Oh Jeff. I think I have to go be ill now. Having to learn something outside the small world of what she considers important was a waste of her time? The solipsistic writing, the whining, the sheer stupidity evidenced by this piece of dreck published in the Iowa newspaper is almost too much to bear. This woman considers herself a future journalist? No wonder we're fucked.
By the way, did you drop her a line? She conveniently supplies her e-mail. 'Course, she's probably googling herself, and will soon see what a fucking moron she really is. I HOPE the editors at Glamour get a chance to read it--my guess is that they want their writers who have some knowledge of the world.

I'm just glad she's at Iowa and not Iowa State, my alma mater. I do remember seeing the occasional letter to this effect when I was an undergrad, though. Sad.

This is what I'd say to Stacey: Fewer than 25% of students end up in careers related to their college major, anyway. In any case, any job you train for today won't be around in a decade or two. Better you learn how to work hard, and learn how to learn, because if you don't you're toast. You'll be working at Starbucks and have 60K of student debt.

That said, given the way the job market is, I don't think it's a bad idea for students to consider an apprenticeship with the idea of starting their own business. If they're not interested in intellectual pursuits, fine; there's time for that later. Or never; but why take up space in a classroom if you're not? There's a guy in my town who runs a site called bluecollarandproudofit.com, which gives young people advice on how to get into a career as a skilled tradesperson.

I tell you, my plumber is always busy, and can pick and choose his jobs. His job isn't going to get outsourced, either. I would be perfectly happy to see my sons go into business as Williams Brothers Electricians.

I'm very frustrated with how corrupt higher education has become -- kids and their parents get charged outrageous tuition, while many classes are taught by academia's equivalent of migrant laborers -- part time faculty with no benefits and no job security. Where's all the money going? Even if you don't want to treat education like a commodity, that's a legitimate question to ask of institutions of higher education.

EVERYTHING LISA SAID!

This is the #1 reason why I do not teach anymore --because the system is so corrupt. It's all about money and adjunct instructors and professors are nothing more than hifalutin indentured servants. Schooling at any level in this country has nothing, NOTHING to do with education.

If motherhood radicalized me, Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling (which I have in the archives) really fuels my sense of rage about the mainstreaming of servitude in this country. Socialization? No, when people ask about 'the socialization of kids', they are not talking about manners; they are talking about how incorporate are they into the systems of punishment and control 'necessary' for a life of corporate servitude of any kind.

Deschooling has opened up for me a whole new way of looking at the mundane. Deschooling is a full frontal attack on alienation, of the Marxist kind.

It is an absolute must read.

i posted my own rant at BlueOregon this morning about the crappy education my son is getting in high school, and then i watched the discussion devolve into nothing more than an argument over money. that's what education has become to much of our society: a money thang.

but how often do we hear discussed the value of education for its own sake? that to take a class in something we won't follow as a career, or maybe even as an interest, will teach us to think, to evaluate, to consider? hell, the ability to think critically is not even rarely discussed in our society, it's frequently denigrated.

stacey did not create herself: she's a sad product of a society that values money, not people.

I feel so incredibly fortunate to be in a district where the focus is on critical thinking. My high schooler has three hours of homework every night--no lie--and, in the past week has considered the impact of Castro on Cuba through a huge a rousing class discussion; read short stories by Latin American writers in order to get an introduction to the interweaving of literature, politics and history; observed a local eco-system and analyzed the interactions among species; struggled with analytical proofs in her math class; read two novels by Chuck Paluniak (on her own time); added new words to her French vocabulary; and sketched every day in her art notebook.
Do I think she's working hard? Yes. But she also, at the age of 14, has a critical understanding of the world that my college students lack. And she's in a public school district.
There is hope out there in the public schools for creating these types of critically thinking citizens, but it takes a commitment from the community.
Liza is having to do on her own what should be available to all children. I know how privileged my children are to be living in a rural school district that happens to have a major university in its midst. I wish these opportunities were available to every child. It's why the Staceys of the world piss me off as much as they do. She sounds like a privileged, spoiled brat who does not want to have to think outside her picture-perfect little box.

