A Solution for the Adjunct Problem?

So check this out, folks. Our university is considering offering some courses that would count both as high school and college courses. They will be taught in high school by high school teachers. The teachers will be trained to offer these “dual credit” courses and will be supervised by college professors. The content and methodology will be approved by the college. If students pass these courses successfully, they will receive credit for them when they begin their Bachelor’s studies.

This sounds weird at first and my first instinct was to be suspicious of the idea. But now that I have considered it, I wonder if this might not be a path that will allow us to stop exploiting adjuncts (or to avoid ever getting involved in such an exploitation, as in the case of my university.) If we shift remedial learning back towards high school, we will not have to teach these basic courses at the college level. The administration will have less justification in eroding tenure lines and hiring adjuncts.

Something needs to be done to address the issue of students coming to college completely unprepared and needing very basic courses. Solutions that do not involve opening adjunct positions seem promising.

What do you think? Would you support this?

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18 responses to “A Solution for the Adjunct Problem?”

Kellen

October 2, 2013

I would totally support this if the high school could truly teach at a higher level. No matter the town, there are always kids in high schools who are probably bored by the current level of work. At my high school, we were lucky enough to have the option to go to the university and attend classes there if we exceeded what the high school had to offer.
How would these courses be different than AP courses though? There seem to be so many subjects available in the AP curriculum, and then the university wouldn’t need to be involved at all (not that it’s a bad thing, there’s just already a system that allows high schools to offer ways for their students to get high school credits, without being overseen by professors.)
I do think it would be better than an AP course, since it could be more interesting topics, instead of just a general topic like “AP US History.”
Then the other issue would be that this only allows college credit at your university, while AP allows them to qualify for credit at many universities, so the students may not be as interested in this option. In my experience, about 75% of the college-bound students at my high school went to the local state university, but when they’re picking classes in high school, before their parents have learned about the difficulties of paying for college, they might think they will go to a different university.

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bloggerclarissa

October 2, 2013

I also wondered about the AP courses. The email we received about this says that this will be different from AP courses in that there will be no standardized test at the end of the course.

Another question is whether the college profs who will supervise this process will get a course release or will have to do this as part of service. This will be a huge time commitment.

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Glenfilthie

October 2, 2013

No.

Our public school educators are doing an absolutely dismal job by all accounts; it’s so bad that most privately or home-schooled students will wipe the mat with publicly schooled ones.

You are effectively putting the people responsible for the problem in charge of solving it. Nor do universities have any business, IMO, in ‘remedial learning’. That is not what they are for. I blame these underperforming students and their parents for the proliferation of useless degree programs such as ‘gender studies’ and such.

In the old days the universities spelled out the prerequisites and students that met or exceeded them got their shot. Those that didn’t were rejected. I fail to see anything wrong with any of that.

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bloggerclarissa

October 2, 2013

“In the old days the universities spelled out the prerequisites and students that met or exceeded them got their shot. Those that didn’t were rejected.”

– If we do that today, we will have to reject everybody. The result will be a country of people who are not prepared for any work but manual labor. And this is precisely what is not needed by today’s technological society. We are not doing remedial teaching because we enjoy it. I see students who have taken 6 years (!!) of Spanish in high school and can’t say anything in Spanish. What choice do I have but to start teaching them from the level of Spanish 101 until we build up to the level where they are fluent and can begin to take actual university-level courses?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 2, 2013
  
  The “old days” are over, folks. People with nothing but a high school diploma can barely make ends meet and find employment today. This trend is irreversible. Soon nobody without a Master’s degree will be able to find a good job. We can’t recreate the past in a world that is changing every day.
  
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2. Glenfilthie
  
  October 2, 2013
  
  Well Clarissa, I don’t mean this to be snarky: but what can you do for these kids that the other ‘educators’ couldn’t?
  
  I’m sorry, but back in the 50’s kids learned Latin in high school. Today they learn remedial English in university. Kids haven’t changed that much, Clarissa – but our teaching methods sure have. I have heard the spiels from educators about how studies PROVE our new teaching methods and mindsets are more effective – but out there in the real world a high school diploma has been worthless for 20 years, and today a growing number of degree programs are worthless too. I don’t blame the educators for all of this – the parents are equally responsible for dumbing down cirriculums and lowering standards.
  
