As Seen on TV

Toward the end of last semester, I got an email from my department chair.  Well, not exactly from my department chair, whose messages are usually brief, often cryptic missives set from his iPhone. This email was a forward from a disgruntled applicant in the part-time faculty pool at Snowflake College.  Apparently, I was being asked to address his concerns.

The applicant wanted to know why he hadn’t been hired.  Reading the attached c.v., I learned his chief qualification was a master’s degree from a well-known online graduate program which is well known because it advertises on TV.  No classroom experience.  He once attended the state Republican convention as an observer.  He was a veteran who earned a Good Conduct Medal.  And that was about it.

I pondered the gentleman’s situation for a while, then wrote an answer choosing my words carefully so as not to offend.  I told him the academic job market was tight due to falling enrollment, and to seek other avenues to beef up his resume until things got better.  After clicking “Send,” I fretted that maybe I was a little condescending but he wrote me a rather gracious reply a few days later.

The incident got me to thinking.  As I’ve written in earlier posts, I’m not a fan of online education in general.  I look askance at those programs which advertise heavily.  So, I was gratified when Corinthian Colleges shut down a couple of years ago after years of investigation into its shady business practices, and was pleasantly surprised when ITT Tech abruptly ceased operations late last year. 

Our belief in our own shrewdness and common sense notwithstanding, we’re babes in the woods as consumers.  We will believe any claim as long as it’s stated authoritatively enough.  We’re told that studies beyond high school, which for most people means job training tarted up as “education,” is essential to getting ahead.   Public community colleges such as the ones I work for absorb much of the demand.  However, many folks can’t spare the time for in-person schooling due to work or family obligations.  That’s where the “virtual classroom” comes in.

Distance learning is an old idea.  Online classes are the latest manifestation of the correspondence course, which emerged in the late nineteenth century.  For generations, correspondence courses afforded its ambitious students the opportunity to learn everything from shorthand to TV repair to law.  Traditional universities had their own correspondence programs; living in a small rural town growing up it was common for people to take agriculture courses via our land grant university’s highly regarded extension program.  Britain’s Open University is considered a very successful experiment in affording higher ed to those excluded from it in the past.

Enrolling students who in an earlier time would never have considered college is big business.  P. T. Barnum would approve of the business model: Raise unrealistic expectations, take the money, then move on to the next bunch of suckers.  Speaking of P. T. Barnum, his latter-day incarnation faced controversy last fall when the revelation that Trump University had defrauded its students led the news for a couple of hours before the next lurid Trump tale took its place.  TU wasn't an online program, but it welshed on its implied promise that at least some of the proffered seminars would feature The Donald himself.  That particular example is an outlier, but many consumers are being sold a pig in a poke just the same when it comes to their postsecondary schooling options.

I suppose my sour attitude on this topic has been aggravated by the fact that I’m teaching an online course for the first time this semester.  It’s an honor on its face.  It’s a brand-new course, never before offered at Snowflake College, and I was given a free hand in its design and content. 

It’s not anything all that grand in practice.  The subject is the one in my discipline with which I have the least experience.  Except for a couple of hybrid classes which went dreadfully, I’d never taught anything but in-person lecture courses.

I got the job for two reasons.  The first is that my department has never seen me as the ideal public face of Snowflake College, in spite of consistently good student evals.  But they can’t force me out due to seniority and would prefer me to teach online as a consequence.  The second is that the new course is required for the transfer AA degree in the discipline but several of my colleagues already teach specialty courses they’d rather concentrate on instead of piloting a new one.  Since I like paying my bills and having a place to sleep, I accepted the assignment.

Its petty annoyances aside, I prefer the personal touch of an on-the-ground class.  I get to know my students as people instead of as names and email addresses.   My principal contact with the online students is to post brief comments on their discussion threads and written work and to troubleshoot the inevitable glitches with the LMS.  (These are more numerous and more consequential when the class is online than with in-person classes where I use the LMS mainly for posting study notes and grades.)  The absence of feedback in an online class is offputting for me.

Then there’s the odd cliquishness surrounding the distance learning people at Snowflake.  I took a preparatory training—online, of course—last summer.  We were hectored to drop our old-fashioned classroom personae.  We were informed in no uncertain terms that distance learners are different from those taking boring old traditional courses.  They don’t want a “sage on the stage,” we were told, they want a “guide by their side.”  The training was scattershot, but by August I felt ready to tackle the course shell.

