Transcending Macro to Micro: Lines of Research that can assist in Understanding the Manifestation of Neoliberalism in the Lives of Faculty

by Leslie D. Gonzales, Assistant Professor, College of Education, Michigan State University 

Background

             Scholars of higher education have developed a large body of scholarship that addresses faculty careers. Within this scholarship, there are consistent themes: the importance of disciplinary background in forming faculty views of the world and their work, how the type of college or university where one works bears down on the roles and expectations that a faculty member is expected to fulfill (and supported to fulfill). Higher education researchers have also illustrated how faculty careers are not immune to the bent of the wider political-economy, most often characterized as neoliberal, market-centered, commercialized, or austere (see Harvey, 2005 for history of neoliberalism). In fact, neoliberal critiques abound, not only in the U.S. but also throughout Australia, England, Canada, Mexico and many other countries (Apple, 2013; Torres & Schugurensky, 2002). Most of this research demonstrates how the professorial role has been unbundled, de-professionalized, and transformed (sometimes in the face of resistance) into a distinctive entrepreneurialism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).

            Within the neoliberal critiques, studies show that faculty tend to work long hours in order to keep up with growing work load demands; that their work is increasingly understood for its fiscal or cultural resource generation; and that evaluation of faculty work is contingent on their ability and willingness to self-surveil and document what they do with their time (e.g., What was their percentage contribution to a manuscript; How many students did one graduate; How much revenue was generated via one’s course offerings?) (Gonzales & Núñez, 2014). As with most institutionalized patterns of valuation and resource allocation, the effects of the neoliberal turn are often disbursed unequally with female faculty members, individuals of racially or ethnically minoritized statuses, those working in disciplines further from the market, or faculty employed by institutions with fewer resources and limited infrastructure feeling the brunt of inequality. Indeed, Among those most effected are contingent faculty who teach a vast majority of undergraduate courses across American colleges and universities, and who are poorly paid, marginalized, and find themselves with limited or inconsistent access to teaching and learning professional development opportunities and materials from employing institution(s).

            To date, the field has learned a great deal from studies that use a neoliberal lens to explore faculty careers. However, as just suggested, this research has tended to document the ways in which faculty expectations and/or productivity/output patterns have changed, and how those changing expectations often reproduce inequities along the lines of discipline, institutional type, gender, and race (Misra, Lundquist, & Templer, 2012; Niehaus & O’Meara, 2015; Renzulli, Reynold, Kelly & Grant, 2013; Treviño, Gamez-Mejia, Balkin, & Mixon, 2015). Beneath or perhaps behind the pressures to publish and to demonstrate tangible outcomes are daily seemingly invisible or small micro level processes and experiences that the neoliberal moment also bears down on, but which are currently under-examined. To this point, Bastedo (2012) urged higher education researchers, and especially organizational theorists, to take a close look into “educational work” (p. 10) as it unfolds in a daily, perhaps even mundane, way. The goal of this post is to explore three ways of doing so, and I begin, drawing from the work of Anna Neumann, by asking if and how we might shift to studying faculty careers not only or primarily as a producing enterprise, but as a learning one.

Understanding the Faculty Career as a Learning Enterprise

            In her work, Anna Neumann (2009) encourages scholars and college and university leaders to remember that the work of faculty hinges on continual learning—an idea that is often muted in the desire to understand outputs, outcomes, and productivity. Although, the focus on output or productivity, in general is important and connected to an overarching concern with how the neoliberal bent positions colleges and universities, and in turn their faculty, as market competitors, there is also much work on the part of faculty that goes into “producing,” which the field knows little about. Specifically, the field knows little about how faculty members, embedded in (and producers of) the productivity culture, extend their scholarly learning: how they form and explore ideas, test out or articulate their thoughts as they grapple with old and new theories and developments. Given this gap in knowledge, there is merit in exploring such phenomena, broadly, and also in trying to understand how faculty learning efforts fall out differently among different groups of professors, such as those on and off the tenure-line, across gender lines, among faculty members who hold racially and ethnically minoritized status inside an institution constructed by and for White, wealthy males and for those who have come to know the world with Western-centric ideology and epistemology.

