Dec 12, 2022·edited Dec 12, 2022Liked by Robert Reich
The workforce model of U.S. higher education is "past its shelf-life expiration date."
The model was built first of exploding enrollments following WWII and solid student numbers growth through the 1990s. The model started to crack in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Comfortable tenured faculty jobs made possible by the growth gave way to 70%+ of teaching staff being adjunct or "contingent," often not making enough to pay rent and some living in their cars.
To keep the game going the model shifted to free and easy student debt. It was easier to get a student loan than buy a car, which lead to massive run up in student debt. Now the bubble has burst with a decade of declining enrollments with a crash caused with Covid. Plus, one could logically believe that being an Uber driver may be more attractive than being an adjunct faculty member. At least you would have a newer model car.
To add insult to injury, there has been no leadership in Congress. Education committee assignments are often made to the "left-overs," who did not get on the "important" committees such as defense, intelligence, etc. This explains, in part, why the Higher Education Act has not been reauthorized since 2008!
The issues with the U. Cal system are a small tip of an iceberg.
Doug, thanks for that excellent assessment of what is going on in higher education. I just don't understand why so many people in this nation care so little for our nation's future and our young people are our future. The people who educate them for the future are disrespected and undervalued. We need to do better, but how do we get people outside California's strike to even pay attention. Our media tell the people that inflation and crime are the only issues worth thinking about and their constant whining about both is disgusting and mostly irrelevant except to those who want to ride those issues to power. Our young people are student loaned into debt they can never afford to pay off and the Trump courts tell Biden he can't even help them. Unacceptable!
This caught me at a particularly vulnerable and depressed moment. Quite contrary to my usual mindset. Last night the new Sarasota, FL school board fired one of the most admired and successful superintendents I remember. This was initiated, literally, moments after 2 new members were installed. A special and a regular meeting had hours of testimony by staff and community demanding he stay. This followed several minutes of a standing ovation for him as he entered the room. This is happening all over FL. DeSantis endorsed candidates are running rough shod over our public education system. A supposed non partisan election has been turned political by DeSantis and his minions.
Rhana, I am so sorry to learn of your superintendent's demise by Republican fools. Republicans right now are on a trajectory that is putting them farther and farther from what they would claim as American ideals. That seems to me is because thinking clearly is no longer part of the Republican practice, if it ever was since say, Teddy Roosevelt. Republicans now are pretty universally racists, misogynists, homo/transphobes, xenophobes, fearmongers and fear mongered people who have decided everyone who is not them is unworthy of their support at any level, and they will use this newly acquired power given them by the elected Republicans, to destroy what they can and blame others for the bad behavior they themselves have perpetrated while they whine that they are not getting everything they want. I forgot to mention that Republicans have given up a quest for adulthood. They prefer the childish, even toddlerish whining, complaining, demanding and the expectation that they will get whatever they want or cause tantrums if they don't. It is shameful, but DeSantis is the toddler in chief in Florida and the people there seem to love him, or if not, their votes were stolen or they just decided not to vote. In any case, Florida and so many other places in this country are in trouble. Toddlers usually don't make good leaders. These Republicans today are proving that to be true.
In most public education, the revenue sources are public record. Where does the money come from? Ans. taxpayers.
The parties to the table probably do not have a personal stake in the outcome. Our custodians were represented by the Teamsters. In the first session, they wanted to does know the shoe sizes for everyone in management. Concrete overshoes.
In Pennsylvania, the response is to close and or consolidate public colleges.
Why is there a UC San Francisco? Why does UC own Los Alamos?
The revenue sources are much more diverse than taxpayers and depend on the mission of the institution. Football schools make millions from sports. Universities with med schools often own entire healthcare systems and clinical trial organizations. Engineering schools often do well with industry cooperations.
In terms of who owns what, there is an abundance of historical accidents around. There are different historical strands of schools in most states--traditional flagship, agriculture, teaching ("Normal Schools"), and community college--which are usually overlapping and not rationally organized into a system. Trying to reform this in any state is usually political suicide.
Historically, the whole Land Grant system was often used to rescue bankrupt private schools and make them public universities. The education market forces were already failing at the time Congress and Lincoln set up land grants. Solution--Use stolen land sold to developers to fund the deal. We have of late also seen how market forces worked with the for-profit grifts. It was not, by almost any measure except executive compensation, a better alternative a well-funded and inclusive public system.
Market forces work well when there is an immediacy to match cost and benefit. The benefits of education are years into the future, which makes leaving everything to the market problematic.
Doug, isn't it sad we have tied the "market" to everything, even our young people's future? We should be able to do better for our young people and for the future of this nation since so much of the innovative research happens on university campuses, and the training of our future leaders and innovators often happens there too.
Ruth Sheets: I suspect that the old Capitalist profit motive is the real culprit here, as it seems to be everywhere else. Look at our medical care system! At one time I saw a proposal to put medical care ' futures' on the stock market for trading! It was not enacted/ allowed. That was a few years ago. Look at the proposal during the Bush administration to 'privatize' Social Security. (They are still at it). Crazy!
It's the commodification and blind profiteering being foisted into every aspect of American society that's putting us on a treadmill of constantly paying more for everything, while getting increasingly worse quality and outcomes for our trouble.
The mythology that the "private market" does anything more efficiently or better has been pretty well debunked at this point. We've learned now that there is certainly always an event horizon where in the need for ever increasing profits starts eating away the actual functions until all that's left is systemic dysfunction.
A story in the news years ago featured people in Hong Kong feeding money into an oxygen machine to take a breath while waiting for a commuter train. If meters could be placed on our noses, someone would try to make them mandatory using some rationalization or other, to make a profit.
Laurie, yeah, that "market" drive to privatize everything is really sick, especially since so much of the "market" id not doing all that well at verious points. That would put our Social Security at risk every day. That is simply insane and another ploy by rich white guys to get rich off the tax payers and it is criminal to me. I don't know how we stop the insane strive to keep the idea alive.
Dr. Gilbert. As public, they have to publish their budgets.
Truth is that their value is like any other asset. Capitalization of net income. We have a public university here in Florida that was founded on the basis that they wouldn't grant tenure.
I have a cousin who was a university president at a young age and is a consultant to colleges world wide how to deal with it. Just like all businesses. Plant and equipment (i.e the campus) may be an impediment to growth.
I have worked with several smaller colleges on the verge of collapse because past presidents were hired by boards for their ability for "development" or getting money from alumni for new facilities. That's great until enrollment declines and the institution cannot afford to maintain the white elephants. The board members then wring their hands, fire the president, and look for a merger partner.
This is but one corner of the governance problems in higher education. With the publics usually the qualification has more to do with the applicant's role with a political party than any knowledge of how to run an education institution. Florida is just a current example.
Compound poor decisions like this with a governance system designed for a population where less than 5% had more than a high school diploma (1940 and earlier). It is not a recipe of for success in the 21st Century with 35%+ with some level of education beyond high school.
UC San Francisco is dedicated to Medicine. Public Health, Health Policy, Research. It is one of our best endeavors. Los Alamos is owned by the federal government. It is affiliated with but not owned by Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A & M, and the University of California. It is operated by something named Triad National Security LLC.
See this kind of stuff is what frustrates me. Owned or affiliated who really cares the point is that they are all in bed together right, and the universities have no business being there but for financial gain. Especially Cal that has a no nuke policy but only at Berkely. I guess New Mexico is ok or just up the road at Livermore seems to be ok as well. See, don't let them separate us on some techno BS. There really should not even be a need for Los Alamos anyhow if we are going to do away with nukes. But with the Putin's of the world maybe we need some (like another hole in our head). I am not against nuclear energy, but we are miles away from taking the cheap out of it and ending up with another Chernobyl is a real possibility if we don't. I think the US Navy does it right, look at their track record, but I guess it cost them a lot to do that as well. The matter at hand is that colleges are overpriced and tacking advantage of most workers while the ones on the top do little and collect a lot. As I said they are intellectual fascist trying to say they are bleeding heart liberal. So that is the point not who owns or manages or is affiliated with whatever all that shows is just how far the colleges will go to get money. New Mexico for a California school and a Texas school just proves the point.
The subject of this thread is the UC academic workers' strike. The reason for the strike is low pay, as it was back in the 1980's when they struck before. The disparity between low pay and high housing costs is driving people into homelessness, not just UC academic workers. Society has not addressed this stage of capitalism and we are seeing the consequences. For the city of Berkeley to impose more rent control on property owners is a heavy lift, given the norms of today. Good news- the norms are shifting, because of young people and because of reality.
If you endorse the corporate structure of universities, yes. UCSF is one of the most lucrative outposts for the UC system in the Medical-Industrial Complex. For a state that cannot provide affordable care to many of its less-thrifty citizens, more often women and children, I’m sure UCSF is a point of pride.
There's more to it than this. Another problem is that the way we do our accounting has been hiding issues in whom we're paying for what. Robert Reich touched upon this when he said that teachers should be treated as "assets" rather than expenses.
Well, in accounting terms that's not quite correct: an asset is something the company owns outright, which may depreciate and eventually be discarded. That's not a way you want to look at people.
But one thing that _would_ make sense in an accounting system is to account separately for the work that directly produces the product (whether that be cars , textbooks or education-hours for students) and the overhead work used to run and maintain the organisation that supports that work (such as managers and administrators). Totalling up these two costs separately would do two things:
1. It would let us see that the overhead costs in universities have increased dramatically over the last few decades, and consider whether we should be working on reducing those, rather than reducing what we spend on actually teaching students.
2. It would help work towards a perceptual shift that puts the labourers actually doing the production in their rightful place, _above_ rather than below the managers.
