Back to the Future: DIYU and other Thatcherisms
by zunguzungu
In her dystopic science fiction novel masquerading as progressive reform pamphlet — DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education — Anya Kamenetz argues that
“The promise of free or marginal-cost open-source content, techno-hybridization, unbundling of educational functions, and learner-centered educational experiences and paths is too powerful to ignore.”
And with a Thatcherian ownership of the future — as you can read in this excerpt — she grandly pronounces that “[t]hese changes are inevitable,” that “I have visited the university of the future,” and that “[h]ere’s what I know for sure.”
We’ve come to be very familiar with the language of neoliberal techno-reform.[1] But my first reaction to this type of claim is always the same particular kind of skepticism: when anyone tells you with certainty what the future looks like, remember how unsuccessful everyone always is in predicting the future, how the only people who tend to be right are people — like Margaret Thatcher — who actually have the power to render their visions into reality, and how categorically wrong the whole boom-fueled globalization propaganda cult of the late 90’s turned out to be.[2] Which is why, for example, we should eventually listen much more closely to what university administrators, boards of trustees, and legislators are saying about the future of education than what a technophilic staff writer for Fast Company wants to tell us about the inevitable future. They’re the ones driving the change; she’s just the one spinning pretty pictures of it.
Which is why my second reaction is to note that nowhere in her conception of the future is there a clear sense of the past. Which is, again, always the problem with these sorts of people: with their eyes uplifted to the glorious post-Soviet future, they forget to watch out for the latest version of the Czar. And so, in the case of Kamenetz in particular, it’s particularly telling that while she has tons to say about how the future will solve the problems of the present — which she’s right to flag as limited access to and spiraling costs of education — she seems to have no sense of how we got to where we are.
Here, for example, is where I am, in the University of California, where undergraduate student fees (adjusted for inflation) have risen dramatically since 1965:
That’s a huge jump; in 2008 dollars, Californian students are paying over four times today what they did in 1965. Yet why is that student fees are rising so fast? This really is the elephant in the room: her entire analysis is premised on the notion that fees are rising because costs are rising, since cutting costs can only stem the bleeding if that’s where the blood is coming from. But it certainly isn’t at the UC. The amount the University is spending on each student, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping for years; to use the UC’s numbers,
“the state’s per-student spending for education at UC, adjusted for inflation and enrollment growth, has fallen nearly 40 percent since 1990 — from $15,860 in 1990 to $9,560 today in current, inflation-adjusted dollars.”
In other words, the university today pays 60% per student what it paid in 1990. Yet fees can rise at the same time as spending diminishes because state funding has, in the meantime, fallen off a cliff. Whereas California spent 8% of its general funds on the UC system in 1965, for example, it now pays 3.6%. We’re seeing a long term trend of disinvestment in higher education on the part of the state of California, and that massive shortfall in state funding leaves students the only people capable of picking up the slack, forcing them to pay for a massively larger proportion of the total costs. in 1967-8, for example, a Cal student paid 6% of the total whereas in 2008-9, they paid 31%:
In this graph in particular, you can see how — starting around 2000, long before the great recession — the state‘s total support flat-lined, right when student fees spiked through the roof:
I suspect there’s a connection, you know? But Kamenetz doesn’t talk much about where state budget shortfalls are coming from. If you look at the sketch she opens with in her article for The American Prospect, for example, this is how she narrates the transformation in higher ed:
For most of the thousand years or so since it was invented, a university education was thought to be suited for only a tiny group — a ruling class or a subculture of scholars. Today, nine out of 10 American high school seniors say they want to go to college…Sending your kids to college is now part of the American dream, just like homeownership. And like homeownership, it’s something for which we have been willing to go deeply into hock.
And nothing is wrong in this sketch; education has both traditionally represented a class privilege because it was restricted to elite classes — male WASPs in the US — and it was restricted to the elite classes because it opened the door to higher incomes and greater prestige. And though this situation has changed in substantial ways in the years since WWII, it is still simply a fact that a person without a college degree is shut out from a variety of opportunities; a degree is nothing like the guarantee of middle class stability that it once was, but those nine out of ten high school seniors want a college education because they understand the score.