            Indeed, history has shown that women, women of color and communities of color, more broadly, create and engage in productive learning outside of mainstream apparatus. Martinez Aléman (2000; 2010) illustrated how the learning experiences for young traditionally aged women and women of color differed (in terms of space and content) from that of young male students, and also from that of the other female group. Espino, Muñoz, and Marquez Kiyama (2010) shared how their friendship and bond has been central, indeed integral, to their intellectual development. With the power of these examples in mind, we need more studies that systematically focus on how faculty commit and recommit to learning over the course of their work lives, the ways in which community and friendship play a role in allowing academics to form ideas, to talk out loud about their work in ways that allow them to be vulnerable, and what such efforts look like across gender, race, familial composition/commitments; disciplinary affiliations; appointment types; and across different institutional types. Such work would not necessarily shed light on productivity, as it is typically defined in the current neoliberal moment, but it would remind researchers and leaders that meaningful productivity must be fed by scholars’ ability to extend their learning.

Deploying Intersectionality to Trace the Differential Effects of the

Neoliberalism on Faculty Mobility

            As already alluded to, cultures (e.g., disciplinary norms, normative dispositions toward work, professionalism) and structures (e.g., appointment types, hiring processes, tenure and promotion guidelines) do not operate in the same way for all faculty members. Faculty members enter academia as raced, gendered, classed, and otherwise marked bodies. However, beyond the personal and biographical markers that faculty carry, they also enter academia with particular forms of capital such as that attached to the type of institution where they completed their doctoral work, unearned capital attached to the cache of their major advisors, their methodological experiences/stances, and myriad other forms of privilege that are not well documented in current research regarding faculty hiring or mobility. In other words, like the hidden curriculum that many scholars have documented in the context of K-12 schooling, there are hidden and not well understood forms of capital that allow/constrain movement within academe (Margolis, 2001). It is notable that that women and racially and ethnically minoritized women and men, occupy the majority of non-tenure-track positions (Finkelstein, 2015); that racially and ethnically minoritized people are more likely to graduate from a non-Ivy League school, and more specifically, from a Historically Black College or University or a Hispanic Serving Institution as documented in emerging work by Dongbin Kim.

            When one holds these latter pieces of information in one hand, and then considers the fact that the majority of tenure-track hires are drawn from a tiny portion of doctoral-granting universities as noted here and here, it becomes evident that understanding faculty hiring, promotion, and mobility patterns demands an intersectional approach: one that accounts for personal identity markers; organizational/field markers or forms of capital; and also academic markers (e.g., research topics, methodological approaches) as each of these markers holds a certain value in this neoliberal context.

            By incorporating this three-dimensional approach to studying the composition of the academic labor force, higher education researchers might be able to investigate the manifestation of neoliberalism differently: perhaps as the layered reproduction of hierarchy, where scholars of color or otherwise minoritized (class, college generation) scholars, most likely to graduate from non-Ivy League institutions are fed into ranks of a labor market that are not promising pathways to mobility. While neoliberalism is currently understood for its de-professionalizing and unbundling effects on faculty roles, there is a need to understand how neoliberalism works in tandem with the deeply institutionalized logics of the field of higher education in ways that hamper access and mobility within the professoriate.

Emotions in Academia

            One final line of inquiry that might be developed within the broader neoliberal critique deals with emotion. At ASHE 2015, my colleague David Ayers and I put forward a new theoretical framework to explore the labor experiences and expectations of community college faculty in this neoliberal moment. We borrowed from an eclectic set of literatures, including institutional logics, nuanced discussions of neoliberalism, and emotional labor (Hocschild, 1983). In developing our argument, we recognized that one of the most powerful expectations for contemporary faculty, particularly those working in under-resourced colleges and universities and in the least secure of positions, especially contingent labor, is that of emotional labor. Our argument differs from recent writing that stresses the emotional toll and anxieties absorbed by non-tenure-track faculty (and faculty, writ large), and instead focuses on the idea that faculty members, especially those working in under-resourced settings, like community colleges, are expected to remedy structural inequities that stem from austerity politics and neoliberalism through their passion, commitment, and creativity. Adopting this vantage point, researchers might consider how calls for creativity and passion are actually attempts to draw on the emotional resources—particularly the passions—of those who attach a deep sense of purpose to their appointment as teachers, researchers, or academics, writ large.