How we do our accounting and how we design markets ("free" or otherwise) embeds a lot of value judgements, often in a way that makes them hard to see. This is part of the reason we have such inequality and workers are treated so badly: the people benefiting from this can point to their accounting system or "free" market and say, "it's not us, it's just the way the world is" when that's not true at all: it's the way the world in which we work was _designed._
Curt - Excellent points. Since the late 1980s, I have worked with the issues of human capital and its role in the asset-based business accounting system. The modern accounting system can trace its roots to the 1494 writings of Luca Pacioli, when some people were, in fact, owned assets. Modern accounting is ill-equipped to deal with the value of people and, more importantly, their relationships with one another.
To your first point, overhead in higher education is certainly an issue. My experience is that the overhead bloat comes from grafting social and non-academic programs on top of outdated instructional methods. Disentangling things such as professional sports teams pretending to be college teams, giant healthcare systems in many universities, and the use of endowments as investment funds should be done but will take time.
A thought is to introduce self-governance models. An experiment in the U.S. of a university as cooperative might be interesting. Institutions could be transformed into hybrid consumer and worker-owned limited cooperative associations (LCAs). Students and the workforce would need to sort out the offerings and administration through a one-person, one-vote governance system. The additional advantage of LCAs is that investors are allowed as a separate type of coop member with limited voting rights as a way to address the need for capital.
In addressing your second point, coops do permit this shift. Some experiments already exist. Mondragon University in Spain has operated this way since 1997. It has around 4,000 students. The University of Jyväskylä in Finland also uses cooperatives as part of its core instructional design.
Excellent question. The idea of education as public good is unevenly applied. It has been more clearly implemented at the K-12 level with universal education but not at the post-secondary level. Historically this has been because a very small part of the population (5% before WWII) was college educated. That, of course, has changed and will change even more with those having some college credential likely to surpass 45% by the mid 2030s.
Where co-ops have been used in K-12, e.g. Minnesota regional service co-ops, they are producer co-ops providing shared services. That could be one model for public institutions, which educate 70%+ of students in the U.S. Private colleges could choose to be entirely run as a co-op such as Mondragon University in Spain.
A producer co-op would not disturb the public character of higher education funding because the institutions would be the co-op owners. This is similar to the credit union service organizations ("CUSOs") authorized for credit union shared services since 1934. Perhaps we should see the creation of educational service organizations ("EdSOs") as part of the mix for higher education.
The fundamental benefit of co-ops is in the change in mentality required away from elitist hierarchical management that dominates our business culture. Rather than focusing on the exchange of "things" in "markets," co-ops require a focus on people and relationships while operating in a market. The change may even involve the democratic election of leadership!
The idea has merit - but there has to be a catch if the institution which most embodies that concept (U.C. Berkeley) hasn't embraced it...
Indeed, UCB has long been a leader in facilitating income mobility (by admitting & graduating more first-generation students than all Ivy League schools combined); even as the state walked back from its commitment to higher education (and costs have, correspondingly, risen) UCB has found ways to limit expected family contributions to 15% of income up to ~$130k+ (and to ensure that they are zero below $80k). Could a co-op hope to effect similar outcomes (i.e. without any adverse impact to educational quality or institutional character)...?
CA has overall capacity issues. Not all qualified CA residents can be admitted to system schools. The state will have to find new and different ways to finance and build delivery capacity.
If a co-op structure reduces administrative costs through sharing at a producer level, it would free up funding for more seats. The California system already has a shared services initiative through UC IT innovate (UCITi). A limited cooperative association could be used to allow transparent investment in the effort, but retain control of the services. There is no need to go down the road of the online program manager grift scheme.
“The model started to crack in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Comfortable tenured faculty jobs made possible by the growth gave way to 70%+ of teaching staff being adjunct or "contingent," often not making enough to pay rent and some living in their cars.”
Same can be said about archaeological and environmental consulting within engineering firms. It’s a serious crisis.
Omg, you just nailed it. I have for years been concerned about education in the US. The wholesale decimation of education, ALL of it from pre-school to university is grave. When the ruling elites decided they were rolling back The New Deal they were intent in impoverishing the country. A word about Newsom and the democratic legislature, they bend the knee to big donor, the moneyed elite call the shots. They're also ruining the United States. I would love to see a mass exodus of young, talented kids emigrating out of here. I have two college age grandsons, bright, hard working kids and I'm encouraging them to leave.
The process has been a long-term project that can may be book ended at the start by the "Nation at Risk" report during the Reagan administration.
The critical fallacy (or agenda) of the approach was one of taking a massive system of education, setting "theoretical" targets, use testing to show non-attainment of those theoretical targets, and then privatize everything because the free market will solve all problems.
The project has moved to a new phase in the past few years post Citizens' United with "mega donations" to school board campaigns and dark money flowing into public university administration appointments.
Reagan's "Nation at Risk" was a Republican tactic to stem the G.I. Bill's wave of college students who were learning too much, becoming liberal thinkers, and changing the politics of the nation.
Jeff, you are right about the GOP plans to slow education, especially in the areas of thinking and reasoning. Can't have those young people figuring out the truth from the lies the Republicans tell with every breath they take. Every single parent in this nation should be yelling and voting for people who actually care about their kids instead of the rich white guys who want it all for themselves and are not shy about telling everyone that is what they want. Hey, in fact, Marjorie Greene is calling for an armed or better armed insurrection. She claims she could have done it better than the folks who actually followed Trumps orders to attack the Capitol. It seems Greene should not be able to hold office as an insurrectionist, but her constituents just love her to death, maybe. I am not sure where she and they went to school, but they clearly didn't learn much about our nation and our people, and thinking clearly was not an asset at their schools. Shameful!
Excellent assessment. One of my concerns is that the problem begins earlier. Look at graduation rates and literacy rates in our schools at the secondary and elementary levels. We embrace idiots on parade. It is sad.
Where did you come from? I could not agree more. Overpriced education that has little value supported by intellectual's that found this as fertile ground.
Professor Reich, thank you for supporting the student workers and all the staff and teachers and Professors of the California higher education system. The public is not aware of the limits of salaries and benefits for teachers at all levels. As a California public school teacher, I spent my own money to earn a Master’s degree so I would not only move higher on the salary schedule but qualify to teach in the public community college system. However, that system was hiring only part-time faculty, two office hours per week, no benefits and less than 12 units of teaching. And no tenure. That’s the clincher. No tenure means no security. No assurance you will have your position next school year, no matter how well you teach. I had to pay off my student loans for my higher degree. So I stayed in the Title 1 program and received a $5,000 dollar payment from federal government for teaching in a low income school for five years. I know people who earned PhDs in English and had to move out of state to teach full-time with benefits. I did teach halftime at the college level at a private school in California. However my goal was to stay in the public system.
That was not an option. There are countless stories of highly qualified candidates who move out of state or teach in private technical schools so they can work and pay off their loans.
Irenie, I, too paid for my own Master's Degrees plus, hoping to advance my skills and increase my salary in a public school. My salary turned out to be enough to support me since I had no kids. Anyone with a family would have had a hard time and the lack of tenure in public universities kept a lot of people who would have been good instructors on the college level working in public k-12 schools to pay off loans and support their families. It strikes me and a bunch of others that this is not a workable system for giving our young people an excellent preparation for the advanced careers students will need to carry our nation and planet into the future.
This country was built by people who behaved in one way, exploitive of Indigenous people, women, and people of color, but who dreamed of a better more equal country that valued all citizens. We have yet to really confront and deal with our dark past so we continue to repeat it. Politicians always talk about how much they value children, they are our future, but do little that shows how they value them. Giving a great education is one of the best ways to show we value our children, yet how can you attract and keep great teachers if you don’t pay them? We all agree that over the past 40years the gap between the haves and have nots has grown greater. History tells us that this is when you get more and more rebellion against governments which we have seen here in America. We have lawmakers, and political leaders that have supported this greed. I would like to see all service workers go on strike and demand salaries and benefits that show they are valued. Why should professional athletes, actors, Upper management, etc make so much more money than the workers who make their jobs possible. I am hopeful that there will be more strikes and we will get universal child care, paid leave, sick leave, a livable wage, and respect and concern for the well being of all workers. The countries with the highest happiness quotient, while paying higher taxes, people don’t have to stress about having basic needs met. We need to grow out of the adolescent stage of egocentrism and start caring about our neighbors, our communities, our country, our world.
Linda! Wow! You hit the mark I have been trying to hit for a while, calling for our young people to be truly valued at all levels of development. We the People lie to ourselves that we actually care about our kids, but keep voting in people who do not value public education or probably education at all, assuming they sprang from the womb brilliant and fully educated or something like that. Education needs to be higher up on the priorities list. Every time I have filled out a Democratic priorities survey, except for the ones from Elizabeth Warren, education is not even listed. I list it in the "other" category, but somehow, 2 years later it is still not included on the main list of priorities. That is disgraceful and I no longer even open those survey emails which of course are really fund-raisers. We should be able to do better.
Ruth Sheets ; As the wages of workers who still have jobs have flatlined for the past 40 years, it is not surprising that people who are squeezed by inflation are not clamoring to fund higher education. There are many who have not gone to college, who still pay taxes. When I placed a sign that favored building new high school and middle schools in my town in my business window, I was counseled to remove it. As I could lose business. I put it up at my home, and we got both schools. A few short years apart. They were needed. They were both built. Our taxes went up. It was worth it. " If you think Education is expensive ; try ignorance" was my favorite bumper sticker. Results are showing in our town already, with new curricula, like financial literacy and civics .
Laurie, I am so pleased your community got its schools. Because our community has a tiny tax base due to poverty and some other issues, and because the state of PA has a strong GOP that wants to undermine our public education system, our newest school among the regular public schools in our community was built in 1974. On the other hand, all the charter schools have buildings built within the past 10 years. At least the real public schools have the best teachers. That really does make a difference. The charter schools don't even have to have certified teachers, just 75% must be certified. Their turnover in teachers is really high while the regular public schools have teachers who want to be teaching here for the long-haul. Charter schools were one of the worst inventions for our schools and our kids but a lot of parents don't know their kids are getting a lower quality education. In addition, the fact that the charters get to take their money off the top, even the cyber charters which are really terrible, the real public schools get the money dregs. It's just not fair, but it is exactly what Republicans and their buddies want as they work to undermine public education.