Still, what Kamenetz is flagrantly not describing is the thing which did so much to make economic mobility a possibility (and which is now almost gone), the post-war project on the part of American liberals to bring higher education into reach of whoever was academically eligible for it. This has been a desperately unfinished project, to be sure, but it’s one whose outlines are still clear many years later, and it’s the thing we’re missing right now.
Take California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, drafted in 1960 to provide a coherent blueprint for building what has since become this country’s flagship public institution. As the Public Policy Institute for California put it in an illuminating study, the architects of the Master Plan had clear goals for expanding California’s college educated work force:
When the Master Plan was established in 1960, only 11 percent of working-age adults in California had a college degree. The Master Plan’s goals of access, affordability, and quality allowed for the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates to be admitted to a University of California campus and the top 33.3 percent of high school graduates to be admitted to a California State University campus. The Master Plan thereby both anticipated and provided for a large increase in college enrollment and the awarding of college degrees in California. It was understood that the state needed to provide funding to realize the enrollment increases, and until the past decade or two, the state was, for the most part, willing and able to do so.
I emphasize that last sentence because it really is the crucial point here; the people who wrote the Master Plan simply took it for granted that educating the state’s citizens was the cost of being a first world nation, and they were willing to pay the cost to do so. They took the long view on their investment in California’s students, a long view that has been pretty well born out: a state filled with well educated workers will benefit at a broad social level as those educated workers go into the economy and create value. That’s not really controversial.
Where liberals in the 1960’s part company with today’s neoliberal consensus, however, is the belief that government should pay for these things when students cannot. In the 1960’s, as the Legislative Analysts Office puts it, the Master Plan called
“for student fees to cover the operating costs of noninstructional services (such as laboratories, student activities, and athletics). Financial aid would be made available for students who could not afford these costs, and for all California residents direct instructional costs (such as faculty salaries) would be paid by the state. Ancillary services (such as parking and dormitories) would be self–supporting.”
In plain English, the upshot was that while student paid enough in fees to cover “noninstructional services,” the state was on the hook for things like, you know, teaching, since it’s manifestly the case that not all students can afford such things. This was deemed to be a good investment, and it has been.
Today, on the other hand, the model pretty clearly understands students as subsidized customers, and as the subsidies drop, the product moves out of reach. Instead of simply paying for “non-instructional services,” students are expected to make up, out of their own pocket, whatever shortfall there is between the University’s budget and the state’s funding. Instead of an investment in the future, in other words, students have now become the customers. And instead of committing to provide an education to everyone who is academically eligible, “public” universities are becoming public in name only, behaving more and more like publicly subsidized corporations. But this changes the entire fiscal structure — and decision making logic — of a university like the UC; instead of educating citizens for the public good, universities make decisions based on where the money is to be found.
And so we have online classes, a development which only an administrator — or a student who wants the accreditation and doesn’t care about the education — could love. And which is why, by the way, you see schools like the UC taking the lead on online education; universities with endowments and economic stability aren’t so desperately insolvent that they’ll jump into the pool before they know whether there’s any water. And because the UC is not only at the mercy of Sacramento but is actually run by the governor’s appointees, they’re going to be the quickest to strip mine what’s left in the system, to “do more with less” by finding ways to make people keep paying for inferior product. But at most, the expansion of online education will simply allow an upper crust public university like the UC to stem some of the bleeding; not only is the scale of the savings to be had much too small to make up the budget shortfalls from the state — which will continue to be made up by rising fees — normalizing online education will do less than nothing for the next tier down. An online course from Berkeley or UCLA, after all, at least has the name; an online course from Marshall University does not, and will just lose local students to the more prestigious schools.
[1] As Ed at ginandtacos puts it, “when free market enthusiasts attempt to sell an idea with the promise that it will “democratize” something – bringing broader access to a previously exclusive good, service, or market – two things are about to happen. A small group of people are going to get obscenely wealthy, and they are likely to do so as a direct result of a much larger and less exclusive group of people getting bent over and unceremoniously screwed.”
