Where burned out teachers go

As the mercury leaps toward the century mark outside, I hunker in the Love Shack with all my west-facing windows barricaded against the approaching sun, hoping that by the time the temperature reaches 90° indoors, it will have dropped to 85° outside, and I can throw open the windows and doors, turn on all the fans, and tough it out with wet washcloths on my head. We can hope.

I ran my errands early. Bank, gas station, car wash, grocery store. Yes, I actually washed the Dustmobile, the first time in well over a year. Hey, I park on a gravel road. In the summer, it's dusty, in the winter, it's muddy. Why waste water washing it, when it looks so cool, sort of like an Army test for a stealth urban warfare vehicle, cloaked in its thick patina of grime? Believe me, there's nothing more invisible than a dirty, dusty old black Ford Focus.

So, yay me, I ran my errands. I've caught up on my Access and Excel grading, posted the updates in engrade, so the students who check their grades every five minutes don't have to wait another moment to know they are failing my class. Now what?

Yesterday I posted my second update on my final dissertation course. I should say, what would have been my final dissertation course, had I been able to keep to the schedule. With the update I submitted Chapter 1, which consists of the Introduction, the Problem Statement, and the Purpose Statement. I threw in the key terms and an outline of the Literature Review, just to give my chairperson the impression that I'm not a slacker. She's not a slacker either, apparently. I just checked my online university course room, and she's already given me credit for the update, along with a cheery note: I'll review your Chapter 1 and give you my comments soon! She lives somewhere in Florida. It's probably a lovely Friday afternoon in the Sunshine State (formerly the Land of Good Living, if Wikipedia can be believed). I can't blame her if she wants to get a jump on the weekend.

So, here I am. I could read Chapter 6 in the mind-numbingly boring Business Ethics book for Monday morning. My three students, all female accounting majors, were assigned to team-teach Chapter 5, which they presented on Wednesday. The topic was Ethics and the Environment. What could be more interesting, right? What I got was anything but team, and very little teach. (I wasn't expecting all that much; after all, I'm a professional, don't try this at home). As I feared, one by one they stood shakily at the lectern and sped through the notes they had gleaned from the book. They provided no examples or original commentary, no visual aids, not even a few expressive hand gestures, not even when Al Gore's personal carbon footprint was briefly mentioned. Oh, the wasted opportunities.

I couldn't help myself. After a few seconds to let their heart rates settle, I leaped up.

“Say, did you hear that Bill Gates is sponsoring a challenge to design a better toilet?”

They eyed me skeptically.

“It's true! A toilet show! In Seattle, right now!” Clearly I was ready to organize a car pool.

Their faces told me how monumentally uninterested they were. Tammi at least giggled, bless her heart, but then she giggles at everything. Renata and Kayley just rolled their eyes.

I love the idea of toilets that help people and the planet, (don't you?) but my intention was to engage them in the topic of environmental ethics. There is so much to be righteously angry about, where does one begin? Toilets is as good a place as any. But I fear once again I failed as a teacher. My expectations were unclear; they resorted to the traditional fallback position that all teachers use: when you don't have time to prepare something innovative, lecture. Wouldn't you think after sitting through umpteen boring lectures that these students would search for another teaching method? A skit, maybe? A dance? Oh wait, these are accounting students. Nuts, even a pop quiz would have been more interesting than watching them stumble over their notes, for crimony's sake. Dead letters filled with sawdust.

I was so happy when I got this teaching job, nine long years ago. After so many tedious years of stultifying admin work, finally a vocation I was well suited for, something that let me be self-expressive, creative, and useful. At the time I had no idea that for-profit vocational education wasn't even on the bottom rung of the higher education ladder, or that the institution that hired me was (a) barely better than a diploma mill, and (b) desperate for a warm body because the previous warm body had bailed two days before the term. No, I was utterly ecstatic to have a job in a place where I thought I could fit and be of service. My glasses were rosy, and the world looked bright. And in the beginning, I was a creative teacher.