            There are other ways that emotional labor might be studied within academe while holding in mind broader political-economic contexts. For example, the personal identity markers—gender, race, class, sexuality and so on—discussed throughout this post often seep into the work that faculty do, how that work is perceived, and how they, in turn, strive to position that work (see Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, González, & Harris, 2012 for many examples). Scholars whom occupy one (or multiple) marginalized statuses and whose work is explicitly focused on critical questions concerning race, equity, power, inclusion, and Whiteness receive several warnings about the risks of such work: they will be perceived as overly political; as one-dimensional; as subjective or biased. Such critical work is imperative to understanding the inherently political production of knowledge, and how knowledge shifts and expands over time, but the field has yet to investigate how scholars engaged in this work negotiate, recoup, and thrive in spite of threats to or warnings offered about their intellectual viability. In other words, higher education researchers might consider exploring how scholars, who are engaged in critical— or less mainstream work (in any discipline)— move through and subvert the warnings they receive, but also what it takes to sustain such scholarly agendas. Such movement, it seems, would require a great deal of emotional energy, and as such, is deserving of close study as yet another way that neoliberalism collides with power and politics in the production and evaluation of knowledge.

Closing Thoughts

            Although the field has a well-established body of work concerning the academic profession, there are many questions and angles that remain unexplored. My hopes for this post were to motivate new ways of thinking about the study of faculty work and roles, such as what lays behind productivity (learning), how the opportunity to enter and be mobile within academe hinges on hidden curricula attached to historical and structural inequities, or perhaps what is expected or what it takes—emotionally—to move through academia today.

References

Apple, M. (2013). Audit cultures, labour, and conservative movements in the global university.

            Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(4), 385-394.

Bastedo, M. (2012). Organizing higher education: A manifesto in M. Bastedo (Ed.). The organization of higher education—Managing colleges for a new era, pp. 3-18. Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Espino, M. M., Muñoz, S. M., & Kiyama, J. M. (2010). Transitioning from doctoral study to the academy: Theorizing trenzas of identity for Latina sister scholars. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 804-818.

Finkelstein, Martin J. 2015. “Do I Still Want to Be a Professor and, If So, Can I? Entering the     

            American Academic Profession in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century.” In Young 

            Faculty in the Twenty-First Century: International Perspectives, edited by Maria M. 

            

            Yudkevich, Phillip G. Altbach, and Laura E. Rumbley, 45–73. Albany: State University of   

            

            New York Press.

Gonzales, L. D., & Núñez, A. M. (2014). Ranking regimes and the production of knowledge in    

           

            academia: (Re)shaping faculty work. Education policy analysis archives, 22, 1-23.

Gutierrez y Muhs, G., Flores-Niemann, Y., González, C.G., & Harris, A. P. (2012). Presumed incompetent. The intersection of race and class for women in academia. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres.

Margolis, E. (2001). The hidden curriculum in higher education. New York, NY: Routledge.

Martínez Alemán, A. M. (2000). Race talks: Undergraduate women of color and female friendships. The Review of Higher Education, 23(2), 133-152.

Martínez Alemán, A. M. (2010). College women's female friendships: A longitudinal view. The Journal of Higher Education, 81(5), 553-582.

Misra, J., Lundquist, J. H., & Templer, A. (2012). Gender, work time, and care responsibilities among faculty. Sociological Forum, 27(2), 300-323.

Neumann, A. (2009). Professing to learn: Creating tenured lives and careers in the American research university. Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press.

Niehaus, E., & O’Meara, K. (2015). Invisible but essential: The role of professional networks in promoting faculty agency in career advancement. Innovative Higher Education, 40(2), 159-171.

Renzulli, L. A., Reynolds, J., Kelly, K., & Grant, L. (2013). Pathways to gender inequality in faculty pay: The Impact of institution, academic division, and rank. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 34, 58-72.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press.

Torres, C. A., & Schugurensky, D. (2002). The political economy of higher education in the era of

            neoliberal globalization: Latin America in comparative perspective. Higher Education, 43(4),

            429-455.

Trevino, L. J., Gomez-Mejia, L. R., Balkin, D. B., & Mixon, F. G. (2015). Meritocracies or masculinities? The differential allocation of named professorships by gender in the academy. Journal of Management, doi:10.1177/0149206315599216

The Under-Realized Potential of Higher Education as a Field of Study Within and Beyond the U.S.

by Sydney Freeman, Jr., Associate Professor at the University of Idaho, Dept. of Leadership & Counseling 

Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at King’s College London, UK

