{"id":48776,"date":"2019-07-24T02:28:58","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T09:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=48776"},"modified":"2019-07-24T02:28:58","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T09:28:58","slug":"the-college-bookpocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-college-bookpocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"The College Bookpocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

One of the few things every school must have is a library, it’s literally written into the accreditation rules. A century ago this made sense as books were the primary means of retrieving and storing knowledge. If you\u2019re reading this, then you know books have taken a back seat to the internet, aka \u201cthe font of all human knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our schools which have been around a century or more have huge libraries, so they can be excused for having so much \u201cwasted\u201d space on a bunch of old tomes, but it\u2019s interesting to watch these schools struggle to come to grips with modern reality:<\/p>\n

The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The author of the above piece is the \u201cVice Provost for Information Collaboration.\u201d I\u2019ve mentioned many times the real issue in higher education expense is the proliferation of administrative positions, as evidenced by the ever more splendiferous titles they have. A good rule of thumb for fixing higher ed is simply to eliminate the positions with titles twice as long as the name of the holder. The holder in this case was a scholar though he long ago abandoned such pursuits in exchange for the kind of money most Americans could only dream about making.<\/p>\n

Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale\u2019s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wow. That\u2019s a huge drop in use\u2026the gentle reader can be certain there hasn\u2019t been a drop in librarian positions, otherwise there wouldn\u2019t be a need for a position titled \u201cVice Provost for Information Collaboration,\u201d i.e., \u201clibrarian.\u201d We really should ask why the people running our schools get paid salaries to rival CEOs of fabulously successful corporations, yet run things so inefficiently.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the article cites around a 75% drop in book use by students over the last 20 years. While the internet is cited for the drop, I maintain there are other factors, and I\u2019m not simply talking about how students aren\u2019t assigned nearly as much work as a score of years ago.<\/p>\n

What kind of drops are we seeing in other populations on campus? Grad student use is down 61%, and faculty use is down 46%. Sadly, such statistics in a vacuum are hard to interpret\u2014if there\u2019s been a huge increase in faculty or grad students (there hasn\u2019t for faculty to be sure), I can\u2019t make a fair comparison but let\u2019s just assume all these sub-populations have been stable\u2026do so and we again have evidence that many students are buying their papers, more so than faculty or grad students, anyway.<\/p>\n

Of course, admin aren\u2019t paid to think about such things, so let\u2019s hear the musings of the Vice Provost for Information Collaboration:<\/p>\n

At the same time that books lie increasingly dormant, library spaces themselves remain vibrant\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, he makes sure his job is secure\u2026making sure to emphasize the library is valuable even if the books aren\u2019t. That\u2019s some good information collaboration there!<\/p>\n

Our research library\u2026has also seen a surge in group work.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, the drop in use per student is probably much larger. It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve mentioned the huge emphasis of \u201cgroup work\u201d on campus, but this is just another way education is debased. We all know that \u201cgroup project\u201d just means some students in the group do all the work while one or more students do nothing and leech off the work of the diligent students\u2026because we\u2019ve all been there. But group projects are a staple of college courses now, those courses which still dare to assign work, anyway.<\/p>\n

Statistics show that today\u2019s undergraduates have read fewer books before they arrive on campus than in prior decades, and just placing students in an environment with more books is unlikely to turn that around.<\/em><\/p>\n

The average college freshman reads at the 7th grade level, so I accept those referenced statistics.<\/p>\n

The sharp decrease in the circulation of books also obviously coincides with the Great Recession and with the steady decline of humanities majors, as students have shifted from literature, philosophy, and history to STEM disciplines\u2014from fields centered on the book to fields that emphasize the article.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ok, I\u2019m probably reading too much in the statistics above, but this whole bemoaning of the humanities is smoke. Our student loan scam has caused tuition to inflate so that only a fool would invest tons of money into a humanities degree of little value (the schools still get plenty of fools, however). If anyone in higher ed is serious about increasing humanities majors then there\u2019d be real effort to lower tuition. Perhaps by reducing excessive administrative positions? What would the Vice Provost of Information Collaboration say?<\/p>\n

Do I hear crickets?<\/p>\n

(I’m posting because Monday I get to have the first of two (or three, or four…) complicated lung surgeries; as per all cancer treatments, it’ll be painful, involve months of misery, and the more it fails the more money modern medicine makes.)<\/p>\n

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the few things every school must have is a library, it’s literally written into the accreditation rules. A century ago this made sense as books were the primary means of retrieving and storing knowledge. If you\u2019re reading this, then you know books have taken a back seat to the internet, aka \u201cthe font […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":48777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[11954],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-48776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-libraries"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe College Bookpocalypse - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-college-bookpocalypse\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The College Bookpocalypse - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the few things every school must have is a library, it’s literally written into the accreditation rules. 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