Very nice Chronicle article HERE. One of the interesting things about the book is it demonstrates just how incredibly destructive are the neo-liberal (in the United States that's "conservative") pressures on higher education. Pressures to measure success by graduation rates as well as greater support for degrees that are supposedly "relevant" (this means where universities have tried to make it that certain industries do not have to do on the job training) have been incredibly destructive to learning.
Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
There is also a lot of data showing that (1) while students in career oriented fields make more money out of school, their life time earnings are on average the same or less (more American CEOs have liberal arts degrees than Business degrees), and (2) getting a MBA makes zero difference to life time earnings, even at elite schools such as Harvard. If you compare students without MBAs who made the same SAT scores, their lifetime earnings are on average the same as as those who take two years out to get the MBA. But much of the institutional support goes to such "practically oriented fields.
The second point about teaching is equally depressing.
Pannapaker discusses 9 reasons for the decline in reasonable expectations in courses: (1) Lack of student preparation. (2) Grade inflation. (3) Student retention. (4) Student evaluations of teachers. (5) Enrollment minimums. (6) Lack of uniform expectations. (7) Contingent teaching. (8) Time constraints (this is a result of contingent labor teaching too much and non-contingent labor having to do more and more administrative type things). (9) Curricular chaos. (10) Demoralized faculty members. This last one is worth quoting Pannapaker at length:
Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence. It starts in graduate school, when we begin to fear we are destined for unemployment, when we compare our pay with that of comparably educated professionals, and when we realize that—for all the sacrifices that we've made, often with idealistic motives—we are held in slight regard. Many people even think of us as subversives who "hate America." During the latest economic crisis—perhaps the endpoint of a 40-year slide—many of us have felt as if we've become expendable, if we are employed at all. That makes it hard for us to make strong demands on our students, or, perhaps more important, to stand up for any kind of change in our institutions.
Well over half the professors I know in the United States have had to deal with a rather grotesque combination of rudeness, condescension, and anger towards college professors from their own family members who buy into the ideology that is the matter with Kansas. Europeans have no idea how toxis the pseudo-populism of the contemporary Republican party is in this regard. It's one of the main reason that 80% of research scientists (not humanities professors) in the United States are now Democrats. Under Eisenhower, 80% of them were Republicans. After Reagan the proportion held steady at 50% for a few decades. Somewhere in Bush's first term the shift happened.
As Pannapaker notes, when you add to this toxic cultural milieu the job insecurity from the recent recession (thouth the politicians and financial industry types who caused it continue to do considerably better than fine), it can be a recipe for pretty severe demoralization.
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