Are We Creating Walmarts in Higher Education?

Dear Commons Community,

The Atlantic has a featured article entitled, “We Are Creating Walmarts in Higher Education”, that comments on the push to graduate students and to reduce costs as leading to water downed academic programs.  As described in the article:

“Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.

Now critics are raising the alarm that speeding up college and making it cheaper risks dumbing it down. “We all want to have more students graduate and graduate in a more timely manner,” says Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the American Association of University Professors. “The question is, do you do this by lowering your standards?

About 100 university faculty-members from all over the country plan to meet in January in New York under the umbrella of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a national movement that aims to “include the voices of the faculty, staff, students and our communities—not just administrators, politicians, foundations and think tanks—in the process of making change.”

The group says the push for more efficiency in higher education often leads to lower quality, and that reforms are being rushed into practice without convincing evidence of their effectiveness…

Meanwhile, to save money, more conventional classrooms are filling up with part-time faculty, often hired two or three weeks before they’re due to begin teaching, according to research by another organization, the New Faculty Majority Foundation.

“We are creating Walmarts of higher education—convenient, cheap, and second-rate,” says Karen Arnold, associate professor at the Educational Leadership and Higher Education Department at Boston College.

Steven Ward, a sociology professor at Western Connecticut State University and the author of Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, likens the new world of higher education to another American business known for its low prices. Ward calls it the “McDonaldization” of universities and colleges, “where you produce more things, but they’re not as good.”

The article also comments on online learning technology and specifically MOOCs as part of the McDonaldization of higher education.  The meeting in New York in January mentioned in the article is being hosted by CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress.

Tony

3 comments

  1. The bursaries and scholarships should be granted by the higher education department. The students will get motivation towards their studies after getting some good deals.

  2. It is a system that I appreciate the fact to offer everyone the facility to acquire a good education. I thought we speak only in underdeveloped country like ours.