[2] Again, Ed puts it well, “This kind of bluster is par for the course for the magazine that spent the nineties promising us that the unregulated market would bring us to economic nirvana. Life was going to be one long technogasm laden with “innovation” and unfettered prosperity for all; we would all be wealthy once The Internets let every Tom, Dick, and Harry buy mutual funds.”
so it’s up to us to formulate an alternative eh.
ZZ, all these points are well taken, but I think there’s a deeper problem here than the allocation of funds or establishing of priorities in the UC system.
On the one hand, there’s the rhetoric that equates a four-year college education with the American dream, and indeed with civil rights. It’s the “engine of California’s economy,” for example. On the other, that same rhetoric is behind the commodification of higher education. If everyone deserves a college education, then there should be nothing wrong with putting our resources behind making it as widely available as possible — and online courses make the most sense in this respect.
The problem with all this, the contradiction at work, is that higher education is directly equated with a monetary value. What I see here isn’t a problem with priorities in the UC system, or with the master plan, or in Sacramento. What I see are the trickle-down effects of the forward march of capitalism. The reason Yudof so easily co-opts our rhetoric is because it’s the same rhetoric. We are fundamentally on the same side.
No doubt shit is bad right now for all undergrads, especially those in public universities. But I promise you don’t have to worry about access to higher education in the long term. There’s waaay too much money to be made. In the future — perhaps very, very near future — everyone will have access. Buy stock in the University of Phoenix now. The cost of a four-year degree will find a comfortable market value, and our children will be able to afford it. Right now, we’re going through a phase in which the old system — the university as cultural capital — is coming into conflict with a new system — the university as capital. I know you have a problem with people who think they can predict the future, but I have to say I’m pretty sure I know which one will prevail.
As I said, I’m ambivalent about all of this. But what I’m most worried about is the content of those four-year degrees of the future. I’m reminded of David Lurie’s fate in Coetzee’s Disgrace: from scholar of the English Romantics to lecturer in the department of communications. The humanities and other disciplines have no use value in the new system. That is to say, the culture of critical discourse that occupied a troubled and Janus-faced place at the heart of the old system.
* – scholar of the British Romantics. Cut and paste error. =)
I agree with all of this, but Seafan makes an important point. Many people have very different conceptions of what education is about. The technocrats see it as fundamentally about job training. It should be about moving people through as quickly as possible, telling them what they need to know so that they can do their job, and not much more. It’s a popular notion, and not just with university administrators. The “college educates citizens, not employers” train of thought is much less mainstream, and of course much less amenable in a market-based political/economic culture. I think there’s a clear, ethical defense of the university to be made, but it’s going to be hard to make in a society where the whole point of growing up is to learn how to make money for corporations.
hmmm. I start from a pretty firmly held belief that online courses simply are not the same as “real” courses, which makes the idea that taking an online course from Berkeley (taught by an adjunct who you never meet) seem more like a gross parody of universal education than its implementation. Especially since online courses are being positioned as cash cows for universities like the UC — whose reputation will enable them to charge accordingly — the amount of money they cost makes them precisely not the sort of thing that will allow everyone to have a university education. If we want to think of higher education as a civil right — my own inclination — we need to make it affordable, and monetizing the online landscape will do the opposite of that. Right now, after all, you can download free lectures from iTunes U (I’m currently listening to Vinai Lal’s British India course from UCLA), and that’s kind of an amazing thing. Systematizing and expanding that stuff will do a great deal to make the substance of education available for those who are self-motivated enough to take advantage of it. But for one thing, most people aren’t, and there are a lot of people who might want to learn more about British India and who might take a class from a real human being, but who are unlikely to benefit from freely available lectures on the internet. And for another thing, to the extent that online education becomes a commodity universities can sell, there will be structural disincentives against providing these sorts of things for free.
