What is the Integrity of America's Colleges?

If you are considering going to college to increase your income, you may want to carefully reconsider your options in reality. It used to be the case that college graduates had a shot at making some serious money when they graduated, being able to secure a 'lucrative position' at a educational facility or business. Unfortunately, the people going to college to try to gain those advantages nowadays are not getting the same deal.

For the most part, we need to consider the institutions that we are dealing with. These institutions are in the business of making money and they are also in the business of reducing their liabilities. That is what they do.

To make claims that you will be making a better life for yourself as a college graduate now is a matter of internalizing the educational value of what you have paid for. In other words, the sales pitch has gone from getting a better life through significant developments in employability to notions of betterment through the education value, as this is not involved with employability factors, employability factors beyond how to write a resume are not pursued.

Most colleges have reduced their placement offices to nonexistence. This move by the colleges essentially mirrors their reality. They are turning out more college graduates than employment positions can handle. As a result more and more college graduates find themselves not working in the field in which they trained. They find themselves working for fast food restaurants, as waiters and waitresses and bussing people. This is definitely not the goal the student had in mind when they entered the world of collegiate education. These unfortunate students may have been better off saving their money and working that job in the first place. Sure, they may be able to secure employment in the field in which they were trained either immediately or a decade from now, but the probability is that those individuals will not make a living in their field of study. They will have to do that as a hobby to the real job that they hold (The real job not being in education.). That also means that one should put off the educational endeavor until such time as the fast food job could afford to fund such activity. This is highly unlikely, so do we say goodbye to the educational process at that point?

Basically, if the college you are attending is one which does not assist you in securing employment in the field that you have trained in, then you may want to tell them that you are considering going somewhere where the employment outlook is better. Maybe that would spur the college on to try to do something about the problem that they themselves are causing. The devaluation of the educational process through the inability of the system to value the number of graduates that are being shoved into the market.

I would hate to see the amounts of school loans which are gong unpaid, placed in default, or put on income contingent repayment. The government has to be losing money in tidal amounts given the economy and the trends in employment. Perhaps they are doing this honorable notion of funding in an attempt to try to gain a smarter cultural society in America. That is noble. Can we afford to go bankrupt as a nation in order to pursue these high ideals? Probably not. Given the statement that I recently heard that Michigan was going to have to shut down its government due to costs and as a result will be reducing funding going to education, this high ideal stuff may not be what it is cracked up to be. Personally, I say let the government fail. It is not like they are doing a lot to stop fuel price gouging or increase education in any real way (Instead proposing unrealistic, uneducated goals as the goal of education at the same time as cutting the schools' funding.)

I will tell you that I have worked for the collegiate education system in Michigan for the last five years. That's right, as a part-timer. Five years is enough for me to understand that this is not a 'lucrative career' but rather that is employment situation is substandard and even counterproductive to the entire educational process. There are increasingly fewer full-time positions available at all throughout the nation, as well as in all of the 11 regional centers I have been working at except for administration positions. The political liaison and administrative positions seem to be on a steady climb. This is a political septic tank in my opinion. It is unfortunate that politics and brown-nosing are more apt to gain reasonable employment than the acquisition of actual skills.

There are more and more people in those high paying administrative and office jobs that have almost no education outside of business training, have inadequate degrees for the positions that they hold and are the holders of power over people much more knowledgeable in what education means than the administration ever will. As a result, the business trade has pretty much taken over the collegiate system with little more than political ties and business principles to sustain the facilities in which they are employed. Hence, the likely failure of today's collegiate system to increase anything but their own profit margin and administrative salaries.

This looks a lot like the government systems which keep cutting services to the people but then votes in their own executive benefits packages and salary increases which are far from being 'representative' of the people they serve. The teachers, instructors, and even students being somewhat stymied by the fact that those in power are not of the same ilk.

It is hard to try to find the will to make sacrifices in order to make the system work at all when the people who are in charge are making themselves rich off of the sacrifice of those who provide the crux of the business they are in: teaching and education. It is probably necessary that the government come into the picture just as they had done for the K-12 educational system to try to put an end to this breed of exploitation. I would hate to see that be the case but one cannot beg from the slave master. One must put that person out of the business in order to save the system itself.

To get to the matter at hand, when you do take college courses ask the instructor if they are a full-timer or part-timer. Then ask what they make for a salary. You may be really surprised to find that the part-timer is not making the poverty level of income. They are making less than that. Besides that, they do not merit unemployment insurance, or any other benefit really. The colleges themselves seem to be trying to justify the low wage per year by saying that it is a high wage per hour, but then they seem to want a lot of labor that is not on the books or on the clock. To add insult to injury, the contracts for the full-time faculty make it necessary for the part-time instructor to work at several different facilities on opposite sides of the State. Talk about railroading someone into the poor house.

It is not a very smart thing for the education system of America to rely on part-time labor in the front ranks. This shows the people going to college that the system does not work very well. I had been confronted time and time again by students who were making more than I was for a wage. These same students then ask me "What am I doing here if I am not going to be making any more than I am now. I could be reading about this stuff at home in books and accessing websites for information. I cannot afford to do this for the heck of it."

They do not see the wisdom of administrative action with the formulation of the teaching faculty in mind. Neither do I.

It is also so amazing how much weight the administration gives to psychologists as well. The administration seems to look right past the fact that the veritable idiot who spouts that "Teachers should be doing their job for the love of it" was himself making in excess of $75,000.00 per year when he said that. Oh yeah, he is doing it for the love. Love of money. Maybe even love of oneself in the face of the thousands groveling for pennies.

Something needs to be done before the system crashes and we end up with some business minded imbecile in an administrative office deciding that he can also do the college service by teaching biology instead of hiring expensive professionals to do that job. If you want quality philosophers, biologists, geologists and so on, then pay them a quality wage. In a capitalist society, what do you think the compensation would be? Kudos?

To put this in a way that business minded imbeciles can understand. Do you put the worst compensated product plan up front? No. That would be a quick way to sell the idea to the public that you only want your profit margin. Do you underpay and overwork your staff? No. That would give the potential clients the notion that if the business can treat their own people that way, how are they going to treat the client (yet just another person) once the business has secured their payment from that client? Probably the same way that today's colleges and university administrators treat their students, graduates and faculty. We appear to be all on our own.

So if you are considering a college degree you may want to figure out if it is a hobby that you want, if the degree is one which will allow you to escape reliance on coporate minded ideologies which will have us all living in the poor house, or if the degree is worth the price that the colleges have placed on its acquisition.

I am sure that some will complain that such statements are not good for the nation's educational system, as the current system is better than the collapse of the same system through spreading the word that the degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on. I would have to argue that if the degrees are worth something then they are worth the independence of the individuals securing such degrees. If the colleges want to continue being 'diploma mills' then the administrators need to lobby for the increase of the employability of those that have their degree. To not do so is to jeopardize the very value of the service that the colleges are trying to sell.

In short, just don't train people, or give them all kinds of useless classes just to state that you rounded off their education, or change their programs frequently to merit increases in tuition revenue from the same students that you currently have. Put those people to work by securing them positions based on the qualifications that you have granted them. If students do not merit such consideration, then the administration should get out of the education business completely before the would be students figure it all out and you are all out of a job.