Now, nine long years later, my glasses are tarnished, bent, and scratched. I know a few things now that I didn't know then, and it has definitely taken the shine off the world of education for me. I try to balance the good and the bad, to keep from going crazy. This for-profit vocational college is not the monster that traditional education fears, but neither is it a substitute for an academic education. The life of a full-timer at a for-profit vocational institution has its benefits (no research requirements), but its drawbacks (low pay, low prestige, no tenure, no support from management) are hard to ignore. The caliber of student at the for-profit college is not generally what one might find at a traditional academic institution, but in our defense, we serve a different target market, and seeking job skills in order to find a good job is arguably just as worthy a goal as working toward a degree in philosophy, or art, or English. Some would say possibly better.

What is the purpose of higher education? Is it to get a well-paying job? Is it to become a good citizen? Can we teach both, I wonder? What makes a great teacher? One who lectures in front of the room? Or one who facilitates, guides, coaches, coaxes, and challenges? Do we even need teachers anymore, in this world of Web 2.0? When MIT and Harvard are offering free online courses to people around the world, what need do we have for brick and mortar schools? When you can learn how to do anything—virtually anything!—from a youtube video?

I don't care anymore about being a teacher. That's a good thing, because teaching at the career college has ruined my teaching career. But I'm stuck there until I finish this Ph.D. I went down the dissertation path like Little Mary Sunshine skipping merrily toward a cliff. I leaped, eyes shut. I pancaked a long time ago, but I prefer to pretend I am still falling.

I'm a blip

In the wake of the various disasters and traumas in the news, I am finding it hard to focus on the trivially mundane, parched, pedestrian blip I call my life. What is there to say? I haven't been in a car wreck (yet), I haven't been shot at (recently), I haven't failed a class (yet)... really, what is there to complain about, you might ask? Go ahead, ask, but be careful what you ask for, because the chronic malcontent always has something to complain about. Whine is my middle name. Well, not really, it's Mary, but don't tell anyone. Whine is so much more accurate. And funnier.

On Thursday we ended a term at the career college. Friday was spent complaining to my colleagues, grading a few papers, complaining some more, and then driving with Bravadita to in-service in Wilsonville, to sit through three back-to-back sessions of peer-produced palaver aimed at making us better teachers. (Did it work? How could you possibly tell?) After which, we escaped, only to spend the next 45 minutes sitting in near stand-still traffic, trying to get back in time to grade a few more papers, maybe actually turn in our grades.

And when we finally made it back to the Clackamas site, we found out we wouldn't be allowed to stay very long—low enrollments means no evening orientation, which means the staff goes home early (those slackers!), which means we don't get to use the copy machines to print out syllabuses (syllabi? No, apparently not anymore), which means we will have to frantically compete with each other for copies on Monday morning. Argh.

Today I was tired. No excuses, just gray skies and foggy neurons. Even after the clouds departed, leaving lovely blue sky, my mental fog remained. I knew I should feel peppier, with so much sunlight, but with all the drama and trauma of the week, I just can't seem to conjure any gumption. The best I could do was take out the trash. Some days, that feels like climbing Everest.

It occurred to me today that none of this so-called life, this thing I think is so important, none of it really matters. In the end, all this crap I have accumulated will end up in a landfill. All my art will molder into dust. All my writing, all these stupid journals, will get dumped in the recycling bin and shredded to make more important things like paper bags or cardboard boxes. No one will care, because I have no descendants to speak of. (Well, I have one niece I don't know very well. I guess I could designate her my heir, but that seems like a mean thing to do to someone I like.) I certainly won't care what becomes of all my earthly crap, because I'll be dead, beyond caring, quickly forgotten. The whole sordid thing I call my life is just a blip in the continuum of human existence.

Just a drop in the ocean of life. Just a few breaths in the timeline of breaths. A couple shuffles on the mortal coil. Carrying on the fine tradition of being born, complaining about how life sucks, and then dying to make room for someone else to do the same. You know, it just occurred to me that this blog might outlast me. What a thought. Long live the blip.

The perfect storm destroys a perfectly good career college

In my last post I described the mammoth production known as graduation, which happened on Saturday morning (mandatory attendance by all faculty). The event was organized and produced by two strong and capable women, let's call them Janey and Sally. On Monday morning, Sally sent out an effusive email at 6:00 a.m. thanking everyone for their participation in making it one of the best graduation events in the history of the college. Sometime after that, Sally was called into a meeting with the human resources person and fired.

