Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
1–10 of 121 posts
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#2The title suggests that all colleges are effected, but the facts in the article primarily criticize the major "elitist" colleges. I go to a local community college, and do not see this problem personally.
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#3As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#4"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."
A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.
EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#5i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine
what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century
any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#6Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus.
This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics.
The American university system may well have jumped the shark.
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#7There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#8Terrible review of the book. Doesn't really get to the meat of what he was trying to say about colleges.
One, the article never mentions that the author wants to get rid of all degrees except liberal arts. He is totally against college as "training".
He's also against the standard complaints of colleges, tenure, sports, ivy leagues, etc. etc.
It's be much more enlightning to go this NPR transcript or his website:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1289333... http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#9There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'
You oppose the war in Iraq? Why do you hate the troops and support terrorists?
Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students
#10"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocati…
I noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY.
This continues the tendency I've seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.