Selling It

There has been an insidious trend in higher education over the past twenty years or so that challenges a two thousand year old tradition regarding the best ways to teach adults. This new thinking suggests that we abandon the traditional methods of the past and approach the offering of college classes as we would selling dishwashers. Education is a product that must be marketed, promoted, advertised, and all but hawked on the street corner. As with selling dishwashers the key is to identify what the public wants and then provide it to the customer as cost efficiently as possible. And yes, in this new marketplace, the customer is always right.

There are several aspects of this new improved view of college that I personally find highly disturbing, not the least of which is the education, experience, and motivations of those who espouse it. Twenty years ago I taught at a moderately large state supported university in Texas. The president of that institution had worked his way from the lowly level of Assistant Professor in Entomology to the higher levels of administration. For him, college was about teaching and learning, questioning the easy answers, exploring the world through scientific research and philosophical inquiry. The board of regents hated him.

I clearly remember one faculty meeting early in the academic year where the chairman of that very same politically appointed board of regents angrily denounced the university’s faculty, to our faces, for publishing articles in professional journals that were so erudite that he was unable to understand them. He told us that we needed to simplify what we did; we needed to dummy it down for plain folk, like himself. At this point we all knew what was to come: our university’s scholastically oriented president was doomed.

The president who replaced him was a businessman who believed that we the faculty needed to sell a product, that product being education. Our goal, he proclaimed, was to be an efficient business. One of his first acts as president was to cancel the math requirement for the bachelor's degree. Why cancel it? Because students were having too much trouble passing math, and they resented the inconvenience. He told the faculty on many, many (too many) occasions “I’m not telling you to lower your standards. But...” But lower the damn standards. The more people that graduate, the more money the college makes. More product out equals more income in.

You see, it’s no longer about education. It’s about buying a degree. I recently challenged an Honors class where I currently teach , “We ought just to charge you one large fee at the beginning of the year and give you your final degree then. You’d never have to go to class at all.” The cretin in the front row agreed: “Awwww Right!!!!”

So today we invest in telecourses for students who want to earn college credit by watching TV, Internet course for those who want credit for playing on the World Wide Web, while we suffer declining enrollments in the classrooms where the real, dirty, hard, interactive learning actually occurs. Yet, the most common course grade today in the majority of college classes is A (there are as many 4.0 grade point averages among currently enrolled students as there are recent college graduates who can’t explain who Aristotle was). We send students to a consortium of higher learning here in my city that is so weak academically that its graduates have essentially no chance of successfully completing postgraduate training at one of the reputable state universities or private colleges (but it is about earning a degree, right?).

To facilitate the decline in academic integrity we hire administrators with doctorates earned weekends in extension courses and who have never taught in a college classroom. Thank God they have jobs as college administrators because they’d never survive in the teaching trenches of academe or the board rooms of industry; what would they do? What could they do?

"You'd like to enroll in our college/university? Wonderful! Would you like fries with that?"

If I offend, forgive me. It is said “Those whom the truth does not convince, it angers.” I don’t wish to anger. After all, the customer is always right. Even when he isn’t.