The Great Recession that began in 2008 has had a profound influence on higher education sector, particularly in the western world. College and University tuition continues to rise as more students continue to seek access to the middle class through the attainment of higher education. Much of the US research that is influencing policy discussions centers around providing access to postsecondary education and students apart of historically marginalized groups. This is also happening at the same time that countries such as the United States is providing less financial support to the college and university sector. However, in other parts of the world, developing countries are increasing their investment in higher education.  For example, Jordan views higher education as the one strategic investment the country can make into ‘human capital’: surrounded by neighbors rich in natural resources like oil, education is the one resource this country can provide for its own citizens and also for those from neighboring countries.  Some of the non-western countries over the last 50 years have begun to develop higher education programs, centers, and institutes that prepare leaders for service in this sector (Rumbley, Altbach, Stanfield, Shimmi, de Gayardon, & Chan, 2014). Also these same entities develop research to inform higher education policy in their local context. What is interesting is that much of the growth of over the last five decades have been on the continents of Africa and South America, and in large countries such as China and Australia. Great growth in this sector is the product of these regions understanding that there are individual and societal benefits to developing a robust tertiary sector. As in North America, a strong higher education system is still seen as a stable route to upward mobility. China is expected to have more students in higher education than the United States by 2020. 

Higher education as a field of study was founded in the United States. Over the 120 years since its inception more than 200 higher education graduate degree programs, institutes, and research centers have been established. However, there is a concern that while the largest programs, which are characterized by having more than eight full-time faculty continue growing, smaller less supported programs are shrinking and disappearing. On many campuses, the sentiments exist that higher education graduate program faculty expertise does not inform the decisions happening on campus. Some academic leaders are critical and even hostile towards such programs. Questions related to the relevance of the field and programs have gained traction. 

A failure to communicate the value and relevance of our work to the current challenges facing our campuses has not been good for the field as a whole.  Higher education experts and researchers can ‘undersell’ their skills and expertise by not highlighting what they can contribute or engaging in research that is too removed from practice to be relevant to practitioners. There have been cases where universities have hired outside firms and experts to help solve problems that higher education faculty on that same campus have the expertise to address. With all the conversation that has been bantered about regarding “translation” of research from scholars to policymakers. Too little of our work effects institutional, state, or national education policy.  In many cases, expertise is sought from disciplinary experts in other fields. Although, we highly respect other disciplines and fields and believe they can provide a wealth of knowledge in solving higher education problems. We believe that it is important for higher education scholars to move from the margins of conversations that inform our work and take leadership in areas that intersect with our scholarship. Our teaching and scholarship should be practical, relevant and be able to be applied to challenges confronting the postsecondary sector. We should be viewed as social scientists who inform the study of the field of higher education. 

This issue does not only apply to how are scholarship is viewed. This also informs our preparation of the next generation of scholar-practitioners. Graduates of our programs should be highly sought after for positions in such areas as mid to senior level administration and education policy advisors. We should be preparing our students to communicate not only within our scholarly associations and periodicals, but with policymakers and general public. Although, we are proponents of generating knowledge for knowledge sake we also understand the necessity and the imperative that we provide our graduates with the knowledge, experiences and transferable skills that can help them secure employment beyond the professoriate and provide the skills for undertaking action research for the good of whatever graduates choose to do with their lives. Critical thinking and professional ethics should be at the center of our instruction. Teaching our students how to review and conduct academic research without undergirding it without modelling and displaying those traits will put our graduates at a disadvantage.   

In the United Kingdom, a more positive story for higher education research is emerging.  There is a vibrant community of higher education researchers and there has been a rise in employment opportunities within higher education for scholars interested in teaching and learning. Some Higher Education Departments are located in traditional Departments of Education and often work along linguists and those supporting teacher training in primary and secondary schools. Others are located in the growing central Learning and Teaching units - the main remit of these units is to support academic faculty and graduate students who teach to professionalise their practice. There has been a shift in consciousness among academics from viewing such units as a necessary evil and a ‘conscript attitude’ to participating in teaching development because such programmes are often tied to probation requirements, to a more curious and enhancement focused culture in approaching opportunities to develop teaching practices.  Slowly, academics from a range of discipline appreciate that the idea of evidence-base and deep understanding are meaningful in learning and teaching and not only in their home disciplines, let it be physics, medicine, or modern languages. 

In the UK, the increasing importance of teaching, even in leading research institutions, and the introduction of teaching-based promotions across the sector have helped to increase the salience of the teaching agenda.  However, just as in the United States, the ability of these researchers to research, enhance and influence institutional practices can vary.  In the most constructive and positive collaborations, academics collaborate with professional service staff and students as partners in the academic development processes to enhance the evidence-base and sharing for best practice and interventions. Academics in central learning and teaching units might collaborate with academic faculty in specific disciplines to undertake particular action research projects - there are also some national evaluations, often funded by central national bodies such as the Higher Education Academy or the Higher Education Research Councils. 

