enormous hurdles to unionizing or organizing in any meaningful way, the
primary goal should be to reestablish a greater number of full-time
positions. The harsh economic reality is that most community colleges
will probably never be able to pay adjuncts enough to make a living, and
most decent four-year colleges will not pay adjuncts a decent wage
because they don’t have to.

A fundamental problem for adjuncts, especially in professional fields
like law, business, engineering and communications (but also in many
other fields), is that decent colleges have an almost endless supply of
people willing to teach for non-economic reasons. My university
generally pays adjuncts $2,000-3,000 per course (depending on the field)
and basically hasn’t raised adjunct pay in at least 15 years. Some
other local colleges pay even less than we do. It’s embarrassing and
shameful. Yet we have a queue of people ready and willing to teach
courses for us. Many of them are retired and looking to stay active
intellectually; some are successful professionals wanting to “give back”
to their alma mater; still others are wanting to add a brownie point to
their resume by being associated with a university. Virtually no one
does it for the money. This is not a new phenomenon. Almost thirty
years ago, when I was a businessman and taught as an adjunct, I
considered my adjunct teaching at the University of Hawaii to be a
public service, and I donated the money (about $2,500 a course, even
then, as I recall) back to the university for student scholarships.

Somewhere along the line, some people got the idea that one could
make a living teaching as an adjunct. I don’t think that’s realistic.
In fact, it will probably become increasingly unrealistic, given the
education model that many universities are exploring (video and internet
lectures in which “master” professors will teach thousands of students
in basic courses, leaving more time for full-time faculty to teach
upper-division and graduate courses and to conduct research). So my
advice to people who can’t get a full-time teaching job is to get some
other full-time job, outside of academe. In the meantime, I would
highly encourage them to moonlight as adjuncts and continue their
efforts to organize or unionize if they feel that’s the best solution.
But I think a far smarter strategy would be to focus on restoring
full-time positions that would pay a living wage.

I believe your analysis of the situation has some validity. There
are many people who will adjunct for little or no remuneration. But
higher education institutions are not charity organizations. 

Personally, I spent several years to get a Ph.D. and expected to find
full-time work, but it hasn’t happened, and I am indigent. For seven
years I worked as a prison guard and caseworker to make ends meet (and
actually attain a middle-class lifestyle). Why should I make 60K (with
benefits) as a prison worker but only expect 16K as a community college
teacher at three schools? 

I know other administrators who feel the same as you do yet go along
with the exploitation of labor and the taking of surplus value. You
know in your heart that you are complicit in the slow unraveling of
higher education in the US.

Some questions for you:

* Why would anyone possibly think that getting a certain degree
automatically entitles them to a certain kind of job? (Tell that to the
hundreds of thousands of students who are have graduated in recent
years who are unemployed or underemployed. )

* How oblivious would one have to be to spend years working on a PhD
without understanding what the job prospects were for that degree?

* What kind of self-delusion and self-entitlement would it take for a
person to think that just because they spent years doing a certain thing
that the world somehow owes them a living wage for doing that thing?
(Every human being on earth would love to get paid well for doing
something they love. But not many of us are so naïve that we think we
are good enough to make a living wage playing basketball, playing golf
or taking travel photographs – my preferred occupations. )

* How could anyone who has spent time in the academy not understand
that good colleges and universities are, in numerous respects,
charitable organizations? (Benefactors give billions of dollars to
higher education, just like other kinds of charities. Hundreds of
thousands of people volunteer their time and money to colleges as guest
speakers, sponsors, advisors, fundraisers, etc., just like other kinds
of charities. And thousands of people like me give up lucrative
professional careers to teach – while most of our former colleagues are
getting rich and retiring early – because we believe that education is
something worth devoting/donating our time and energy to, even though we
receive pay that is far below what we could earn in our previous jobs.)

* Why should adjunct college professors be exempt from the laws of
supply and demand, while almost everyone else in the country is bound by
them? (If you are so unhappy with the laws of supply and demand in
the U.S., why don’t you just move to a communist country where such laws
don’t apply so much?)

* Where were you (or others like you) 30 years ago, when I was raising
hell about the inappropriate formation of an adjunct/non-tenure-track
underclass? (There was a real opportunity to address the problem then,
before it became the intractable problem that it is today.)

* Where were you (and others like you) when I stood up in an
all-faculty meeting, with virtually no support from my faculty
colleagues, and told the president of my university that he needed to
resign because the central administration’s incompetence and greed were
destroying the finances and educational integrity of my university?

