Lumpen academia

[bigbadwolf]

Excellent article on the travails of higher education in The Nation:

Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it.

At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

Bell Labs, once the flagship of industrial science, is a shell of its former self, having suffered years of cutbacks before giving up on fundamental research altogether. ... Basic physics in this country is all but dead. From 1971 to 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by 20 percent, but the number awarded in math and statistics declined by 55 percent.

Now the system is in danger of falling into ruin. Public higher education was essential to creating the mass middle class of the postwar decades—and with it, a new birth of political empowerment and human flourishing. The defunding of public higher education has been essential to its slow destruction. In Unmaking the Public University, Newfield argues that the process has been deliberate, a campaign by the economic elite against the class that threatened to supplant it as the leading power in society. Social mobility is now lower in the United States than it is in Northern Europe, Australia, Canada and even France and Spain ...

Our college-completion rate has fallen from second to eighth. And we are not just defunding instruction; we are defunding research, the creation of knowledge itself. Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students. In fact, the whole California system, the crown jewel of American public higher education, is being torn apart by budget cuts. This is not a problem; it is a calamity.

... Nearly all involve technology to drive efficiency. Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction: this is the future we’re being offered. Why teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail?

 

[DominiConnor]

This is what Americans want.
Look at the issues they vote on.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Looks like Britain is going the same way in terms of over-production of PhDs, commercialising higher and further education, raising tuition rates, and curtailing/ending basic research . The two differences I see are:

1) Not such use of starving adjunct faculty, and

2) lack of strip mall "universities" like this one here.

 

[Tsotne]

Very interesting article. I'd like to see the number of people applying for physics and mathematics increasing.

 

[TBeas]

Very interesting article. I'd like to see the number of people applying for physics and mathematics increasing.

Why? There aren't enough jobs for them as it is right now, and almost the entirety of their funding is dictated by the government, which has been reluctant to fund recently.

 

[Tsotne]

Why? There aren't enough jobs for them as it is right now, and almost the entirety of their funding is dictated by the government, which has been reluctant to fund recently.

I agree with you but my point was a bit different. Assume I wish the funding and jobs were enough. So you think that the above mentioned decrease in their number is due to the reasons you stated? Or maybe people find it more interesting to apply for arts, verbal (easier) fields rather than physics and math. Anyway, I wish there was demand and interest for those fields. I find physics and math most precious fields.