Perhaps because of the smaller size of the United Kingdom, there are also ample opportunities for academics in the field to exchange and share their practices. Again, the best scenario here is a diffusion effect of academic practice that enhances the student experience and supports meaningful and inclusive higher education curricula. This ideal is not always met, but there are pockets of excellence and good practice that show that such constructive partnerships and collaborations between academics of different fields, professional service staff, and students are possible.  

International comparisons help those with a strong legacy of institutions of higher education look at challenges with a fresh pair of eyes. We will see that scholarship can be the interconnective issue that can help us advance leadership and policy development internationally.  However, a comparison with our European, or Australian neighbors is not where international work should stop. As our programs continue to grow around the world, we cannot afford for our scholarship to continue to Western-centric and need to engage with wider international discourses and developments.  

For example, in western scholarship certain subjects such as governance and leadership  may be close to saturation , but in developing countries there is a huge need for additional context specific knowledge developed in that area. Cross pollination in scholarship could help to shed light on ways to solve problems.  In turn, US scholars can learn from other models of higher education where education is free – this is the case for Germany and Denmark. And Scandinavian countries pay their students to go to college. Also fundamental questions around institutional stratification become stranger when looked at through the lens of an outsider – indeed, there is nothing inevitable about the Anglo-Saxon model of hierarchical university system divided by prestige and alternative models exist.   Furthermore, should we accept that prestige should be determined by how many students are excluded from participating in the higher education context, the competitiveness of entry and yield rates?  Or should prestige be based around inclusion, how many previously under-served students higher education succeeds in reaching, and the added value or learning gains in higher education?  Such alternative conceptualizations of prestige might turn some traditional university hierarchies upside down.  

We believe that the field of higher education and those associated with its’ programs are well positioned to advance leadership and policy development internationally. However, the research that we conduct must remain relevant and able to inform higher education policy and practice. We need to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies that will help them solve complex challenges that may have international implications. We need to engage with international agendas and share practices and experiences with a view to enhance the public benefits of higher education as a field of study.  Within our institutions and national contexts,  we must be fearless in asserting our expertise in our local campus context and to the broader public and collaborate with university management and higher education sector body to be part of initiatives that can meaningful change and enhance higher education.   

References 

Rumbley, L. E., Altbach, P. G., Stanfield, D. A., Shimmi, Y., de Gayardon, A., & Chan, R.Y. (Eds).(2014). Higher education: A worldwide inventory—Research centers, academic programs, and   journals and publications (3rd ed.). Science Management series. Boston and Bonn, Germany:   Center for International Higher Education, Boston College and Lemmens Media.

 

The Second Chance Pell: An Opportunity for Higher Education to Increase Access to Opportunity for Incarcerated Students

by Erin L. Castro, Assistant Professor, University of Utah & Instructor Affiliate, Education Justice Project: erin.castro@utah.edu

and Augie Torres, Undergraduate Student, Governors State University & Alumni, Education Justice Project: augie.m.torres@gmail.com

Last month there was a debate contest, and you have probably heard about it by now. A debate team comprised of students who are incarcerated at Eastern New York Correctional Facility (ENYC), a maximum security prison, beat Harvard’s undergraduate debate team. The students who are incarcerated attend classes through the Bard Prison Initiative, a postsecondary education program run by Bard College. Both teams have impressive records: the Harvard debate team earned national championship status in 2014 and the incarcerated debate team has victories against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont. NBC’s headline describing the win for students incarcerated at ENYC Facility – and the loss of students at Harvard – reflects a common tone among popular headlines after the event: Harvard’s Prestigious Debate Team Loses to a Group of Inmates. For the most part, the headlines were disappointing. There appears to be a certain sensationalism associated with “inmates” beating ivy-league students, but there shouldn’t be.

The win for imprisoned students at ENYC is not surprising for those of us who teach inside prisons and work with students who are incarcerated, have family members and friends who are incarcerated, have a keen understanding of how mass incarceration works, or have been incarcerated ourselves. To be surprised, one must rely upon dangerous raced and classed assumptions about both individuals who are incarcerated and those who attend Harvard. We don’t often hear about the educational, intellectual, and academic work being done inside prisons across the United States and so perhaps a bit of amazement is warranted. It is our hope, however, that for those of us involved in higher education, the feeling of astonishment at the ability of individuals who are incarcerated to intellectually outperform students at one of the most recognized institutions of higher education becomes less of a spectacle and more commonplace. The current emphasis on college-in-prison programming on behalf of the Department of Education makes us optimistic.

