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\nHigher education is a scam. Administrators run universities for profit and care little for standards. Students don\u2019t learn anything, don\u2019t get good jobs and end up in debt poverty. Welcome to the world of the edusceptic, where we, my fellow academics, are the rip-off merchants of the age.<\/p>\n
A slew of books, blogs, newspaper articles and documentaries in recent years have questioned the value of higher education in the US and the UK. These criticisms have largely been ignored by the academy, but, like the Eurosceptics, this vocal (although disparate) group of critics has started making a serious impact \u2013 in the UK in particular.<\/p>\n
Even the prime minister has got in on the act. Announcing a review of higher education funding at the Conservative Party conference last month, Theresa May noted that students in England \u201ctake on a huge amount of debt\u2026and if we are honest, some don\u2019t know what they get\u2026in return\u201d. And since the summer, former Labour education minister Lord Adonis has been bashing universities not just for overpaying their vice-chancellors but also for (allegedly) giving academics\u00a0long holidays<\/a>\u00a0and for running a\u00a0\u201ccartel\u201d<\/a>\u00a0on tuition fees. Meanwhile, in his inaugural\u00a0newspaper column<\/a>, published in August, May\u2019s former chief adviser, Nick Timothy, called English higher education a \u201cgravy train\u201d and a \u201cpointless Ponzi scheme\u201d that is \u201cblighting young people\u2019s futures\u201d. His outburst earned him a front-page headline.<\/p>\n Timothy is by no means the first to suggest that academics are small-time (or even big-time) Bernie Madoffs. The Ponzi scheme jibe hit home to me personally when I was at a recent conference for journalism educators. My former tutor, Jenny McKay, was being honoured for all her great work in higher education (stretching back to\u2026well, a good while anyway). I had paid for my postgraduate course with a bank loan, and I couldn\u2019t help but ask myself whether I, as a lecturer, was now making up my losses in this scam by suckering in the young and naive.<\/p>\n One of the more elegant, personal and poignant criticisms of higher education in the US comes from the self-styled \u201cProfessor X\u201d. He (we presume he is male \u2013 although it might just be a ruse to shake us off the scent) is a part-time professor at unspecified private and community colleges in the country\u2019s north\u2011east. In an essay in\u00a0The Atlantic<\/i>\u00a0magazine \u2013 later developed into a 2011 book called\u00a0In\u00a0the Basement of the Ivory Tower<\/a><\/em>\u00a0\u2013 he tells the tale of a civil servant who bought a house beyond his means and turned to teaching in the evening to make up the financial difference.<\/p>\n Dispirited, disappointed, but at least humoured by what he encounters, he paints a Hogarthian portrait of struggling and uninterested students embarking on an education that relates little to their difficult and often impoverished lives. As a writing instructor, he is full of the joys of reading and writing, but is frustrated that his students are simply not ready for higher education.<\/p>\n What is best about\u00a0In the Basement<\/i>\u00a0is that its author is genuinely nuanced. He loves his subject, and he loves teaching; he just finds it hard to pass students who read so little and who haven\u2019t mastered the basics of grammar and spelling. The final pleasure for instructors \u2013 of seeing their students grasp what they have been taught and put it into practice \u2013 is too often denied to them, Professor X reports.<\/p>\n Some of this rings true to me, from my emotionally scarring years teaching in UK further education. In that sector, there was a similar focus on retention and on dispensing paper grades irrespective of actual learning. And that combined with the lowly status of lecturers to generate abject cynicism among teaching staff.<\/p>\n Perhaps standards have since improved, but, less than a decade ago, external scrutiny of BTEC coursework was negligible \u2013 and for many, if not most, of these professional qualifications, coursework was all there is in terms of assessment. Dozens of students each produced 18 portfolios (one per module) over the course of two years, yet fewer than 10 of those needed to be put forward for external examination \u2013 and even those were chosen in advance. The examiner would not speak to the students or ask to see any other work. It was simply taken on trust that the teacher would put forward work that reflected the students\u2019 true knowledge of the subject. But of course, if you have a college principal waiting in his office to fire you, demote you or banish you to some godforsaken corner of the campus, no tutor in their right mind is going to let all their students get anything less than straight distinctions.<\/p>\n This is the point that the self-styled \u201cProfessor Doom\u201d presses home again and again in his 2013 book,\u00a0Why Johnny Can\u2019t Read, Write, or Do \u2019Rithmetic Even with a College Degree: An Account of the Fraud of Higher Education<\/i>, and his blog,\u00a0Confessions of a College Professor<\/a>. Along with issues of free speech and the encroaching power of \u201cadministrators\u201d in the US, Doom is despondent about grade inflation. The Louisiana instructor in mathematics sees a conspiratorial collusion between colleges and the government to feed a system with debt that ultimately impoverishes many of the students who take it on while leaving them with a valueless degree. In the professor\u2019s mind, this is a classic bait-and-switch. After promising an education that will more than pay for itself, the colleges substitute for genuine teaching a curriculum and assessment process that can easily be passed \u2013 resulting in low learning and no increase in saleable skills.