Ruth Sheets ; Ironically, the new schools have increased property values and are attracting young families who can afford to buy homes here. With that increased tax revenue, those who worried about the tax rate should calm down. We do not have charter schools in town, but there are some near enough for some to attend. I have not seen figures, because I have not looked for them.
Laurie, I am pleased your new schools have made a difference. As for charter schools, most of them are in poor communities of color since those communities are most easily exploited. State governments pretty much hand districts over to charter corporations and rich individuals so they won't have responsibility other than paying a per pupil amount which, of course is always lower than what rich or even middle class white districts have per pupil. Check out New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Since charter schools often have contracts that give them their money off the top of a district's budget, they are rarely hurting for funds, except that there is, as one might expect a lot of corruption among charter school operators: paying "CEOs" enormous salaries and their wives as CFOs equally high salaries, buying properties with their profits as some PA cyber charters are doing, and more. It is a disgrace, but Republicans and their friends are making out really well, donating to candidates (as they should not be doing with our tax payer money), and generally lying about their successes and lack thereof. It really is a racket but our kids, kids who already face every disadvantage, lose,
Linda, you ask a critical question: “yet how can you attract and keep great teachers if you don’t pay them?” Expecting teachers, instructors, professors, assistants, aides, even the admins like principals, to subsidize the system is folly. More astute people leave if they need to earn a salary that pays the bills and the loans they made to pay for the years of professional education. I was too vested in the teachers retirement system and California teachers couldn’t pay into social security. Some called waiting to retire at age 63 “the golden handshake.” As much as I loved teaching and students, I call it “golden handcuffs.” At least for California.
As a nurse that worked for a state hospital, I too was not allowed to pay into social security.,but paid into SURS. Previous jobs left me 4 quarters shor so the money I had paid in was just lost. They call it double dipping, but if I worked at 2different companies that had retirement plans I could draw from both. i stayed home when my children were young for 8 years so I should have been able to draw on my husbands social security, but we divorced after 11 years and lost this because I remarried. That marriage only lasted for 5 years so I as not allowed any SS. Our SS system is designed against woman and those who are just short of time. Woman who stay home with children or to take care of older relatives truely get penalized. Teachers, nurses, social workers, many jobs that are predominately female have historically not allowed for any kind of descent retirement. It is another form of systemic misogyny which does not get addressed. I hope we are entering an era of greater workers rights.
Linda, your timeline I fear is typical for women of our generation. I also checked out my ex-husband’s SS. We were married 32 years. I helped him through university. He was a teacher but had paid into the system enough for a partial SS benefit. In addition to teachers retirement that we both had and shared. When the SS rep talked to me and learned I had a teacher’s income she told me I would not get enough to make it worthwhile. I’m sorry to say I listened to her. Let’s say $100 per month for 25 years. So far. We’re both still alive. The benefit for spouse does not depend on income. It depended that I am not married. And it would not have reduced his benefit at all. I am still single. I should have applied. Of course it’s not my only mistake. This example is just one more where we don’t know or understand our rights and we aren’t given correct information.
My career was spent in k-12 public schools..........upon retirement I was able to spend four years at a local university in administration.........was paid very well (approximately 1/3 more than I had made my final year in k - 12)............yet shocked to learn that instructors, assistant & associate professors made less than most k - 12 teachers. Adjuncts on the rise......vacancies filled by adjuncts & interims. The root cause was in large part the erosion of support from state government.
Craig, you are right about the poor pay, but of course, the coaches in state universities are some of the highest paid state employees. There's something off about that observation.
Can custodians show that their work generates income?
Coaches. ..because the sport makes money they sell it as an investment. If they cut it, they kill a cash cow.
In collective bargaining, if adjucnts want more money, they have to prove that they can increase, rather than decrease net income. I.E. Do they have intellectual property rights that they can transfer to the university?
Coaches in College may be well paid, but high school coaches typically receive poor compensation for the hours they spend in practices, planning, transportation, games, parent and community contact, meetings. Of course college sports has the potential to bring in money and some do, but there are a lot of factors that determine the income of a sport. High school funding is different.
Irenie, you are so right about high school coaches and their, let's say, less than stellar pay. Most of the time, it's a teacher who get's "after school" pay to do it and they are only allowed a certain number of hours and nearly always go past that number, so with little or no compensation for that overtime. It's a good thing most of the coaches I have known love what they are doing or it would be really bad for them.
Yes, I have personal experience with a houseful of athletes and coaches. And even referees. It’s been fun to watch the kids coach younger children when they were in middle and high school and referee, too. And make a career for high school and college coaching. They grew up in a modest income two teacher choice of career over big bucks. All advanced college degrees. So as you wrote, doing what they love. However we got to this coaching topic, the pay in high school and lower is low. College head coaches at prestigious schools may make high salaries but if we’re talking about where the money goes in high schools and colleges the pie has a lot of slices and they’re not all the same size. Monetization of high performance players is new especially in high schools but I’m not sure what this has to do with the original conversation. Maybe comparing where money comes from and goes and the budget from the original topic.
As ever the rich, in whom power exists, don't want to leave hold of their pennies. Greed is their religion. What we have we must protect. This is not exclusive to America- it's rampant throughout the world.
"Money, money, money it's a rich man's world!" goes the song. Until economies stop worshipping Mammon little will change. Its a question of values. What matters more? In this case the teacher, lecturer starving to keep moneybags full. It makes me ashamed of humanity.
when i was pursuing my PhD, i was a student senator and we went on strike for ... health insurance. yeah, we were not viewed as state employees so we had to pay our health insurance costs out of pocket. we did win, eventually.
meanwhile, i had no family or parents to support me by paying rent, etc., so i was getting food from a foodbank or scavenging from university meetings where food was provided, and i was homeless several times, crashing in my office (when i could get away with it.) it was awful. one time, a nurse asked me how i manage, so i told her, and added "after i get my PhD, no one can take THAT away from me, and i'll have a career that i love and care about and i'll never again be unemployed."
i was so incredibly optimistically stupid: i am not only unemployed NOW and have been so for a very long time, but i am UNEMPLOYABLE because, according to potential employers, like starbux, mcdonald's, etc., i am either vastly overqualified, or "differently qualified" and i am seen as a poor employment risk who will leave any job they offer the second i find something better, either something more in line with my career goals, or that pays better.
of course, leaving my education off my job applications leaves me with a giant, gaping hole in my employment record which means ... NO JOB.
so i worked as an adjunct when i could find such temporary jobs, and earned less than poverty wages to teach anatomy and physiology to university students who were studying to become medical doctors.
the entire academic system, which i poured my heart and soul and dreams of a bright future into was a beautiful lie that i stupidly, happily bought into, and i paid a severe price with my career, my health (both my mental and physical health), my utterly completely destroyed self-esteem and (probably) my life.
and the best i can hope for is to be mocked by strangers, as i was when i was homeless. otherwise, i am invisible, as is everyone else who, like me, bought into a predatory academic system under the desire to work hard to improve our lives.
Girl Scientist, it is so hard to hear your story, knowing how the majority of people in government care nothing for the struggles of students and those who cover so many of the college classes yet are paid so little. The big names earn pretty decent salaries, but the majority, especially those who can't get tenure because that usually brings with it insurance and some salary security, earn very little. Administrators often earn well because they are the ones who bring in the donations. Something is wrong when those who run the education institutions earn more than those who actually do the teaching and operation of the day to day activities of the institution. There needs to be a restructuring.
This is a thing that's been going on for awhile.The people who are teaching our future leaders and workers are treated like dirt,are subject to the whims of idiot governors like Ron DeSatan,and can be fired almost on a moments notice.
And yes,we sure as hell don't hear near enough about it,because the media don't consider this issue a priority,over the silly antics like our so called leadership of our country commits on a daily basis(here's looking at trump and his assortment of foolhardy minions)and inane celebrity gossip that passes as"news"nowadays.
This needs to be addressed country wide,in each state's university systems.This is happening everywhere.
Thank you for standing up for these professors in Cali and calling out not only the billion dollar surplus that could better pay the people teaching our future leaders,but improve everything across the board for everyone,and the governor and the board of regents for sitting on their hands whining why they can't"afford"to help.Baloney.
Hoping it gets better for these folks really soon.
Our great governor moRon deathSatan can't spend money on education he needs it to send more immigrants from a different state anyplace else so he can make the news. All he wants is to be known all over the US so it makes it easier to run for president.🙏 Please 🙏 don't let that happen.
Maureen, I, too am praying that DeSantis jerk is not elected anything. I still can't figure out what happened in Florida that so many voted for him to remain governor. He cares for no one but himself, a perfect follower of the Trump "hate everyone but those who bow to you and do as much damage to those people who are not kissing your a** as you can, theory. A lot of attention is paid to the "swing" states' voting but almost nothing to Florida that has a history of voter fraud. Or perhaps, Floridians just love the idea of hurting their neighbors.
Indeed! The Republican dominated electoral system of Florida should be investigated. It could be that Floridian voters are that ignorant, gullible or masochistic, but their politicians are well-known to be crooked, fascist grifters, so I wouldn't trust their electoral results. Usually what Republicans accuse Democrats of doing, Republicans are doing.
@Barbara Woodward and @Ruth Sheets yes I live in Florida. Unfortunately I think we are no longer purple we are red. If you've noticed most of the January 6th insurrectionist have come from Florida. Those are the people that are so thrilled to be living in a state run by deathSatan and with the rump their idol living here too. I'm just hoping some of the jail time is helping to convince some of them that what they were doing was wrong. I wish the news would stop covering that side and spend more effort and time covering the good things that Biden and the Democrats are doing. I'm glad the people like Robert Reich are showing the way but unfortunately the people that need to learn about it aren't reading him.
