College Inc.

                                                          College Inc.

                                                    by Marco M. Pardi

“For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.”  Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) “Education”, The Philosophy of Ingersoll, ed. Vere Goldthwaine, 1906.

Most readers know I have a lengthy history with higher education.  Although I went through graduate school on a University Scholarship, I also had a research position and taught Introductory classes.  Turned off by the effete atmosphere of the Ivy League private university,  when I left I steered intentionally toward teaching positions at what were then becoming more popular – Community Colleges.

The history of colleges in the United States may surprise some.  Almost all of the now prestigious private colleges and universities originated as church affiliated schools.  This is not saying they were phony – like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, or even lunatic asylums – like Bob Jones university, but rather their orientation was not so much career preparation in the subject matter sense as it was producing “well rounded” and well connected scions of already established families developing the industrial foundation of the growing country.  The college students of those years, almost all male, had no worries about after graduation employment; employment in or connected to the family business was a given.  A college degree was a Rite of Passage, a protracted “Coming Out” party for a privileged few.

Over time that slowly changed, accelerating in the post WWII years with the G. I. Bill, a program from which I derived some support after my Viet Nam Era service.  As the American workplace broadened and became more complex the high school diploma quickly fell from its benchmark status.  A four year college degree, seemingly in anything, became an employment ticket.  The late 1950’s and especially the 1960’s saw college enrollment swell at a record pace.  But there was more behind this than just the changing employment landscape.  WWII was seen as a just war, Korea far less so, and Viet Nam quickly became viewed as an abattoir for those too young to vote against the Draft that was intent on sending them there.  A Student Deferment was seen as a means to forestall the day when, literally, your number was up.  Add in the “Sexual Revolution” spurred by pharmaceutical contraception, the growing popularity and availability of mind altering drugs, and the growing intellectual social protest movements spinning out from the Civil Rights era and you get the university campus, the epicenter of the “Age of Aquarius”.  Trade schools just did not carry the cachet.

Yet we still needed people who knew how to install and repair plumbing,  fix and maintain the automobiles,  wire homes and offices safely, repair the air conditioning that was becoming ubiquitous and all the other “blue collar” realities so many still take for granted.  The community college was a, then, unique blend of trade/tech school and undergraduate core program college.  Typically, a student could elect to pursue an Associate of Arts (A.A.: essentially a certificate of completion enabling package transfer to the Junior class of a four year college or a university) or an Associate of Science (A.S.: a certificate program of varying duration which certified the graduate at higher than unskilled labor in a particular trade).   The common campus, and even some common classes seemed ideal for this realistic approach.

However, during my first 10 years (7 of which were tenured) at a community college, also teaching by request at another community college and at a four year private college, I found little variance in a troubling statistic:  Of the enrolled community college students, 80% enrolled in the A.A. four year college track; of those who actually completed the two year track, only 20% transferred to a four year college or university.  I felt there were two main factors at work here:  Enrollment in an A.S. certificate program was seen as far less prestigious; and, there was a prevailing attitude that two years of college were better than no years of college.  Of course, tighter admissions policies and unforeseen costs also played roles

I felt the colleges were at least partially to blame, in differing amount, for each of the two main factors.  Holding elaborate “Graduation/Commencement” ceremonies for people completing the first two years of what normally is a four year program is misleading, to say the least.  Another trend, as community college enrollments swelled and larger amounts of money went into infrastructure and a growing ratio of highly paid administrators to lowly paid faculty, was the cost cutting measure of increasing reliance on adjunct faculty, for whom no benefits are provided and whose salaries are mere fractions of full time faculty.  In many cases that I knew of the only qualification for such a position was possession of an appropriate degree; no teaching experience was required.  The result was an increasing presence of “faculty” whose loyalties lay elsewhere, who were doing this for reasons other than commitment to their subject field (their full time work was often unrelated to their degree and they were not current in their field), and who, frankly, were using access to the college classrooms as dating services.  And, as enrollments swelled classrooms, sometimes to physically uncomfortable levels, the emphasis increasingly moved toward “getting them through.”  The institutional euphemism for this was “Student Success”.

But, what is “success”?  I’m familiar with success subsequent to college education.  My biological family is quite small, but when my extended family is added we count 9 physicians, 5 BSN or MSN nurses, 2 Pharm. D. pharmacists,  1 microbiologist, 2 mechanical engineers, 1 CPA bank president………and me.

I won’t judge anyone in the foregoing group, but will say that my 23 year career in what many consider the world’s premier medical science institution afforded me the opportunity to know hundreds of medical specialists in a variety of fields.  This served to sharpen my perception of what I consider to be the difference between Smart and Intelligent.

When I play chess against my computer it instantly recognizes my move and responds with the appropriate counter move.  My computer has banked all possible moves and holds a reserve of logical counter moves. My computer is smart.

When I ask my computer to discuss the social applications of playing chess, it does nothing. When I ask my computer to venture an opinion on my approach to life, based on how I play chess, it says nothing.  My computer is not intelligent.

As higher education has grown into a mega-industry, complete with a baffling complexity of infra-structure, personnel, financial networks woven throughout the prevailing economy, lecture rooms commonly populated by some 300 students at a time watching state of the art techno-media teaching, tests scored electronically, and entire degree programs being offered through on-line instruction it has lost any room for intelligent.  It has moved toward producing and certifying smart.  This strong trend is manifest in the larger community colleges and in most if not all (undergraduate) universities.  There is variance from one university to another, and even within a given university.  For this reason, ranking of universities can be misleading.  A university is a collection of colleges; the same university can have a world class College of Architecture, and a bottom rung College of Life Sciences.  

In sum, at least at the undergraduate level, many colleges and universities are little different from businesses.  They receive marketplace information on what products are needed, take in the raw materials, fashion and certify the product and push it out the door – with a ceremonial handshake if you care to stick around for it.  The problem lies in the fact that the complexity of the process affords rapidly diminishing room to the innovative, flexible, intelligent student, rewarding the narrowly focused performer who, as I have seen in the tumult of the real world, is ill prepared for how things actually work and poorly prepared for true problem solving.  Compounding this problem is the speed with which the employment arena is changing.  The very attributes that colleges and universities should be developing and encouraging in students are being blunted; by the time a student completes a program the career for which it was designed may have radically changed or disappeared. 

For at least the past twenty years it has been commonly said the person entering the workforce should anticipate and be prepared for at least three or four significant career changes.  The standardized product oriented mega-machines we now call colleges and universities fall dramatically short in quality control while excelling in quantity control.

“The aim of the college, for the individual student, is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man.”  C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People, 1963