  I think it is time to (forgive my French) ‘chit or get off the pot’. Why not call a spade a spade and be honest about it? If you can’t teach a kid a stitch of Spanish after 6 years – it is because
  a. you are not doing your job
  b. the student is not doing his
  c. the student is incapable of doing his
  d. both a & b
  
  I am not ripping on you personally for any of this Clarissa, I am only only speaking from my perspective as a guy out on the street watching the crap being churned out by our universities. Many institutions are showing alarming signs of becoming intellectual wastelands. I suspect that battle was fought and lost before you even got in the game Clarissa; I and my views are not unique out in industry today. Again, none of this is aimed at you or meant to offend; it is just meant to address some viewpoints preconceived mindsets that I think you in academia need to question.
  
  We have this notion that menial labour is demeaning and that academics are somehow noble and I say it just isn’t true. My grandfather had a grade 6 education, fought in two world wars and rode on the roofs of trains in the dirty 30’s looking for work – who could look down their nose at somebody like that? Conversely – who can respect these tenured, leather elbowed academics who have never worked in the real world as you have?
  
  All I know, Clarissa, is that the systems from the good ol’ days WORKED. The new teaching methods clearly aren’t. I have to ask what your goal is? To give all your students a scrap of paper and a passing grade? Or to produce truly educated and capable students that have earned their marks and credentials? I don’t think it is possible to do both without compromising quality of education somewhere along the way.
  
  Sorry for the rant.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    October 2, 2013
    
    I can teach students to speak, read and write fluently in Spanish, understand the history and culture of the Hispanic civilization, and conduct their own research in Spanish. I can do that in 4 years. High schools don’t manage to teach them how to say “Hello, how are you?” in Spanish in 6 years. Of course, I’d prefer to see those 6 years they spend learning the language in high school amount to something.
    
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  2. bloggerclarissa
    
    October 2, 2013
    
    As for teaching methods, in the area of foreign languages, they have improved dramatically since 1960s. They had to because more people need foreign languages today than ever did before.
    
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Fie Upon This Quiet Life

October 2, 2013

We do have duel credit courses at my university. The students can get credit for lots of different 101 classes. However, we have found that the high school teachers don’t have the same expectations that college professors do, so there ends up being some grade inflation and the students end up not fulfilling the goals of our courses. And no, there is absolutely no course release for supervising these courses for our faculty. It’s just another little extra thing that someone has to do. And when you teach at a 4/4, you really don’t need one more freaking thing to do.

On the other hand, these classes ARE transferable to other universities, so dual credit definitely helps the students who take them, as far as being efficient about finishing college in 4 years. The departments here that offer dual credit, though, really wish we had never gotten into it. We still have to offer about 15 sections of 101 classes, and we still use adjuncts for a lot of those sections. Dual credit really resolves nothing. There’s also an argument to be made that students are not mature enough to handle college-level work. It’s not like one semester is really going to change that, but at least if students take an Eng101 class in the fall of their freshman year, as opposed to the spring of their Senior year of high school, they would be in a college environment instead of taking a “college” class at their high school with the same old people.

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bloggerclarissa

October 2, 2013

Thank you for the information. It helps a lot to know how this works (or doesn’t work) in places that have adopted this practice already.

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Shakti

October 2, 2013

I think having that kind of transitional course would ease the wall that many students face upon graduating high school and entering college. It would allow them to acclimate towards college level courses. I personally saw a girl from a rural high school who graduated in the top 1/3 of her class struggle with a basic psychology course, and it was her second go-round. The class was super easy for me.

I have a couple concerns.

I like the idea, but I’m not sure how having a smoother transition will ease the exploitation of adjuncts. Which professors will train these high school teachers? The current adjuncts? The full professors? The administration is likely to treat, “underprepared freshman students” and “exploited adjuncts” as separate issues. This hopefully affects class size (because upper level classes supposedly are smaller). Unless you’re counting smaller class size for the lowest college level courses taught at college as an effective raise, I’m not sure how that raises pay.

In my experience, the kids taking ANY courses for college credit were the ones in the least need of remedial courses. They had super involved parents willing and able to pay for tutors and testing. They took AP/IB courses. They took SAT prep. How would either the high school administration ensure that those who need to take those courses, besides making them mandatory courses to graduate?

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bloggerclarissa

October 2, 2013

At our university, we don’t have adjuncts. But if we continue offering more and more remedial courses, I don’t know how we can justify not hiring adjuncts for these very basic courses. Since high schools are not likely to improve any time soon, there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get students to some basic level of literacy that we need to see in order to teach them.

Of course, this solution means that we will have to participate in running high schools. That’s obviously an enormous drain on resources and time. But what are the alternatives? Somebody has got to teach students to read and write. This will either be done by adjuncts in college or teachers in high school. What else is there?

