POST SECONDARY ON THE ROCKS

When the focus is on bums in seats and turning the wheels of lecture, quizzes, assignments and grades you end up with students who waste four years on academic activity but don't learn much.

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I need to ensure that when I write this, I don't impugn the institution where I work, as they are sensitive to criticism. So I write this hypothetically and anecdotally, based on what my neighbour, a well-known university professor, tells me. His name is Toby, and it is only a coincidence that he has the same name as my beloved Westie terrier, who is sleeping on the other end of the couch right now, curled up against his sister Malibu, another Westie but who isn't his sister. 

I do not have a professor friend named Malibu. Malibu is not a good professor's name; people associate it with a doll or a stripper they had a shining to when they lived in Sault Ste. Marie. Stripper names hurt you if you want a career in academia. 

However, credentials are shorthand for learning and accomplishments. Above my head in the basement are two graduate degrees on the wall; my wife's medical degrees got the upstairs premium office billing, and my degrees were put in the basement by my mother-in-law because she was tired of Guinness posters. And these degrees work to take the focus off two surround sound speakers that have never worked. Nevertheless, these credentials, these framed pieces of paper, are just symbols. These distract from two surround-sound.

Symbols and credentials are supposed to save time. They are supposed to assure an employer that you may be better than the non-parchment holding person. They should not simply be for some bored, drunk person in my basement to read, so they might inform me that they are surprised I made it through high school - a most unfair assumption just because I can't figure out how to add rum to the overused Bartisium cocktail machine on the bar counter. 

I fear we are obsessed with the credential and the sub-credential in post-secondary education. Credentials without substance are worse than no credentials; if one assumes a lack of credentials makes you uneducated, you will at least be able to prove yourself. Credentials and sub-credentials signal to put the brakes to even a passing interest in learning.

As with the picture above, if a buoy floats in the harbour but is not attached to anything, it does nothing more than say, “Look at me. I’m a pretty buoy.” Then, the painter and maintainer of that unmoored buoy is an idiot, for when you focus on a credential and ignore what it symbolizes; you deceive yourself and the world.

As we speak, a colleague is getting street protests because he failed too many students (yes, tents, loudspeakers, idling police cars, the package deal). The administrative powers have decided this must be corrected, and mob justice will win. One hundred more students will be reassessed and passed. I have no idea of their competencies, but I trust my colleague’s ability to measure whether or not their skills meet the minimum expectations in the course outline.

But while my colleague is fully qualified and competent, not to mention possessing a large set of balls, a sad reality is now that many post-secondary administrators don't even check the credentials of their prospective colleagues, especially if they come from another country.  That would be racist.  Obvy.   However, this fact could create problems, not to mention a small measure of cynicism about the value of formal education.

However, when it comes to confusing credentials with meaning, the issue is that means and ends are treated similarly.

Learning and developing critical thinking skills should be the only things that matter in education.  Formal post-secondary education is not about creating a parchment to show a student’s name in calligraphy, a formal document with their name printed under a pretty logo and above two signatures of people they have never met. Nor is there deep value in showing the school’s logo, so often surrounded circularly by a Latin phrase which only one grey-haired guy on the eighth floor understands.

But let's call course grades "sub-credentials," those numbers we give students at the end of a course, allowing them to move on to get another number at the end of another course. 

Again, we run into the problem of misaligned incentives. There are two options: a. the incentive to have a student get a passing grade in a course versus b. the incentive to help them learn, improve their critical thinking, and ensure they walk away with an optimistic spirit about what they have learned.

Suppose you are teaching a course and want to do little (laziness being one of humanity's universal incentives). In that case, you can use the publisher's slides, use the publisher's questions, and link digital quizzes directly to the course’s learning management system. At that point, a skilled work-avoiding humanities or business professor might get away with reading the slides, with the occasional off-topic segue and amusing anecdote. Teaching assistants can do most of the marking.

Even this assumes that the school hired someone who worked in their teaching area or (hopefully ‘and’) that the instructors themselves studied in the same area. I’ve seen some department heads who think someone is qualified to teach finance if they’ve ever worked in a bank.

However, no matter who was hired, education must confront and make students uncomfortable. It cannot aim for ease and comfort. Market efficiencies don’t work well in education. Education needs friction. You can’t light a match when you strike it on a marble counter.  

But suppose the main incentive of the prof was to minimize their efforts, with the institution’s main incentive being to put bums in seats (collect tuition, they need the cash, they might have warm weather academic conferences to fly out to and not attend). Professors' main incentive was warm-weather.

After that, the goal might be to put them through a process that gives the noted student a grade above 50 or 60. 

In this case, you are in dangerous territory. Numbers are numbers; they are useless if they don't represent something meaningful. 

If you care about students not giving you negative feedback or writing nasty letters to your dean, there is a perfect solution: raise your grade average by 15%.  20% is even better. I remember someone who gave her class a 96% average; her students almost put her on their shoulders and ran around the school!

Grade inflation is like alcohol at a party. Once, as an undergraduate, I experimented, and I went sober to a football player's party. Of course, such scientific research is invaluable.  

No, this time, I did not steal their cologne from the bathroom and piss behind the furnace so the house would smell like burnt urine; I stayed sober. I realized how foolish the event was; yes, I went home alone.

Regardless of my social failings, my sobriety opened my eyes to the banality of the event.  