I've had students like that as well, Jeff, and that letter is People's Exhibit #1 for why general education courses are required.

Lisa, I'll tell you why tuition is rising so much, and even where the money goes. It's rising because state support for higher education is dropping like a stone. The "state" university where I work actually gets less than 30% of its operating budget from state funds. What that means is that we must depend more and more on tuition increases (which the Illinois legislature, in its infinite stupidity, just capped) or on external research grants.

Where the money goes is easy: to pay the teachers, the librarians, the janitors, the admissions staff, the academic advisers, etc. Personnel costs are always the #1 expense in any business, and doubly so in academe.

But if you're concerned about the numbers of instructors and non-tenure-track faculty who are bearing an increasing share of the teaching load, you need look no further than the increased reliance on external support. If you're getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants, you're expected to produce results--and that means you're going to be in the lab more, or out doing field work, or digging in the archives in some foreign country--and someone else will have to take your place in the classroom.

Michael -- I'm sorry to hear about the stupidity in Illinois (a place I've visited and liked and think deserves better).

Education has, over the past years, been an amazing growth business as more and more people consider college an essential. But as the business has grown, the inequity between high paid people at universities and low paid temporary workers has become extreme -- and, perversely, the most exploited workers are the one actually producing the product (at Harvard, for example, there's a technical and clerical workers' union. Many of those employees make more money and have better benefits than professors who are on the front lines doing teaching. There is more money, it did go somewhere, and it didn't go into teaching. Why?

I don't think the drop in state subsidy is equal to the rise in the number of tuition payers over the past 20 years. (That said, states should focus on higher ed, and the federal government should stop screwing states so they can).

What we have is overpriced universities where teaching comes last. Nobody is encouraged to take teaching seriously -- nobody gets tenure for it. Maybe part of students' poor attitude about taking teaching and learning seriously is that they aren't getting the message that they should from the university they attend.

I think students and graduate students -- particularly those teaching classes for low wages and no benefits -- should form a joint union to agitate that the university pay more attention to the people who make the university exist: teachers and students.

Liza, I've heard you talk about that book Deschooling, and though I haven't read it the idea gave me a little chill. I loved school as a kid -- I had a very disorganized home life; school gave me a sense of mastery and the idea that there were some things I could control and make come out right. I make a lot of sacrifices to send my kids to a good school. It terrifies me to think I might be doing the wrong thing, but I don't know what else to do.

(Side topic: Parents get so much contradictory information on the right thing to do with their kids -- and the stakes are jacked up so high -- that it is in itself a form of oppression, a way to keep parents cowed, baffled, and especially out of the political sphere of saying to school administrators from prekindergarten through college, "No, this is crazy.")

At the self-described top of the educational pyramid, Lisa, you've hit the nail squarely on the head. But I got my bachelor's degree at a small private liberal arts college--where teaching was indeed enough to get one tenure.

Over the past 20 years, if I remember rightly, the state funding for the place where I work has dropped from over 50% to barely 30%. In dollar terms, that puts our current funding level from the state approximately where it was about 20 years ago--but costs aren't what they were that long ago, and neither are our resources.

In the same time period, I believe, our total enrollment has risen by something on the order of 10000 students--but some of that is through the expansion of our outreach programs, executive MBA programs, and the like, and doesn't necessarily represent an influx of new traditional undergraduate students.

I think students and graduate students -- particularly those teaching classes for low wages and no benefits -- should form a joint union to agitate that the university pay more attention to the people who make the university exist: teachers and students.

Believe me, people have been trying. There have been attempts to organize graduate students on quite a few campuses. Universities have come up with some creative ways to try and stop it (like saying that teaching classes isn't actually labor, it's part of the training graduate students receive).

The problems surrounding recognizing good teaching are big for me. I've been an adjunct at 5 schools now. The pay is crap, there are no benefits, and we're not really part of the university--we're glorified temps. I'm a great instructor...even as adjunct I'm ranked at the top of the departments I teach in, according to student evaluations. But, I'm never going to be the kind of guy who's churning out article after article. A book every few years is what I'll probably shoot for. I'm a teacher. And as I prep for the job market, that doesn't count for a hell of a lot.

Michael, maybe you don't want to reveal where you work online, but what would you recommend parents and college-bound kids look for if they are genuinely interested in a learning and teaching-centric environment instead of just a credential?

Liza: just ordered Deschooling from Amazon (feel the fear and do it anyway!).

I hope labor efforts get some traction -- not just on fairness grounds, but also because making the concerns of teachers and students central to universities and colleges would be great for society at large.

Re what TA said earlier on valuing learning for its own sake:

It seems to me that valuing learning for its' own sake is up there at the top of Maslow's pyramid (where the bottom is basic survival needs and the top is self-fulfillment, developing yourself into the person you have the capacity to be).

Economic stressors force people down the pyramid. Which is why creating bad conditions for working people and the middle class can have the effect of reducing time and energy for critical thinking as they scramble for security. Which in turn makes it easier for political elites to hoodwink them and loot society for their own benefits. Economic stressors produce changes in attitudes towards education that benefit kleptocracies.

What the would-be "Glamour"-girl of the original post seems to have missed is how the publishing world hires its "journalists". They can and will demand someone in this job have a solid liberal arts degree (much more likely English than Journalism) with a high GPA from a "name" school. They will then pay this person next to nothing for the privilege of working in that rarified world. Stacey - and anyone like her - doesn't have a chance in hell of getting a job with them.

But far more sickening is where the Stacey's of the world end up: taking jobs from people in their mid-careers. Why? Because once Stacey finds out what kinds of jobs are available to her, she will quickly understand and adapt to the fact that being young and compliant are all the qualifications you need after college these days.

She can have her pick of jobs as long as she's willing to learn how to lie about her qualifications and agree to go along with whateve the boss is selling. Older people in the working world aren't so easy to get along with and they make far too much money. Out they go, in comes the undereducated, clueless, air-headed Stacey to work for $15/hour.

I'm not surprised that this one has her eyes on a journalism career. It sounds like she already knows everything that's needed to tackle that big story; ie: nothing.

Lisa:

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but things have been a little crazy in real life for me lately.

The best way to identify places that do a solid job of educating their students is to ignore most of the hype and the hypers thereof. Forget about the U.S. News (or any other) rankings--nobody really knows how they arrive at them anyway, and if it's impossible to reduce a college applicant's suitability for college to a two-digit (or four-digit) numerical score, how is it any easier to reduce a college's whole ambience and mission to a numerical ranking?

First thing to do is to read the literature--and the web presence--carefully. Identify places that look good, and then go talk to them. Check out their booth at the college fair, and really talk to the person staffing it--especially if it isn't one of the admissions staffers, but an alumnus or a current student. Look to see who's gone there, and what they say about it. Check into their endowment--if the alumni aren't giving to their own alma mater, that doesn't speak well to their experiences (though I wouldn't use that as a high-stakes, make-or-break criterion, because there can be other reasons for small endowments). Also look at faculty history: how much turnover do they have? What's their tenure rate?

Go to the campuses--and not just for an afternoon. Take a day or two and really walk around. Look at the buildings and the grounds, listen to the conversations you hear in passing. Eat in the cafeteria. Get a look at a residence hall. Look at the kinds of flyers posted around campus. Talk to the faculty members in your (or your child's) area(s) of interest.

If I might add one to Michael's list, if you can find a faculty member who will let you, sit in on a class, particularly in an area of interest to your kids. I've had prospective parents/students do that before. You shouldn't try to take part, necessarily, but you may get an idea of what sorts of things happen in the classroom there (keeping in mind that you might find one of the best, or one of the worst, instructors and that that particular day in the classroom may not be representative of the whole institution).

I knew there was one I was forgetting. Thanks, Jeff.