The Wal-Martization of Higher Education

by Oronte Churm

Sam Walton—huckster, billionaire, icon of the self-made movement—is proof that a representative democracy with a market economy permits class movement if you sell enough discounted panties. The late Walton’s embarrassment of riches was amassed, of course, by providing the appearance of prosperity to the masses, a cornucopia of goods at apparently affordable prices. Just as it’s hard to turn down Ol’ Roy Hearty Loaf dog food (recalled) at just 38¢ a can—it’s so available! and everybody’s buying it!—who wouldn’t want their kids to get what everybody labels “an education”? Higher ed is seen as opportunity in our culture, and it’s available in record numbers. Like Wal-Marts (3,702 Discount Stores, Supercenters, Sam’s Clubs and Neighborhood Markets in 2005 in America), Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) are everywhere for easier access. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1949-50 there were 1,851 IHEs (excluding branch campuses, which were not accounted for). By 2004-05, there were 4,216 Title IV-eligible IHEs (including branches). And if lobbyists for other sorts of technical, business, and trade schools get their way, there soon will be thousands more.

Other numbers tell the story even better: In 1919-20, only 48,622 people received bachelor’s degrees in America. In 1929-30, it was 122,484. By 1949-50, it was 432,058. And in 2005-06, it was projected that 1,431,000 students would receive bachelor’s degrees. That’s a 2943 percent increase in less than a century. (By comparison, the national population has grown only 286 percent since 1919.) If our citizens were being truly educated in these numbers, wouldn’t we be…smarter in our choices as a society right now? Going to college has always been a rite; now it’s nearly a right. A recent NY Times article, “Can’t Complete High School? Just Go Right Along to College,” reports that “many colleges—public and private, two-year and four-year—will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.” I’m not a fan of jumping through hoops, but it might be useful to demonstrate basic competency before moving up.

This questionable triumph of the educational ideal begins to sound like what sociologist George Ritzer calls “the irrationality of rationality”—resources and methods applied so aggressively that the intended outcome becomes something we couldn’t have foreseen—which Eric Schlosser applies to our eating habits in Fast Food Nation. But why is college education so important that it needs to be as ubiquitous as the Wal-Mart experience? Is higher ed. meant to provide a secular humanist education of breadth and depth? Or does it teach how to have a more enjoyable life through a sense of context and self-actualization? Does it provide informed citizens for the republic? Raise social status (if not always affluence)? Get the kids out of the house? Or is its purpose, as an inscription in stone at Hinterland says, “To prepare for a life of social service”? Are we training business managers? (In 2003-04, of 1,399,542 bachelor’s degrees conferred, 413,427 were in either business or education, and many of the others were in other pre-professional or technical curricula.
The return of the word “polytechnic,” as an alternative to “university,” comes to mind.) Or is higher ed. an increasingly complex gateway and checkpoint for the class system in America? I’m uncomfortable that I’m in the system and can’t be sure myself what we’re up to. It’s important to know, since the price to students is high: years of their lives, lost wages, false expectations, and, increasingly, crippling debt.

What We’re Buying

We don’t need everything that’s sold, even if it is plentiful and seemingly cheap. An example from The Wal-Mart Effect is the great pink slabs of salmon that now sell there for less than five dollars a pound. The middle class remember when the fish was prohibitively expensive, so they want it. They think: progress! I can eat as the rich do! We are a democracy! Wal-Mart doesn’t just cater to that desire; it creates it, and in the process, as Charles Fishman points out, hides the true costs: ecological disaster on the Chilean coast, where the non-native fish are raised, and loss of diversified jobs and culture. It also drives smaller producers out of business, messes over employees’ lives from Chile to Chattanooga, and demands concessions from our community chests. That’s a high price for an apparently cheap product, which is sold partly on pretension.Similarly, do we all need what IHEs are selling? Since much that passes as a “college education” is not what the culture has agreed to say it is, and since there are hidden costs involved here too, we should consider carefully.The cost of tuition, fees, books, and housing are well-known, but the presumed benefit of a degree makes us forget true cost, which continues to rise. The Mortenson Research Seminar on Public Policy shows that in 1964-65, students at a public university would have had to work 1,134 hours at the available minimum wage to finance their attendance costs. In 2002-03, it was projected that it would take 2,852 hours to accomplish the same. (That must be in-state.)In the name of making opportunities available to anyone, the loan system was developed. Unfortunately, it’s an offer filled with risks that many don’t consider; students often can’t know what their prospects will be after graduation, so they don’t know how long they’ll be in debt. Inside Higher Ed even reports that colleges are allowing third-party vendors to process students’ tuition payments by credit card. Now students can rack up school loans to the tune of 19% annual percentage rates. (O! you speech-com majors and humanities dissertators!)Aimlessness also has to be counted as a cost in a culture that expects people to “go to college.” IHEs often fail to make clear to students what, exactly, getting a degree is all about. This manifests in what Vartan Gregorian describes, in Declining by Degrees, as “a Home Depot of courseware where there is no differentiation between consumption and digestion or between information and learning. The nation cannot afford to turn the university into an academic superstore, a collection of courses marketed much like sinks and lumber.” (My niece has completed a master’s degree that she says she’ll never use. She’s $35,000 in the hole, on top of her parents’ sacrifices to send her to a private university for her bachelor’s, and now she’s taken a job as a travel agent. “Oh well,” she says with a bemused grin.)The Economic Policy Institute showed that in January 2004 there were nearly 1.2 million unemployed college graduates, age 25 or older. This surpassed the number of unemployed high-school dropouts (about 1.1 million over 25 years of age).I wonder if anyone keeps statistics on the number of college grads among the working poor—collecting trash, serving fries, or scrubbing toilets the rest of their lives—or the homeless? Everyone in America cannot, after all, be Sam Walton (Missouri, ‘40).