Actually, I was ready well before that but the online programs director was out most of the summer due to a personal emergency and so did not create a shell until there were less than two weeks before the mandatory first review.  Add to that the fact I was creating course content from scratch and you can imagine how the first review went.  The evaluators, one a nutrition professor and the other a kinesiology ( ! ) professor, were not at all complimentary of my frantic efforts of the previous fortnight.  Much of it was nitpicking over the wording of certain passages in the syllabus and the absence of something they referred to as “instructor presence.”  Nutrition Proffie was especially scornful, concluding with a damning, “This instructor is not ready for the distance learning program.”  Ouch.

I pled for mercy with the program director who was partly to blame for the situation in the first place and got a re-review a few weeks later.  The course passed and now here I am.   Eight weeks in, and there have been only a couple of minor hiccups.  My fingers are crossed for the second half concluding successfully.

I’ve acquired a few insights concerning online classes based on my newfound experience.  Simply put, they’re a cash cow even for not-for-profit institutions like Snowflake College.  Once the 40-seat course was announced in January, it filled and waitlisted within days.  I was deluged with pleading emails from students desperate to add.  When the dust settled two weeks into the term, I still had 40 students but had experienced a turnover during the add/drop period of close to 20%.  When I read the discussion thread where I asked the students to introduce themselves, I learned nearly a third were not majors in the discipline at all despite the course being specifically intended for transferring majors.  No matter, they paid their fees, right?

Now we’re at the midpoint of the semester, a certain number have abruptly stopped submitting work.  A few more turn in stuff sporadically.  Several never attempted any work at all, which means I’ll have to cut them before the drop deadline so it won’t be my fault for their failing the class.  No matter, Snowflake College will keep their money anyway.

I’ll spend the next couple of months catering to the remaining, disembodied students who have persisted.  (Actually, a couple are students who took a class with me before whom I see around campus.  Even then, it’s hard for me to connect their online presence to our occasional real life interaction.)  I’ve been given my schedule for the next academic year.  I will be teaching the new course again in the spring.

Brick and mortar institutions benefit from e-learning because the ancillary costs are lower.  They still have to pay an instructor, true, but online classes reduce demand for physical facilities such as classrooms and offices, as well as saving on expenses for facilities maintenance, utilities, and campus security.  On the other hand, it creates opportunities for the burgeoning administrative class to advance their interests at the expense of students and the professoriat alike.

Back to the existential questions surrounding online instruction.  I’ll say what I’ve said numerous times on this subject.  For a growing segment of the public, higher education is a dumbed-down commodity hawked by cynical hustlers to take their money in exchange for goods of questionable value.  Even for the comparatively small number of students possessing the self-discipline to complete an online degree, the credential may not get them as far as they hoped.

Even in the much-maligned liberal arts, which do not have any immediately practical application and are thereby presumed to be readily communicable in the online format, distance learning has serious shortcomings.  Discussion threads facilitate peer-to-peer communication, but the asynchronous nature of the discussion hinder the sort of in-depth dialectical analysis of abstract ideas needed to foster critical thinking.  (Not that critical thinking is a skill particularly desired by employers, mind you, but I was always told that this was the lasting value of a liberal arts education.)   Real time classroom discussions are essential to an in depth understanding of the curriculum.

None of this is hinted at in the TV ads for University of Phoenix (the reigning king of nontraditional higher ed), National University (“national” despite U of Phoenix having greater market penetration), Southern New Hampshire University (my favorite—who knew tiny New Hampshire had an identifiable southern region?), and Grand Canyon University (for Christofascists wanting an online experience that won’t challenge them or their superstitions).  There are others as you know, but these are currently the worst offenders. 

I think of the spurned applicant from time to time.  How does a person lacking experience in mainstream academia but possessing the requisite paper qualifications break in let alone survive in a game whose nature he in no way understands?  It’s bad enough when your paper says you’re qualified in a particular field like my own where the economics of the game lead many well-qualified individuals to move on to more lucrative work.  But what if you have a degree in, say, nursing or clinical psychology without much (or any) field experience?  I’ve read of cases like these, where the students couldn’t find work in their chosen vocation and yet were stuck with crippling student loan debt.

Caveat emptor, some might opine.  The casualties of the education bubble are no different than those of the housing and tech bubbles before them.  The distinction is that while the previous market crises involved the relatively affluent and educated who should in fact have done their due diligence, the prey of the higher ed hucksters are more vulnerable and easily manipulated.  I doubt if this factored into their moral calculus, however. 

It’s just business, they’d say.  True, but it’s a shameful one,

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

  

Loops & Boomerangs, Jedi & Trogs: Thoughts of a Freeway Flyer

Inservice training week is over.  Convocation came and went.  And I can breathe somewhat easier now that all my scheduled classes are a go for Spring semester.  Now all there is is the nervous anticipation of what to expect when I return to work on Monday.