Maureen, it is hard to watch Florida from afar, knowing there are pretty great people who live there but alas, a huge number of people who have decided their neighbors are worthy of the abuse DeSantis and crew choose to toss out at them to incite neighbors to turn on neighbors over books they are not supposed to approve of or CRT which isn't even taught in K-12 (but probably ought to be), and trans hate that will keep young people from receiving treatment that could save them a lot of pain and suffering in the future. Yep, DeSantis and his legislators are cruel, but it will be seen whether Floridians are OK with the cruelty and plan to participate. I hope not, but don't know for sure.
Jaime, I suspected all along that Florida votes are not necessarily accurate but because they are "red," no one is even questioning results. At least this time there are no "hanging chads" Republican Floridians can whine about and claim they don't know what it means. However, it could be that a large number of Floridians really do hate their neighbors and want DeSantis to head their efforts.
Melissa, It is really pathetic that our media follows the moving laser beam pointing at the most unimportant issues. People, thin think that since they are being covered they are important. How do we get education out there as the critical issue it is when so many in power want it ignored and privatized so their rich friends can have even more power over what is taught and to whom?
Ruth, you bring up a critical issue: education should be a top priority, but in many repub states that system is manipulated by “leaders” who ban Truth: CRT, sex education, the founding of America connected to Indigenous peoples, and their continuing subjugation, slavery and the civil war, and for some the Holocaust, Japanese Internment and continuing poverty and racism for people of color and minority groups, including gender orientation choices. Truth in speech and in resources, books, teaching. In some states it seems like they are still in the confederacy. Or want to be.
Irenie, I do believe the former Confederacy is still the Confederacy and they have recruited other white states to their warped world view. Those states are ruled mostly by scared white people who seem terribly afraid their fragile children can't handle learning about their ancestors' bad behavior toward other human beings. Actually, I think the parents/leaders are more scared that their kids might not have the same respect for the ancestors the current adults want them to have and might want to do something different, more positive. Fear is a really strong motivator. Republicans have learned very well how to use it to warp our education system into something it is hard to see as public education. The education system is becoming the fiefdom of those scared white leaders who are pretty ignorant despite their claim of being educated at "good" schools. It seems to me that anyone who is a follower of Trump and Kump learned only means to harm others through their years in higher education. That is beyond sad!
I was born and raised and educated in California. When I graduated from high school in 1965 the public options for higher education were the UC system, the State College and University system and the community college system. The community colleges were free tuition and the others were low tuition. The quality of all was high. The next year Ronald Reagan was elected governor and the attack on public education (at all levels, but especially the UC system) began. That is the root of modern underfunding of contemporary public universities. Sadly, especially after 1980, the Democrats joined the Republicans in embracing Thatcher/Reaganomics and underfunding got even worse. Many of us had to leave California (something I had never thought I would ever do) to find stable employment in higher education. Sadly, the infection spread and academic work has become tenuous almost everywhere. Good, hardworking scholars are forced to take jobs with no future or leave the profession. Thank you to these members of the academic proletariat for standing up and fighting back. Come on, Gavin. You want to be a progressive and not just some clueless rich guy? Put up some of that budget surplus and stop the scandal of a great public university system being only 10% funded by the public.
This is so inspiring! I'm hoping the strikers will get everything they ask for, need, and want. For much too long this has been going on. We need to back the people who provide education as well as regular workers the backing and decent wages they should be getting. And, this should stand. No rolling back on wages or scrimping on benefits! I'm with you all the way folks! It's about time...
It’s a matter of priorities. Congress is on the verge of passing a $850 Billion dollar defense budget, a huge increase from last year, $858B vs $773B this year but the military claims this will leave them a “hollow force”. If you’re a high school graduate, or just have a GED, 18 years old and with just 6 months of training you can become an LAPD police officer and earn $72,000 a year before overtime. When we hear the titans of industry whining about their situation they claim they need “more incentives”. So I ask, where’s the incentive to go to a first rate university, get a degree or even a graduate degree only to live in poverty? Some may claim the love of knowledge or the process of learning, but unless we reward our real Best and Brightest the advent of the Military Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us of is where we’re destined to end up.
If you're lucky, apparently. What is happening with student loans? Are the state governments making money on these student loans? I have heard that U Mass tuition is now close to what it costs for private colleges. What's going on with that?
John Goodman, you bring up important points about budget and priorities. In addition to critical funding going to military, and not education, the military is allowed by law to come into the schools to educate or inform , but isn’t that recruiting, especially in schools or areas where students already may not be able to attend college and the steady pay and perceived opportunities lure them into enlisting. Parents may not know they can opt out of the “military information session” which is often a one on one private meeting, student and recruiter.
Thanks for sharing this. I don’t know if I disagree with this but it certainly should be done only with the parent’s knowledge and approval, especially if the student is under 18. I’m sure these recruiters are very persuasive, especially to the naive.
John, my older son, in 1985, met with the military recruiter without parental knowledge. The law allows the recruiting. I don’t know if it’s both male and female now. But parents complained and four years later parents were informed the recruiter would be at school and we could opt out. My younger son wanted to hear what the recruiter had to say, but was much more interested in sports and school. And we were not a military family. The school had a high percentage of students attending college and university post high school, with few entering military service. However imagine students in low income schools being called in to meet with a military recruiter and thinking this is the chance of a lifetime. And maybe it is. Or not.
John, it seems the military has been thought of as a positive option for people, usually males, who aren’t going to college and don’t have good jobs. Even kids in minor trouble. But I, along with many others see another option and that is a non-military commitment that provides housing, salary, mentoring, companionship, training for jobs, community volunteering. Like Peace Corps, Americorp or similar. Development of self discipline that is helpful in building up not breaking down. Getting away from discipline that includes weapons, a macho mentality and a continuation of the video game strategies of violence and war. I don’t think that helps young people develop into productive citizens. But we could help by offering choices that lead in that direction.
Good point. Most of the positions in the Peace Corp however require you come in with a skill set and usually a bachelors degree or more. Also, most Peace Corp volunteers come with a mature set of emotional and social skills. Again, as evidenced by my post I believe the military needs some serious auditing and probably reigning in, but it does provide a career path and social skills training that some wayward individuals may not otherwise have available to them.
Last time I checked in Florida, some 70 plus percent of teaching was done by adjuncts. No security, no healthcare, no retirement, no tenure. Many need to take outside gigs to pay the rent. And since then the rising rents and food costs are crushing. Scandalous.
Educational workers on every level from administration to teachers have been over worked and underpaid for years. Here in in Wisconsin it really took hold with governor Walker and act 10. Moral and and support for staff on every level has deteriorated to an all time low in every district. This needs to change soon. I think the government especially the republicans want us to be uneducated so they can take over and we will be an uneducated nation!
Thank you Robert. I agree with everything you said ... well, higher Ed in Michigan isn’t small potatoes either... but the argument you make for California is exactly the same as one might make for Michigan, or Ohio, or New York. Or others. And it is a tragedy everywhere.
You are so right Dr. Reich, California has lost sight of it's most valuable asset, educated citizens. I attended the California State University system, my daughter the University of California system. Between the time I graduated with a Masters Degree and my daughter daughter graduated with a Doctorate in Medicine, tuition and the cost of living had sky rocketed. Why? California under Pat Brown (Governor when I arrived in 1961) was a progressive, far sighted administrator. Under Pat Brown we invested in infrastructure, education, and the good of the State. Since then we seem to be governed by greed, selfishness and backward sliding. Our highways, that were the envy of the world in the 1960's and 1970'a are now desperately in need of repair, our bridges are unsafe and the average Californian cannot afford to get a college degree with out burdening themselves for life with student debt. What, so millionaires can snort cocaine? Brag about their bank accounts? I support Governor Newsom, but he is not up to the standard set by Pat Brown. Jerry Brown had his head in the clouds so long it muddled his brain. Gray Davis actually joined the enemy, the wealthy energy industry. The Republican Governors we've had beginning with Ronnie Reagan were determined to change California from a relatively classless society to to a full on caste system a la Europe. Have we no young liberal progressives willing to give a few years of their lives to the benefit of the people instead of chasing the almighty dollar?
The workforce model of U.S. higher education is "past its shelf-life expiration date."
The model was built first of exploding enrollments following WWII and solid student numbers growth through the 1990s. The model started to crack in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Comfortable tenured faculty jobs made possible by the growth gave way to 70%+ of teaching staff being adjunct or "contingent," often not making enough to pay rent and some living in their cars.
To keep the game going the model shifted to free and easy student debt. It was easier to get a student loan than buy a car, which lead to massive run up in student debt. Now the bubble has burst with a decade of declining enrollments with a crash caused with Covid. Plus, one could logically believe that being an Uber driver may be more attractive than being an adjunct faculty member. At least you would have a newer model car.
To add insult to injury, there has been no leadership in Congress. Education committee assignments are often made to the "left-overs," who did not get on the "important" committees such as defense, intelligence, etc. This explains, in part, why the Higher Education Act has not been reauthorized since 2008!
The issues with the U. Cal system are a small tip of an iceberg.
Doug, thanks for that excellent assessment of what is going on in higher education. I just don't understand why so many people in this nation care so little for our nation's future and our young people are our future. The people who educate them for the future are disrespected and undervalued. We need to do better, but how do we get people outside California's strike to even pay attention. Our media tell the people that inflation and crime are the only issues worth thinking about and their constant whining about both is disgusting and mostly irrelevant except to those who want to ride those issues to power. Our young people are student loaned into debt they can never afford to pay off and the Trump courts tell Biden he can't even help them. Unacceptable!
