Who is in charge?

Citation

Abeles, T.P. (2004), "Who is in charge?", On the Horizon, Vol. 12 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/oth.2004.27412daa.001

Who is in charge?

A colleague who works for a large telecommunications firm in Australia tells the story of a Pakistani man whose family struggled to send their son to a good university in the USA. The firm subsequently hired this graduate and after only a few months had to let him go. It was determined that, in spite of his degree and letters of recommendation that rhetoric and reality were not congruent. His skill sets, evident by his credentials did not translate into usable skills and the retraining would have been cost prohibitive. Somewhere in this individual’s global journey there was a disconnect.

Many US corporations have been outsourcing computer programming to other countries but are now bringing this work home because they are finding that, even though some of the personnel are US trained, the communication has lead to problems in product/service development. As we move towards a wired world where students, faculty, academic offices and the servers can be scattered around the world, will these problems eventually be resolved with better communications and cross cultural understanding or will the problems escalate to a point where the differences force a reclustering within conventional geo/political boundaries or new intellectual enclaves?

Perhaps the problem lies deeper. One university which delivers masters level courses to the business community offers to refund the tuition and fees if the materials do not satisfactorily address a student’s need. A public university in the USA was considering offering a guarantee with each undergraduate diploma, such that if the student’s performance did not meet the level of company expectations, the institution would provide a certain number of credit hours to overcome the deficiencies. The formal offer never materialized, nor did their threat to impose similar sanctions on secondary schools if the incoming freshman proved deficient in basic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics.

Here we have two issues that revolve around the expectations of a college degree, certain areas of expertise and particular levels of competency with respect to the acquired skill sets. Is the proper arena where one should be attacking the issues at hand, or does the problem lie deeper, perhaps at the philosophical area surrounding education in general and post secondary education in particular? Jose Ortega y Gasset, in his “Mission of the University”, does identify one of the dimensions of a college degree as training in the professions. Of course, when he was writing in the 1930s, such recognized professions were few in number. Post-Second World War, with many soldiers returning to civilian life and to college, this definition became very large. And the number of students entering the post secondary institutions mushroomed, changing forever the idea of the elite university into one which became an essential gateway to a career, a profession which would allow an individual to change collars from blue to white. Until that time graduates entered the professional ranks of lawyers, doctors, engineers or similar occupations, headed towards public service or set one’s goals towards higher degrees and, eventually, a position within the university, itself. The numbers were few and their ranks among the elite. After the Second World War, the college degree was seen as an economic path rather than, almost exclusively, a social or intellectual path.

This shift, not much more than three score years old, has left academic institutions, globally, responding significantly more slowly than the technological and social revolution that has driven the global society, primarily at the bachelor’s level. Some institutions remain committed to a “liberal education” where professional skills are either obtained at an advanced degree level or through other vehicles, including on the job training. Some institutions, as many realize, provide an education where the expectation is that the graduates are headed into professions at a management level, while others see their graduates practicing the “art”.

Additionally, universities, much to their chagrin, find themselves being ranked by independent publications, much like the Michelin guide for hotels and restaurants. Yet we encounter cognitive dissonance such as the examples above with regards to employment. Part of the issue may rest in how universities differentiate themselves from vocational or trade schools, believing that the type of education that they provide differs or should be perceived as different. Thus, a vocationally oriented degree in information and communication technologies might have similar course descriptions to those which are taken by an individual enrolled in a business degree in another university or even an institute of technology in a third institution. There is third party verification or standards which create, in various disciplines, some uniformity. The American Chemical Society has standards, various licensing organizations require testing, and many have expectations that post graduate work will be required to become professionally qualified or to maintain such qualifications.

But, today, university courses remain largely hand crafted where pride in the individual courses, programs and institutions resist universal certification. This is the concern raised with the idea of e-learning and their “learning objects” which can be delivered across institutions and programs, globally. Yet, on a planet woven together by the Internet, how do we overcome the problems of communication and find some manner to assess competency. The problem gets more interesting because, as some pundit remarked, when you are on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog. Thus, the agora has truly become universal and caveat emptor prevails, particularly in the arena of education and individual competency. And this is without trying to sort out the “digital diploma mills” and blatant attempts at academic fraud at all levels.

Of course, this, supposedly, is the function of organizations that certify institutions and programs. Yet, we know that even with very well written and administered certification procedures, that there is a spectrum of quality. For the Academy in the USA this results in small, local, colleges having the same certification as prestigious “medallion” institutions, leading to the disappointment of the firm in our initial example. The qualifying criteria become more of those established by guilds where meeting the “standards” is an effort to keep certain parties out while protecting those who have been vetted.

The problem is more than an intellectual exercise as the European Union seeks to bring some semblance of order across the education systems of the member countries. At one time, there was thought that one could take, for example, a level one course in Calculus in one country, level two in a second and the third level in a third internationalized institution. Of course we also recognize that the level of educational preparation of a student in the USA does not equate with an English university, until, approximately the masters level in comparable institutions. But these discussions and comparisons are taking place external to the universities, often where funding is allocated by government agencies. Thus, the issue becomes even more interesting since it appears that, hand-crafted or not, the ability of the scholars to control their disciplinary courses and, even, certification, at the post secondary level may be transformed to the level of control allocated to primary and secondary school faculty.

But all of this is predicated on the idea that the major roll of a university is to prepare a person to participate in society as a fully informed, articulate, citizen where the skills needed within a vocation is but one element of such an experience. Yet, as the costs for a post secondary education are supported less by the public sector and the burden shifted to the students, both government and the citizens start to measure how such costs can be recovered, repaid by the students on graduation. Thus, the expectations that a university degree prepares one to earn sufficiently more than could be obtained from alternative opportunities starts to loom large both for those incurring the obligation and those who must pay the graduates for performance.

De facto, we may see a re-emergence of selective institutions for those, who, as in the past, had the fiscal resources to attend a university where the degree might not be required for financial survival. At that point, education for a career will move from the current K-12 to K-16.

When the USA was founded, there was a serious debate as to who might participate in selecting and serving in government. There was a strong sentiment that only those who met certain fiscal criteria would have the time and could make the commitment to serve. Globally, there is a similar tug-of-war between the idea of a grass-roots, populist, movement to participate and the selectivity and power conveyed by access to fiscal resources. The growing demands of a world wired via the Internet have again raised these issues where the debate has been taken out of the Academy and into the wired commons.

The university seems unresolved on these issues and the pressures which the introductory examples provide raise the stakes, particularly where the institution is dependent on tuition and other external resources which do not come without expectations. Few universities have the fiscal resources to pick their own paths, as institutions. Few faculty have similar personal resources to resist the demands made by the Academy. Even medallion institutions with substantive endowments are subject to fiscal whimsy of donors, funding agencies and students. The concerns raised might lead to negative fiscal responses from which some institutions might not recover.

At one time, the university held the “bully pulpit” from which it could dictate, almost ex cathedra. Today, few institutions and their faculty command the moral and intellectual high ground. As Bruce Sterling said in his short story, “Green Days in Brunei”:

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  The “technical elite” were errand boys. The didn’t decide how to study, what to work on, where they could be most useful, or to what end. Money decided that. Technicians were owned by the abstract ones and zeros in bankers’ microchips, paid out by silk-suited hustlers who’d never touched a wrench. Knowledge wasn’t power, not really, not for engineers. There were too many abstractions in the way.

Tom P. Abeles