I recently completed teaching a course and one of my colleagues was checking the answers to essay questions and problems with some modern software program, available on line, which would alert the Professor to the likelihood that the student was cheating by obtaining answers on line or from other students in the class.  In one sense, I was astounded that there is a program available by subscription that Universities can purchase that would do this checking, and yet, was not terribly surprised given the pressure facing a majority of students in today’s Universities.

When I first began college, the cost of attending a State University was negligible and the tuition and books were easily covered by my working a part time job.  Granted that was a long time ago when everything was cheaper, but even taking into account the inflationary pressures in society over the intervening decades, it was still inexpensive.  Today, it is not uncommon for students to spend between $20,000 to $40,000 on tuition and books for one year.  My tuition and book costs were in the hundreds, not thousands, and the cost of my tuition was not equal to the down payment on a median priced home.  Today it is not uncommon for students to graduate Universities owing between $50,000 to $100,000 in student loans.

Back then, there were still good jobs available to the average person who was not a college graduate.  That is rarely the case today as there is no manufacturing sector left to speak of in this country as jobs and the accompanying wages are being split into two distinct categories.  The high paying jobs for those who have graduated with advanced degrees from prestigious Universities, and those on the low paying end of the scale, basically flipping burgers or working in some low paying service industry job.  There are precious few jobs left in between as evident in our declining middle class and the growing disparity between the haves and have nots in our society.   It was recently reported that 47% of American do not pay Federal income taxes.

The combination of the high cost of tuition and the absolute necessity to graduate from college and with high enough grades to be considered for graduate school is placing an incredible pressure and burden on the students.  College is no longer about learning.  College is about graduating with the highest possible grades – almost regardless of the means utilized.   I shall never forget one young woman in my last year of teaching who approached me on the last day of class and beseeched me to help her get a grade of an A in order to bolster her grade point average.  She was averaging a B in the class, and that was not good enough.  To quote her almost exact words – “I will do anything, absolutely anything to get an A”.  The message was clear as to what was being offered as I refused to take the blandishment.  True, there have been anecdotal stories in the past about students sleeping around for grades, but this was different, it was not about passing the course, it was about getting the coveted A.

That last episode was merely five years ago.  I would imagine the pressure is even more intense today.  The Universities are part of the problem and not part of the solution unless they change their ways.  I cannot fathom what is driving the cost of tuition so high.  University professors are not very well paid.  It was true in the past and equally true today.  Professors of Physics were earning less than their students who had graduated with Master’s Degrees and finding entry level employment in corporate America.  With some rare exceptions at either Universities with major endowments or where there is a privately endowed chair, Professors are, at best, in the middle class.  The salaries paid to them have not exponentially increased so as to justify massive increases in tuition.

What have apparently changed are two elements.  First, for State Universities, there has been a relative decrease in the level of state funding for college education.  Second, and more important from my perspective, is there has been an incredible growth in the size of the University’s bureaucracy.  When the executive assistant/secretary to a University President makes as much as a full professor, the world is turning topsy turvy.   When the California State University system has a high rise building all to itself, staffed with an incredible number of Vice Presidents and supporting staff, one wonders what they do all day, and what impact they have on the education system.  I recall one colleague of mine who had left the classroom and entered the administration for a ten year period of time.  When he returned to the classroom, his comments were telling, for to paraphrase him, nothing he had done in the ten years of administration had the slightest impact upon what was going on in the classroom.  What then are the administrators doing except generating more paper work, more committees and shuffling reports back and forth to make busy work.  Administrators may claim that I am unfair and that all they are doing is responding to the demands of State and Federal bureaucracies’ above them.  If this be the case, then it only serves to prove my point.  The goal of the University would seem to be full employment for the bureaucratic administrators.   If, as we proclaim that the primary function of a University is to educate our students, then why is the salary scale turned upside down ?  Why do the administrators receive the perks and not the faculty ?  Shouldn’t those doing the actual teaching receive the higher salaries ? I would not be surprised if an independent audit revealed that as much as forty percent, if not more, of all funding to the University is spent on bureaucratic administrators.

Thus, the higher the tuition costs, the greater the financial pressures placed on the students and their parents, and thus the greater the pressure to pass a class with the highest grades possible.  I would argue that the system is no longer focused upon the mission of educating our population, but the mission is now on perpetuating the bureaucracy.