Supersize Sucks

This is by way of saying that the growth of American IHEs was not solely to provide educational access to more students. It’s also for the sake of the institutions. As Murray Sperber writes in Declining by Degrees, an “Academic Arms Race” began in the post-Sputnik boom era for higher ed., when money was plentiful. Colleges aspired to be universities, and universities competed for prestige by building research programs and feeling “impelled to grant advanced degrees in almost all areas.” But when funding dried up in the 70s, schools didn’t trim back research or refocus on core strengths. Instead, “schools forced-marched undergraduates from small classes into huge lecture courses, along with some reasonable-size classes sprinkled into their schedules. However, for an increasing number of classes with fewer than twenty-five students…schools began hiring lowly paid non-tenure track faculty or grad students to teach them and generate a small profit.” Sperber concludes that “Quality undergraduate education …does not exist for most students at public universities.” Paul Fussell said the same thing 20 years ago in Class: “‘Educational opportunity’ [in the 1960s] was opened up by the process of verbal inflation, by promoting, that is, numerous normal schools, teachers colleges, provincial ‘theological seminaries,’ trade schools, business schools, and secretarial institutes to the name and status of ‘universities,’ thus conferring on them an identity they were by no means equipped to bear, or even understand.”It’s not a new trick in America, he points out: “As one citizen exulted in the 1870s: ‘There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and thirty-seven in Ohio. “The result,” Fussel says, is that “State colleges and teachers colleges all over the country were suddenly denominated universities, and they set to work, with the best motives in the world, ripping off the proles.”

Fussel never defines what is worthy of the name undergraduate education, other than “curiosity…study…intellectual rigor…excellence.” (Presumably, if one is a matriculant at Harvard, one knows exactly what he’s alluding to, just as if one needs to ask the price of that Coach handbag, one can’t afford it.) A few years ago, an administrator at Hinterland University proudly said we were going to the “Michigan model”—larger sections—to solve budget problems. The History of the Short Story, for instance, had always been a two-semester course taught in sections of 36 students. Through consolidation, it’s now done in a single semester, in a lecture hall of 160.

Many graduating seniors have had so little contact with tenured professors that they ask me, the adjunct who taught their intermediate rhetoric class or introductory creative writing workshop, for reference letters for internships, law school, or grad school scholarships. Cheap, outsourced labor—adjuncts—is one of the results of the corporatization of the research university, and that’s a problem too. But at least I get to know students’ names, some of what is on their minds while they’re in my classes, and I help them become better readers, writers, and thinkers—more intellectually autonomous.

Not everybody thinks Wal-Mart is a bad idea. As John Dicker says in The United States of Wal-Mart, “The bottom line is that many anti-Wal-Mart activists have incomes that allow them the luxury of cultivating a global social conscience. It’s harder to care about sweatshop workers in Bangladesh when you can barely afford your baby’s formula, and when it’s on sale at the Wal-Mart two blocks away, well, that’s where you’re going to buy it.”

Similarly, any higher education is preferable to none, to those who see others supposedly getting one, and it’s a hard sell for me, with my graduate degree, to say differently. But shouldn’t consumers of the college experience be educated well enough to understand the quality of what they’re getting, why they want it, and what it really costs? Plentitude isn’t enough.