<\/p>\n In\u00a0Why Johnny Can\u2019t Read\u2026<\/i>, Doom pinpoints the root of the problem: \u201cYou really do have to push a little to move people ahead, and some will push back\u2026If an administrator sees nobody pushing back, that should raise questions, at least if administrative goals were about education, instead of retention. An educator that is loved by all his students and never challenges them is as likely to educate students as a gentle drill instructor is to take raw recruits and turn them into elite soldiers without challenging them.\u201d<\/p>\n The edusceptics\u2019 bible is 2010\u2019s much-cited study of undergraduate learning by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa,\u00a0Academically Adrift<\/a><\/em>. The essence of the book\u2019s argument is that almost half of US higher education students do not improve their critical thinking or writing skills after two years of study. Arum, now dean of the School of Education at the\u00a0University of California, Irvine, is emphatic that it is a misreading of the book to use it to question whether higher education is worthwhile. \u201cHigher education degrees are extraordinarily valuable in terms of improving a wide variety of individual life course outcomes, including labour market outcomes, marriage market outcomes and health outcomes,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWe should encourage more students to go to college, but we also need to encourage colleges to do a better job of intentionally designing programmes to improve student learning.\u201d<\/p>\n Still,\u00a0Academically Adrift<\/i>\u00a0is frequently presented as absolute proof that there is something rotten in the state of higher education.<\/p>\n Other books in the edusceptic genre typically bear much more apocalyptic titles. A case in point is\u00a0Emory University\u00a0English professor Mark Bauerlein\u2019s 2009 polemic\u00a0The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don\u2019t Trust Anyone under 30)<\/i>, which basically amounts to a list of study after study showing that young people don\u2019t read much.\u00a0Fail\u00a0U: The False Promise of Higher Education<\/i>, published last year, also burns with indignation at the whole US system, and is just the latest in a series of books from conservative political commentator Charles J. Sykes that take a bite out of academia. Previous offerings include\u00a0ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education<\/i>\u00a0(1988) and\u00a0The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education<\/i>(1990). With such bile being poured out, one wonders if university leaders should not perhaps hire bodyguards.<\/p>\n The British, too, have their edusceptics. In 2013, Christopher Giles, then still a student at the University of Bristol,\u00a0wrote a piece<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0The\u00a0Daily Telegraph<\/i>\u00a0advising those who had just received their A-level results that \u201cif you aren\u2019t going to a Russell Group university or otherwise respected institution, forget about it altogether. Life is about making the right investments and university is pretty big one. It has to be worth every penny.\u201d In the same article, he claims that \u201cthe stigma attached to having a weak degree could be worse than not having one at all\u201d.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, the reaction was fierce. One\u00a0University of Sunderland<\/a>\u00a0graduate wrote in the online comments: \u201cI can safely say you are sorely mistaken. Since graduating last year with a 2:1, I have worked for some of the most prestigious fashion brands in the world, including Chanel. I am now going on to study my master\u2019s degree at the\u00a0University of St Andrews. The majority of those who were on my course are also now doing incredibly well.\u201d<\/p>\n A strong, personal rebuttal, but newspapers continue to print sweeping criticisms of the entire university system. In July, in the wake of the Labour Party\u2019s popular general election campaign pledge to abolish English tuition fees,\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0columnist Melanie Phillips pre-empted Timothy\u2019s charge by also\u00a0claiming that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe whole of higher education has become one giant Ponzi scheme\u2026Young people have been led up the garden path and are then having to pay through the nose for the privilege\u201d.<\/p>\n Maybe such columns are simply a sign of a broader scepticism about higher education that has been running through UK journalism (which never used to be a graduate profession) for many years. In 2011, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of top-selling tabloid\u00a0The Sun<\/i>, told\u00a0XCity<\/i>\u00a0, a student magazine at\u00a0City, University of London, that journalism university courses were a waste of time and money (the remarks were deemed important enough to be reprinted in\u00a0The Independent<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can learn in three years studying media at university that you can\u2019t learn in just one month on a local paper,\u201d MacKenzie asserted. \u201cUniversity may be enjoyable: you make friends, drink a lot and occasionally turn up to lectures, but you don\u2019t need any of those things to be a journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n