* Where were you (and others like you) when I was giving speeches and
writing academic articles and a book on the dangers of treating
universities like businesses instead of like educational organizations?

* What are you doing now (besides whining), while I am engaging the
trustees and central administration of my university in an attempt to
pressure them into getting rid of the silly business model that they are
using to run the university, which treats adjuncts as nothing more than
a cheap source of labor?

* Why should I continue to care about the plight of adjuncts like you,
when you blame innocent people for your own problems, when you refuse to
listen to basic facts and logic, and when you insult the very people
who are probably the best hope for solving the problem?

In no way, shape or form am I complicit in unraveling higher
education, as you so incorrectly suggested. Nor do I know in my heart
that I am guilty of any such thing, as you so dishonestly stated in your
posting. My job is not to ensure that you have a job. And I cannot
help you at all, if you are too thick-headed to act in your own best
interest by first understanding the problem and accepting responsibility
for your role in helping to create the problem in the first place.

One doesn’t have to be in denial about the dire state of American higher education to fail to feel any sympathy for the entitled, badly educated, would-be education professionals who have not only helped sow the seeds of their own indebted servitude, but still actively serve as intellectual shock troops and recruiters for the very system that oppresses them.

They also don’t seem to understand that all the social spending on the elderly, the vibrant, and the foreign they support means that there is little remaining for the liberal arts that the aspirational middle class used to proudly fund.  The same people that previously had no objection to paying for government-funded orchestras and theatres now resist being taxed to pay for the diversification of their schools and neighborhoods.

Furthermore, a graduate student with inside access notes that the tenured faculty absolutely bears considerable responsibility for the academic decline:

I’m currently a graduate student and a staff person at a major
college. I have the dubious honor of sitting in and taking notes during
the faculty meetings of one department. Our faculty have, at every
budget crunch opportunity, cut the funding for graduate students,
student activities, and part-time instructors. Our faculty bemoan their
salaries to any and every ear, but given a single whisper of power
behave as cruelly as any member of the relative 1% and abuse, exploit,
and exhaust the students.

College has been destroyed by the abuse of tenure. The faculty are
the 1%, the students and part-timers are the 99%. The Administration ARE
former faculty.
Our faculty are the -sole- source of the corruption, laziness, and
weakness of the department. They are each required to teach 2 courses a
semester and each of them asks for a ‘course buy out’ on the
justification their research is more important than students. Of 24
Professors, 11 are currently teaching. While our university has courses
with 500 students, our part-time instructors, the abused 3rd class, or
our graduate students teach those sections. Our professors select
’boutique’ courses, some of which enroll 5 students (undergraduate
courses with course caps of 55, but only 5 interested students because
the class is irrelevant to the major but interesting to the professor).
When professors buyout courses they ‘pay’ from their salary or a grant
approximately $4000. It costs our department over $11000 to reassign the
course (I do the budget). Our faculty declare tenure is end-all-be-all.

Tenure committees value research and publication, not teaching,
therefore so do our professors. They publish drek that goes straight to
archive, get tenure, and sit on their title for another 30 years. They
are not assets and are barely intellectuals. When we recently had a vote
in my department on whether to fund graduate student scholarships or
faculty travel, travel won in a vote of 2:22.

The administration, which is so denigrated, and rightfully so, in
this article is in fact made of up of former professors. My Dean is an
English PhD. He has pulled half of our TA and GA positions, leaving our
students without funding and forcing those who want to continue their
education into massive debt. He simply increased the minimum number of
students the other TAs had to teach (for the same amount of money). He
hired over 70 new faculty with the money ‘saved.’

Our Associate Dean in charge of curriculum is a Chemistry PhD who
taught for 20 years. He personally made the announcement, taking public
credit for the idea, to no longer require fine arts or foreign language
credits for undergraduates. This decision resulted in a huge reduction
of registrations and effectively killed our German, Russian, French,
Italian, Mandarin, and foreign literature programs. Without
undergraduate classes to teach, the graduate program is disappearing
too.

Of course, it hardly comes as a surprise to anyone with a university degree to be informed that most tenured academics are narrow-minded, self-centered bastards.

Even as a strong advocate of homeschooling, I’m a little surprised to see how rapidly it is growing:

As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools.

