Good Morning 99%'ers. Today's Open Thread topic in another in the series on neo-liberalism. For those who may be interested in previous essays on this subject, here are the links to those essays.

Week 1 - The Curse of Neo-liberalism
Week 2 - Neo-liberalism Part 2
Week 3 - The Neo-liberal Myth of Meritocracy
Week 4 - Characteristics of Neo-liberalism
Week 5 - Neo-liberalism - Obama and the Clintons
Week 6 - Neo-liberalism - The Legacy of Bill Clinton
Week 7 - Neo-liberalism - Lack of Empathy
Week 8 - Overview of the Impacts of Privatization
Week 9 - The Rule of the Market
Week 10 - Effects of the Neo-liberal Push for Deregulation
Week 11- Cutting Expenditures for the Social Safety Net
Week 12 - Neo-Liberal Commoditization of Education

In one of my first essays in this series on neo-liberalism, I referenced an excellent article titled What is Neoliberalism? This article was written by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia and published by Corp Watch. This article provided an excellent definition of neo-liberalism as well as a listing of the five characteristics of neo-liberalism. Among the five characteristics of neo-liberalism is the cutting of public expenditures for social services and reducing the safety net for the poor.

CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURES FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.

In my last essay, I wrote about how neo-liberalism has greatly impacted our public education system through commodification via extensive testing used to evaluate teachers, shutting down or reconstituting poorly performing schools, and promoting the use of mostly non-union charter schools. All of these factors result in a shifting of financial resources from public schools to corporations and private entities. This essay is an attempt to scratch the surface on how neo-liberalism is having a devastating impact upon higher education. As with my last essay on the subject of education, I want to begin by saying that I do not have a background in education and I welcome comments and input from those here who have a personal expertise in the area of education.

First, a quote from an interview with Truthout by the always quotable Henry Giroux on the state of college education in the United States. It serves as a lead in to my personal story below.

If this tendency continues, it will mean the death of critical thinking and higher education will simply become another ideological apparatus dedicated to training rather than education, stifling critical inquiry rather than nurturing it -- and will narrow if not kill the imagination rather than cultivate it. One consequence will be that knowledge will be utterly commodified, students will be defined in utterly instrumental terms and the obligations of citizenship will be reduced to the private orbits of self-interest, consumption and commodification. This nightmare scenario will reinforce one of the central tendencies of totalitarianism; that is, a society dominated by thoughtlessness, stupidity and diverse modes of depoliticization.

As I often do, I am going to introduce this subject with a personal story from many years ago. As many of you here already know, I worked nearly my entire working life for a local city/county planning department. Because our city was also the home of two universities, we often had interns working for us. Many were excellent and some eventually came to work for our department full time. One intern really stands out in my mind because her approach to work was so different than any of the others. She was older and had previously served in the military and was now returning to school.

With most interns, we would have a short period in which we would familiarize them with how we operated and then we would assign them a project, usually involving some sort of research so that they could get a feel for what the real world of planning entailed. However, this one intern, the former military service person, could not even grasp the concept of being assigned a whole project for which she would be responsible. Her thinking and training was in being assigned a task for which she was constantly supervised. She was basically a technician.

The more I read about the way education is being approached as focusing upon technical skills rather than creative and critical thinking skills, the more I remember the frustration of working with this one intern. And now I wonder if this intern was not a glimpse into the future of our labor force which will be staffed mostly by technicians working in a top down managerial environment.

In late 2013, the Alternet published an article titled, 6 Ways Neoliberal Education Reform May Be Destroying a College Near You. In it, the author examines changes being pushed by the Obama administration. The President himself went on a bus tour in the summer of 2013 to sell the administration's new programs to remedy the high cost of college education.

This past August at the State University of New York, Buffalo, President Obama made a familiar offer: “major new reforms,” this time in higher education, “that will shake up the current system.” The New York Times described it as a plan “to shame universities into holding down prices.”

On that tour, Obama listed three major initiatives that the administration would be implementing in that regard. Strangely, they tracked along the same lines as the Race to the Top program that the Obama administration implemented to be applied to public schools K through grade twelve. As with the Race to the Top, Obama's higher education plan relied heavily upon performance ratings and punitive measures rather than addressing the structural problems that have led to college becoming too expensive for the vast majority of Americans.

Obama’s remarks were an overture to what will become a major campaign to transform higher education through three measures: instituting a ratings system and performance funding for federal student aid; encouraging technological innovation and competition; and mitigating student debt.

In July of this year, the House of Representatives passed five bills, under bipartisan support, that appear to implement some of the goals of the Obama plan for higher education. All of these bills seem to have the same thing in common and that is they are driven by the neo-liberal view of life in which there is monetary competition in all things and that competition results in winners and losers.

The entire ideology of neo-liberalism runs counter to the classical idea of education as a way to open up the students' minds to further discovery and creativity. Instead, the neo-liberal ideology is one of training technicians for the job market as determined by corporate entities. As a result neo-liberalism is destroying the purpose of education and turning our colleges into institutes of vocational training. With this in mind, here are the six ways neo-liberalism is destroying our colleges as listed in the Alternet article referenced above.

1. Misdiagnosing the root problems. This is exactly the same issue we are seeing the way neo-liberalism treats our K-12 public schools. Once again teachers and tenure are attacked as the reason for poor performance while ignoring the real elephant in the room, income inequality and rising poverty levels. The correlation between socio-economic levels and performance in academics is more direct in the United States than in most other countries.

These inequalities pervade higher education as well. A charmed sliver of the undergraduate population attends elite colleges and graduates at passable rates. Meanwhile, masses of students attend middling schools, graduate occasionally, and struggle to turn their degrees into gainful employment.

Tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation while undergraduate instruction has become the province of adjunct professors and grad students. Student debt averaging $35,000 shackles the typical college graduate.

2. Pushing accountability through perks and penalties. This is the same kind of corporate competitive model being placed upon higher education that we have seen in our K-12 programs. The net effect is that it rewards institutions who can select elite students, often from more well to do family income backgrounds and therefore will automatically have higher rates of graduation. This carrot and stick approach once again fails to acknowledge most of the basic reasons why students fail to graduate.

Obama’s college ratings initiative doesn’t have standardized tests to lean on, so the president offered other guideposts: graduation rates, tuition costs, post-college earnings, number of Pell grant recipients enrolled. According to these measures, “students attending high-performing colleges could receive larger Pell Grants and more affordable student loans.”

3. Gaming the ratings. We have already seen where school systems have tried to game the ratings under No Child Left Behind. Perhaps the most famous case of gaming the ratings involved Michell Rhee and the DC school system.

If post-college earnings become an accountability metric, colleges would be incentivized to hobble humanities departments and consolidate instruction around lucrative majors like engineering and business. Small liberal arts colleges would face existential perils; already, a gubernatorial committee in Florida has advanced an idea to charge students more for degrees in the humanities.

4. "Saving" schools by sacrificing students. Low income and students of color are less likely to graduate than white or more affluent students. So if aid to colleges is pegged to graduation rates, colleges are going to be more inclined to not accept students from low income backgrounds or those of color. This becomes a self perpetuating form of educational discrimination.

A recent ProPublica report found that over the last two decades, “four-year state schools have been educating a shrinking portion of the nation’s lowest-income students.”

Pegging financial aid to graduation rates will likely exacerbate the pattern. “It's not hard for schools to lower their dropout rates,” wrote the L.A. Times editorial board in response to Obama’s plan. “The cheap and easy way to accomplish this is by accepting the students most likely to graduate…and lowering academic standards so that almost no one flunks.”

5. Privileging “value” in the university. For this concept which was promoted by the Obama Administration, I am going to excerpt two paragraphs as to what is or is not "value." By value, Obama seemed to mean that by rating various colleges and universities, students could compare which offered the best value for them. In my opinion, once again this concept is similar to what a consumer would do to compare various products in the marketplace. But education should not be a product, but a process of awakening and learning. This is where the neo-liberals fail to understand the real value of education.