This caught me at a particularly vulnerable and depressed moment. Quite contrary to my usual mindset. Last night the new Sarasota, FL school board fired one of the most admired and successful superintendents I remember. This was initiated, literally, moments after 2 new members were installed. A special and a regular meeting had hours of testimony by staff and community demanding he stay. This followed several minutes of a standing ovation for him as he entered the room. This is happening all over FL. DeSantis endorsed candidates are running rough shod over our public education system. A supposed non partisan election has been turned political by DeSantis and his minions.
Rhana, I am so sorry to learn of your superintendent's demise by Republican fools. Republicans right now are on a trajectory that is putting them farther and farther from what they would claim as American ideals. That seems to me is because thinking clearly is no longer part of the Republican practice, if it ever was since say, Teddy Roosevelt. Republicans now are pretty universally racists, misogynists, homo/transphobes, xenophobes, fearmongers and fear mongered people who have decided everyone who is not them is unworthy of their support at any level, and they will use this newly acquired power given them by the elected Republicans, to destroy what they can and blame others for the bad behavior they themselves have perpetrated while they whine that they are not getting everything they want. I forgot to mention that Republicans have given up a quest for adulthood. They prefer the childish, even toddlerish whining, complaining, demanding and the expectation that they will get whatever they want or cause tantrums if they don't. It is shameful, but DeSantis is the toddler in chief in Florida and the people there seem to love him, or if not, their votes were stolen or they just decided not to vote. In any case, Florida and so many other places in this country are in trouble. Toddlers usually don't make good leaders. These Republicans today are proving that to be true.
In most public education, the revenue sources are public record. Where does the money come from? Ans. taxpayers.
The parties to the table probably do not have a personal stake in the outcome. Our custodians were represented by the Teamsters. In the first session, they wanted to does know the shoe sizes for everyone in management. Concrete overshoes.
In Pennsylvania, the response is to close and or consolidate public colleges.
Why is there a UC San Francisco? Why does UC own Los Alamos?
Meanwhile market forces apply. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-861-colleges-and-9499-campuses-have-closed-down-since-2004/
The revenue sources are much more diverse than taxpayers and depend on the mission of the institution. Football schools make millions from sports. Universities with med schools often own entire healthcare systems and clinical trial organizations. Engineering schools often do well with industry cooperations.
In terms of who owns what, there is an abundance of historical accidents around. There are different historical strands of schools in most states--traditional flagship, agriculture, teaching ("Normal Schools"), and community college--which are usually overlapping and not rationally organized into a system. Trying to reform this in any state is usually political suicide.
Historically, the whole Land Grant system was often used to rescue bankrupt private schools and make them public universities. The education market forces were already failing at the time Congress and Lincoln set up land grants. Solution--Use stolen land sold to developers to fund the deal. We have of late also seen how market forces worked with the for-profit grifts. It was not, by almost any measure except executive compensation, a better alternative a well-funded and inclusive public system.
Market forces work well when there is an immediacy to match cost and benefit. The benefits of education are years into the future, which makes leaving everything to the market problematic.
Doug, isn't it sad we have tied the "market" to everything, even our young people's future? We should be able to do better for our young people and for the future of this nation since so much of the innovative research happens on university campuses, and the training of our future leaders and innovators often happens there too.
Ruth Sheets: I suspect that the old Capitalist profit motive is the real culprit here, as it seems to be everywhere else. Look at our medical care system! At one time I saw a proposal to put medical care ' futures' on the stock market for trading! It was not enacted/ allowed. That was a few years ago. Look at the proposal during the Bush administration to 'privatize' Social Security. (They are still at it). Crazy!
Exactly this. ^
It's the commodification and blind profiteering being foisted into every aspect of American society that's putting us on a treadmill of constantly paying more for everything, while getting increasingly worse quality and outcomes for our trouble.
The mythology that the "private market" does anything more efficiently or better has been pretty well debunked at this point. We've learned now that there is certainly always an event horizon where in the need for ever increasing profits starts eating away the actual functions until all that's left is systemic dysfunction.
We've completely lost the plot as a country.
A story in the news years ago featured people in Hong Kong feeding money into an oxygen machine to take a breath while waiting for a commuter train. If meters could be placed on our noses, someone would try to make them mandatory using some rationalization or other, to make a profit.
Crystal Miron ; Certainly if it was left up to some 'leaders' we might suffer that fate.
Laurie, yeah, that "market" drive to privatize everything is really sick, especially since so much of the "market" id not doing all that well at verious points. That would put our Social Security at risk every day. That is simply insane and another ploy by rich white guys to get rich off the tax payers and it is criminal to me. I don't know how we stop the insane strive to keep the idea alive.
Ruth - Regrettably, rich white women also engage in this kind of theft.
Ruth Sheets ; They are thieves who feel entitled.
Dr. Gilbert. As public, they have to publish their budgets.
Truth is that their value is like any other asset. Capitalization of net income. We have a public university here in Florida that was founded on the basis that they wouldn't grant tenure.
I have a cousin who was a university president at a young age and is a consultant to colleges world wide how to deal with it. Just like all businesses. Plant and equipment (i.e the campus) may be an impediment to growth.
Daniel - So true on plant and equipment.
I have worked with several smaller colleges on the verge of collapse because past presidents were hired by boards for their ability for "development" or getting money from alumni for new facilities. That's great until enrollment declines and the institution cannot afford to maintain the white elephants. The board members then wring their hands, fire the president, and look for a merger partner.
This is but one corner of the governance problems in higher education. With the publics usually the qualification has more to do with the applicant's role with a political party than any knowledge of how to run an education institution. Florida is just a current example.
Compound poor decisions like this with a governance system designed for a population where less than 5% had more than a high school diploma (1940 and earlier). It is not a recipe of for success in the 21st Century with 35%+ with some level of education beyond high school.
In bargaining, colleges remind that there is no longer any need for tenure. No need for professors, adjuncts, lecturers in many (if not most) fields.
If there is no campus, who needs custodial staff?
Once upon a time, there was PBSU. One lecturer could reach millions of students. They abandoned it because colleges saw that online was marketable.
There is pushback, but the trend is to maximize profit. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/unimpressed-by-online-classes-college-students-seek-refunds
UC San Francisco is dedicated to Medicine. Public Health, Health Policy, Research. It is one of our best endeavors. Los Alamos is owned by the federal government. It is affiliated with but not owned by Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A & M, and the University of California. It is operated by something named Triad National Security LLC.
See this kind of stuff is what frustrates me. Owned or affiliated who really cares the point is that they are all in bed together right, and the universities have no business being there but for financial gain. Especially Cal that has a no nuke policy but only at Berkely. I guess New Mexico is ok or just up the road at Livermore seems to be ok as well. See, don't let them separate us on some techno BS. There really should not even be a need for Los Alamos anyhow if we are going to do away with nukes. But with the Putin's of the world maybe we need some (like another hole in our head). I am not against nuclear energy, but we are miles away from taking the cheap out of it and ending up with another Chernobyl is a real possibility if we don't. I think the US Navy does it right, look at their track record, but I guess it cost them a lot to do that as well. The matter at hand is that colleges are overpriced and tacking advantage of most workers while the ones on the top do little and collect a lot. As I said they are intellectual fascist trying to say they are bleeding heart liberal. So that is the point not who owns or manages or is affiliated with whatever all that shows is just how far the colleges will go to get money. New Mexico for a California school and a Texas school just proves the point.
The subject of this thread is the UC academic workers' strike. The reason for the strike is low pay, as it was back in the 1980's when they struck before. The disparity between low pay and high housing costs is driving people into homelessness, not just UC academic workers. Society has not addressed this stage of capitalism and we are seeing the consequences. For the city of Berkeley to impose more rent control on property owners is a heavy lift, given the norms of today. Good news- the norms are shifting, because of young people and because of reality.
If you endorse the corporate structure of universities, yes. UCSF is one of the most lucrative outposts for the UC system in the Medical-Industrial Complex. For a state that cannot provide affordable care to many of its less-thrifty citizens, more often women and children, I’m sure UCSF is a point of pride.
Similar model to most of the other national labs. A newer model is NREL, which is a rather interesting mix of public and private participants.
What are they worth?
BTW we had whistleblower Los Alamos cases, and UC has sovereign immunity.
I was stunned at the closures in the above link! I knew colleges were closing but I found these numbers staggering. Thank you for this Daniel.
because Berkley is a nuc. free zone after Livermore invented the thing there. Cake and eat it too.
There's more to it than this. Another problem is that the way we do our accounting has been hiding issues in whom we're paying for what. Robert Reich touched upon this when he said that teachers should be treated as "assets" rather than expenses.
Well, in accounting terms that's not quite correct: an asset is something the company owns outright, which may depreciate and eventually be discarded. That's not a way you want to look at people.
But one thing that _would_ make sense in an accounting system is to account separately for the work that directly produces the product (whether that be cars , textbooks or education-hours for students) and the overhead work used to run and maintain the organisation that supports that work (such as managers and administrators). Totalling up these two costs separately would do two things:
1. It would let us see that the overhead costs in universities have increased dramatically over the last few decades, and consider whether we should be working on reducing those, rather than reducing what we spend on actually teaching students.
2. It would help work towards a perceptual shift that puts the labourers actually doing the production in their rightful place, _above_ rather than below the managers.
How we do our accounting and how we design markets ("free" or otherwise) embeds a lot of value judgements, often in a way that makes them hard to see. This is part of the reason we have such inequality and workers are treated so badly: the people benefiting from this can point to their accounting system or "free" market and say, "it's not us, it's just the way the world is" when that's not true at all: it's the way the world in which we work was _designed._
Curt - Excellent points. Since the late 1980s, I have worked with the issues of human capital and its role in the asset-based business accounting system. The modern accounting system can trace its roots to the 1494 writings of Luca Pacioli, when some people were, in fact, owned assets. Modern accounting is ill-equipped to deal with the value of people and, more importantly, their relationships with one another.