The latter part of the semester break found me in a kind of groove.  (A groove for me is like a rut, just not as dismal.)  We’ve had a let-up from the constant snow we experienced since before Thanksgiving, and the sunlight through the windows has been a most welcome sight.   I’ve spent my days cooking soups and stews for sustenance and catching up on my writing. 

The past weeks have had a pleasantly monotonous quality, the house quiet as I sit at my desk tapping away at the keyboard.  When I needed company, I would play “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out on an endless loop.  When that no longer appealed to my ears, I’d play The Beta Band’s “It’s Not Too Beautiful” instead. Or perhaps Eric Reed’s instrumental version of “An Englishman in New York,” interspersed with “Poinciana” by Ahmed Jamal.

I’m going to miss this peaceful interlude.  This week’s trainings included a department meeting, where I was pleased to learn that Snowflake College was going to tackle the problem of declining enrollment by borrowing a page from the for-profit vocational “colleges.”  The counseling staff would plan a student’s curriculum from start to finish with a goal of finishing up within two to four years.  (We are, after all, a two-year college.) 

At first, this was good news.  A plan!  Administrators actually providing leadership!  Why, the president had gone to the length of appointing a task force to tackle the challenge! 

Then came the details.  In order to place students on predictable schedules, the times of day courses are to be offered will be “rationalized.”   In other words, general ed courses will be offered mainly in the morning and early afternoon while major or career training-specific classes will be offered primarily in the late afternoon and evening.  That didn’t faze me, until the other shoe dropped.

Paradoxically, it wasn’t the move toward making students ready for the local workforce that was the bad news.  Rather, it was the plan’s effect on the four-year transfer students which got everyone’s attention.  Permit me to set up the background: My discipline is in the social and behavioral sciences.  The “service course” my department provides for gen ed fulfills the same transfer requirements of the state unis in our region as a similar course in one of the humanities departments.  Students may choose a two-course sequence in the humanities or mix-and-match one course each from both departments.

The cannibalization of enrollment this overlap already causes is a problem for my department.  And for me.  Treetop, my “home” campus, which programs its own schedule, often places my section(s) on the same day and time block as the other department’s sections.  The campus administration is quite open about its preference for the instructor of the competing course, so I get shafted by them pretty regularly.  What I didn’t know before attending the department meeting is this is a reflection of attitudes in Snowflake’s administration as a whole.

Matt, our chair for this academic year, a bespectacled fellow about my own age with a dry sense of humor, explained that our department’s offerings weren’t included in the gen ed course package planned for the initiative.  Almost in passing, he added a colleague had mentioned that an unnamed administrator had suggested that our department, even its gen ed course, were unnecessary and that the humanities folks could do the job we’ve been doing.

Matt’s words were met first with disbelief, than with a clamor to identify the administrator.  Anita, our department’s only other tenured professor, a lady with a strong personality and a well-earned reputation for getting things done, promised she’d get to the bottom of this and raise some Cain in the process.  We part-timers murmured among ourselves as to what the implications would actually be.

We needn’t have asked.  Each of us knew the score.  The existential threat for us adjuncts is now two-fold.   If the rumor is true, we won’t jockey about to get class assignments anymore because the assignments will be nonexistent.

This isn’t what I bargained for ten years ago when I got an out-of-the-blue email from my graduate advisor telling me Snowflake College needed a last minute hire to teach a class.  I’ve covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of the adjunct’s life in this blog.  But it just seems the stakes for survival in this trade have gotten dicier as time goes on.

I have my own private narrative for what I do.  As a “freeway flyer,” a part-timer who divides his time among several campuses and institutions, I’m struck by the variations in students and institutional cultures.  I’ve even come up with a taxonomy not only for my classes but my commutes.  Days where I start from home in Treetop, teach at one campus (or two if the evening brings me back to home campus) are “loops.”  Days where I drive to Verdant Fields Community College, forty miles to the east of home then double back on my tracks to teach at Snowflake’s Quartz City campus, which is fifty miles west of home, are “boomerangs.” 

Boomerangs can be particularly stressful.  Last spring I taught six sections.  Three out of four of my instructional days were boomerangs.  That semester I drove 550 miles per week.

This semester, all my days will be loops.  But that still leaves the question of the kind of students I’ll have.  All my sections are day sections, which means even at VFCC many of them will be traditional four-year transfer students.  Even then, I know the personality of each section will vary.  The section whose students show the best attitude and aptitude will be my “Jedi class.”  (I’m not a Star Wars fan; I just made the label up on the spot one day and the kids were really pleased when I called them that.)  The section I find most trying is my “Trog class.”  (As in “troglodyte.”  I don’t share this appellation with them.)  I’ve had very few semesters where I haven’t had one of each.  