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

It can be almost amusing how easy it is to derail an outspoken critic homeschooling.  Asking them how old they were when they took calculus usually does the trick… it’s a rhetorical tactic that is particularly effective on adults who never made it that far in mathematics.

Or the survival of the university system is at risk!  Although I don’t quite see how either more or less female professors is going to stop universities from being able to overcharge indebted young men and women for useless degrees.  Stickwick, who is herself a female academic with a PhD, has a few thoughts:

Thought you might find this interesting, if only for the way people are trying to spin this old news.

Truth: Few PhD candidates, male or female, want to pursue an academic career once they get a taste of the life in graduate school.

Spin: Women are being driven out of academia!! The survival of academia is threatened!!!

By their third year in grad school, only 21% of men in grad school say they want to pursue an academic career. The number drops to 12% for
women, and it’s for the usual reasons — women see academia as very competitive and requiring a lot of personal sacrifice. There’s nothing
new here; but the spin is very silly. What I find preposterous, besides the notion that academia cannot survive without women, is the claim th academia is in any way threatened by the fact that relatively few people want academic careers. The last thing we need right now is more PhDs. I have friends who are on their third post-docs, because they can’t even find jobs at small liberal arts universities.

For every job offered at a halfway good institution, there are literally hundreds of applicants. On top of this, there is very little grant money available; soft-money people everywhere are scrambling to find any funding at all. Universities are cutting every position they possibly can. It makes no sense for the author of this article to claim that academia is in any way threatened by a smaller applicant pool.

What I find amusing is this claim by the author of the article: “We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest.”  But the fact is that the universities stopped doing that the moment they openly announced their intention to employ more women and minorities while at the same time blackballing Christians and political conservatives.  The best and the brightest at my university’s economics department were me and the White Buffalo.  He was the departmental award winner while I was permitted to do three independent studies with my professors rather than bothering with classes. And I’ve now published more books on economics than most of my professors had.  But neither of us ever considered, for a moment, an academic career, nor were we ever encouraged to pursue one.

The fundamental problem for the Left is that it is not possible to simultaneously pursue both equality and excellence.

I can’t help but notice the difference between the way fatalities are treated depending upon whether the children killed are being educated at home or at public school.  If seven children were killed by a demented homeschool mother, this would spark a national media outcry and demands for more restrictions on homeschooling.

And yet, in the past four months, we have seen multiple incidences of multiple fatalities due to acts of Man and Nature, but the thought that perhaps it is not wise to congregate large numbers of vulnerable children together never seems to enter the national discourse.

According to Wikipedia, there have been 278 tornado-related deaths at school since 1885.  That is nearly 2.2 deaths per year, which is a trivial percentage of the 48 million or so children attending the public schools.  And yet, they are entirely avoidable deaths; under the oft-cited “if just one life can be saved” metric, it cannot be denied that children who are not forced to congregate en masse at school cannot be killed by tornadoes there.

Two tornado-inflicted deaths per year isn’t much, but add to them the 26 schoolbus deaths per year, the 600 school-automotive deaths per year, and the 34 violence-related deaths, and it soon becomes readily apparent that school cannot reasonably be considered a safe place for children.

Forget the superior education received by homeschooled children.  Doesn’t saving the lives of more than 662 children every year make banning school a moral imperative?

Especially in light of the fact that 119 children under the age of twelve, (and 565 under the age of 18), were killed by guns.  School is literally more lethally dangerous than guns; something you might want to remind your average pro-public school, pro-gun control left-liberal.

Guns secure freedom at a lower cost in children’s lives than the public schools manage to deliver inferior educations. We don’t need gun control, we need school control.

But degrees, particularly advanced degrees, are increasingly less so thanks to the magic of technology and the Law of Supply and Demand.  Dr. Helen points us to Slate:

I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

You might think your circumstances will be different. So did I. There’s a little fable from Kafka, appropriately called “A Little Fable,” that speaks to why this was very stupid:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”

“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.

The mouse wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse, because “A Little Fable” lasts three sentences and is made up, while graduate school lasts at least six years and will ruin your life in a very real way.

Staying in school in order to avoid facing the economic environment isn’t merely cowardly, it is self-defeating. It shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be for people with 16+ years of “education” to figure out that the more there is of something, the less everyone else tends to value it.  And just because a decision made sense in your parents’ day, or your grandparents’ day, doesn’t mean that it still makes sense now.

The frightening thing is that far from learning from all the warnings, young Americans are going ever more heavily into student loan debt.