To Seafan’s larger point on the future, I agree that we’re in a particular moment of transition, but to that I’d make several thinking-out-loud thoughts
A: Higher ed has been in a state of radical flux for generations, and I would characterize the system which we live and work in now somewhat differently. For one thing, while cultural capital is part of it, I see the larger effect of an undergrad education as a multitude of different disciplinary socializations, after which students are left with a variety of very different social tools that they can do with as they please. After all, the cocktail party value of knowing Shakespeare or whatever is not at all the only thing one takes away from a class in English literature (a belief I’ve staked my career on), and when you expand your view to the vast array of things undergrads do, the sum of the experience is best characterized by that diversity: university students are forced to learn a variety of different roles and different professional and social forms of behavior, out of which they’ll eventually choose a particular set that works for them. Much of the use value of what it is that students do is, naturally, most applicable to vocational applications, but an awful lot of it isn’t.
B: I don’t think our neoliberal overlords really have a good sense of what it is that they want students to actually be learning either, nor are they well placed, in practice, to actually do it; the people with the most inclination to radically neoliberalize education, in practice, are also people most alienated from the culture of actual academics, such that I anticipate the conflict between admins and the people who have chosen to professionalize themselves within academia to only intensify (rather than our side getting swept away). They will always need us because, as intellectuals, we’re the only people willing to do the jobs they need us to do at the wages they’ll pay. Our wages are artificially subsidized by the satisfaction we get from doing intellectual labor, which means — I think — that universities will need to be substantially staffed by people whose priorities are fundamentally not market driven. Market-driven people would never work for these wages, while neoliberal hacks like Yudof are as tone-deaf to the cemetaries they govern for precisely this reason. I’m not all that optimistic about this kind of heighten-the-contradictions marxist argument, but I do think it’s an important element of the political landscape.
C: Instead of an epochal shift, then, I see us in a moment where the system is in crisis, and in which the corporate model is being rammed down people’s throats — both by admins and politicians and by propagandists like Kamenetz — but in which actually implementing those changes are going to be far more difficult than even they really understand. I expect things to get worse before they get better, of course, but even though a college education is still almost a *prerequisite* to a good job, it’s so far from being a *guarantee* of one that the “college trains employees” line will become more and more unconvincing the more successful the Yudofs of the world are in neoliberalizing the universities. Neoliberalizing institutions might empower capital, but it also reduces capital’s ability to discipline, a fact which has consequences that neoliberal types rarely understand. I’m not an optimist, again, just pretty convinced of the rightness of my own agnostic approach to the future, if that makes sense. Shit is complicated.
My point is that quibbling over the pedagogical effectiveness of online classes is completely beside the point when the ground beneath you is shifting. (On that score, though, I guarantee online education will only continue to improve and become more “real.”) While you and I share the belief that the true value of higher education isn’t reconcilable to use-value, the point is that few systemic forces are on our side. The more important perspective in this discussion isn’t us humanities grad students, but that of undergrads. Talking to my students, I know that the overwhelming majority of them think of their degree monetarily. The rhetoric of higher education as a civil right is complicit, though not entirely consistent, with the “privatization” of the university. That’s the essence of my point. The most sinister problem with privatization, then, is that it’s precisely not being shoved down our throats. It takes a certain choir, and a certain sermon to argue efficiently that it is (I’m in that choir, of course, and I’ve delivered that sermon, so I know). When we see fee hikes and the expansion of the UC online campus and the burgeoning of a managerial class, we see the writing on the wall. But when our students see fee hikes, they don’t think privatization. And even if they did, there’s absolutely no guarantee they’d be opposed to it. We can’t fault them for that.
I use the word “point” a lot.
Seafan,
What’s your point? No, actually, this is a conversation we’ve been having off and on for a while, but I’m starting to understand your position a bit better, though I’m going to think more about what you’re saying. Write up your manifesto as a post, if you want.
My first reaction, though, is that I simply don’t share your telos of online hegemony. I think online education will consolidate and develop the niche it has right now, which is a shittier alternative to “real” education. The more common it becomes in resource-stripping schools like Cal, the more the Ivy’s (and the many colleges and universities that *aren’t* completely falling apart) will work to establish the idea that while online education might be okay for *those* people, nothing can replace a Harvard education or whatever. In other words, the more common online education becomes, the more a backlash against it will develop by the many schools who have an interest in the status quo. Such a state of affairs will be massively tiered, of course, but they’ll be right: if you can only get a classroom education at an Ivy, Harvard will continue to be the gold standard. There just won’t be, as there has been for our students at Cal, a public option that offers something equivalent at the same price.