Sally was not the only one. Another staff member lost his job on Monday, too. In addition, a program director who teaches accounting was told that this would be his last term at the college: in five weeks, he, too, will be out of a job.

As news of the layoffs spread to our site, the shock waves rippled outward. We muttered in the faculty office. We mumbled under our breath about updating our resumes. But no one actually thought the scythe would sweep through our site. Today I received a phone call from my colleague, Sheryl. I could tell by her voice that something was wrong. I thought her grandfatherly cat had finally kicked the bucket. Nope. Apparently, the grim job-reaper visited our site today, lopping off one of our own. By the end of July, he will be gone. Do not pass go, do not collect your vacation pay or your faculty development stipend. Turn in your grades, dude, you are so outta here.

Today, as part of my feeble attempt to earn my faculty development stipend, I attended a workshop on fostering creativity and innovation in organizations. I got up at 5:30 a.m. on a day I would normally ignore until about 8:30 a.m. (painful when you work until 10:20 p.m. the night before). Bleary-eyed, I trundled in my old dusty Ford Focus up to Northwest Portland in spitting rain, found a place to park, signed in with a seriously scary security guard, hiked through a huge office building in search of the conference room, and eventually received my sticky name tag. The two woman sitting at the registration table, for some reason, looked dumbfounded to see me. Maybe because they didn't know me and they knew everyone else? That's all I can think of. Otherwise their behavior makes no sense.

“There's coffee,” one woman said, pointing. I followed her finger and found deliciously hair-raising coffee in urns on a back table, but only non-dairy creamer (Which is worse, dairy or non-dairy? Remind me to ask my naturopath). I carried my cup, half-full, toward the front table where one person was sitting, planning to bravely introduce myself. I was waylaid. The facilitator (call me Bud!) barred my path and held out a deck of cards. “Pick a card!” he ordered. I did, slipping it in my pocket.

“Don't let me walk out of here with it!” I laughed, trying to be friendly. A woman standing nearby smiled politely. I was nervous so I had to say something else.

“Wouldn't it be funny if you could buy playing cards individually to replace the ones that get lost? My brother was a notorious cheater.” Which is a total lie, as far as I know, but the words “notorious cheater” are just inherently funny. I was grinning, expecting someone to say something like, “Wow,” or “So was mine!”

“We never cheated in my family,” the woman sniffed, not looking at me, and sipped her coffee.

I didn't know what to say after that, so I drifted away toward my original destination, where I met a lovely woman named Lynne who apparently works as a trainer at some big manufacturing company, I didn't catch the name. Each time I go to one of these workshops, when I introduce myself as an instructor at a career college, they look at me like I'm from another planet. Like, what's the difference between being a corporate trainer and a teacher? She teaches people hardskills and softskills, just like I do. The only difference is my students pay to take the training, whereas her students get paid.

I'm digressing. I mention this workshop because the topic was about how management can foster creativity and innovation in the organization. One of the ways management can help its workers be innovative is by not punishing them when they offer suggestions on how to improve the company. Sally (remember Sally?) apparently went to the college president recently and passionately expressed her belief that the school could be doing more to improve effectiveness and efficiency. She presented a list of suggestions (rumor has it). What happens if management is narrow-minded, controlling, and territorial? A lively discussion followed.

Now we see what happens, for real, and it is not pretty. Sally's suggestions came home to roost in the form of a pink slip. You're outta here! That's what you get for being loyal, for caring enough to offer suggestions, and for busting your ass to put on a well-organized graduation event, and then emailing us at six-freaking a.m. on Monday morning to thank us all for being there! That'll teach you... you loyal, hard-working, committed (former) employee, you.

Speaking of dead and dying roosters, more heads are on the chopping block. If enrollments don't rise fast, two other instructors will be gone, and with one of them for all intents and purposes goes the entire paralegal program. Could this get any worse?

