Professor X (33 page)

The community colleges are right there with their more upscale brothers, launching expansion projects both grand and modest. Work has begun on a $31 million expansion of Community College of Philadelphia; a pet project of Senator Arlen Specter, the new Northeast Regional Center is billed as the first certified “green” facility in the area.
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In Texas, Austin Community College is preparing to open its eighth and largest campus in the fall of 2010.
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In Michigan, Kalamazoo Valley Community College has begun taking bids for its $12 million expansion.
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On April 8, 2010, ribbon was cut at a new facility at Bucks County Community College, a $15 million 28,000-square-foot facility—“green,” of course—housing a library, café, student commons, classrooms, and outdoor amphitheater.
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Ivy Tech Community College plans to expand into downtown Muncie, Indiana, taking over the former offices of the Muncie
Star Press
.
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Some of the cannier institutions are using the recession to their own advantage, picking up real estate on the cheap. The aforementioned University of Delaware has centered its expansion plans on the acquisition of a closed-down Chrysler automobile plant. Arizona State University wants to acquire a couple of office buildings and vacant computerchip plants that became available when the manufacturing moved overseas. The University of Pennsylvania is looking at picking up a real bargain, a “stillborn condominium development.”
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St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley wants to expand into the vacant Circuit City building next door.
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The economic downturn has done nothing but help community colleges. Even without President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, the price of community college tuition is highly attractive during a recession. A late-2009 cover story in
Community College Week,
“Bursting at the Seams: Study Finds Colleges Struggling With Unprecedented Demand,” talks about surging enrollments fed by the recession. College administrators would no doubt say that they are merely trying to satisfy a demand that already exists, and that is true. But every new facility, every expanded student union, every additional classroom wing, commits colleges to maintaining enrollments high enough to justify their expense. That infrastructure will never go away. A college such as Yale may be able to increase its enrollments 15 percent without dropping its standards. There are many elite students who do not get in. It is not as clear to me that an institution such as Huron State, which has done its own expansion in years past, can do the same.

 

The students.
Even the worst-performing students, who have scant hope of graduating, may use government-sponsored financial aid, or get themselves buried under mountains of debt in the form of student loans. And for what? For something that is very important in our culture: to try to participate, successfully or not, in what Bryan Caplan, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, calls a “signaling game”:

The students understand the signaling game, and the necessity of their playing it. They feel compelled to attend and succeed at college. They pay their money, or sign the aid forms, and they expect to thrive, no matter what level they start from. They see everybody participating, so it seems that everyone should be able to succeed; the sheer universality of college attendance makes for an odd sense of entitlement among the students. The students understand that they need a college degree to get a good job, and even though attending college might never have been their fondest wish, what choice do they have? But a more inefficient system can not have been devised by man. For a certain percentage of students, college attendance is an emotional, spiritual, and financial drain, with the expected financial rewards only tangentially a result of all the effort and expense. Until the core job-training components are separated from the rest of the college curriculum, students less inclined toward an academic track will suffer.

 

Industry.
A college diploma means higher earning power—no one denies that. But the number of jobs calling for college has become artificially inflated. In much the same way that the country spent the first decade of the 2000s redefining what it meant to be a homeowner (to disastrous effect), so too we have reclassified which jobs require a college degree of some sort. Industry, including the civil service, wants its workers to be as credentialed as possible.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has published a list of the 30 fastest growing occupations covered in the 2008–2009 Occupational Outlook Handbook. One requires a professional degree: veterinarian. Five normally require a master's degree: mental health counselors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, marriage and family therapists, physical therapists, and physician assistants. Nine normally require a bachelor's degree: network systems and data communications specialists, computer software engineers (applications), personal financial advisers, substance abuse and behavioral disorder counselors, financial analysts, forensic science technicians, computer systems analysts, database administrators, and computer software engineers (systems). Four normally require an associate's degree: veterinary techs, physical therapist assistants, dental hygienists, and environmental science and protection technicians. Three normally call for nothing beyond postsecondary vocational education: theatrical makeup artists, skin care specialists, and manicurists. The rest call for just on-the-job training: home care aides, home health aides, medical assistants, social and human service assistants, pharmacy techs, and dental assistants.

I am not impugning anyone's career, but it seems apparent that the bachelor's or even the associate's degree required for some of these professions is an inflated credential. Surely a vocational certificate coupled with on-the-job experience would be sufficient for a substance abuse counselor or forensic tech. Why does a dental hygienist require 60 credits of college? Why would a computer software engineer require a full four-year degree? Five of the nine professions requiring a bachelor's degree, in fact, involve computer systems, networks, or software, and it seems particularly challenging to connect the technical aspects of the computer science program with the remaining requirements of the bachelor's degree, the hallmark of which is a breadth of learning much at odds with vocational training.

