There's going to be a lot of election talk about education between now and the time the voters finally go to the polls in November to elect a president. Both GOP nominee Mitt Romney and President Obama are going to try to convince college students and their parents -- a rather large voting population -- that their plans to reconfigure American education are the best ones for our future.
Our presidential candidates take two distinct approaches to higher education. President Obama still believes that the federal government has a role to play in educating our young people, especially qualified students who come from families of modest means. Governor Romney, who calls himself a "business guy," seems to favor a more corporate, for-profit approach to education.
In unscripted moments, Governor Romney has told students that no one is going to give them money for free -- no handouts for young people. Championing the competitive nature of the free enterprise system, Romney has famously advised college students to "shop around" for the best loan rates. As for his educational philosophy, Mr. Romney seems to be crusading for private for-profit institutions of higher learning, outfits that process a large number of students with efficiency and good returns on investment. Growing class sizes, of course, also increases profitability. On a recent trip to a public school in Philadelphia, Mr. Romney conveniently suggested that class size had no bearing on successful student learning. The teachers in the audience disagreed -- some not so politely.
Such push back doesn't seem to have changed Governor Romney's educational mindset. His model of for-profit education is Florida's Full Sail University. According to David Halperin in The Huffington Post, Governor Romney has suggested that Full Sail, which is an institution that I, like most of the university educators I know, have never heard of, is an inventive and efficient "leader" in the world of colleges and universities.
Mr. Halpern writes:
Never mind that Full Sail has sky-high prices and, at best, a mixed record when it comes to helping students. Romney did not inform voters hat his campaign and Super PAC have received nearly $100,000 from Full Sail CEO Bill Heavener and from C. Kevin Landry, chairman of TA Associates, the private equity firm that owns Full Sail.
In short, Governor Romney is pushing for much more privatization in higher education. Given his way, Romney's plan could transform our system of public higher education, once the envy of the world, into a disconnected tangle of diploma factories. These institutions would spit out into our increasingly complex and challenged society an increasing number of poorly trained students.
In Mr. Romney's America our colleges and universities would be increasingly operated as if they were for-profit businesses. In the past, the campus crusade targeted the transformation of wild-spirited agnostic men and women into God-fearing Christians. These days the campus crusade is not only about religious transformation, but about bottom lines, performance incentives, and class size quotas -- the corporatization of higher education -- all to the advantage of investors in private equity funds or other corporate entities that have invested in for-profit education.
Mr. Romney's ideas about for-profit education suggest a much more fundamental difference between the GOP nominee and President Obama: the role of business in our society.
Should you use a business model to run a university?
Should you use a business model to run a government?
President Obama clearly sees some fundamental differences between the social life of corporations and the cultural climate of our universities. He doesn't believe that the complexities of our society can be unimaginatively reduced to a business model. Mr. Romney, a "business guy," seems to have a narrow risk/reward orientation to not only the game of venture capital, but also to the irreducible complexities of the contemporary world. He wants to run colleges and universities as if they were businesses, believing that our government would work better it were run like Bain Capital. Put another way, Mr. Romney's private equity tunnel vision may work well in the clubby atmosphere of the corporate boardroom, but is a prescription for the rapid spread of educational mediocrity that will retard social and economic progress. Mr. Romney's worldview charts a path toward more -- not less -- social inequity, which, if history is a reliable teacher, suggests a future of broken dreams and social chaos.
There is trouble afoot when a presidential candidate touts Full Sail University as a model of higher education. Would Mr. Romney, who holds two degrees from Harvard, send his grandchildren to study in the heady halls of Full Sail University?
As a professor with more than 30 years of experience in university education, I'd prefer to send my loved ones to a non-profit university in which (small) class size matters, in which education is more than learning how to score well on an exam, in which scholarship is more than acquiring a set of marketable skills. Promoting the spread of 21st century" diploma factories" condemns our children and grandchildren to dull, bleak and unproductive lives.
If we don't publicly invest in the education of our next generations, what will be left for our children?
Follow Paul Stoller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/stol1
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David_Halperin: 5 Reasons Mitt Romney Would Be the First Corporation to Be Elected President
Patrick O'Connor: The Problem With Mitt Romney's Education Plan
America has fallen to near the bottom of the industrialized world in standardized math and science test scores.
Our colleges and universities continue to need to offer and mandate remedial courses to get incoming freshmen up to the point where they can learn on a college level.
Our kids know all about Mary's two mommies, hugging a polar bear, feminism and every other fringe belief but they know less and less about what they and we need to compete in the global market.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
I believe we must heed the dire warnings of Professor Stoller. Through legitimized financial manipulations, huge amounts of wealth are being siphoned off from normal capital markets and from the middle class by the likes of "Mitt". This is dignified with terms such as the "free market", "capitalism" and "globalism".
Part of that profiteering agenda seeks to reduce education to mindless vocational training. For example, the "humanitarian" (sic) Bill Gates' "foundation". Somehow, he now appears to be advocating reshaping our educational system to produce drones to service the world's most buggy and insecure operating system!
The globalist neo-feudalists promote a system of "profits" for contributor friends while playing down or outright ignoring the situation of millions of students and disavowing any governmental involvement, the same government involvement which, starting with the GI College bill in the 1940's, made it possible for millions of middle class students to obtain an education they never could have gotten otherwise.
We MUST HEED Stoller's warning: "Promoting the spread of 21st century" diploma factories" condemns our children and grandchildren to dull, bleak and unproductive lives." In fact, it is that very DULL BLEAK AND CONTROLLED world that "Mitt" and those of his mentality seek.
We WILL deny them this goal !
They are great.
We now homeschool our children.
The first two are now in college on full tuition merit scholarships.
The next two look to do as well if not better.
They are musical, athletic and great people who volunteer in the community and have surrounded themselves with good friends.
Do yourself and your kids a favor: Homeschool your kids.
The problem with running universities like businesses is, like you said, they become 'diploma factories.' At the University of Florida, I was taught by superb, well known professors who taught the same courses for over 25 years. These professors were well paid because the public university put great emphasis on educating its students. A for-profit university has a constant cycle of mediocre professors who will accept low pay for a short amount of time. Mediocre professors lead to mediocre education - which is what you get from for-profit education. In fact, if anything, it is a financial burden for for-profit colleges to educate well since it will require better professors and hence, more salary costs.
The public has to think about what it wants - to save a little money and have poorly educated future generations, or to continue to subsidize public universities through state taxes as a small sacrifice for a well-educated future for their kids and the rest of the public.