Education in the Corporate Oz

BY AARON BARLOW

Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz

public domain (see note below)

One of the more depressing articles I’ve read recently—outside of politics—is Kevin Carey’s “The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education” for Huffington Post. He writes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instead of students receiving a reasonably priced, quality online degree, universities are using them as cash cows while corporate middlemen hoover up the greater share of the profits. In a perfect twist, big tech companies are getting the spill-off, in the form of massive sums spent on Facebook and Google ads. It’s a near-perfect encapsulation of the social and structural forces that allow the already-rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else.

Carey believes one can get a reasonable undergraduate education online. I think that is extremely rare. My experience with distance education goes back more than thirty years; I know what its uses and limitations are. In particular situations, when students are unable to take advantage of face-to-face instruction, distance, now online, education can provide a viable alternative—but it is never optimal. The best education always includes extensive personal interaction between student and instructor—and not interaction mediated by the mail, the phone or the internet.

But that’s not what I find so depressing.

Everyone with serious experience in education knows this is true: Good education requires close student/faculty interaction—even Carey knows this, though he may not want to admit it, still excusing distance learning, even while pointing out the damage its misuse causes. The evidence, though, is right in front of all of us: Students and their families pay upwards of $60,000 a year not simply for “name” education but for the heavyweight and very real education behind the name. Students clamor to get into the ivies and to Oberlin, Reed, Haverford and all the other small residential private colleges providing impeccable educations through the opportunity to work closely with faculty. No one, except someone conned into equating the name with the education, would pay the money these schools cost for an online alternative.

Except, as I said, if they are swindled.

This swindle lies behind Carey’s essay. To save money, many universities are moving more heavily than ever before into online education, charging as much, sometimes, for their new courses as they do for their more costly (to the institutions) on-campus courses. Even public institutions are involved: They charge the same for online and hybrid (partly online and partly classroom) courses as they do for classroom-based ones, though it costs much less for the institutions to offer such courses. This saves so much money that the colleges and universities are loathe to signal that they are providing a lower-standard product through their online and hybrid catalogs. So, they maintain the fiction by charging the same for both. They want to keep that money coming in; they don’t feel they can afford to admit, through a separate pricing structure, that the online and hybrid courses are not on the same level of instruction as what goes on when the focus of education is at least three hours a week of personal “interface.”

Carey argues, without meaning to, that this reluctance to admit that online education is second-rate has opened the door for an entirely new corporate intrusion into education. Companies are “assisting” universities with their online programs and, according to Carey, are syphoning off a percentage of the huge and growing amounts of money involved for this ersatz education that is so much cheaper to provide. This, he claims, could be the death knell for education as we have known it, for the style of education that has made American universities the envy of the world.

Toward the end of his long article, Carey comments:

As our most trusted universities continue to privatize large swaths of their academic programs, their fundamental nature will be changed in ways that are hard to reverse. The race for profits will grow more heated, and the social goal of higher education will seem even more like an abstraction.

The situation is actually worse: Even public institutions that are not outsourcing the digital structures for the online courses which bring in so much more profit are part of this race. Faced with diminishing governmental support, they scramble to find ways of approximating the education they once provided, doing so with reduced resources. To keep this up, they cannot admit that they are shortchanging their students any more than they can admit that they are cutting corners through their increased reliance on adjuncts (who may be fine teachers but who are exploited and, often, overworked as they move from campus to campus).

The idea of a college education as America once saw it (meeting Carey’s “social goal of higher education”) is dying, Instead of something dedicated to the improvement of the whole of each student, it is reduced to simple certification, to quantifiable outcomes instead of development of well-rounded and really educated citizens.

We know this. But no one is willing to admit the obvious and do something about it–for that costs public money and reduces private profit.

There’s just too much money in the charade, in keeping people believing that the Scarecrow does, in fact, get smarter when the Wizard of Oz hands him a diploma.

And that is very depressing.

Photo credit: It is unclear as to whether the press-materials were distributed by a personal publicity agency representing the subject, or if they were distributed by an agency employed to publicize the film, and/or the first CBS television broadcast of the film, which aired on November 3, 1956. 

2 thoughts on “Education in the Corporate Oz

  1. Pingback: Reading: Education in the Corporate Oz | ACADEME BLOG | Morgan's Log

  2. There’s so much wrong with educational institutions now that it must be very difficult to say anything nice about them. I can’t imagine heading into the state university system in CO in this day and age; I wouldn’t have been able to pay for it!!

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