Let's look at the requirements of one school at random, a nice prestigious college: the University of Pittsburgh. For a Bachelor of Science degree from the Department of Computer Science, the student is required to take 8 core courses for 25 credits and electives for 15 credits, making for 40 credits. Additionally, 2 math courses and a statistics course are required, bringing the total to 52 credits or thereabouts, which is less than half of the 120 credits needed to graduate. Industry wants the bachelor's degree for all that it signifies about a candidate. The larger question is: what is the value of those additional 68 credits, those 22 or 23 courses, in terms of computer expertise? Couldn't the computer degree be compressed into a smaller, shorter, cheaper, more efficient certificate?

I suppose if we don't want nineteen- or twenty-year-olds horsing around the corridors of industry, or causing trouble in the streets, four-year colleges are the best place to warehouse them. But the burden of debt a baccalaureate degree imposes on many students is cruel. The latest available figures state that 66 percent of students graduating with a bachelor's degree find themselves saddled with debt. The top 10 percent of those with student debt owed $44,500 or more on graduation; 50 percent owed at least $20,000. Almost as many graduates of certificate programs, 63 percent, graduated with the debt, but that debt was smaller by half. The top 10 percent of certificate recipients with student debt owed $22,300 or more; 50 percent owed at least $9,000. Credential inflation has ensured that earnings for certificate holders are smaller, but this really doesn't need to be the case.
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Credential inflation can be insidious. After a while it starts to seem that a particular occupation requires a degree, when it simply may not be the case. Consider the illustration of nursing. Currently, approximately 60 percent of nurses graduate with a three-year associate's degree, but that wasn't always true. Although a few baccalaureate programs in nursing began in the late nineteenth century, they never provided more than 15 percent of the new nurses each year; most nurses originally came from diploma programs affiliated directly with the hospitals. The model was that of an apprenticeship; the nursing students were essentially employees. The discovery of antibiotics expanded the need for health care services, and by the end of World War II the United States faced a serious shortage of nurses. Tasked by the Carnegie Foundation to study the problem, a sociologist named Dr. Esther Lucille Brown recommended a game change: that nurses be educated in colleges and universities, an idea that suited many of the young women entering the profession as well as the hospitals, which had begun to find their nursing programs burdensome. Meanwhile, President Truman's Commission on Higher Education urged large-scale expansion of the community college system, and soon the two-year colleges had moved into nursing education.
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The Associate Degree in Nursing, originally a two-year program, has grown to three years. And now the Carnegie Foundation, once again seemingly in the forefront of credential inflation, has put in its two cents: a new study from their Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommends that a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a four-year program, be a prerequisite for all those seeking to work as nurses.

Kim Tinsley, a member of the National Organization for Associate Degree Nursing's Board of Directors, raises her objection to the recommendation. “[The nursing students] cannot afford to attend four years of B.S.N. classes and not work. The A.D.N. student does take up to four years to complete their degree, but it is due to the fact that they are working (sometimes full time) and have a family to support. The average age of our student is 27. The majority of our students are either married with a family or are a single parent. They cannot afford the time nor resources to attend a four-year program.”
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Soon, they'll need a master's degree.

 

Sheriff Obama.
President Obama is a cheerleader for universal education. Perhaps because of his own unusual biography, a multiplicity of individual narratives rings in his ears. He is an educationist: a believer that “schooling will guarantee the creative growth of cultural systems” and tends to influence “positively the development of an individual's potential.”
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“We need to put a college education within reach of every American,” says President Obama, and I can hear his inspiring cadences. “That's the best investment we can make in our future.”
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It seems to me we've done that already.

The schools, the teachers, the students, industry, and the sheriff hold their weapons aloft. No one will back down. For any movement to occur, someone has to move first, and no one will. Mexican standoff.

I have had no choice but to recognize that many of my students have no business being in college. Putting an end to their participation without sentencing them to a life in the aisles of Wal-Mart would require that Americans relinquish their ill-thought-out love affair with higher education. Which would require an abandonment of the cockeyed optimism that has taken over our educational discourse. Which would require an embracing, again, of simple job training. Which would involve an acceptance on the part of human resource gatekeepers that college is far from essential in many professions. Which would require the colleges, particularly the lower-tier and community colleges, to rethink whom they are enrolling, whom they are serving, what the purpose of the whole rigmarole is. Which might lead to some streamlining, and the elimination of my job.

None of which I see happening. Undeniably, it is a societal ill for a poor student, financially poor and academically unskilled, to get lots of aid and go off to college where the likelihood is that he will not even finish the degree. But no student wants to be the first to forsake going to college for the good of society. No employer wants to be the first to admit that his job may not require college skills. No college wants to sacrifice enrollments. No senator wants to cut educational funding. No president of the United States wants to grab the podium and call, in bell-like tones, for fewer enrollments in the coming years, for more blue-collar workers who are skilled at what they do and make a good buck but don't have a clue about Bloom's Taxonomy. And the American people, bless their hearts, have no stomach for limiting anyone's options.