They hired two high-powered marketing/sales executives last month to boost enrollments. I hope it works. But who is going to teach all those students they entice into our classrooms? (Oh wait, that's what adjuncts are for.) It seems to me we are experiencing the perfect storm: the convergence of tightening government regulations, poor academic quality, and years of mismanagement. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a student of management to watch the ship founder and go under, just another career college, wrecked on the rocks of ineptitude.

I'm ok for another five weeks. After that, all bets are off. I may get to work tonight and find a pink slip in my mailbox. Thanks for all the fish. I'm outta here!

I don't need a Magic 8 Ball to see what's coming

I can always tell when my colleague in the Gen Ed Department (I'll call her Sheryl) has some juicy gossip to share. Sheryl waved me into the office last week, grinning like a fool with a secret. “Guess who I saw in the parking lot this morning!”

Sheryl is a spry, near-retirement gal with bottle-blonde hair who has taught English, math, and computer classes for the college for fifteen years. She has a memory like a video camera, capturing everything—events, conversations, reactions—in a linear fashion, frame by frame. (My brain, in contrast, uses a snapshot approach, organizing scenes more or less by strength of emotion rather than chronological order. So, basically my memory is a photo album organized by a three-year-old.)

The future has been looking somewhat precarious at the career college. Rumors abound. We're moving, we're closing, we're fired...  so I was quite interested when Sheryl told me she cornered the President of the college in the underground parking lot for some answers. I wasn't there, but I can picture him pinned against a car by her direct, no-nonsense, schoolteacher manner.

“Tell me the truth now. Are we closing?”

She's quite intimidating when she assumes her full school-mistress persona, complete with lowered brows, pointing index finger, and strident voice. I can only imagine he was transported back to childhood, cowering under the shadow of his first-grade teacher as she demanded he stop biting the buttons on his shirt. No, wait, that was my childhood. Well, he probably ate crayons. (I never did that.)

Apparently he realized he wasn't getting away without coughing up some answers. She said he sounded like he was eager, almost relieved, to tell her his plans for the college. His plans. That phrase surprised me. I don't know why I thought someone else was driving the bus off the cliff. Maybe because we rarely see him, our invisible college president. I guess I thought he was traveling to conferences, hobnobbing with career college academic-wannabes, doing team-building exercises while his team languishes back at our wilting campuses. What do I know. This is what happens in the absence of leadership: people make up stories to explain what they see and hear. I'm very creative, as you know. But being a chronic malcontent, my stories tend toward the sturm und drang.

 Anyway, back to the story. The answer to the question was “Yes.”

Yes, the site is closing. By the end of 2013, when the lease on the decrepit moldy office building runs out, we will have transitioned to a new site, currently under negotiations, somewhere near the airport (and our major competitors). So, we aren't actually moving; the site will be closing while a new site is opening.

I don't need a Magic 8 Ball to see the future now. Sheryl and I and a handful of other long-timers will man the sinking ship at the old place, while shiny new adjuncts and keepers from the other campuses launch the new venture. While we nurse along the old computers, patch together wobbly chairs, and erase the ghosts of 20 years' worth of scribblings on tired whiteboards, they will enjoy new desks, new chairs, new computers, new whiteboards, maybe even a few Smartboards. While we alternately sweat and freeze in the microclimates of our familiar worn-out classrooms, they will have thermostats in every classroom that actually control the climate for that room.

And when we finally usher out the last student, wipe down the whiteboards for the last time, pack up our mementos, and close the doors on the old site, what then? Do you think there will be room at the new site for us?

We'll be lucky if they remember who we are.

Launch the lifeboats, the ship is sinking!

The term ended today at the career college. Last week was spent preparing finals, administering finals, and grading finals to the few students who actually showed up. (I know, like, who wouldn't show up to the final?) I took time out from all the grading to wonder how some students could, despite ten weeks of reminders, pleas, and threats, turn in no work during the entire term and have an expectation of passing the course. And as I reflected on how few Access tests I had to grade (bonus!), an increasing amount of my time was spent wondering how long this career college is going to survive.

I love that terms are only ten weeks long. I hate that, after the term is over, we have no time to process or reflect on our 10-week journey. No time to think about what we would like to improve. No time to create new assignments we hope will be more engaging than the lame things we did last term. I submitted my last grade packet this morning, but some instructors will be spending their weekend grading. Grades are due Monday morning, and first thing Monday morning we launch into a new term. With so little time to reflect, grade, and prepare, how can we possibly do a good job?

