Over the last 30 years, a slow and ruinous trend has turned our institutions of higher learning into degree mills, where students are called “clients” and faculty are hired as contingent workers.  Students are being taught by dedicated but demeaned professors who have no offices, who are hired semester-by-semester for wages lower than those of K-Mart workers.  Students have little to no personal access to faculty beyond the classroom. They receive no on-going mentoring or guidance; they get precious little of the support they have a right to expect from a faculty available full-time for meetings, professional advising or course content help.  Their teachers have to meet them in hallways, or in faculty lounges….sometimes in the neighborhood coffee shop.  Rather than face to face meetings, they are forced to resort to email exchange.  Forget what you remember about the university experience of the past.  This is the corporatized university, where the needs of the students and the value of the professors are minimized in the pursuit for a profit which benefits neither.

As tuition costs soar, and students and their parents strain under the debt of loans, a pyramid scheme has been developing.  University president salaries have skyrocketed, administrators now outnumber faculty on campuses around the country and the contingent majority faculty are living on food stamps and state assistance.  Student drop out rates are increasing while success scores are lower than they’ve ever been.  Our students are pushed through a degree mill that results in a more and more meaningless diploma which is no longer reflective of real higher education.

We’ve seen the terrible damage that has been done with the corporate take-over of medicine and the ruination of our healthcare system.  We’ve seen how rampant greed in our financial and banking systems have caused the meltdown of the average American’s financial security.  What is happening in our universities is part of the same disease.