ZZ, yes, maybe Ivies will continue to be the gold standard. But the gold standard for what? And what will that translate to in the future when we talk about K-16 education? That’s basically my… point.
But see, right now the whole “online education will save us!” line can only work to the extent that people believe an online education is as good or better as a nonline education. In the glorious future, I predict the falsity of that belief will be pretty manifest; the Anya Kamenetz hot air balloon will burst. In which case, the availability of online education will, in its shittiness, do little or nothing to mitigate the growlingly obvious problem in the “real” classrooms. Not that we’ll necessarily have a solution; I just don’t think online education hege-topia is in the cards, I think the contradictions will continue to heighten, etc.
Hmm… Let’s talk about this on Skype.
This is an excellent post. It really documents how public education has been gutted since the Reagan revolution, and makes a strong case for returning to the mindset that public education is a public service that should be paid for with public dollars. Even as an out-of-stater, it pains me to see what’s happened to the Master Plan.
We’re definitely at odds over how to interpret DIY U, though. I see this technological shift as part of the quest to bring education to everyone who can benefit from it. You see it as a front for those who would privatize public education, thereby enriching themselves while impoverishing the public.
Certainly there are those who have that goal. I don’t think they would consciously frame it in those terms. No, they’ll believe they’re helping people, by wresting education away from inefficient educational bureaucracies and subjecting them to the glorious efficiencies of the free market. They’ll see the wealth flowing into their pockets as a trifling payment for the good they’ve done.
But I don’t think that privatizing education will be as easy a task as they expect. Privatizing accreditation, perhaps. But the building blocks of education are themselves free. Anyone with the right knowledge can write an open textbook, or license a lecture under a Creative Commons license, and those who would charge for access to the content will have to compete with those resources forever. The same thing can be done for online games that teach concepts, for lists of resources that can guide students through subjects, for software that quizzes students to assess their mastery of concepts, etc.
It would be my hope that some government somewhere will see the light and devote public dollars to developing top-notch open education content and curricula. Once one does, that material will be available worldwide, for free, forever.
I see the open education movement as liberating for both students and teachers. Teachers will be freed from the drudgery of giving canned lectures and preparing much of their own course material, freeing them to do more valuable things, like answering individual questions and performing the sort of assessments that computers can’t. Students will have more freedom to proceed at their own pace, to receive more effective instruction*, and to integrate learning into their broader life, rather than trying to conform to the young, full-time student model that most institutions are geared toward. I also believe that the end result will be dramatically cheaper, easing the financial burdens on both the students and the state.
However, even if online education is noticeably inferior to what education offers today, we’ve happily traded quality for accessibility before. A book can be less illuminating than a direct conversation with the author. A quick blog post might not capture an author’s thoughts as well as a book chapter might have. MP3s lack the warmth of vinyl, or the social contact of attending a concert. Cell phones sound worse than land lines, and Skype sounds worse than either.
In every case, the power of ubiquity or convenience overwhelmed any disadvantage. So in my mind, the process of opening education seems inevitable. My hope is that the institutions that value education as a public service will take the lead, rather than the for-profits, and that education continues to be recognized as a vital public good. Unfortunately, it is the for-profits (and non-profits outside the formal education system) who seem to have the advantage right now, because they don’t have any prior investments in the traditional model.
Thus endeth the spiel.
* Why? Several reasons. The lectures they’ll be watching will be top-notch, or at least far better than average. They won’t be slaves to the spatiotemporal limitations of a brick-and-mortar setting. They can fast-forward through things they already understand, and replay things they don’t.
There are advantages to physical classroom settings, but I think they’ll be eroded as technology improves.
[...] zunguzungu: Still, what Kamenetz is flagrantly not describing is the thing which did so much to make economic mobility a possibility (and which is now almost gone), the post-war project on the part of American liberals to bring higher education into reach of whoever was academically eligible for it. This has been a desperately unfinished project, to be sure, but it’s one whose outlines are still clear many years later, and it’s the thing we’re missing right now. [...]
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