The commercialization of post secondary education: a future scenario

College Student Journal, Sept, 2002 by Joel C. Snell, Saul Mekies

The authors suggest that public post secondary education in numerous decades in the future may need to go to major private retail corporations for monies to continue operations and expand. This process, we believe, will be gradual and fraught with controversy and ambivalence by administration, faculty, students, staff, and taxpayers. We assume that current level or larger increases in students will mitigate, but not reduce this trend. Thus, we assume that private monies will be used to promote numerous products that are purchasable in the retail market to students on a daily basis through direct and indirect means. This trend also means that colleges and universities will begin to mimic the culture and social organization of private multinational corporations (Beatty, 2001.) Last, we believe that it will be in the best interest of state legislatures to continue to reduce the financing of state colleges and universities. We borrow heavily from THE McDONALDALISATION OF SOCIETY (1996)

Funding

If trends continue, state legislatures in the future will continue to cut funds and colleges will have to go to other sources. Thus, schools will probably go to private revenues to continue operations. A caveat is that schools, who form partnerships with private corporations, try to establish a curriculum in which students can find work is incidental to this trend. We believe that a liberal arts background with career skills is extremely important. * However, we believe that the future will go beyond this. Taxpayers want more services for less cost and colleges will need to go to corporations to survive.

Infrastructure

Future schools may look more commercial than ever before. Hallway walls may contain product advertisements for retail goods. Textbooks may have products in the pictures along with ads in the books, commercial pop-ups in software packages and advertisements in the classrooms. Schools may sell naming rights to their schools to alcohol, tobacco, or junk food products. Teachers may wear blazers that have the school logo intermixed with product brand labels.

Faculty and staff

Faculty will probably lose tenure. Rolling yearly contracts will be assigned to those faculty members that can attract millions of dollars in grant money. This would also apply to authors of best selling text books in which the profits go to the school. Most faculty will have adjunct status (Dubson, 2001). This trend has been a long time coming and adjuncts perfectly reflect the market (Snell, 2001). Collective bargaining may decrease, but teacher unions will prospers as they sell group benefits (health, life, disability and liability coverage)(Snell,2000) Both staff and faculty will be "on call." 18 hour teaching load may not be considered too heavy, because most of classroom activity will revolve around computers, work books, and time spent teaching to the basic skills tests (Burnett, 2001.) Thus, teaching is deskilled and routinized. Schools may purchase the same textbook all across the state so that there is an economy of scale and large discounts, along with workbooks and software.

Many faculty will have distance learning classes or a combination of any time/ anywhere classes along with face to face courses (Levine, 2000.) The collective bargaining of teaching assistants and adjuncts will be strongly opposed. Faculty will work when needed and may be wanted for weekend classes, nights, holidays, and any other market arrangement. They may be paid on a per/capita basis of those that are retained and succeed in the class and pass the general skills tests at the end of the semester. Individual tutors will be available, paid on a head count formula. Outstanding adjuncts can "challenge" rolling contract faculty for their position given that they write and succeed in obtaining large grants. Individuals with masters and lesser PhD's will continue to find work on an adjunct basis. Stars from the very best schools with ability to attract grant money may find that their doctorates are partly funded on the basis of contributions from private corporations.

Administration and Staff

We believe that administrative positions will be kept at a minimum and when possible those generalists will be hired to do many different jobs over their career with the school. However, it is likely that many will not continue in the same school as they move to new schools so they can improve upon or save their job. To avoid overlap, public colleges will begin to merge and administrative duties will be shared. As an example a state with 15 community colleges could be merged to 10 colleges with the other 5 part of the remaining 10. Some may be sold off to private corporations or have a public/private operations.

Research and Publications

All faculties will be encouraged to publish. How can this be when workloads are considerable? Faculty will probably have shared publications. If one looks at the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, one can see that authorship of an article can include from 10 to 15 faculty members. Thus, to continue publishing, every faculty will want to be in a writing group, where one has 10 scholars who each contribute so that each faculty can publish numerous essays, articles, presentations, and related every year. They will be dropped from the group if they fail to contribute. Fee paid journals should show explosive growth as memberships drop in the voluntary associations of various fields (Snell,Noble, Mekies,2000.) Universities will no longer provide travel funds for faculty to cut costs. For the journal of these organizations to avoid folding, editors can demand membership fees, reviewer fees, and pagination fees from their authors (Snell, 200 1). Applied research will probably be most encouraged because it can provide the foundation for getting large grants. If funded by grants, the results of the various studies may be owned by the grantors and only released for publications with their permission.