There are many more people graduating with PhDs than there are academic positions to absorb them. The reason for this is the same as for the growing number of adjuncts in academia: the rapid deterioration of secondary education in this country.
Professors want to teach interesting, complex courses. It’s normal to want to come to class and discuss your research with people who are at least somewhat equipped to understand what you are talking about. The absolute majority of students, however, is in need of intense remedial learning. One can barely get anybody to enroll in advanced courses while enrollments in the classes that teach the basics are exploding. The Bachelor’s degree has become what a high school diploma should be.
The few students who are interested in exploring their major beyond the few very basic courses that these days constitute most programs of study go into graduate school. Professors who want to teach serious courses resign themselves to the idea that this can only be done in the format of a graduate seminar. When there are 40 students in a classroom whose knowledge of the Hispanic Civilization is limited to “Latin America is a fascinating country” it is impossible to accommodate those three who are reading Octavio Paz for enjoyment and have passionate opinions on the origins of Spanish Romanticism. For such students, graduate school becomes the only place where they can finally study things that interest them.
It is useless to repeat “there are too many PhDs; let’s produce less” or “there are too many adjuncts; let’s hire fewer.” The college system we have in place arose in response to the breakdown of the system of secondary education. The number of schools that manage to prepare students for college is tiny and it seems to be shrinking. The rest of the graduates come to college lacking the most basic knowledge and have to dedicate the first two or three years of their Bachelor’s studies to catching up.
We keep pretending that college and high school are two completely different worlds. This pretense will end up destroying higher education in this country unless we wake up already and take a peek beyond the walls of the ivory tower.
Clarissa's Blog 
I believe very strongly that what needs to happen here is that the “surplus” Ph. D.’s need to become high school teachers, thereby improving the academic achievement at the high school level. This natural self-correction is stymied by the extreme certification requirements to be able to teach at the high school level.
I say this as someone deeply involved in the education and training of high school mathematics teachers. The students are enthusiastic and really want to teach, but they would do much better if they learned much more mathematics. I suspect the same is true in other disciplines also.
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I don’t know if this is a realistic solution because most PhDs would want to teach at schools that already have extremely high teaching standards like prestigious east coast boarding schools that already consistently graduate very prepared students.
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Until you get rid of the rot in the educational system you are going to continue to have “dumbed down” kids entering college and university. To think many of the highschools wont even allow a student to fail or be required to turn things in on time is incredulous. “We cant let our poor little kiddies feel the sting of failure” 😦
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Titfortat: Yes, and there is a move afoot to press for better “retention rates” for our students in college and university settings.
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Retention rates are a real issue for STEM majors at elite schools, and should not be confused with high school retention rates.
Many students drop out of STEM majors not because they are not prepared for the rigor of the college courses, but because the courses have 1,000 person enrollments, the professors are barely involved, the curricula are tired and monotonous, the major has burdensome requirements that amount to 3 – 4 courses each semester, etc.
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Anonymous, this is just not true. We have at my university no math classes of more than 120, and the university is distressed with us that about 10% of so of entering students do not make it through the stem majors. This is a perfectly reasonable attrition rate. The only way to reduce it would be to simply have no standards and not require students to learn anything.
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We are persecuted with retention rates all the time, irrespective of whether we are in STEM, Humanities or Arts.
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There is also a move afoot to maintain that our children stay children. In my region our soccer teams no longer keep score for children under 12yrs old. It seems they are trying to avoid too much competition. Like the kids don’t know the score, lmao. I am baffled at the people who end up in charge and make these kinds of decisions.
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I totally agree that it’s silly not to keep score. It’s a poor attempt to calm parents and coaches who want to win at all costs.
I was humiliated regularly on my elementary school softball team because I wasn’t as good as the other children. The score wasn’t the underlying issue!
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Clarissa, I was in between those two poles of “Latin America is a country” and “I have passionate beliefs about Octavio Paz” as an undergraduate.
A side point: In college, I found most classes terribly boring and not very challenging (in the humanities anyways) until I became a junior. That’s when I got to take advanced courses relating to an actual major.
I also think most college courses do a terrible disservice in not requiring students to generate their own ideas or do their own original research until the most advanced courses. At the very least, it should be built in intermediate courses with an eye toward “you will need to do this at the end of your degree”. I went from regurgitation and short essays to “write your own original research paper with a cite for every line and evaluate the worthiness of the sources” with no real in between. The papers produced were absolutely cringe-worthy and I mean that “I knew this as I was writing it”. I had classmates who struggled horribly with regurgitating on basic quizzes.
I think I’m going to go burn my undergraduate papers now. Ugh.
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I know for a fact that the papers you produced could not have been worse than the papers I produced because mine were absolutely, completely and totally pathetic. 🙂
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The Atlantic just published an article about the greater importance given to sports than to academics in American high schools: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/. One school in Texas cut all sports teams and found that their graduation rate immediately improved. Still, there doesn’t seem to be any desire to improve the education system, if it means sacrificing football.
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Still, there doesn’t seem to be any desire to improve the education system, if it means sacrificing football.(Twice)
Considering football can be a source of income for the school maybe they should just manage the monies better. 🙂
Plus, I know many kids who wouldn’t have made it through school had their not been athletics. I am one of those kids and the only sibling in our family that went to college. It need not be a one or the other mentality.
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Football may bring in a lot of revenue, but it has even greater expenses. Look at this infographic and the explanations below it: http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228. The universities are subsidizing the football departments, despite the fact that they are bringing in millions of dollars.
Other countries don’t have these outrageous athletics departments at their universities. It is the tail wagging the dog! Canadians are crazy about hockey, but university hockey teams are small and not particularly well funded. If you want to be a hockey player, you don’t go to university.
Also, in Canada as in many other countries, the universities are subsidized, so that people like you and me, who don’t have wealthy parents, can still go to university. I just paid my son’s tuition for his first semester – it was less than $3000.
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