On Thursday, September 17, the Department of Education hosted an informational webinar open to anyone who was interested titled The Second Chance Pell: Pell for Students Who Are Incarcerated. The webinar follows up on the Federal Register notice released by the U.S. Department of Education on August 3, 2015 inviting higher educational institutions to apply to participate in the new initiative under the (ESI), which tests the effectiveness of statutory and regulatory flexibility for higher educational institutions that disburse Federal student aid. The webinar provided educators with information about the Second Chance Pell, a new institutionally-based initiative. The initiative provides an opportunity for participating institutions of higher education, in partnership with one or more Federal or State penal institutions, to provide Federal Pell Grant funding to otherwise eligible students who are incarcerated. As many readers of this blog know, the Higher Education Act stipulates that students who are incarcerated in Federal or State penal institutions are ineligible to receive funding through the Federal Pell Grant program. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act eliminated Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated individuals and as a direct result, the overwhelming majority of college-in-prison programs closed due to lack of funding. The steady withdrawal of higher education programs from U.S. prisons has effectively severed access to educational opportunity for incarcerated individuals and severely limited future educational access as formerly incarcerated individuals find themselves without the educational credentials to successfully pursue postsecondary opportunities upon release.

The initiative is good news. According to the webinar, it aims to do the following:

• Examine how weighting the restrictions on providing Pell grants to individuals in Federal or State penal institutions influences participation in educational opportunities, and academic and life outcomes;

• Examine whether the waiver creates any challenges or obstacles with an institution’s administration of the Title IV HEA programs. The DOE is interested in determining how disbursement of federal Pell grant funds affects incarcerated students and;

• Allow participating institutions to provide federal Pell grant funding to otherwise eligible students who are incarcerated in federal or state penal institutions and who are eligible for release into the community.

There are a number of requirements that schools must meet in order to be eligible for the program, including providing academic and career services as well as transition guidance to support successful reentry. Potential students must meet specific criteria, too. Preference is to be given to potential students who are eligible for release back into the community, with emphasis on individuals who are scheduled be released in the next five years. The initiative does not weight certain restriction criteria and it does not waive costs of attendance. It is worth reading the specifics and a transcript of the webinar is available here. 

                                                                                                                                              

The informational webinar was the first in a series sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to encourage institutions of higher education to partner with State and Federal prisons to provide access to postsecondary education. The initiative is not perfect; for example, both of us would like to see greater emphasis on individuals who are not eligible for release in the next five years and we have a number of questions regarding what constitutes education in this context. Yet, reinstating Pell grant eligibility for incarcerated students is a necessary first step to increasing access and one that we hope invigorates conversations about what postsecondary educational opportunity in prisons should look like during our era of mass incarceration.

We urge the higher education community to learn more about postsecondary education efforts in prison contexts. There are a variety of ways to learn and we only touch upon a few here. Find out if your local or regional prison provides educational opportunities for incarcerated people by talking with the Department of Corrections. If they exist, see if you can support already established efforts by donating time, resources, and/or desperately needed funding. Ask if your own institution is involved in providing or supporting classes for incarcerated people. Listen to what directors of college-in-prison programs across the nation need and learn more about the long history of postsecondary education provision in prisons. Begin conversations with non-incarcerated individuals on your own respective campuses about the Prison Industrial Complex, mass imprisonment, and the contemporary carceral state. Find out if prior criminal history is considered in your institution’s admissions criteria. Importantly, if you have never been to a prison, go. Call and make an appointment and ask for a ‘tour’ (this, inappropriately, is the dominant language – at least in the state of Utah). For an institution so integral to the political and economic fabric of the U.S., we urge you to go see what you are paying for. Prisons are institutions in which we all invest and in at least 11 states, we spend more on imprisonment than higher education. It is outrageous.