I wish I had something good to say, some cheery and uplifting observation, sort of like the pithy and pointed remarks my father used to say, along the lines of, “Hey, you have a job, what are you bellyaching about?” I should be grateful. I'm not. What I am is burned out.

The amount of effort, angst, grief, and frustration that goes into the ending of a term and the prospect of beginning a new one has led me to one unsettling conclusion: I need a new job. But where can I find a job that pays me full-time wages for part-time work? Until I finish this stupid doctorate, I am stuck.

So what, who cares. In about eight weeks, I will have forgotten how crappy I feel right now.

A little more venting, and then I'm done. Today, in addition to the grading and prepping, as we do at the end of every term, we attended three hours of in-service workshops designed to make us better teachers. I could tell them what would make me a better teacher: Let me get enough sleep. Give me some time to process what I've experienced. A door prize of a school t-shirt or a Wells Fargo grocery bag is not going to cut it. My boss's boss, who is the business program director at another campus, sat by me in one session. He wrote something on a piece of paper and turned it so I could see it. He wrote, “I had zero starts.”

Zero starts! He told me we need 64 students at our site to break even. If every new student actually shows up on Monday, new starts at all three campuses will total 64. Clearly the ship has crashed on the rocks and is taking on water fast. Launch the lifeboats. Mucky-mucks, no cuts. We are watching you.

Speaking of mucky-mucks, they were around at the end of the day, lurking like the mostly invisible creatures they are, coming out after dark to flit around the building. At 5:00, we got the news: Time to leave. Evening orientation was canceled due to lack of enrollments. Everyone out of the building. As I lugged my bags full of last term's binders toward the door, I passed the president of the college and another man in a suit. Both looked quite relaxed, standing in the lobby, smiling. I wanted to ask them what they had to smile about, but I didn't. Oh wait, let me guess. I bet you have some pretty nice golden parachutes to save you if the company goes under. Not me. But I'm not going down with this ship. Last one out is fishfood. Beat you to the lifeboat.

The fine old tradition of abusing adjunct professors

Today a colleague showed me a recent article from Salon about the “disposable professor crisis” in American higher education. In the article, the author s.e. smith, an interesting woman who writes for AlterNet and other alternative Web venues, accused institutions of relying on cheap adjunct teachers to cut costs, to the sad detriment of students. (s.e. smith is also a poet.) In the article, Ms. smith did not mention for-profit colleges; however, having worked at one small one for going on nine years, I can say my experience supports her claim. Leaving aside the question of whether you believe for-profit colleges should be included in the hierarchy of higher education institutions, the bottom-feeding for-profit institution I work for seems to be abusing adjunct faculty along with the best of them.

I find it fascinating what people believe (and don't believe) about college. But I want to know, what is college, anyway? The federal student financial aid Web site obliquely defines college as any education after high school. Not everyone believes for-profit education should be considered “college.” Tech school, trade school, career education, maybe, but not college.

Not everyone believes college should be the next step after high school. In the Salon article, s.e. smith linked to a speech by presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who said, “there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college. To sort of lay out there that somehow this is... should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work” of “people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college.”

His argument sort of reminds me of the “Poverty is a virtue” mentality I grew up with. Like, education? I don't need your stinking college education! Living in squalor, thumbing my nose at the elitist college-educated snobs, was good enough for my dad and his dad before him, so it oughta be good enough for me. By gum. Of course, I will be the first to admit that a college education does not guarantee a job, a steady income, or decent housing. But it's a start. Assuming we agree on what college is and what it is for.


I downloaded out the spreadsheet created by Joshua Boldt at the Adjunct Project. It was enlightening to see the comments by people who work at higher education institutions in Oregon. While the college I work for was not mentioned, several local community colleges were. Their pay scales, benefits, and attitude toward adjuncts were noted. This anecdotal information can’t be assumed to apply to all the adjuncts who work at these institutions, but it certainly opens a window on a world that has been closed to me. When I first started working on this Ph.D., my objective was to teach online for some higher education institution somewhere... now it looks like that may be a disappointing proposition. Unless you believe the claims of Dr. Dani Babb.


