Bastardization Of Higher Education Summary

Prof. Swiheart Michael Cox
Sociology

The Bastardization of Higher Education

The entire video hits on the privatization of universities and how they are becoming mcdonaldized to the point that they are pushing students through just for the dollar signs instead of the reason for higher education. The video is a direct conflict between these pop up universities and schools that have rich history such as “ivy league” or traditional universities. Most of these newer universities are a convenience in that they are mainly on line instead of the traditional class room setting and these for profit universities are accelerated instead of taking the full time to earn a degree and actually retaining the information. From the view
of structural functionalism the” for profit” universities are breaking the norms set forth by the masses based on the traditional standards of universities. Employers are not recognizing these new schools as credible because they are not offering the correct training that universities offer, according to insidehighered.com, in fact, Phoenix University is being placed on probationary status for failure to comply with accreditation criteria. Also their prices are outrageously high (about twice as much as a traditional four year institutions). Functionally, from within the structure, is built to make money and all of their parts are put in place not for the sake of education, but for the sake of making money. They help the school survive by lobbying investors to throw money at failing schools and then revamping them with accelerated programs boasting a degree that employers want but in half of the time that it would take otherwise. People are drawn to this because we are in need of instant gratification and we need things done quickly so that we may move on to the next project. The conflict prospective fits this case relatively well, of course conflict theory fits everything when one is as pessimistic as I am. The power struggle here may feign being about education but the underlying issue is in fact money. The owners of the university are out for money as are the investors. Privatizing education only proves to dampen the need and drive for education and tends to dilute the pool of those that seek higher paying jobs. The job market is so saturated now that an inflation of education is bound to take place to weed out all of these dummy schools and to get people into the right education instead of filling online chat rooms with usernames and calling it a classroom. Marx may have been accurate in his theory. According to the book “sociology in our times” Karl Marx focused on the exploitation of the workers by the owners. This video showed that workers or students were being exploited and tricked into phony degrees so that the owners could collect on all of that inflated tuition. In terms of symbolic interactionism, looking at all of the parts as a sum of the bigger picture, the students are perpetuating the cycle for these rich bourgeoisie to continue to cash in by buying into their scheme over and over without wising to the plot of a tragic story.
People are so ready to accept that there is a fast, convenient, mcdonaldized approach to a good education that they do not stop to take a look at what is actually going on by their educational institution taking short cuts and skipping vital parts of the learning process. The sum of the parts, being from students perpetuating the cycle, to the staff being paid to chop the curriculum, to the owners and investors lying that they are prestigious; only helps in stretching this shadow of schooling out to boundless limits. Though all of these pieces play a vital role, they are not the only ones to blame. In my opinion the biggest culprit for driving these schools into existence are the countless amounts of employers now requiring a piece of paper to do the same job that some people have been doing, with proper training, for years and years with little less than a high school diploma. It is a shame that inflation touches every aspect of our lives, from a gallon of gas reaching four dollars a gallon to basic laborers now being required to have an associate’s degree or
better. From every perspective that I look at this issue I see no resolution, nor any good that can come from it.
It seems that since the beginning of the semester we have been primed to look at our country from a new prospective and to see what is really going on with the world that we are a part of and have helped to create in our complacency. Though I have been on a soap box for a very long time about all of these issues that are arising in our society today, I am extremely grateful to hear that someone else shares my views on much of the goings on in today’s society. It is becoming more and more prevalent that modern science has gotten the “chaos theory” right to a fault, everything in any state is constantly moving from a position of order to a more natural form of chaos. According to Marxist.com: chaos takes a dialectical view of nature, meaning that many points in any orderly configuration is on the edge of chaos, and a small push in any direction could have dire consequences, the example used from the site is “a ball balanced on the top of a hill, when pushed, would not roll slightly but instead would completely topple down the hill”. In any case the fact that our nation along with many other countries all around the world are moving ever closer to the proverbial edge has me in a constant state of paranoia and unease, these reason among others are the reason that I, if you will remember from our first time meeting, have become a “prepper” and will continue to invest in
my family’s safety by being ready for any situation that may arise, instead of putting my funds in the bank, where it will be deemed useless in the near future anyway.