To your first point, overhead in higher education is certainly an issue. My experience is that the overhead bloat comes from grafting social and non-academic programs on top of outdated instructional methods. Disentangling things such as professional sports teams pretending to be college teams, giant healthcare systems in many universities, and the use of endowments as investment funds should be done but will take time.
A thought is to introduce self-governance models. An experiment in the U.S. of a university as cooperative might be interesting. Institutions could be transformed into hybrid consumer and worker-owned limited cooperative associations (LCAs). Students and the workforce would need to sort out the offerings and administration through a one-person, one-vote governance system. The additional advantage of LCAs is that investors are allowed as a separate type of coop member with limited voting rights as a way to address the need for capital.
In addressing your second point, coops do permit this shift. Some experiments already exist. Mondragon University in Spain has operated this way since 1997. It has around 4,000 students. The University of Jyväskylä in Finland also uses cooperatives as part of its core instructional design.
How would such a model square with the idea that education is a public good (and should thus be financed by the public)?
Excellent question. The idea of education as public good is unevenly applied. It has been more clearly implemented at the K-12 level with universal education but not at the post-secondary level. Historically this has been because a very small part of the population (5% before WWII) was college educated. That, of course, has changed and will change even more with those having some college credential likely to surpass 45% by the mid 2030s.
Where co-ops have been used in K-12, e.g. Minnesota regional service co-ops, they are producer co-ops providing shared services. That could be one model for public institutions, which educate 70%+ of students in the U.S. Private colleges could choose to be entirely run as a co-op such as Mondragon University in Spain.
A producer co-op would not disturb the public character of higher education funding because the institutions would be the co-op owners. This is similar to the credit union service organizations ("CUSOs") authorized for credit union shared services since 1934. Perhaps we should see the creation of educational service organizations ("EdSOs") as part of the mix for higher education.
The fundamental benefit of co-ops is in the change in mentality required away from elitist hierarchical management that dominates our business culture. Rather than focusing on the exchange of "things" in "markets," co-ops require a focus on people and relationships while operating in a market. The change may even involve the democratic election of leadership!
The idea has merit - but there has to be a catch if the institution which most embodies that concept (U.C. Berkeley) hasn't embraced it...
Indeed, UCB has long been a leader in facilitating income mobility (by admitting & graduating more first-generation students than all Ivy League schools combined); even as the state walked back from its commitment to higher education (and costs have, correspondingly, risen) UCB has found ways to limit expected family contributions to 15% of income up to ~$130k+ (and to ensure that they are zero below $80k). Could a co-op hope to effect similar outcomes (i.e. without any adverse impact to educational quality or institutional character)...?
CA has overall capacity issues. Not all qualified CA residents can be admitted to system schools. The state will have to find new and different ways to finance and build delivery capacity.
If a co-op structure reduces administrative costs through sharing at a producer level, it would free up funding for more seats. The California system already has a shared services initiative through UC IT innovate (UCITi). A limited cooperative association could be used to allow transparent investment in the effort, but retain control of the services. There is no need to go down the road of the online program manager grift scheme.
“The model started to crack in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Comfortable tenured faculty jobs made possible by the growth gave way to 70%+ of teaching staff being adjunct or "contingent," often not making enough to pay rent and some living in their cars.”
Same can be said about archaeological and environmental consulting within engineering firms. It’s a serious crisis.
Omg, you just nailed it. I have for years been concerned about education in the US. The wholesale decimation of education, ALL of it from pre-school to university is grave. When the ruling elites decided they were rolling back The New Deal they were intent in impoverishing the country. A word about Newsom and the democratic legislature, they bend the knee to big donor, the moneyed elite call the shots. They're also ruining the United States. I would love to see a mass exodus of young, talented kids emigrating out of here. I have two college age grandsons, bright, hard working kids and I'm encouraging them to leave.
The process has been a long-term project that can may be book ended at the start by the "Nation at Risk" report during the Reagan administration.
The critical fallacy (or agenda) of the approach was one of taking a massive system of education, setting "theoretical" targets, use testing to show non-attainment of those theoretical targets, and then privatize everything because the free market will solve all problems.
The project has moved to a new phase in the past few years post Citizens' United with "mega donations" to school board campaigns and dark money flowing into public university administration appointments.
Reagan's "Nation at Risk" was a Republican tactic to stem the G.I. Bill's wave of college students who were learning too much, becoming liberal thinkers, and changing the politics of the nation.
Jeff, you are right about the GOP plans to slow education, especially in the areas of thinking and reasoning. Can't have those young people figuring out the truth from the lies the Republicans tell with every breath they take. Every single parent in this nation should be yelling and voting for people who actually care about their kids instead of the rich white guys who want it all for themselves and are not shy about telling everyone that is what they want. Hey, in fact, Marjorie Greene is calling for an armed or better armed insurrection. She claims she could have done it better than the folks who actually followed Trumps orders to attack the Capitol. It seems Greene should not be able to hold office as an insurrectionist, but her constituents just love her to death, maybe. I am not sure where she and they went to school, but they clearly didn't learn much about our nation and our people, and thinking clearly was not an asset at their schools. Shameful!
Excellent assessment. One of my concerns is that the problem begins earlier. Look at graduation rates and literacy rates in our schools at the secondary and elementary levels. We embrace idiots on parade. It is sad.
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and how did they arrive at the term "continent" to describe their devolved conditions of employment... the dictionary lists these two definitions:
• one of the six or seven great divisions of land on the globe.
• exercising continence - i.e.: Most children are continent by the age of three.
"Contingent" per Webster
contingent (con·tin·gent kən-ˈtin-jənt)
1: dependent on or conditioned by something else
Payment is contingent on fulfillment of certain conditions.
a plan contingent on the weather
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Sorry, I saw your original word spelled wrong.
My apologies if it was my eyes, and not a typo.
Dr. Gilbert,
Where did you come from? I could not agree more. Overpriced education that has little value supported by intellectual's that found this as fertile ground.
More like the head of a pin...
Professor Reich, thank you for supporting the student workers and all the staff and teachers and Professors of the California higher education system. The public is not aware of the limits of salaries and benefits for teachers at all levels. As a California public school teacher, I spent my own money to earn a Master’s degree so I would not only move higher on the salary schedule but qualify to teach in the public community college system. However, that system was hiring only part-time faculty, two office hours per week, no benefits and less than 12 units of teaching. And no tenure. That’s the clincher. No tenure means no security. No assurance you will have your position next school year, no matter how well you teach. I had to pay off my student loans for my higher degree. So I stayed in the Title 1 program and received a $5,000 dollar payment from federal government for teaching in a low income school for five years. I know people who earned PhDs in English and had to move out of state to teach full-time with benefits. I did teach halftime at the college level at a private school in California. However my goal was to stay in the public system.
That was not an option. There are countless stories of highly qualified candidates who move out of state or teach in private technical schools so they can work and pay off their loans.
Irenie, I, too paid for my own Master's Degrees plus, hoping to advance my skills and increase my salary in a public school. My salary turned out to be enough to support me since I had no kids. Anyone with a family would have had a hard time and the lack of tenure in public universities kept a lot of people who would have been good instructors on the college level working in public k-12 schools to pay off loans and support their families. It strikes me and a bunch of others that this is not a workable system for giving our young people an excellent preparation for the advanced careers students will need to carry our nation and planet into the future.
The issue for many people is transferrable skills.
https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/transferable-skills/
This country was built by people who behaved in one way, exploitive of Indigenous people, women, and people of color, but who dreamed of a better more equal country that valued all citizens. We have yet to really confront and deal with our dark past so we continue to repeat it. Politicians always talk about how much they value children, they are our future, but do little that shows how they value them. Giving a great education is one of the best ways to show we value our children, yet how can you attract and keep great teachers if you don’t pay them? We all agree that over the past 40years the gap between the haves and have nots has grown greater. History tells us that this is when you get more and more rebellion against governments which we have seen here in America. We have lawmakers, and political leaders that have supported this greed. I would like to see all service workers go on strike and demand salaries and benefits that show they are valued. Why should professional athletes, actors, Upper management, etc make so much more money than the workers who make their jobs possible. I am hopeful that there will be more strikes and we will get universal child care, paid leave, sick leave, a livable wage, and respect and concern for the well being of all workers. The countries with the highest happiness quotient, while paying higher taxes, people don’t have to stress about having basic needs met. We need to grow out of the adolescent stage of egocentrism and start caring about our neighbors, our communities, our country, our world.
Linda! Wow! You hit the mark I have been trying to hit for a while, calling for our young people to be truly valued at all levels of development. We the People lie to ourselves that we actually care about our kids, but keep voting in people who do not value public education or probably education at all, assuming they sprang from the womb brilliant and fully educated or something like that. Education needs to be higher up on the priorities list. Every time I have filled out a Democratic priorities survey, except for the ones from Elizabeth Warren, education is not even listed. I list it in the "other" category, but somehow, 2 years later it is still not included on the main list of priorities. That is disgraceful and I no longer even open those survey emails which of course are really fund-raisers. We should be able to do better.
Ruth Sheets ; As the wages of workers who still have jobs have flatlined for the past 40 years, it is not surprising that people who are squeezed by inflation are not clamoring to fund higher education. There are many who have not gone to college, who still pay taxes. When I placed a sign that favored building new high school and middle schools in my town in my business window, I was counseled to remove it. As I could lose business. I put it up at my home, and we got both schools. A few short years apart. They were needed. They were both built. Our taxes went up. It was worth it. " If you think Education is expensive ; try ignorance" was my favorite bumper sticker. Results are showing in our town already, with new curricula, like financial literacy and civics .