Even though I work at a crummy for-profit college, I still see most of our students learning, graduating, finding jobs, and making better lives for themselves and their families. In spite of the Santorums of the world, in spite of all the for-profit college bashing that is popular these days, I still think we do some good. Yeah, maybe we do treat our adjuncts like second-class citizens. But we are just emulating our betters. It's a fine old tradition for management to abuse labor. That's one thing our little college does well. You know what they say: If you want to run with the big dogs, you gotta get off the porch.

Dissertation limbo and a diatribe about the Gainful Employment rule

My dissertation chair forwarded me a short, but positive comment about my concept paper from someone on my committee: "I found this easy to read and follow." That seems like good feedback, right? I'm delighted she found my paper easy to read and follow; however, what I really want from her is a thumbs-up on my concept. Does the fact that she found my paper easy to read and follow mean that she approves it? Or is there a big HOWEVER coming my way, followed by the dreaded PLEASE RESUBMIT?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm grateful. It was nice of my chair, after two weeks, to flip me this little crumb. I think the mentors and chairs have a finely developed sense of how long they can keep a student waiting for feedback before the student complains to the advisor. According to the syllabus, they have two weeks to turn around my submission. The longer they can keep me on the hook, waiting, the longer this course will take, and the more money they and the school will make.

Northcentral University is a regionally accredited online university. Regional accreditation is the highest accreditation an institution can earn. However, the fact that the institution is fully online is a red flag to many people. (How good can the education be if the students never interact in person or even in synchronous real time with each other or the professor?) NCU is also a for-profit corporation. I have some experience with the for-profit higher education world. Besides "attending" a for-profit university, I work for a for-profit career college. I often think about the uneasy tension between academic rigor and the profit motive.

When I look around our campus (three floors in a pumpkin colored rented office building surrounded by a busy retail hub the size of a small city), I see shabby carpets, old whiteboards, shoddy chairs, out-dated dilapidated textbooks, and weary instructors. The energy of former days is long gone. We don't offer the latest computer simulated learning environments. We don't have smartboards and projectors built into every classroom. Even our toilets don't work. I know we are losing money now, but at one point, our parking lot was bursting with cars, our hallways were bustling with students. Where did the money go?

I have mixed feelings about the new Gainful Employment rule recently adopted by the Department of Education. (The rule is designed to protect consumers and taxpayers from the predatory practices of for-profit institutions.) I want students to be recruited by honest admissions representatives. I want students to be presented with meaningful and challenging learning opportunities. I want students to have successful outcomes: graduation, employment in their fields, and the ability to pay back their student loans. I want all that for them, and if legislation is the way to "encourage" for-profit institutions to provide it, then I am in favor of it. And if institutions are not able to meet the new standards, then they should be encouraged to change or to close their underperforming programs.

But it's my job we are talking about. As a former artist and consummate under-earner, I fear joblessness more than just about anything. Even though sometimes I think calling myself a teacher is a gross misnomer, I don't have the integrity to quit my job quite yet. Maybe after I finish this Ph.D. Although at the rate I am going, it isn't likely to happen soon.

The 14th day will be tomorrow.

How do we evaluate the value of a college education?

The thought-provoking subject of NPR's Talk of the Nation radio program today was an all-too-brief exploration of the challenge of using standardized tests to measure college student outcomes, which we presume are indicators of academic quality. The three guests on the program discussed the difficulty of designing tests to measure qualities like critical thinking skills, communication skills, and reasoning skills.

The discussion echoed concerns I often feel as I study the topic of higher education academic quality. As I listened, it occurred to me that before designing methods to evaluate quality, we need to spend some time defining quality. Many definitions of higher education quality have been proposed; however, the panorama of higher education includes diverse institutions, each with a unique mission, purpose, and definition of acceptable student outcomes. In other words, agreement on a definition of quality is unlikely if not impossible.

