Academics Get Reality Check

There is such a disconnect between what colleges and universities offer and what students need that even professors are starting to notice. “For over half a century, a college education has been seen as the conduit to white collar employment in this country,” Emily Schnee wrote in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Yet the expansion of higher education has created greater expectations for upward mobility than the job market can bear (Anyon, 2005; Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Lafer, 2002l Nasaw, 1979).”

“In the last decades, institutions of higher education have consistently produced a greater supply of college graduates than available middle class jobs.” Schnee is an assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York.

In that capacity, she is affiliated with the union-supported Worker Education Program (WEP) there. “While working class students often come to higher education in pursuit of social and economic mobility, radical educators, like many who teach at WEP, aspire to teach for critical consciousness and social transformation,” Schnee notes. “The space between these seemingly opposed intentions can be fraught with frustrations on both sides.”

From the student’s perspective, given the WEP syllabi, that may not be too surprising. “The WEP curriculum implicitly (italics Schnee’s) provides students a vision of education for critical consciousness and social transformation with core courses such as Poverty and Affluence, Community Organizing and Work, Class and Culture in which students are engaged in critical analysis of pressing social issues and are asked, through class projects and activities, to connect their learning to their life experiences as city workers and union members,” Schnee relates. “Yet, curricular implementation of this sort is quite uneven at WEP, depending entirely upon the inclinations and ideologies of individual instructors.”

“As a program, WEP does not engage its faculty in sustained or explicit exploration of program mission or the tension between student’s desire to use higher education as tool for mobility and many instructors aspirations to teach for critical consciousness and social change.” For some reason, graduates, and government workers no less, do not find their WEP training all that marketable.

This is causing some nail-biting among the trainers. “WEP, like many public college programs serving non-traditional students, finds itself vulnerable to downturns in public funding for higher education and under pressure to document quantifiable student outcomes, not leaps in critical consciousness,” Schnee explains. “Its undergraduate student population has experienced a steady decline in recent years—like many liberal arts programs at universities nationwide—precisely due to market driven pressures for degrees that, unlike labor or urban studies, promise to yield economic results.”

“WEP has maintained its silence around the tension between student goals and program intentions for more subtle reasons as well: fear of what it means to confront vulnerable students with their dim prospects for attaining mobility out of their degrees; concern that open acknowledgement of student aspirations will mean radical educators have to relinquish their goals in favor of the students’; and worry that students will simply vote with their feet and opt for a degree with ready market potential.”

Schnee’s own proposed reforms of the program do not look likely to stop that parade. “Such changes ought to include: the implementation of a core course on social mobility as part of the urban and labor studies curriculum that explicitly explores the relationship between individual mobility and higher education; new recruitment tactics that honestly represent the challenge mobility poses for adult students; frank discussion of program mission, educational philosophy, and student goals starting at orientation and extending throughout students’ tenure in the program; and the creation of social change internships and a yearly social change job fair to broaden students’ conception of mobility and engage them in assessing their realistic prospects for career change as a result of their degrees,” Schnee suggests.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.