The National Conference on Higher Education is Prison is held annually and this year it will take place in Pittsburgh, PA November 6-8 (an unfortunate date for many of us AHSE-goers, but there is no conflict next year!). The conference attracts educators, volunteers, activists, formerly incarcerated and felony disenfranchised individuals, and others interested in and committed to prison education. Last year’s conference was held at Danville Correctional Center in Danville, Illinois. Andra Slater, who was released late last year, presented a paper as part of a panel on critical approaches to education in prison titled, The Underestimation of Carceral Intellect: Problematizing the ‘Wow’ Factor Among Prison Educators. Andra later published his paper as part of a larger multi-author manuscript examining the purposes of higher education in prison during mass incarceration. You can read the manuscript here: http://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol1/iss1/2/. We encourage all people to watch Andra discuss the seemingly innocent element of surprise at the intellectual capabilities of individuals who are incarcerated, particularly those who find it challenging to believe that ENYC’s debate team beat Harvard’s.

Providing access to high quality postsecondary education for incarcerated students through the reinstatement of Pell grant eligibility is one important element of much-needed criminal justice reform. The Second Chance Pell initiative is welcomed within a larger context that Marie Gottschalk makes so clear: individuals can’t be given a second chance if they were never afforded a first. The DOE’s initiative can partially help to bridge this gap and so too can institutions of higher education. All of us have a responsibility to ensure that incarcerated individuals have access to high quality postsecondary educational opportunities during and after incarceration. For those of us involved in higher education, we can do this by supporting already established efforts, learning more about the extensive history of prison education, beginning conversations on our respective campuses, and listening to and learning from students like Andra. We can only be surprised if we are not seeing incarcerated people as potential postsecondary students and degree completers. As David Register, Director of Debate for the Bard Prison Initiative, describes: “It is critically important to remember that our debaters are students first and debaters second – and prisoners a distant third.”

Let’s work to ensure that incarcerated individuals are given the opportunity to become college students.

A Look Back at Federal Support for the For-Profit Sector

by Nidia Banuelos, Doctoral Candidate at University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology

The “Corinthian 100’s” recent debt strike has brought much-needed attention to the level of support for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) receive from the Federal Government.  Although they enrolled only 9 percent of all degree-seeking students, FPCUs received 25 percent of all Department of Education student aid funds in 2009-10.  That’s about $32 billion (U.S. Senate, 2012).  This kind of unqualified support makes it easy to forget that, not long ago, students were barred from using most kinds of federal aid at FPCUs.  What changed?  Why does our current system make it easy for some schools to profit from federal money?  It’s worth turning, for a moment, to history for some insight. 

Often called “proprietary” schools, FPCUs have been operating in the United States since the late-1800s.  Early proprietary schools were a far cry from Corinthian Colleges, Inc.  Into the 1960s, they had modest goals—most enrolled between 100 and 300 students at a single campus location and conferred certificates (not degrees) in business, secretarial skills, cosmetology, or electronics.  Yet, as early as 1922, there were documented cases of proprietary schools cutting costs by eliminating basic instructional necessities—like desks and textbooks (Marvin, 1922).  These practices became more common after the passage of the GI Bill in 1944, when soldiers used their federal aid at for-profit schools that cashed their checks and offered them little to nothing in return.  (The term “degree-mill” comes from this era.)  In response to these abuses, Congress created the accreditation system we still have in place today.  Nevertheless, this early experience of funding the for-profit sector was so harrowing that, even as college enrollment ballooned in the 1960s, Congress limited proprietary schools’ access to aid. 

In the 1970s, lawmakers faced unprecedented pressure to increase access to college for diverse groups of students while also keeping costs down for taxpayers.  Proprietary schools offered a solution: they promised to “democratize” higher education by giving students who had neither the time nor money to attend a traditional university the opportunity to learn skills that would help them make a living.  And because proprietary schools focused on occupational training alone, they would not waste taxpayers’ money on esoteric research projects, grandiose architecture, or theoretical instruction.  Compared to the free-loving, flag-burning hippies protesting the Vietnam War at elite institutions across the country, the hard-working, low-income students attending proprietary schools looked like saints.  This image—of the beleaguered for-profit student, unable to pay her tuition bills because the federal government refused to consider her school a viable “institution of higher education”—was a powerful tool and supporters of the for-profit sector employed it often.  Words like “discriminatory” and “minority group” were used to argue against the unfair practice of denying for-profit students access to grants and loans (Statement of Richard A. Fulton, 1970, p. 1034).  If a student wants to attend a proprietary school to learn a useful trade, who is the Federal Government to deny her the right to do so?   

