This is now the third post in what will be at least four posts on neoliberalism and its consequences for higher education. Elsewhere I’ve documented my past experiences and my pathways to here. This particular post is a reflective look at how I’ve been affected; specifically, the effects of neoliberalism on my professional practice in community and technical colleges are laid-out. To put it more precisely this is the weltanschauung of an ex-expat participant-observer of post-secondary education in the United States over the most recent 10 years.
I’m beginning in 2010 because that is when I returned from China. In retrospect, I felt like a time traveler, or perhaps Rip Van Winkle. I missed quite a bit of goings-on from 2004 to 2010 because I was living elsewhere; I had a different focus. I missed the economic crash here in the U.S. That’s important too because higher education administrator salaries in the United States seemed to regress. One quick note on that, it took me four years (after returning) to equal my 2004 salary as a higher education administrator. I finally achieved the same pay in 2014, as an assistant vice president, that I had earned with a ‘coordinator’ title, back in 2004.
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I discovered ‘technical education’ (alternately named ‘career & technical education’ or ‘professional technical education, CTE/PTE) during my last two years in China. I wanted to work in that field when I returned to the States. Simple enough, right? I landed a position with a nationally accredited (now closed and disgraced) degree mill that was defrauding the most economically vulnerable potential students in society. I didn’t know that’s what was happening when I interviewed for the position, nor when I accepted the position, but I figured that out within two weeks on the job. I turned in a two-month notice and walked out the door two months to the day later.
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I will not hide the bitterness from that experience, but it is important to understand how I was hoodwinked into believing that ITT Tech was a legitimate educational institution. The position for which I applied, interviewed and landed was Academic Dean. The position was listed in the two major publications about which I naively believed served higher education’s best interests, The Chronicle and HigherEdJobs. For-profit providers had grown due to neoliberal deregulation—which as I have already outlined—that began full-force in 1978 and has continued generally unabated since. The Century Foundation has published a series of essays, called, The Cycle of Scandal at For-Profit Colleges, chronicling the issue and the abuse.
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Following student loan scandals of the 80s senator Bob Dole (yes, that one) and then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, (yes, that one) proposed a ban on federal aid being released to any post-secondary education organization that awarded bonuses to recruiters. That ban was included in the 1992 re-authorization of the Higher Education Act. However, during the G. W. Bush presidency, the ban was overturned. Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times published a piece that covers this as well as it is covered. The Obama presidency reinstated the ban. The Trump presidency has again overturned the ban. The second in the series of essays by the aforementioned Century Foundation includes an excellent recap of this series of events
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Just over 10 years ago President Obama declared that by 2020 America would once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world (1). That put a new focus on community (and technical) colleges more than had been the case since the administration of President Harry Truman. That announcement fueled the completion agenda and this has been received with mixed emotions. Some community college educators view a single-minded focus on completion as a threat to the open door access, traditionally a cornerstone of two-year colleges. Afterward, national associations Lead by the American Association of Community Colleges seized the opportunity to launch a united national completion agenda for community colleges.
1The archive of that address was previously available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-President-Barack-Obama-Address-to-Joint-Session-of-Congress however during the current administration that site has not been maintained, and is generally unreliable.
Personally, after a tumultuous transition (I’d until that ITT experience never left a position without already having another offer in hand) I secured positions at first a technical college, and later a community college, and then an online-only university. The effects of neoliberalism on the community and technical colleges (CTCs) were acutely obvious to me1.
1Of note, I had already worked a dozen years in advanced global manufacturing; I was comfortably familiar with terms such as total quality management, international standards organization (ISO), Kaizen, Lean, and Six-sigma. I learned those on-the-job in an environment where defects in production resulted in lost profits.
CTCs from 2011 onward have been connected to the market-driven and data-driven vocabularies and overtly resembled private businesses and industry in terms of practice. We had to pursue competitive grants from large foundations (Gates, Lumina) to replace funding that states no longer provided. We had to rely on local businesses for revenue in some cases. Relying on those sources for funds meant the monies were restricted. We couldn’t necessarily spend those funds on what the local community might have needed during seismic shifts due to layoffs or complete closures of large employers. We had to force laid-off workers into tracks that were available at our campuses, based on national needs. We had to economize—financial pressures made our decisions for us—rather than lead change. We had to learn a different style of budgeting1 because there wasn’t a pool of money from our state fund anymore. We began to include workforce training offerings, not as optional, but in many cases, those became at least a fourth of our missions. As we overtly focused on private sector priorities, student learning imperatives began to shift and evolve. The outcomes became end-result focused and speed of graduation “efficiency” pressures mounted(2). We categorized this monumental change as entrepreneurship or gaining an entrepreneurial focus.
1In 2000 for example, as an assistant registrar I realized that higher ed budgeting was different. I’d learned budgeting at a factory. In the university, however, when I found a redundancy and alerted my supervisor that I didn’t need that $34K FTE position, I wasn’t rewarded. I was told in no uncertain terms, “don’t cut anything, we won’t get the money back next year if you do.” The shift (I’m not arguing against this, mind you) meant that CCTs no longer had that luxury; we had to find positions and programs to cut in order to operate.
2It is equally important to note that my experiences were at rural and frontier region campuses. These forces had likely been in play for urban and suburban CCT campuses at least for a decade, if not two, earlier than the shifts I experienced and described here.
A consequence of this shift in favor of resource management was (likely strongly negatively correlated, but I haven’t researched that statistically) less and less focus on the worth of humans. We simply counted those in the inventory of resources. We began full force, producing not only increases in graduation rates but decreases in employee contentment. Emotionally unhealthy and egregiously overworked positions became the norm for the entry-level community college worker. We began to resemble corporate structures in more ways than one, as our executives’ salaries skyrocketed and the staff’s salaries stagnated. We thinned our faculty ranks by only hiring adjuncts (those were benefit-free positions) who were unable to advise students due to time constraints and lack of institutional knowledge. We began hiring CEOs from corporations to run our campuses as businesses. At the same time, we were required to take in more and more students that were not ready to attend college. We also began to outsource college degrees through dual-enrollment and concurrent enrollment programs. Our collective philosophy moved from people-driven and data-informed, to data-driven and people-burdened.
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My research (particularly the sort that I need to have peer-reviewed) is squarely situated in an organizational institutionalism framework. In two different projects (Lindbeck, Nix, & Geringer, forthcoming) and (Nix & Song, in progress) we have surveyed and interviewed respectively, academic advisors and academic tutors across a variety of settings. The common themes are burnout, dissatisfaction with pay, lack of respect, and conditions of overwork. In one instance a person said, “certification is the only thing students want; they don’t care about learning, they want the paper so they can get that job they heard about.” In another instance, “I never turn off, there is not a time I can relax. I dream my work, or maybe I work in my dreams, I’m not sure, but I never am not working.” Another: “We are constantly pitted against faculty and I don’t blame them for not liking us, but they also look down on us as unimportant.” And in an incredibly damning revelation, “I love my students, but I can’t wait until I’ve had this position for three years to get a promotion (for higher pay). I’ve had to take another job, working evenings and weekends for a retailer, just to make ends meet.”
In the next post1 of this neoliberalism series, I will outline the two greatest threats preventing us from reclaiming our agency and perhaps outline some tactics to embark on that daunting effort.
1I just read that blogs over 600 words are indexed better and shared more frequently, but blogs passing 1,600 words run a risk of being seen as overbearing. I’m right there, now.