“Still, universities continue to churn out a supply of PhDs far exceeding the academic market’s demand for them. About 70 percent of all professors are not in tenure-track positions. Only 27 percent of those who received history PhDs in 2017 were in tenure-track jobs in 2021.” …
“Covid-19 intensified a [declining enrolment] trend, underway for a decade before the pandemic, of college enrollments declining about 1 percent a year. And an ancillary benefit of today’s sizzling job market is that many young people are beginning useful careers. This, instead of slouching, bored and sullen, at the back of lecture halls not to acquire knowledge or even marketable skills but a bachelor’s degree, a credential of increasingly dubious value.”
George F. Will, in his opinion piece in The Washington Post, ‘As enrollment plummets, academia gets schooled about where it went wrong’ (April 19, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT), illustrates the stupidity in the way persons think, today, about Higher Education policy and the market economy. Foremost that higher education is about the market economy, in that the market economy produces the education required as ‘education’ (mythologically). It is does not. It is almost a classic truism that the market economy is stupid, and yet we still have policy fools talking about education in market economy terms.
Image 1: Collage of Images as (left to right, top to bottom):
Vision, education people concept – displeased red haired teenage student girl in glasses and checkered shirt l showing thumbs down over grey background. Photo 143161962 © Syda Productions | Dreamstime.com
Girl sleeping with holding a sign with the word Help. Photo 134669606 © Sevak Aramyan | Dreamstime.com
A close up shot of a little boy at school who looks distant and upset. Photo 57218706 © Liquoricelegs | Dreamstime.com
Grunge image of a stressed overworked man studying. Photo 39431170 © Kmiragaya | Dreamstime.com
Stressed college student for exam in classroom. Photo 68713779 © Tom Wang | Dreamstime.com
Worried young woman using laptop, teenager feeling nervous passing online exam or distance graduation test on web, f grade, anxious girl stressed by bad news in email, biting nails, looking at screen. Photo 101334378 © Fizkes | Dreamstime.com
The market economists do not care about education. Before getting their plum jobs, they were the young fools, “… slouching, bored and sullen, at the back of lecture halls not to acquire knowledge.” Will refers to ‘a credential of increasingly dubious value’, but I doubt he carefully read Randall Collins’ The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (Columbia University Press, 2019). The issue of credentials is not substantial jobs for the population but for a select few. This is the point of “Only 27 percent of those who received history PhDs in 2017 were in tenure-track jobs in 2021”. It is a selection of an elite by government and the social establishment via the pulling levers in the brainless “market economy”.
Image 2: Dr Neville Buch’s mostly unpaid work in the History of Religious Education (small example).
But what does this mean for the wider population? Mass ignorance. The effect of “Only 27 percent of those who received history PhDs in 2017 were in tenure-track jobs in 2021” is the loss of public knowledge. Since the elite declares that the majority of PhD graduates cannot be employed, whole fields of learning are scraped from the curriculum; and remember the numbers are already the elite. These are fields which once were thriving and the only reason that they are scraped are decisions about higher education policy. It is not merely mass education which suffers, but culturally the elite education. The thinking goes: we have less in the university budget, so we will scrape the approach of full and comprehensive education in the humanities and social sciences and prioritise our investment in STEM or STEAM. Fuck you, the humanities and social sciences. Fuck you, full and comprehensive education.
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Image 3: Dr Neville Buch’s mostly unpaid work in the History of Religion and Theological Education (small example).
I ask the Australian population, do you care that you are ultimately being made stupid?
Image 4: Example of work among Ph.D. ANZHES colleagues
Neville Buch