Let's move this extended metaphor back to the classroom. 

Adding 10-15% to the grade average will eliminate most complaints; scientific papers have proven the direct correlation between higher grades and better student reviews.

Students are strange. 

Imagine if your lash lady called and said she was cancelling your appointment, but you were still charged $120. You would be unhappy. But when students have classes cancelled or they have unwarranted grades given to them, they don't get enraged and scream, "Hey, I'm not learning anything; my critical thinking skills are stagnating."  They cheer. 

Perhaps students subconsciously know that much of University is a waste of time. 

"Higher education is the only product consumers try to get as little as possible out of it."

(Arnold Kling, "College Customers vs. Suppliers.”) 

Focusing on symbols or credentials with little more than a token concern for what they should represent diminishes the credential's value and takes the focus off the core mission. It also creates a public habit of looking for and accepting the superficial.  As far as post-secondary education, if there is not a concerted, management-led effort to ensure that students develop an intrinsic (the only motivation that is worth anything) love of learning - or at least one area of learning - if the institution is not monitoring outcomes of individual courses, if alumni affairs are cherry-picking students whose have done well and pretending not to realize that the business grad still working as an IHOP waiter might not be inclined to fill in a survey. If instructors can use inflated grades to cover up laziness, we must be realistic and admit that systems naturally devolve without controls.

Hard-working professors who push students will see their efforts increase student complaints and lower student evaluations. Professors, lecturers, and instructors might eventually say that they are tired of pretending to be Joan of Arc (minus all the mental health issues) and start doing just enough to get by. Why fight the machine?

But if this happens, education, at both the institutional and student levels, will be nothing more than a branding exercise. That is cynical and sad.

Credential obsession is well tuned to our paper-thin social media, clickbait-consuming age. This is one of the secrets of our Prime Minister's appeal. He cherry-picks one economic stat and says our GDP is rising the fastest in the G7, and the public sees the headline and applauds.  

But they fail to notice that, with immigration rising at an unprecedented rate and our per capita (what the average individual earns) wage falling, we are getting poorer; by 2050, if current trends continue, our average income will be 50% of that of those uncultured "Mericans."

But I'm still convinced our core identity of being Canadian, that being getting snarky when we tell others we aren’t American, will continue. We will still stick Canadian flags on our luggage in Europe.  European travel, though, in 2050 might be a pipe dream. If Bill Gates gets his way, public airlines will be banned, but I'm sure the private aircraft business he bought will do well. 

Yale Professor Brian Caplan, writing in "The Case Against Education" (2018), differentiates between the human capital model and the signalling model when examining the value of education. The human capital model offers little value, and students tend to be taught easily forgotten material irrelevant to their future. Caplan found that first-year and fourth-year college students performed equally terribly on informal reasoning tests. IQ gains attributed to more schooling were deemed just mixing measured smarts with real ones.

Caplan said that the idea of formal education being some goldmine of human capital development is exaggerated and downright ridiculous. Students don't remember much, and adults forget most of it, too. I am trying to remember most of the courses I took. I recall one in Faust legend about some guy who sold his soul to the devil, but I can't remember if it turned out better for the devil or Faust. But I know I passed the course. The degree is upstairs in a drawer. It is the part of my life represented by stuff that I never use or look at and that is thrown in a box every time I move to be put in another drawer and not looked at. When I die, my children will either go through it. But if I die in summer and we have not removed our firepit, I suspect it will not be long for this world.

University students, studies show, barely get wiser from first year to senior year; they know little about the scientific method and can't answer basic civics questions if their life depended on it. But guess what? They're not dumb; they know the game's name is signalling. So they skip classes, chase professors who hand out easy A's, and cram for tests instead of learning material. Some students I know told me about my appalling and suspicious habit of not using published publisher'’ test banks (not only can students find the exact questions and answers, but the questions are mindless, rote memorization specials, usually testing if students know the textbook glossary).

Students seriously thought education meant copying answers from Quizlet. The idea of reading, sweating, understanding, and applying material wasn’t even on their radar.

Remember, it's not about what students know; it's about the piece of paper employers want to see and this signal's brightness, colour, valance, power and overall ability to impress.

Caplan's stark choice is perfect - Ask students whether they want a Princeton education without a diploma or a Princeton diploma without an education. 

Which gets you further in the job market?" 

Option two wins every time. Ouch. 

Of course, while there are personal perks to racking up more years in school, society gains little. It's costing us big time. Most of what education does is just shuffling around information – it doesn't make society more prosperous. If education boosts pay by making workers more productive, society wins as much as the workers do. But if it just reveals who's already productive, society gets nothing in return. And guess who's footing the bill for this costly charade? Yep, it's taxpayers. Education sure knows how to break the bank. 

And no, we can't just overcome this by bringing in more international students and creating immigration pathway education streams: pay us a fortune, we'll pass you, you'll get a work permit or a fake wife, and soon permanent residency will arrive and welcome to Canada.

You can do your citizenship test online; the answers are probably on Quizlet. 

Credentials are liked because they restrict competition, not always because they add much value. Of course, if more intelligent and driven students apply to a university, you will see higher results for university graduates—duh. But that doesn't mean the University is doing any heavy lifting. 

We must examine those credentials and seriously discuss their value. I suspect many credentials have been neglected, and when you do, you see mouse nests and cables chewed to bits by rats and other non-intellectual vermin.