Cruel, But Not a Hoax

There's a good higher education article in the The Atlantic this month titled "In The Basement of the Ivory Tower." It's written by an anonymous "Professor X," an adjunct English instructor at both a small private college and a community college in the northeast. The gist is that many of his students are woefully unprepared for even the introductory courses he teaches. So he must fail them, exposing, in the words splashed across The Atlantic's cover, "Higher Education's Cruelest Hoax." Either that or, as the article's blurb puts it, the "destructive myth" that "a university education is for everyone."

One thing's for certain: this piece will be catnip for those who like to adopt the contrarian too-many-people-are-going-to-college-these-days position. This is an especially attractive stance for elitists and/or people who spend a lot of time searching for opportunities to loudly begin sentences with some variation of the phrase "I know it's not politically correct to say this, but..." as if this denotes intellectual bravery of some kind. The article's sad story of one Ms. L, who says she was "so proud of myself for having written a college paper," only to be crushed by a grade of "F," will be used as evidence that we are not doing people any favors by letting them into college. Charles Murray has apparently written a whole book about this--adorned with blurbs from Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett, P.J. O'Rourke, and Tom Wolfe no less--to be published later this year.

Needless to say, I disagree. Not with Professor X's contention that his classes reveal disturbing truths about higher education. He's right about that. "Remarkably few of my students do well in these classes," he writes. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence." Yet neither of his employers seems to give a damn, because:

Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students--whatever you want to call it--is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford's Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe they would."

Adjuncts like Professor X get paid squat, while his students pay the same tuition as everyone else. This generates enormous excess revenues for universities, which are used to subsidize research, graduate programs, fat administrative salaries, money-losing sports programs, etc., etc.

No, my disagreement is with the prescription. The promise of higher education neither a "hoax" nor a "myth" (in fairness to Professors X, these words don't do justice to the more thoughtful tone of his piece). After all, without college, what are Ms. L and her struggling classmates supposed to do? Live out the rest of their lives hardly able to read and write? Find some menial job quietly providing service to the likes of Murray, Bennett, and Wolfe, who enjoy three PhDs and a J.D. between them? Everyone in this story is getting screwed, including Professor X. (Who apparently isn't comforted by being the world's greatest telepath. When failing students, that probably makes things worse.)

This is a common problem in education, both K-12 and higher, wherein we take the students with the greatest educational needs, give them the fewest resources and the worst education, and then call their failure inevitable. Here are some alternative suggestions:

How about not shunting the Ms. L's of the world into, in Prof. X's words, the "colleges of last resort" ? He talks of "the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students." How about that not being the nature of his job? He says "the rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy." How about cleaning them? How about not using adult education as a profit center, and instead investing that money in better adult education? Professor X says of his department chairpersons, "They don't mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don't bring them up." How about mentioning them? How about bringing them up?

In one of Professors X's two classes, English 102, "we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet." How about not reading poetry and Hamlet? I have nothing against Shakespeare, but Hamlet was written over 400 years ago and isn't easy to read. How about picking some high-quality prose from the last century, or even this one, which is available for free in abundant supply from publications like The Atlantic, and use that to teach the course?

Professor X is right to call attention to his class. For at least the past half century, we, as a nation, having been trying to implement mass higher education on the cheap. As more and more students go to college--because they need college, because in the information age, access to opportunity is dramatically curtailed without the knowledge and skills it provides--we've put lower-income students, first-generation students, disadvantaged students, working students, immigrant students, minority students, older students, disabled students, students from often dismal high schools, in the colleges of last resort. In the dirty classrooms, with the underpaid professors, teaching the wrong curriculum. And when they fail, we say, hey, we gave you a chance at a college. If we say anything at all.

How about we do something else?