The colleges themselves have their strong and weak points.  Snowflake pays better than VFCC.  On the whole, Snowflake students are better prepared for college work.  Despite its large size, VFCC has a sterling support staff for adjuncts who do their utmost every day to make sure we instructors have what we need.   The administration at VFCC is fairly supportive of teaching staff, whereas at Snowflake, as you may have gathered already, the higher ups tend to be autocratic.  (There are exceptions—the folks at the Quartz City campus are wonderful.)   If only I could combine the best elements of both and eliminate the long drives, I’d be content.

In the meantime, I hope for the best even when this is getting ever more elusive.  Now, if only that flutter in my stomach would just go away…

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

Education at a Price

A gaffe by Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney last week concerning rising higher education costs provided a standout example of our society’s attitudes toward what education is and what it means to be an educated person in America.

For those of you who missed the story, Romney told an audience at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire that students struggling to pay for college should consider enrolling at private, for-profit institutions.   Market competition among for-profit colleges, Romney explained, would force them to become efficient thereby lowering tuition costs.  As an example, Romney cited a media design school in Florida called Full Sail University. 

What Romney neglected to add was that Full Sail’s CEO, Bill Heavener, is a major donor to Romney’s campaign and that the “competitive” tuition at Full Sail runs around $80,000 a year.  

Higher education, once treated as a public good by policymakers, is becoming increasingly privatized.  This isn't surprising.  Education is big business, perceived more as a commodity than as a personal attribute.  College is considered a ticket to better, well-paying jobs.  As such, students' goals tend to focus on skills training and workforce preparation.  

While this is a perfectly reasonable expectation, the vocational focus has come at the expense of curricular balance and intellectual rigor.  The teaching of critical thinking skills traditionally imparted by the liberal arts, when they are taught at all, has been relegated to an assortment of lower division general ed classes where more often than not students simply go through the motions.

Educational privatization is a new frontier for corporate America.  There has been talk of higher education as the next economic bubble.  The phenomenon of higher ed as commodity has become evident in all its facets, from corporate grants supplanting taxpayer support of public universities to the proliferation of for-profit institutions.  The latter advertise aggressively, particularly on daytime TV, offering both resident and online classes.  Often, their courses of study are in fields for which employers once provided apprenticeships or on the job training.  What isn’t mentioned is the exorbitant cost of attending these schools, often financed with federally guaranteed student loans that can’t be discharged even in cases of bankruptcy, the high-pressure sales tactics they use, or the sketchy job prospects faced by their graduates.  Federal and state regulation of these institutions is weak to nonexistent.   

Commodification permeates the college experience even at traditional campuses.  Students on the whole seem to embrace this fact without question.  Classes are more about the grade than any knowledge the student gains from taking them.  The banking model of educational progress offers the student a roadmap: Earn 60 semester hours and get an associate’s degree.  Earn 120 credits and get a bachelor’s degree.  Earn a bachelor’s degree and get a job.  Simple, right?

Perhaps not.  Many of the current crop of students seem to have been pushed into college without really knowing why they’re there.  The average time to degree for a B.A. / B.S. has increased substantially in recent years.  Various reasons (aside from cost) include impacted enrollment in popular majors, the need for many students to take remedial coursework, and funding cuts for required courses.  Added to this is the problem of parents and high school counselors pushing college on kids as a nebulous objective divorced from their individual aptitudes, temperament, or goals.

Because of their low tuition and open admission policies, community colleges become a temporary repository for large numbers of these students.  Lacking direction, they flounder for a while and eventually drop out.  Community colleges continue to fulfill the “cooling out” role first described by sociologist Burton Clark over fifty years ago.  The difference today is the social expectation of getting a college degree is much stronger now than it was in 1960 even though opportunities remain comparatively limited.  So, when these “cooled out” students fall short of their own expectations the for-profit schools dangle the illusion of achievement in front of them.  They promise quick results financed with plenty of student aid (i.e., loans).  If they don’t make it through the program or can’t find jobs afterwards it doesn’t matter; the school has already cashed their tuition checks.  Meanwhile, the students are stuck with the debts and are no better off for the experience. 

Yes, I’m perfectly aware that the freedom to try is also the freedom to fail.  But should the consequences be so potentially disastrous?  Should an industry profit from preying on society’s most economically vulnerable people?  Mr. Romney to the contrary, it isn’t private sector competition that will make quality, affordable postsecondary education widely available.  Instead, it will take greater public oversight, a renewed commitment to public investment, and stronger consumer protection laws.  Most importantly, it will take a close reevaluation of the role of higher education in our society and what it really means to have a well-educated citizenry.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar