University of Texas at Arlington President James Spaniolo's recent guest column (See: "Does anyone regret earning a college degree?," July 6) seems to ignore the deeper problems with what we persist in calling "higher education." The question in the headline is rhetorical because it assumes the answer even before Spaniolo unlimbers his arguments. He offers no statistics, and I don't have any to back up my response, just 39 years of teaching experience on the college level.
The truth is, more than a few students start college only to drop out, yet they do quite well while many of those who stick it out get a degree in the "wrong" field, or from a second-rank college, or they study under professors who can't open doors in the job world, so they are set up for a rude awakening after graduation.Another point that Spaniolo's rhetorical question ignores is that everybody is not college material. I teach in community colleges, and my classes are full of such students. They are not prepared for college work, and their only motivation for being there is to get the meal ticket that we call a college degree. We sell too many of them the bill of goods -- they must have and can get a degree.With slogans like "No child left behind," we equate a college degree to a driver's license: Everybody needs one and anybody can get one, even if it takes a couple of tries. Some of the young men in my classes think they can make a career out of basketball or baseball and earn a lot more money than they ever could with a B.A., but their chances of a career as a professional athlete are about the same as their chance of getting a B.A.What are we to tell them? What are we to do with them?We repeat the mantra that college graduates get paid more. If only it were that simple. I have an M.A. in education and a Ph.D. in history, and I'm getting paid less than $2,000 a course as a junior college instructor for a core curriculum (required) course. Plus, junior college instructors are prohibited by rule from teaching more than three courses per semester.The community college system lives or dies on the backs of its adjunct instructors. At Tarrant and Dallas counties' "community colleges" (they don't like the descriptive "junior"), 60 percent or more of the faculty are adjunct, known more prosaically as part-timers. They make less than minimum wage, given the number of hours spent on the job during a semester. One college where I teach thinks nothing of paying $15,500 for unskilled labor to put up window shades in my classroom while paying less than one-seventh of that to the instructors who teach in that classroom.Who's getting the best of that deal?Spaniolo states that students "embrace the opportunity to refine their critical thinking skills and ... shape our culture." The students I encounter every day have only the vaguest idea what critical thinking is and don't make any connection between it and a well-paying job. That's because they've never had a course in it -- and neither have the teachers who teach them. Students can't "refine" something they have never been exposed to. As for "shaping our culture" or acquiring knowledge for its own sake, those are totally foreign concepts to our young people.There is one more quaint idea: Good teaching and good research go hand in hand. I'd argue with that assertion even on the university level. Tenure, which is every college instructor's dream, is not given for teaching; tenure is for those who research and publish. Only those who can't get research grants or publish books spend their careers teaching -- and praying for some kind of job security.On the junior-college level, nobody gets paid to do research, and even the lucky full-time faculty members are teaching five or six classes a semester and being paid a lot less than they could pull down in the business world. There are a number of reasons why those junior-college courses are so cheap compared with their university equivalent, but one big reason is because of cheapskate faculty salaries.If higher education is as invaluable as we like to say it is, then we need to reward those on the junior-college front lines with commensurate salaries and job security.What we are doing right now is trying to get it on the cheap and calling it "community college."We also need to face the fact that not every would-be student is college material, and treating them as "customers" rather than seekers of knowledge makes a sham of higher education.Richard Selcer of Fort Worth is an adjunct instructor of history at Dallas County Community College and Weatherford College.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