Most importantly, education was not immune from the free market ideology that was so rampant in the 1970s.  Supporters of the for-profit sector (Congress included) believed that proprietary schools that were providing a subpar education would lose their students to higher quality competitors.  A representative of the National Association of Trade and Technical Schools put it this way:  “The cost of education in a proprietary school has an even greater safeguard by the fact that if their tuition rates are too high, there is a great tendency on the part of the students not to come to the institution” (Statement of Leo Kogan, 1970, p. 1784).  In other words, if the free market works as it should, for-profit schools will have an incentive to regulate themselves.  Students will notice if the education they’re getting is inadequate and will choose to attend a different school if they are unsatisfied.  Indeed, a little competition from the for-profit sector might even encourage non-profits to better serve the public. 

The Department of Education (then “Office of Education”) initially opposed this plan.  They worried that giving proprietary schools access to aid (and grants, especially) would encourage them to cut spending per student.  But curiously, the DOE was the proprietary sector’s most vocal opponent.  Even community colleges—proprietary schools’ closest competitors—testified before Congress in support of for-profit students (Statement of Joseph Cosand, 1971).    

So, in 1972, Congress passed legislation making proprietary schools “institutions of higher education” under federal law (Education Amendments of 1972, p. 260).  In doing so, it gave them access to nearly all forms of federal aid for which non-profits are eligible.  Congress hadn’t forgotten about the for-profit sector’s sordid past when it made this decision—it just had many reasons to be optimistic about the industry’s future.  It’s also important to remember that the for-profit sector was not nearly as notorious then as it is now.  The DOE simply did not know how big the proprietary sector was, how big it would get, or how well it was doing with the few federal programs to which it already had access.  In other words, Congress made this decision blind.

Finally, lawmakers grew more comfortable with expanding access to federal student aid because they believed accreditation would weed out predatory schools.  Then, as now, in order to receive access to federal student aid, colleges and universities had to be accredited by an independent, non-governmental agency approved by the Department of Education.  Again, the government created this system after WWII, when millions of federal dollars went to degree-mills that took advantage of tuition assistance for veterans.  Before 1970, regional accrediting agencies—those that also accredit respected non-profit institutions—refused to even consider proprietary schools for accreditation.  But, in the 1970s, the growing demand for diversity in higher education also forced their priorities to shift.  At this time the North Central Association (which, in addition to venerated institutions like University of Michigan, also accredits more FPCUs than any other regional agency) made it their mission to craft a “diverse educational system needed for our diverse peoples” (North Central Association, 1977, p. 8; Kinser, 2006).  In 1978, this new philosophy led them to accredit the University of Phoenix, which offered, “so far as our evaluators can determine, programs of a quality comparable with those of traditional institutions” (North Central Association, 1977, p. 15). 

All this goes to show that the for-profit sector benefited greatly from a general move toward democratizing higher education by supporting new kinds of schools.  For both Congress and regional accreditors, betting on these schools seemed a responsible, and perhaps even, patriotic thing to do.  Although the for-profit sector has changed in size and scope, the arguments used to support it remain remarkably unchanged.  FPCUs still describe their project as a democratizing one.  They still cast themselves as opposing the elitist educational establishment. (Consider, for example, DeVry University’s new advertising campaign, which claims that the school is “Different. On purpose.”)  These themes are compelling—not only to students, but to accreditors and lawmakers as well. 

Now that students are refusing to pay back the debt they incurred from attending Corinthian Colleges, Inc. the Department of Education will be financially responsible for the actions of predatory institutions.  As awareness of this issue increases, we may see the Federal Government getting more involved in oversight of the for-profit sector than ever before.  Debates will ensue, accusations will be made, and defenses will be mounted.  Through it all, we should carefully evaluate the validity of the arguments presented.  Are these new ideas or merely old ones repackaged?

Works Cited

Education Amendments of 1972, Pub. L. 92-318, codified as amended at 318 U.S.C. § 417B.

Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street: The transformation of for-profit higher education (ASHE higher education report). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Marvin, C.H. (1922). Commercial education in secondary schools. New York, NY: H. Holt and company.

North Central Association. 1977. Emerging Issues in Postsecondary Education: Standards and Accreditation. Box 12. Records relating to the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools/Higher Learning Commission.  Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Archives. 5 September 2014. 

Statement of Leo Kogan: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Education of the House of Representatives. 91^st Cong. 2 (1970).

Statement of Joseph Cosand: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Education of the House of Representatives. 92^nd Cong. 1 (1971).    

Statement of Richard Fulton: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Education of the U.S. Senate. 91^st Cong. 2 (1970).

U.S. Senate. Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. (2012). For profit higher education: The failure to safeguard the federal investment and ensure student success. (S. Prt. 112-37, Volumes 1-4). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.