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Despite the fact that attending college is the surest way to break into the middle class, it looks like colleges themselves seem mostly to reinforce existing class distinctions.
This is according to a piece by Alex Friedrich at Minnesota Public Radio. Friedrich writes that the “’best’ higher-ed institutions have had to abandon their original mission of serving the public and instead become ‘engines of inequality.’”
The trouble, as Friedrich discovered in an article by Lumina Foundation senior adviser Gordon Davies, is that:
For all the talk about vast increases in the numbers of students enrolled (many of them will be older persons returning to complete degrees they began years ago) and successfully completing their degrees or certificates, the leaders of colleges and universities are usually rewarded for their success in making their institutions elite: top 30 research universities, highly selective admissions, and so on.
The formerly blue-collar commuter institution now is a flashy residential university seeking a high place in a magazine’s ratings. The land grant university, established to provide education to the rural population of the state, all but abandons this mission in a headlong quest to become one of the nation’s top 30 research universities. The urban university in a city with high poverty and high unemployment announces that it, too, will become a great research institution.
Becoming a top research university might be good for administrators’ careers, the state’s prestige, and even the university’s financial stability, but it isn’t good for providing working-class state residents with affordable higher education, which is the point of state universities.
It works like this: states provide less money to fund state universities; state universities respond by striving toward elite status to attract research dollars and bigger donations, the price of college goes up. And then richer students attend the university. And poor students don’t go to college, go to less selective schools, and take out big loans to go to college.
This tactic may save public colleges, but it sure doesn’t help the American public.
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Bernard Schuster on December 31, 2010 1:42 AM:
I'm not sure the current trend toward diminished support for public colleges is permanent, but the flagship universities have been achievement motivated for a long time. Its more difficult to maintain excellence without striving to improve, which tends to lead to the research university path. Otherwise a university is saying, let's stay as we are...mediocre.
Universities also want the best students, not only because they are easier to train and you can educate them to a higher level, but because they are more likely to give the university a reputation for successful alumni.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
twitter.com/arrive2_net
Junct Rebellion on January 01, 2011 1:23 PM:
One very important omission in this article is what has happened to faculty in this new university structure. The corporatized university overpays its glut of administrative workers (administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the U.S.), and has reduced the educators in the system to migrant status. Over 70% of all American faculty, no matter how elite the school, is now hired on a contingent, semester-by-semester basis, often making less than $25,000 a year, teaching at several universities each semester (as well as working a shift at Starbucks) in order to keep their electricity on. Impoverished educators, given no offices or workspace on campuses means students don't have access to their teachers outside the classroom. It means that there is no consistent support or mentoring of these students. It means that administrators make more and more of the decisions, including cutting not only class offerings but entire departments, raising the minimum number of students in a class. The trend towards using more and more Teaching Assistants - Grad students w/o any real teaching experience - has been growing in the last ten years. Now, the newest trend is to put "peer" teachers in the classrooms -- these are other undergraduates without any degree yet, being paid even lower "stipends" to teach their fellow undergrads. Can they actually teach? Of course not. Are the students getting a real education? Of course not. If the universities no longer care about the quality of education they are providing, no longer care about pay equity for faculty, no longer care that it takes an average six years to finish a B.A. because of the impossibility to navigate through the university quagmire, no longer staffs the classroom with full-time, professional, skilled and available faculty -- then why go to college at all? Why are we still believing that college is the way to the middle class? There are no jobs for the majority of college graduates. At least no jobs that they couldn't have gotten without a college degree. Many grads continue to work the service industry jobs - if they were lucky enough to have them in the first place - and can't find a way to move beyond them. College is the fastest way into the debtor status that the bankers and Wall Street love. I established 'Junct Rebellion to raise awareness of the horrifying situation in what used to be academia, and is not an edu-factory. My message is: find alternatives to college, which may include taking the money you would have spent and apprenticing somewhere. Or moving to a country that actually has workers' rights.