Laurie, I am so pleased your community got its schools. Because our community has a tiny tax base due to poverty and some other issues, and because the state of PA has a strong GOP that wants to undermine our public education system, our newest school among the regular public schools in our community was built in 1974. On the other hand, all the charter schools have buildings built within the past 10 years. At least the real public schools have the best teachers. That really does make a difference. The charter schools don't even have to have certified teachers, just 75% must be certified. Their turnover in teachers is really high while the regular public schools have teachers who want to be teaching here for the long-haul. Charter schools were one of the worst inventions for our schools and our kids but a lot of parents don't know their kids are getting a lower quality education. In addition, the fact that the charters get to take their money off the top, even the cyber charters which are really terrible, the real public schools get the money dregs. It's just not fair, but it is exactly what Republicans and their buddies want as they work to undermine public education.
Ruth Sheets ; Ironically, the new schools have increased property values and are attracting young families who can afford to buy homes here. With that increased tax revenue, those who worried about the tax rate should calm down. We do not have charter schools in town, but there are some near enough for some to attend. I have not seen figures, because I have not looked for them.
Laurie, I am pleased your new schools have made a difference. As for charter schools, most of them are in poor communities of color since those communities are most easily exploited. State governments pretty much hand districts over to charter corporations and rich individuals so they won't have responsibility other than paying a per pupil amount which, of course is always lower than what rich or even middle class white districts have per pupil. Check out New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Since charter schools often have contracts that give them their money off the top of a district's budget, they are rarely hurting for funds, except that there is, as one might expect a lot of corruption among charter school operators: paying "CEOs" enormous salaries and their wives as CFOs equally high salaries, buying properties with their profits as some PA cyber charters are doing, and more. It is a disgrace, but Republicans and their friends are making out really well, donating to candidates (as they should not be doing with our tax payer money), and generally lying about their successes and lack thereof. It really is a racket but our kids, kids who already face every disadvantage, lose,
Linda, you ask a critical question: “yet how can you attract and keep great teachers if you don’t pay them?” Expecting teachers, instructors, professors, assistants, aides, even the admins like principals, to subsidize the system is folly. More astute people leave if they need to earn a salary that pays the bills and the loans they made to pay for the years of professional education. I was too vested in the teachers retirement system and California teachers couldn’t pay into social security. Some called waiting to retire at age 63 “the golden handshake.” As much as I loved teaching and students, I call it “golden handcuffs.” At least for California.
As a nurse that worked for a state hospital, I too was not allowed to pay into social security.,but paid into SURS. Previous jobs left me 4 quarters shor so the money I had paid in was just lost. They call it double dipping, but if I worked at 2different companies that had retirement plans I could draw from both. i stayed home when my children were young for 8 years so I should have been able to draw on my husbands social security, but we divorced after 11 years and lost this because I remarried. That marriage only lasted for 5 years so I as not allowed any SS. Our SS system is designed against woman and those who are just short of time. Woman who stay home with children or to take care of older relatives truely get penalized. Teachers, nurses, social workers, many jobs that are predominately female have historically not allowed for any kind of descent retirement. It is another form of systemic misogyny which does not get addressed. I hope we are entering an era of greater workers rights.
Linda, your timeline I fear is typical for women of our generation. I also checked out my ex-husband’s SS. We were married 32 years. I helped him through university. He was a teacher but had paid into the system enough for a partial SS benefit. In addition to teachers retirement that we both had and shared. When the SS rep talked to me and learned I had a teacher’s income she told me I would not get enough to make it worthwhile. I’m sorry to say I listened to her. Let’s say $100 per month for 25 years. So far. We’re both still alive. The benefit for spouse does not depend on income. It depended that I am not married. And it would not have reduced his benefit at all. I am still single. I should have applied. Of course it’s not my only mistake. This example is just one more where we don’t know or understand our rights and we aren’t given correct information.
My career was spent in k-12 public schools..........upon retirement I was able to spend four years at a local university in administration.........was paid very well (approximately 1/3 more than I had made my final year in k - 12)............yet shocked to learn that instructors, assistant & associate professors made less than most k - 12 teachers. Adjuncts on the rise......vacancies filled by adjuncts & interims. The root cause was in large part the erosion of support from state government.
In some states Republicans oppose public everything. Public schools. Higher education. E.G. https://www.psea.org/mastrianocuts
https://www.phillytrib.com/news/state_and_region/pa-state-system-chancellor-calls-on-general-assembly-for-more-funding/article_10bab56e-f24a-592e-aeaa-a2cf18c76280.html
Yes, Daniel, and a whole lot of people voted for Mastriano, that anti everything but himself jerk!
Craig, you are right about the poor pay, but of course, the coaches in state universities are some of the highest paid state employees. There's something off about that observation.
Can custodians show that their work generates income?
Coaches. ..because the sport makes money they sell it as an investment. If they cut it, they kill a cash cow.
In collective bargaining, if adjucnts want more money, they have to prove that they can increase, rather than decrease net income. I.E. Do they have intellectual property rights that they can transfer to the university?
Good point............significant imbalances all over the higher ed landscape
Coaches in College may be well paid, but high school coaches typically receive poor compensation for the hours they spend in practices, planning, transportation, games, parent and community contact, meetings. Of course college sports has the potential to bring in money and some do, but there are a lot of factors that determine the income of a sport. High school funding is different.
Irenie, you are so right about high school coaches and their, let's say, less than stellar pay. Most of the time, it's a teacher who get's "after school" pay to do it and they are only allowed a certain number of hours and nearly always go past that number, so with little or no compensation for that overtime. It's a good thing most of the coaches I have known love what they are doing or it would be really bad for them.
Yes, I have personal experience with a houseful of athletes and coaches. And even referees. It’s been fun to watch the kids coach younger children when they were in middle and high school and referee, too. And make a career for high school and college coaching. They grew up in a modest income two teacher choice of career over big bucks. All advanced college degrees. So as you wrote, doing what they love. However we got to this coaching topic, the pay in high school and lower is low. College head coaches at prestigious schools may make high salaries but if we’re talking about where the money goes in high schools and colleges the pie has a lot of slices and they’re not all the same size. Monetization of high performance players is new especially in high schools but I’m not sure what this has to do with the original conversation. Maybe comparing where money comes from and goes and the budget from the original topic.
For the colleges, the only issue is return on investment.
Some high school coaches and even players have lucrative shoe contracts. https://fortune.com/2022/05/09/high-school-athletes-endorsement-deals-ncaa/
Over the past few years, NIL, "name, image, and likeness," athletes' ability to profit from the right to publicity has extended, even to high school coaches and plyers. https://www.on3.com/nil/news/what-is-nil-for-high-school-athletes/
As ever the rich, in whom power exists, don't want to leave hold of their pennies. Greed is their religion. What we have we must protect. This is not exclusive to America- it's rampant throughout the world.
"Money, money, money it's a rich man's world!" goes the song. Until economies stop worshipping Mammon little will change. Its a question of values. What matters more? In this case the teacher, lecturer starving to keep moneybags full. It makes me ashamed of humanity.
when i was pursuing my PhD, i was a student senator and we went on strike for ... health insurance. yeah, we were not viewed as state employees so we had to pay our health insurance costs out of pocket. we did win, eventually.
meanwhile, i had no family or parents to support me by paying rent, etc., so i was getting food from a foodbank or scavenging from university meetings where food was provided, and i was homeless several times, crashing in my office (when i could get away with it.) it was awful. one time, a nurse asked me how i manage, so i told her, and added "after i get my PhD, no one can take THAT away from me, and i'll have a career that i love and care about and i'll never again be unemployed."
i was so incredibly optimistically stupid: i am not only unemployed NOW and have been so for a very long time, but i am UNEMPLOYABLE because, according to potential employers, like starbux, mcdonald's, etc., i am either vastly overqualified, or "differently qualified" and i am seen as a poor employment risk who will leave any job they offer the second i find something better, either something more in line with my career goals, or that pays better.
of course, leaving my education off my job applications leaves me with a giant, gaping hole in my employment record which means ... NO JOB.
so i worked as an adjunct when i could find such temporary jobs, and earned less than poverty wages to teach anatomy and physiology to university students who were studying to become medical doctors.
the entire academic system, which i poured my heart and soul and dreams of a bright future into was a beautiful lie that i stupidly, happily bought into, and i paid a severe price with my career, my health (both my mental and physical health), my utterly completely destroyed self-esteem and (probably) my life.
and the best i can hope for is to be mocked by strangers, as i was when i was homeless. otherwise, i am invisible, as is everyone else who, like me, bought into a predatory academic system under the desire to work hard to improve our lives.
= (
Girl Scientist, it is so hard to hear your story, knowing how the majority of people in government care nothing for the struggles of students and those who cover so many of the college classes yet are paid so little. The big names earn pretty decent salaries, but the majority, especially those who can't get tenure because that usually brings with it insurance and some salary security, earn very little. Administrators often earn well because they are the ones who bring in the donations. Something is wrong when those who run the education institutions earn more than those who actually do the teaching and operation of the day to day activities of the institution. There needs to be a restructuring.
This is a thing that's been going on for awhile.The people who are teaching our future leaders and workers are treated like dirt,are subject to the whims of idiot governors like Ron DeSatan,and can be fired almost on a moments notice.
And yes,we sure as hell don't hear near enough about it,because the media don't consider this issue a priority,over the silly antics like our so called leadership of our country commits on a daily basis(here's looking at trump and his assortment of foolhardy minions)and inane celebrity gossip that passes as"news"nowadays.
This needs to be addressed country wide,in each state's university systems.This is happening everywhere.
Thank you for standing up for these professors in Cali and calling out not only the billion dollar surplus that could better pay the people teaching our future leaders,but improve everything across the board for everyone,and the governor and the board of regents for sitting on their hands whining why they can't"afford"to help.Baloney.
Hoping it gets better for these folks really soon.
Our great governor moRon deathSatan can't spend money on education he needs it to send more immigrants from a different state anyplace else so he can make the news. All he wants is to be known all over the US so it makes it easier to run for president.🙏 Please 🙏 don't let that happen.