A popular conception of academic quality in the U.S. views quality in terms of fitness for purpose. Quality assessment objectives are evaluated based on how well the institution meets its stated purposes, as described by its mission and institutional objectives. To see this in action, review a school's mission statement for clues to understanding how the school defines quality. For example, one local career college promises to be "uncompromisingly dedicated to helping people improve their lives through high-quality, college-level, career education." The purpose of education at this institution can be found in the word "career."  Because education at this school is all about job placement, success or failure can be measured in terms of job placement rates.

But wait. Is it possible there is more to a college education than just obtaining employment after graduation? Before we can define quality we need agreement on the purposes of a college education. What is a college education for, anyway? Is it solely to provide practical job skills, such as computer literacy or high-temperature welding? Is it to teach those difficult-to-measure skills like critical thinking, communication, and reasoning? Is it to do both? Can a college education do both?

The U.S. Department of Education has decreed in its recent Gainful Employment Debt Measures rule that academic quality in higher education consists of providing value to consumers and taxpayers by meeting minimum standards: students graduate, students get jobs, students pay back their student loans. Considering that taxpayer dollars subsidize public institutions in the form of grants and for-profit institutions in the form of access to student loan funding, it should not be surprising that the government wants to ensure institutions are in compliance with these standards. The DOE has enlisted the accrediting agencies to motivate compliance. Compliance is the new buzzword at career colleges, where great sums of money are spent paying people to figure out how to comply with government regulations.

Another definition of quality would have us measuring how well we meet the needs of the students—the so-called customer satisfaction model. Anyone who thinks that buying an education is similar to buying a toaster has been shopping online at the diploma mills. Student evaluations of instructors and programs are collected every term at at least one career college I know of. Faculty live or die by these evaluations. Are students really the best judge of academic quality? The instructors who are "nice" and "easy" get higher evaluations from students. Does that mean these instructors provide better academic quality? Probably not.

The radio show got me thinking. I've barely scratched the surface of a deep, vast topic. I felt like I had something to add to the radio conversation today, but I would never be brave enough to call in to TOTN. The mere thought of speaking to Neal Conan in person sends me into a hot flash. He's like the Tom Jones of talk radio. So I sent an email. Of course, it wasn't read on the air, but I felt a bit more like a valuable contributor for having sent it.

Obama asks higher education, "What are we getting for our money?"

The aggressive push of the Obama Administration to make higher education accessible, affordable, and effective is stoking a heated debate. In an Associated Press article posted today on msnbc.com, the author described the Administration's position on the role of higher education in American society.

Federal student loan funding is being used to fund students who are unlikely to graduate or get a job in their field. Some critics say some of those students should never be allowed to go to college in the first place because they can't read and do basic math. In his State of the Union address, Obama expressed his intention that every family in America should be able to afford to go to college. He didn't say that every person should go to college.

It seems to me so much of the disagreement between factions stems from a basic question: What is the purpose of a college education?

If you are a leader in a publicly funded institution of higher education that offers degrees in fields like art, music, and philosophy, you might be worrying that so much focus on "gainful employment" is the kiss of death for your liberal arts programs.

This saddens me. I can relate. If I had been left to pursue what I loved, back in the 1970s, I would have studied painting. I would never have listened to people who said I would never be able to survive as a painter. I would never have switched my major to graphic design (commercial art), which ended up to be a hopeless endeavor for me, because I am constitutionally unable to produce "art" to order.

I think of the artists and musicians and other creatives who are being allowed to study what they feel passionate about, without the threat of future unemployment looming over their shoulders. I'm sure they think about their career prospects. But vocations choose you sometimes. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you in its efforts to come forth. Ignore your art at your peril.

Vocational education and liberal arts education are different things—they shouldn't have to compete. Unfortunately, they are being forced to compete because taxpayer dollars are being used to fund both "useful" occupational programs and "useless" pursuits such as art and theater. The value of higher education, then, has become all about the money, and the measure of a quality education has become simply whether or not the student graduates and pays back his or her student loans.

I am a believer in lifelong learning. I hope I never stop taking classes somewhere to expand my skills and my mind. But I don't believe that everyone should have a college degree. I think there should be multiple definitions of higher education, multiple avenues toward learning. Certificate and diploma programs should focus on the job skills demanded by industry. Let academe offer four-year and advanced degrees.