The Higher Education Scam (by Barbara Ehrenreich for The Nation)

[marmar]

The Higher Education Scam

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed. This article was originally published in her blog.

Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials twenty-eight years ago. She had claimed three degrees, although she had none. If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving, but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?

Jones is hardly the only academic fraud. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates that 10-30 percent of resumes include distortions if not outright lies. In the last couple of weeks, for example, "Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D." --as he is redundantly listed in the bestselling self-help book The Secret, where he appears as a spiritual teacher--has confessed to not having his claimed master's degree, and the multi-level vitamin marketing firm he worked for admits that it can't confirm the PhD either.

All right, lying is a grievous sin, as everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows. And we wouldn't want a lot of fake MIT engineering graduates designing our bridges. But there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.

The pundits keep chanting that we need a more highly skilled workforce, by which they mean more college graduates, although the connection between college and skills is not always crystal clear. Jones, for example, was performing a complex job requiring considerable judgment, experience and sensitivity without the benefit of any college degree. And how about all those business majors--business being the most popular undergraduate major in America? It seems to me that a two-year course in math and writing skills should be more than sufficient to prepare someone for a career in banking, marketing, or management. Most of what you need to know you're going to learn on the job anyway.

...(snip)...

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white-collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end--whether in library carrels or office cubicles--does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned--although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/ehrenreich

[truedelphi]

1. Nixon's Treasury Chief, a guy named Simon, wrote about

How the motivation for the college degree coincided with the civil rights victory.

After the civil rights' struggle was won, an employer could no longer deny someone a job on the basis of skin color.

But let's face it - the average black family in the late nineteen sixties did not have the ability to provide a college level education to their youngsters. (In my neighborhood in South side Chicago, many kids went to college because of their dads' job with the steel mills - union positions that kept the "undesirables" like blacks and women out of the good-paying jobs.)

So in essence, the requirement that you have a degree helped the white employers keep blacks out of the work place for a while anyway.

[dmallind]

2. Not being overly sensitive

...as an MBA type but not all business degrees are created equal and nor are the requirements for all business careers. I am continuously shocked when I meet high level executives with multi-billion dollar responsibilities who have not the first clue about financial analysis or statistical techniques. A decent business education will teach these vital skills. Learning on the job might too of course, but in my experience OJT in such matters is more focused on company policies and "ways of doing things" than understanding the techniques that might improve those ways.

If we want to keep losing jobs by the millions, then shortchanging the education of future business leaders so that they don't underatand how to evaluate things like transaction costs, overhead absorption and risk analysis will make that tempting lower direct cost from offshore companies even more irresistible.

[Cassandra]

3. I ran into this in the late 70's at the MBA level.

My MBA was from a second tier (but good) university (I didn't understand at the time that you should pick a business school by the placement office). For an advertising agency to hire a female assistant account exec was a stretch at the time; even more so without a top level MBA (Harvard, Sloan, Wharton, etc.). So much easier for the personnel office to cover their asses and not hire from a less than great MBA program (or maybe just being female was bad enough). The best interview I had at that time (1979) was with an account exec looking for an assistant (account exec) to work with him on a specific project. He was looking for someone he could train and work with directly. I think he would have been a great mentor but the product launch he was working on was scuttled two weeks later by a competitor and he lost that project. Alas! He never had to tell me; I was living in a test market and saw the competitor's ad.