A lot is happening in higher ed these days, and since my life is deeply enmeshed in higher ed stuff, I have Thoughts.
In an nutshell: the general public no longer thinks it's a good idea to spend most of your entire adult life paying for a degree from a mediocre school. As a result, the vast majority of schools are having money troubles and some have decided to eliminate subjects like English and/or university departments entirely. And the government has decided now would be a good time to make it more expensive to get doctoral degrees.
All the academics in my twitter feed seem to think this is a coordinated assault on higher education. But...doesn't it seem obvious that the cost of college is insanely high? And shouldn't students who are going heavily into debt major in something with clearly transferable job skills? Who could argue with a straight face that there aren't enough doctoral students in the world? Who among us disagrees that most PhDs (myself included) may have been better off doing something else with their time? And do we really think that all those entry-level jobs that require a 4-year degree couldn't be done by a high school graduate?
All the academics in my twitter feed seem to think this is a coordinated assault on higher education. But...doesn't it seem obvious that the cost of college is insanely high? And shouldn't students who are going heavily into debt major in something with clearly transferable job skills? Who could argue with a straight face that there aren't enough doctoral students in the world? Who among us disagrees that most PhDs (myself included) may have been better off doing something else with their time? And do we really think that all those entry-level jobs that require a 4-year degree couldn't be done by a high school graduate?
So am I crazy or are all the people in my twitter feed? My hunch: the tweeters (twitterers?) are actually just worried about their jobs. School and department closures mean fewer jobs for new PhDs. No grad students means professors will be deprived the pleasure of replicating themselves through their students. An army of administrators will no longer be available to fill out all that pesky paperwork. Academic jobs are disappearing, the means of (academic) production are changing, and many of us may need to re-train when our positions are eliminated. Who knew that factory workers and academics could have so much in common?!
And the cherry on top: Ben Sasse saying that the humanities, hard sciences, and sports are all "greater than" the social sciences. Reader, I laughed! (Social scientists, of course, are pissed.) Now what I really want to do is find a way to make Sasse's tweets and the responses into a modern version of the Protagoras (a version where Socrates is too busy with his day job at Google to chat with the sophists). Obviously, the conclusion of the dialogue will be that sports management is in fact the highest form of knowledge.
3 comments:
I agree! With you, and that the Tweeters are overreacting. About the PhD tuition tax, I think that 1) obviously the universities and not the students will shoulder it, either by increasing stipends or lowering grad tuition, and 2) once it ends up costing somebody something, that will reduce the number of people admitted to PhD programs, which would be good for the job market in pretty much every discipline. This is actually what people have been requesting for a long time (among them, many of those complaining about the tax bill). They just assumed that grad schools would somehow self-police, but that obviously poses a collective action problem. Now the government threatens to police them to the same effect and it's APOCALYPSE.
I am worried about my job too, but not to the point that I wouldn't admit that there are many, many perverse incentives and market distortions currently at work in higher ed.
We are in agreement! I too think the grad tax won't end up costing any grad students money, though it may require some university accounting departments to think creatively. I do find it interesting that people can be so indignant about the cost of getting a graduate degree for free. I mean, I obviously get it, but to outsiders the hysteria must seem very strange.
Well it does seem to be a bill designed to exacerbate present polarization, so riling up regular people against PhD students and vice versa follows this logic.
I think the provision about taxing endowment returns over a certain amount per student (at least that's the last iteration I came across?) will also push wealthy schools to increase stipends, since that could lower their tax liability (again, maybe, the details aren't clear to me). At the same time, schools that are already barely able to fund graduate students will be squeezed and likely forced to significantly contract their PhD programs. Typically, these are also grad programs that are low-ranked and don't place students, so that contraction might also be a good thing, in addition to smaller cohorts at the top schools.
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