But colleges are already veritable market-leaders in capitalizing on cheap labor and minimizing the experience required to be an instructor. Nationally, untenured or contingent faculty members teach a majority of courses in colleges and universities. According to the American Federation of Teachers, adjuncts teach 49 percent of all undergraduate classes. But this total doesn’t include graduate students, who teach 16 to 32 percent of classes at research universities.

Even in the hallowed halls of Harvard, 57 percent of instructors are adjuncts.

The 75 percent of university instructors who aren’t tenured earn about a third of what their tenured colleagues make.

And then you have on-line courses and even on-line universities.

No more reassuring for college instructors, adjunct and tenured alike, are the new initiative’s endorsements of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. “Some of these approaches are still being developed,” says Obama’s plan, “and too few students are seeing their benefits.” This is true. These approaches see about 90% of enrollees overall drop out, and when compared with traditional courses, have far fewer completers. The empirical evidence for MOOCs’ efficacy is scarce.

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Moreover, massive online courses would denude higher education of its empathetic and interactive nature. Philosophy professors at San Jose State penned an open letter to this effect in response to a social justice course that was being foisted on them. “We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education,” they wrote, “and ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice.”

6. No College Left Behind. And here is the future predicated upon No Child Left Behind and RAce to the Top.

“An outcomes-based culture is rapidly developing amongst policymakers in the higher education sector,” declares a 2012 report sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, “Measuring Value-Added in Higher Education.” With hardly contained delight, they add that this development “mirrors recent trends in the K-12 sector.”

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But in a sense, NCLB and RTTT are coming to higher education whether these reforms succeed or not. In a Washington Postop-ed this year, a retired high school teacher told college professors, “I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom.” After bewailing the stultifying effects of high-stakes accountability, he concluded:

Now you are seeing the results in the students arriving at your institutions. They may be very bright. But we have not been able to prepare them for the kind of intellectual work that you have every right to expect of them. It is for this that I apologize, even as I know in my heart that there was little more I could have done. Which is one reason I am no longer in the classroom.

So this is what we are now seeing. A generation of young people educated in a system that promotes technical trainning and testing of rote learning while ignoring and failing to promote creativity and critical thinking. As a result, students are smart technicians and they are very aware of their own marketability. But they often lack the creativity and critical thinking skills that earlier generations had.

And so I come back to Henry Giroux who always seems to have the best insight into the ills of our society, particularly as they pertain to our education system. And it is no less true than his observations of universities today besieged by neo-liberalism.

The increasing corporatization of higher education poses a dire threat to its role as a democratic public sphere and a vital site where faculty can address important social issues, be self-reflective and learn the knowledge, values and ideas central to deepening and expanding the capacities required to be engaged and critical agents. Unfortunately, with the rise of the corporate university which now defines all aspects of governing, curriculum, financial matters and a host of other academic policies, education is now largely about training, creating an elite class of managers and eviscerating those forms of knowledge that conjure up what might be considered dangerous forms of moral witnessing and collective political action.

Many faculty have bought into this model because it is safe for them and they get rewarded. If the university is to survive, faculty are going to have to rethink their roles as critical public intellectuals, connect their scholarship to broader social issues and learn how to write for and speak to a broader public. Neoliberal modes of governance reinforce the worse dimensions of the university: specialisms, a cult of distorted professionalism, a narrow empiricism, unwillingness to work with others and a mode of scholarship steeped in obtuse and often mind-numbing discourse. All of this must change for faculty or they will not only be unable to defend their own labour as academics, they will continue to lose power to the corporate and managerial elite.

Higher education is a very weighty and complex subject and I have definitely relied upon a lot of quotes in this essay. Obviously, this is simply a sampling and scratching the surface of the issues surrounding our colleges and universities.

As always, this is first and foremost an Open Thread so feel free to comment on whatever is on your mind.