Here at the blog, we still remember that ad in the back of 1970s issues of Rolling Stone (when it was still on newsprint and still about music) that invited readers to send five dollars to the Universal Life Church and become an ordained minister, fully empowered to perform weddings, funerals, etc.
So we weren’t surprised to read in the Seattle Times (6-4-10) that an internet company in West Virginia called American Public University is offering Walmart employees “college credit for performing their jobs, including such tasks as loading trucks and ringing up purchases.” (Really, we’re not making this up.) Apparently, workers can “earn up to 45 percent of the credits needed for an associate or bachelor’s degree while on the job.”
Is this a great country, or what? Now, if you get a job that requires absolutely no college coursework, to say nothing of a degree, you can soon find yourself almost halfway to a degree simply by doing that job. No wonder we’re cutting funding to universities. Why pay for chemistry labs or history professors when people can get paid minimum wage, stock shelves, and earn college credits all at the same time?
The Walmart slimeballs are, of course, pitching themselves as working class heroes. “We want to provide you with more ways and faster ways to succeed with us,” the head of Walmart’s U.S. division told employees at the company’s annual meeting. The chief administrative officer, reaching for ever higher levels of condescension, said, “People will surprise you if you give them opportunities.”
This would be funnier if it weren’t so much like what’s happening in real higher education policy. Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board has a mandate to produce tens of thousands more baccalaureate degrees in the next twenty years. And judging from the HEC Board’s “System Design” discussions last year, they don’t really care how they get them. Applied baccalaureate degrees, online degrees, degrees from for-profit companies, and credit for “life experience” are all on the table. The HEC Board and the legislature are hell-bent on getting people more credentials, but they’re not interested in paying for genuine education.
And all of this gets trotted out with the same sort of populist rhetoric that flows from Walmart execs. “Educating more people to higher levels” was the battle cry of the HEC Board last year. It should have been “Rushing as fast as we can toward mediocre and worse 4 year public education.”
Kittens born in an oven aren’t biscuits, teenagers with five dollars and a Universal Life card aren’t ordained ministers, and diplomas from places like American Public University aren’t legitimate baccalaureate degrees. The education marketplace is booming while real education is rapidly disappearing.
As community and technical colleges and for-profit “universities” continue to grow, public, four-year universities are starving and becoming increasingly more private. This will have a devastating effect on all of American society and culture. The space program, cancer research, American social mobility, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and the free speech movement all have deep roots in American public universities. Their disappearance and transformation into institutions available only to the privileged will dramatically change the United States. At a time when emerging economies like India and China are investing in genuine liberal arts and sciences education, the United States generally and Washington in particular are turning more and more toward narrow technical and vocational training.
The cure for cancer isn’t going to be found at a community college, and the Vietnam war would have ended a lot later if college students had all been working at Walmart.