Maureen, I, too am praying that DeSantis jerk is not elected anything. I still can't figure out what happened in Florida that so many voted for him to remain governor. He cares for no one but himself, a perfect follower of the Trump "hate everyone but those who bow to you and do as much damage to those people who are not kissing your a** as you can, theory. A lot of attention is paid to the "swing" states' voting but almost nothing to Florida that has a history of voter fraud. Or perhaps, Floridians just love the idea of hurting their neighbors.
Indeed! The Republican dominated electoral system of Florida should be investigated. It could be that Floridian voters are that ignorant, gullible or masochistic, but their politicians are well-known to be crooked, fascist grifters, so I wouldn't trust their electoral results. Usually what Republicans accuse Democrats of doing, Republicans are doing.
@Barbara Woodward and @Ruth Sheets yes I live in Florida. Unfortunately I think we are no longer purple we are red. If you've noticed most of the January 6th insurrectionist have come from Florida. Those are the people that are so thrilled to be living in a state run by deathSatan and with the rump their idol living here too. I'm just hoping some of the jail time is helping to convince some of them that what they were doing was wrong. I wish the news would stop covering that side and spend more effort and time covering the good things that Biden and the Democrats are doing. I'm glad the people like Robert Reich are showing the way but unfortunately the people that need to learn about it aren't reading him.
Maureen, it is hard to watch Florida from afar, knowing there are pretty great people who live there but alas, a huge number of people who have decided their neighbors are worthy of the abuse DeSantis and crew choose to toss out at them to incite neighbors to turn on neighbors over books they are not supposed to approve of or CRT which isn't even taught in K-12 (but probably ought to be), and trans hate that will keep young people from receiving treatment that could save them a lot of pain and suffering in the future. Yep, DeSantis and his legislators are cruel, but it will be seen whether Floridians are OK with the cruelty and plan to participate. I hope not, but don't know for sure.
Jaime, I suspected all along that Florida votes are not necessarily accurate but because they are "red," no one is even questioning results. At least this time there are no "hanging chads" Republican Floridians can whine about and claim they don't know what it means. However, it could be that a large number of Floridians really do hate their neighbors and want DeSantis to head their efforts.
This is just a guess - do you live in Florida?😂
Melissa, It is really pathetic that our media follows the moving laser beam pointing at the most unimportant issues. People, thin think that since they are being covered they are important. How do we get education out there as the critical issue it is when so many in power want it ignored and privatized so their rich friends can have even more power over what is taught and to whom?
Ruth, you bring up a critical issue: education should be a top priority, but in many repub states that system is manipulated by “leaders” who ban Truth: CRT, sex education, the founding of America connected to Indigenous peoples, and their continuing subjugation, slavery and the civil war, and for some the Holocaust, Japanese Internment and continuing poverty and racism for people of color and minority groups, including gender orientation choices. Truth in speech and in resources, books, teaching. In some states it seems like they are still in the confederacy. Or want to be.
Irenie, I do believe the former Confederacy is still the Confederacy and they have recruited other white states to their warped world view. Those states are ruled mostly by scared white people who seem terribly afraid their fragile children can't handle learning about their ancestors' bad behavior toward other human beings. Actually, I think the parents/leaders are more scared that their kids might not have the same respect for the ancestors the current adults want them to have and might want to do something different, more positive. Fear is a really strong motivator. Republicans have learned very well how to use it to warp our education system into something it is hard to see as public education. The education system is becoming the fiefdom of those scared white leaders who are pretty ignorant despite their claim of being educated at "good" schools. It seems to me that anyone who is a follower of Trump and Kump learned only means to harm others through their years in higher education. That is beyond sad!
Ruth, YES! . “Fear is a really strong motivator. Republicans have learned very well how to use it to warp our education.”
I was born and raised and educated in California. When I graduated from high school in 1965 the public options for higher education were the UC system, the State College and University system and the community college system. The community colleges were free tuition and the others were low tuition. The quality of all was high. The next year Ronald Reagan was elected governor and the attack on public education (at all levels, but especially the UC system) began. That is the root of modern underfunding of contemporary public universities. Sadly, especially after 1980, the Democrats joined the Republicans in embracing Thatcher/Reaganomics and underfunding got even worse. Many of us had to leave California (something I had never thought I would ever do) to find stable employment in higher education. Sadly, the infection spread and academic work has become tenuous almost everywhere. Good, hardworking scholars are forced to take jobs with no future or leave the profession. Thank you to these members of the academic proletariat for standing up and fighting back. Come on, Gavin. You want to be a progressive and not just some clueless rich guy? Put up some of that budget surplus and stop the scandal of a great public university system being only 10% funded by the public.
These workers should demand not just living wages, but EXCELLENT wages!
This is so inspiring! I'm hoping the strikers will get everything they ask for, need, and want. For much too long this has been going on. We need to back the people who provide education as well as regular workers the backing and decent wages they should be getting. And, this should stand. No rolling back on wages or scrimping on benefits! I'm with you all the way folks! It's about time...
It’s a matter of priorities. Congress is on the verge of passing a $850 Billion dollar defense budget, a huge increase from last year, $858B vs $773B this year but the military claims this will leave them a “hollow force”. If you’re a high school graduate, or just have a GED, 18 years old and with just 6 months of training you can become an LAPD police officer and earn $72,000 a year before overtime. When we hear the titans of industry whining about their situation they claim they need “more incentives”. So I ask, where’s the incentive to go to a first rate university, get a degree or even a graduate degree only to live in poverty? Some may claim the love of knowledge or the process of learning, but unless we reward our real Best and Brightest the advent of the Military Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us of is where we’re destined to end up.
If you're lucky, apparently. What is happening with student loans? Are the state governments making money on these student loans? I have heard that U Mass tuition is now close to what it costs for private colleges. What's going on with that?
John Goodman, you bring up important points about budget and priorities. In addition to critical funding going to military, and not education, the military is allowed by law to come into the schools to educate or inform , but isn’t that recruiting, especially in schools or areas where students already may not be able to attend college and the steady pay and perceived opportunities lure them into enlisting. Parents may not know they can opt out of the “military information session” which is often a one on one private meeting, student and recruiter.
https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/faq/what-are-requirements-access-military-recruiters-high-school-students
Thanks for sharing this. I don’t know if I disagree with this but it certainly should be done only with the parent’s knowledge and approval, especially if the student is under 18. I’m sure these recruiters are very persuasive, especially to the naive.
John, my older son, in 1985, met with the military recruiter without parental knowledge. The law allows the recruiting. I don’t know if it’s both male and female now. But parents complained and four years later parents were informed the recruiter would be at school and we could opt out. My younger son wanted to hear what the recruiter had to say, but was much more interested in sports and school. And we were not a military family. The school had a high percentage of students attending college and university post high school, with few entering military service. However imagine students in low income schools being called in to meet with a military recruiter and thinking this is the chance of a lifetime. And maybe it is. Or not.
True. But in some cases the military option could be an excellent one and not just in low income environments.
John, it seems the military has been thought of as a positive option for people, usually males, who aren’t going to college and don’t have good jobs. Even kids in minor trouble. But I, along with many others see another option and that is a non-military commitment that provides housing, salary, mentoring, companionship, training for jobs, community volunteering. Like Peace Corps, Americorp or similar. Development of self discipline that is helpful in building up not breaking down. Getting away from discipline that includes weapons, a macho mentality and a continuation of the video game strategies of violence and war. I don’t think that helps young people develop into productive citizens. But we could help by offering choices that lead in that direction.
Good point. Most of the positions in the Peace Corp however require you come in with a skill set and usually a bachelors degree or more. Also, most Peace Corp volunteers come with a mature set of emotional and social skills. Again, as evidenced by my post I believe the military needs some serious auditing and probably reigning in, but it does provide a career path and social skills training that some wayward individuals may not otherwise have available to them.
Last time I checked in Florida, some 70 plus percent of teaching was done by adjuncts. No security, no healthcare, no retirement, no tenure. Many need to take outside gigs to pay the rent. And since then the rising rents and food costs are crushing. Scandalous.
Educational workers on every level from administration to teachers have been over worked and underpaid for years. Here in in Wisconsin it really took hold with governor Walker and act 10. Moral and and support for staff on every level has deteriorated to an all time low in every district. This needs to change soon. I think the government especially the republicans want us to be uneducated so they can take over and we will be an uneducated nation!
Thank you Robert. I agree with everything you said ... well, higher Ed in Michigan isn’t small potatoes either... but the argument you make for California is exactly the same as one might make for Michigan, or Ohio, or New York. Or others. And it is a tragedy everywhere.
Americans need full time jobs that pay livable wages not part time jobs like our Congress!
You are so right Dr. Reich, California has lost sight of it's most valuable asset, educated citizens. I attended the California State University system, my daughter the University of California system. Between the time I graduated with a Masters Degree and my daughter daughter graduated with a Doctorate in Medicine, tuition and the cost of living had sky rocketed. Why? California under Pat Brown (Governor when I arrived in 1961) was a progressive, far sighted administrator. Under Pat Brown we invested in infrastructure, education, and the good of the State. Since then we seem to be governed by greed, selfishness and backward sliding. Our highways, that were the envy of the world in the 1960's and 1970'a are now desperately in need of repair, our bridges are unsafe and the average Californian cannot afford to get a college degree with out burdening themselves for life with student debt. What, so millionaires can snort cocaine? Brag about their bank accounts? I support Governor Newsom, but he is not up to the standard set by Pat Brown. Jerry Brown had his head in the clouds so long it muddled his brain. Gray Davis actually joined the enemy, the wealthy energy industry. The Republican Governors we've had beginning with Ronnie Reagan were determined to change California from a relatively classless society to to a full on caste system a la Europe. Have we no young liberal progressives willing to give a few years of their lives to the benefit of the people instead of chasing the almighty dollar?