I would suggest that the morale of University Professors in the majority of Universities is already low and the decline in morale is further precipitated by the pressures being placed on the students.  What is needed is a re-thinking of how the modern University operates in the age of information available on the internet.  The process of educating our educators is partly to blame.  We entrust the teaching at the University level to men and woman who have never been taught how to teach.  Scary, but true.  They have never been required to demonstrate the ability to speak in a public forum as part of their training.  There are innumerable Professors who dryly read their lecture notes or who talk to the blackboard when writing something down.  We hire our Professors based on their mastery of some arcane slice of a much larger discipline.  In the case of the humanities and social sciences, they spend years researching and writing their dissertations about some small piece of the much larger subject, and rarely have to demonstrate how their study of minutiae is integrated into the larger picture.  The result is that our halls of higher learning are filled with Professors whose entire existence, sense of job security, and self-identity is tied into a rather narrow slice of knowledge.

In order to validate their own sense of self and therefore to impress their students, or in some cases to intimidate their students, they demand that the students demonstrate appreciation of the arcane by regurgitating it on an exam.  Tests are designed not to ascertain what the students have learned, or what they know, but rather to find out what they do not know.  Faculty members are promoted based on their continuing publications of “academic books and papers” which are meant to be read by others in their own narrow disciplines.  There is scarcely any recognition to the Professor when they demonstrate the applicability of their knowledge and skills to the “real” world of business.  If something cannot be documented with a plethora of footnotes in other publications, it is of little value.

This system might have worked well in the age before computers and the internet.  Students have no need to memorize arcane minutiae.  What students need to be taught and learn is the much broader picture.  They need to learn how to integrate knowledge, how to analyze information and how to develop creative thoughts.  The last thing they need to do is to memorize and regurgitate small pieces of data or information that is readily available to them on the internet.  Before the advent of the internet, most information was not widely available, and could be found only in a library.  Now, all of this information is available in seconds on line.  There is no reason to test students on how well they have memorized the arcane which defines a Professor’s existence.

Faculty members need to re-analyze what they are teaching.  Universities need to re-analyze what they require for graduation.  Exactly what is it we want our students to remember from their University experience ?  What knowledge do we wish to impart unto them ?  What skills should we be teaching them to make them more effective members of society ?  The benefit to the student must be more than a piece of paper saying that have endured four or more years of boring lectures.

Public Universities are all funded on the basis of a formula based on the fictional full time equivalent student (FTES).  While it might vary slightly from state to state, it is generally a student taking 12 or 15 units per semester is equal to one FTES.  The problem is that this is the way that individual departments are funded.  The more students taking classes in a department means more funds for that department and more Professors they can hire to teach even thinner slices of minutiae.  How thin do you need to slice the pie in each department ?  When I taught history, I taught an upper division class in Modern Chinese history, a period of time which covered from 1644 to 1949, and included a massive stretch of history involving the Opium Wars, the topic of Imperialism, the collapse of an Imperial form of government that had lasted for two thousand years, World War I, World War II, the rise of the Communist Party and the success of Mao Zedong.  In the same fifteen or twenty week period that I had to cover all of this material, my colleagues in U.S. history were teaching a period of history covering twenty years.  How thinly can you slice American history?

Each department adds more and more classes to their majors in order to capture as many full time equivalent students as possible.  There is no attempt to integrate knowledge across disciplinary lines.  When I first began teaching, there was a meeting held to plan for a new MBA degree in International Business.  Prominent business leaders were all invited to attend.  One after another, they all told the same story – give us students who can speak a foreign language, any language, students who have taken courses in the history of different societies, given us open minded students who also possess the bare bones knowledge about business.  We can teach them the specifics about business, but we need open minded students who can integrate knowledge and work in diverse cultures.  In response to this plea, the Business School created their MBA in International Business without including any foreign language requirement, and not allowing a student to take a single class outside of the business school.  In thirty years of teaching upper division courses on Modern China, I never had one student from the business school in my class. Is it any wonder why we are having problems doing business on an international basis?

If we do not value the quality of our education that we are providing our students, why should they ?  If we do not make college a truly valuable experience by re-focusing our efforts, why should students not use any means possible to get a piece of paper that states they survived four or more years and spent thousands of dollars.  If our educational system is boring, is not challenging, is not geared to the realities of the modern world, why should we complain when the students avail themselves of any means possible to pass society’s ritualized form of hazing and come out the other end clutching a meaningless piece of paper.  So long as the goal is to have that piece of paper, I cannot and will not blame any student for doing anything possible to obtain that entry level certificate to a possibly higher paying job.  If the true goal of our Universities is to perpetuate the organizational structure for the benefit of the administrators, rather than our students, then let us not complain about the means used by the students to work through the maze we have created.