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thevenerablecorvex

October 2, 2013

We had a system like this when I was in High School, but my father (a university professor of mathematics and statistics) advised me against taking them since, in his experience, High School teachers very often taught the subject badly.
I hope your University has better luck.

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n8chz

October 4, 2013

One aspect of the status quo in professional development that should be regarded as a feature, not a bug, is the idea of incremental progress, or the demarcation of the process into segments, with waypoints at the transition from one to another. So your professional development path could be

apprenticeship applicant->apprentice->journeycritter->master craftscritter, or

undergrad->grad->postdoc stooge->assistant assistant professor->assistant professor->associate professor->professor->full professor->professor emeritus->Clement T. Rodriguez endowed chair of lepufology, or

egg->larva->pupa->adult

In all of these cases, the humane way to administer these gauntlets of professional development is:

1. count the number of distinct stages of development, referring to this number as “n” (as in number)

2. count the number of apprenticeship applicants, undergrads, or eggs. Call this number “q” (as in quantity)

3. count the number of actual job offers made to fully credentialed persons on the other end of the assembly line. Call this number “r” (as in results)

4. resolve that each stage of development should be calibrated to produce a wash-out rate in the general vicinity of 1-(r/q)^(1/n) (times a hundred if you want that as a “percent”)

(cue movie trailer voice) In a world where it’s harder than last year to become a college perfessor and easier than last year to become a college student, ur most certainly definitely doin it wrong.

As for the adjunct crisis, that’s just the particular form that the temping out of the American workforce has taken in your industry. In another industry (beauté), it might be an expectation that incoming personnel bring with them the clientele they’ve established elsewhere. In still another industry (the retail/restaurant occupational ghetto) it might be 80% of the workforce on part time hours. In another yet (orifice/clerical) it might be 80% of the workplace supplied by temp agencies. In another, maybe (das Autoindustriewerks) they keep the expendables on the company payroll, but structure it as a two-tier payroll. Even the UAW has officially caved in on that one. It’s the same damn economic phenomenon in the academy as it is everywhere else.* Pretend otherwise at everyone’s peril.

I tend to prefer Jacob Hacker’s term, the “risk shift”

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bloggerclarissa

October 4, 2013

It sounds like you are advocating for planned economy, and the idea does sound tempting. However, we all know that not a single attempt at instituting such practices led to anything but extreme poverty in real, not fake American, 99% to 1% proportions. So creating the exact number of jobs that is needed to employ everybody in pre-planned stages is not an answer. I believe that the only answer to the phenomenon you are describing is very rapid and very intense education process that will involve people who are today falling behind the changing demands of a highly technological society. Manufacturing and manual labor are pretty much dead in North America. The service industry is going in that direction, too. Whatever we can manufacture, India and China do it faster, cheaper and better. That’s just a fact.

Of course, I tend to see education as an answer to everything, so maybe that’s a reason why I see it as an only solution to the current labor crisis.

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1. n8chz
  
  October 4, 2013
  
  My recommendation is strictly tongue-in-cheek. But if someone were to actually implement it, I don’t think it would result in mass poverty, or some other version of the world coming to an end. At worst, it would result in an inefficient match of people to skills or skills to jobs. Would it be more inefficient than the status quo? Honestly, I’m not sure you could accomplish that if you tried.
  
  “…creating the exact number of jobs that is needed to employ everybody in pre-planned stages is not an answer…”
  
  Perhaps, but if you re-read it I hope you can find a way to conclude that it doesn’t say that. The number of jobs is input data, not a decision, and there’s even a built-in assumption that there aren’t enough (probably aren’t nearly enough) to go around. What we’re calculating here isn’t the number of jobs needed to match the number of people, but the number (actually the percentage) of people who need to be flushed out of the candidate pool (at each stage) to match the people count to the job count (which, again, we’re assuming we can’t pad with make-work jobs). The goal is simply to make the various stages have approximately the same failure rate. Instead of keeping the education consumers guessing as to whether the “weeder course” is Calc 1 or Calc 2, we do some “load balancing” to give the courses roughly equal failure rates. This takes at least a little of the guesswork out of things like “did I reach for the right brass ring?” or “is this worth pursuing any further?” or “am I plausibly X material?” or even empiricoid guesstimates at questions like “did generation Э have it easier or harder than generation Ю?”
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    October 5, 2013
    
    So how would the candidates be “flushed out”?
    
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2. n8chz
  
  October 5, 2013
  
  http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2013/09/22/17117
  
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