Letter from America
‘Liberal arts colleges’ are fleecing students and creating an underclass
I quit! And they didn’t have to fire me first. Then again, did they ever really hire me? For the past ten years, I’ve been an adjunct lecturer in America’s finishing schools, the universities otherwise known as ‘elite liberal arts colleges’. Conservatives claim that these colleges teach soft Marxism. They certainly did in my case. Now I’m resigning from the academic proletariat.
The price of tuition has risen ahead of inflation every year since 1908. At $60,000 a year for tuition and residency, but not counting the extras, a four-year liberal arts degree now costs more than $250,000. Meanwhile, the hiring of new, full-time faculty has declined, and the number of students has risen. Adjuncts – graduate students and recent Phds in need of cash – make up the gap.
In the third and fourth years, students get to take small ‘seminar’ classes. But for the first couple of years, they get milled through ‘surveys’, lecture courses with as many as 150 students. These are sold as preparing students for higher-level courses. In most cases, they’re a second shot at high school. Professors find surveys boring, so they farm the teaching out to ‘contingent faculty’.
The students take eight courses a year; call it $8,000 per course. That means that the 35 students in my last class generated fees equivalent to $280,000. A tenured professor earns $100,000 for teaching four courses a year; that’s $25,000 per course, plus pension, health insurance, sabbaticals and teaching assistants. An adjunct at a top college gets $6,000, with no benefits.
No job security, either. The colleges talk about social justice, but they’re exploiting an underclass. They employ adjuncts as part-timers, so they never offer contracts or cover your child’s health insurance. When adjuncts attempt to unionise, the colleges block them.
It is impossible for adjuncts to make a living wage, and the colleges keep that wage down by producing more Phds than the job market needs. A recent Guardian investigation found that the best-qualified people in America are living like the least-qualified. A permanently impoverished underclass, with PHD after its name, works multiple jobs to make ends meet, with high rates of substance abuse and suicide.
The college prospectus promises that your children will be taught by worldclass experts. So does the barrage of fundraising mail-outs to alumni. But the American Association of University Professors calculates that ‘more than 50 per cent’ of all appointments are parttime. As an adjunct, you’re a pitch man for a pyramid scheme. Call it Ponzi College.
After the GI Bill, higher education became an escalator to social mobility. Since the 1980s, however, the price has risen but the escalator has jammed. Recent surveys find that students who attend the top thirty or so universities can expect higher salaries after graduation. The money-for-mobility trade now only works for those least in need of it – like Chris Hughes, who roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and co-founded Facebook.
The colleges spend the money on shiny buildings, the better to sell their product. They are cheating parents of their life savings. They are cheating students of an education, and hindering their prospects with student debt. They are hollowing out standards, by boosting the cost while cutting the quality. No wonder the students expect ‘A for effort’. I’d expect full marks too, if I was paying $60,000 a year for a degree that is only a prelude to another two years of extortion at graduate school.
It would be cheaper, and much more productive, to use the 18th-century method and have a private tutor. But then your children might miss out on the chance to room with the next Zuckerberg. Colleges sell social mobility, but their real value is to act as a winners’ enclosure, as the middle class falls into the ‘contingent’ economy. How long before the education bubble bursts?
The colleges have already prepared themselves for the day when the American middle class can no longer afford the fees. Enrolments from the new rich in Asia are raising rapidly. In case Mohammed can’t come to the mountain, politically correct institutions in the West have created satellite campuses in places such as Abu Dhabi (NYU) and Singapore (Yale). Qatar has attracted major US universities – Cornell, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown.
The American universities’ deal with Qatar guarantees American standards of free speech and equality. But in 2015, the
Washington Post reported an all-male majlis (meeting area) at Texas A&M’S Qatari outpost, and the harassment and intimidation of students who had tried to photograph public buildings. In the art room at Virginia Commonwealth’s satellite, there are no nude models ‘in deference to cultural norms’.
The universities have sold out at home, and now they’re selling out abroad. Tuition is the same as on the American campuses, even though a secretive foundation set up by Qatar’s ruling family subsidises the American universities with $320 million a year.
On the bright side, the teachers get paid better in Qatar. Perhaps I should reconsider my retirement?
‘They spend money on shiny buildings. They cheat parents of their life savings’