Great Article on the Real Value of College (and stop thinking of a business model)

Hunter Rawlings, College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. What truly makes an education valuable: the effort the student puts into it.

Very well said critique of the college "business" model and the entitlement of students to easy grades.

The Corporatization of Higher Education

No, I have not disappeared from the blog scene, although I see that my last post was probably six months ago. Things come up, other projects get in the way of writing on the blogosphere; administrative demands attention, etc.  Right now I'm doing training to be qualified to offer a hybrid course.  Even though I've been teaching at a distance and online for a lot of years now, and even though I taught with the inter-college video system years ago, etc, I still need training. It's one of the features of corporate. bureaucratic education run afire, there is absolutely no trust on the part of the administration re the abilities/capabilities of the professors. Got to submit some paperwork to prove that you know how to do this or that.

We are now drowning in paperwork, committees, meetings, credentialing, testing, student learning outcomes.  It's just a much different environment than it was twenty or thirty years ago.

Faculty v. Staff in the online world

We've run distance education for decades now, and we've been online for at least a decade, and I've been involved in online ed for a lot of years now.  First, in the last five years we have dramatically expanded our distance enrollment options.  There are many factors that explain that focus from the administration to increase online enrollment:  limited classroom supply; perceived in-expense, need to find more enrollment, etc. 

So we've added a lot of courses and a lot of instructors (many of whom are, quite frankly, not suited to teaching online).  That has lead to a huge growth of staff to make it all work.  Let's just say that maybe we've gone from 12 support staff to 80, and everything has become bureaucratized with staff.  That, of course, means a lot more staff expense, which, means, in turn, that we need a lot more enrollment to support the staff and still grow, and to get more enrollment, we need to offer more courses, but to offer more courses, we need to have more staff.  It is very Kafkaesque--and if you walked through the sea of cubicles where most of our staff are now lodged, you would feel as if you were walking through one of Kafka's settings.

Anyway, the title of the post is fac. v. staff.  What has happened with the great increase in staff, is that almost everything about the online teaching process is now controlled by staff decision-making, and there is almost nothing in the last year or so that has been done with faculty input.  And because staff likes to have uniformity, my impression is that courses slowly begin to resemble one another.  Now someone is going to object to that, but I'm talking impressions here.  Don't all BB courses really resemble one another?