What will happen to you if you take out student loans to get a liberal arts degree and can't find a job?

 Late last year, the University of Vermont announced it will shut down two dozen academic programs with low enrollment. 

Geology, religion, and Asian studies are on the chopping block, along with several language programs--Greek, Latin, and German.  At least three departments will close: Religion, Classics, and Geology. Some minors are being eliminated--Theatre and Vermont Studies.

All across the country, universities are shrinking or closing their liberal arts programs because fewer students major in those disciplines. Young people sense they are in a bleak job market, and many are shifting to more vocation-directed academic majors.

Indeed, Jeffrey Selingo and Matt Sigelman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, report that entry-level college graduate jobs have fallen 45 percent in recent years.  Many graduates will be forced into "lifeboat jobs," where they will be underemployed both in terms of salary and vocational development. 

"[T]hose who graduate into underemployment are five times more likely to remain stuck in mismatched jobs after five years compared with those who start in a college-level job," Selingo and Sigelman warn.

Should students stop majoring in the liberal arts? Not necessarily, Selingo and Siegelman argue. Instead, they give this advice:

None of this requires abandoning the liberal arts or social sciences; it's just a matter of ensuring that students also acquire marketable skills. English departments don't need to teach computer programming, but they should show students how to develop writing and critical thinking skills in ways that resonate with employers. And they should help students to acquire more technical skills, whether on campus, through internships or through the growing array of online  options.

With all due respect to Mr. Selingo and Mr. Sigelman, I am deeply skeptical of the proposition that liberal arts departments can make their academic programs more vocationally driven. 

Does anyone think a medieval-history professor will adjust his teaching style to help students acquire more technical skills?  I doubt it.

And how will sociology, political science, and religion departments develop internship programs that help students find jobs after graduation? I don't see it happening.

It is no good to say liberal arts departments can adjust their academic programs to make them more job-relevant. Students won't buy that line.  They know that a degree in liberal arts probably won't lead to a good job. That's why more and more of them are majoring in business.

Brutally put, it is madness for young people to take out six-figure student loans to get degrees in history, religion, political science, ethnic studies, or sociology.  In today's economy, an individual who takes out student loans to earn a bachelor's degree must immediately find a good job.  

What will happen to you if you borrow $100,000 to get a humanities degree and can't find employment? You will be forced to apply for an economic hardship deferment to get short-term relief from making your monthly loan payments.

But while you are skipping those payments, interest is accruing on your student loans. That interest gets capitalized so that your loan balance increases.

At some point, your student loan debt will become unmanageable, and then your only option will be to sign up for an income-based repayment plan that stretches out your loan obligations for a quarter of a century.  

And that will give you plenty of time to ruminate about the stupid decision you made when you were 18 years old to major in sociology with a minor in Vermont Studies.

Will this guy teach you critical thinking skills?

Young v. Grand Canyon University: Eleventh Circuit rules doctoral student is not compelled to arbitrate his claim against a for-profit university

 Donrich Young enrolled in a doctoral program at Grand Canyon University based on his understanding that he could finish the program by taking 60 credit hours. However, he didn't complete his degree in 60 hours and was forced to pay for three additional research-continuation courses.

Young sued Grand Canyon for breach of contract, intentional misrepresentation, and violations of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act. But Young had signed an arbitration agreement that forced him to arbitrate his claims rather than file a lawsuit.

An Obama-era federal regulation prohibited for-profit colleges from requiring their students to arbitrate their disputes. Grand Canyon argued for a tortured interpretation of this rule, and it convinced a federal judge to buy it.  Thus, the court dismissed Young's lawsuit and required him to arbitrate his beef with Grand Canyon.

On appeal, however, the Eleventh Circuit reversed. It began by stating that the regulation was "poorly written." Nevertheless, in the appellate court's view, the regulatory language clearly prohibited Grand Canyon from forcing Young to arbitrate his breach-of-contract and misrepresentation claims.

Indeed, in the Eleventh Circuit's view, "common sense" confirmed that Young's interpretation of the regulation was correct.

We need not dwell on the Eleventh Circuit's analysis of regulatory language. The critical point is this: Obama-era regulations prohibited for-profit schools from enforcing arbitration clauses that bar students from suing for breach-of-contract or misrepresentation.

Unfortunately, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rolled back the Obama rules to allow for-profit schools to force their students to sign arbitration agreements. As David Halperin wrote last July:

Predatory schools love forced arbitration — a secret proceeding with a paid corporate rent-a-judge — and class action bans, because those things make it harder for a ripped off student to obtain a lawyer, afford a legal process, get justice before an impartial decision-maker, and create precedents and expose information that could help future students.

It will be interesting to see whether President Biden will reinstate the ban on arbitration clauses that the Obama administration commendably instituted.  Let us hope so because mandatory arbitration has been the chief way that unscrupulous for-profit colleges have protected themselves from being sued by their students for fraud and misrepresentation.

References

David Halperin. 

For-Profit Colleges Race To Block Students From Suing Them. Republic Report, Jul 20, 2020.  https://www.republicreport.org/2020/for-profit-colleges-race-to-block-students-from-suing-them/.

Young v. Grand Canyon University, 980 F.3d 814 (11th Cir. 2020).

When did university book stores become T-shirt shops?

 I live about a mile from the Barne & Noble bookstore, the official bookstore for Louisiana State University. Yesterday, I walked over for a cup of hot chocolate at the bookstore's Starbucks coffee shop.

While the barista was constructing my cocoa (a laborious business), I contemplated the murals above the counter. Overhead, I saw some of the great English-language authors: Faulkner, Hardy, Joyce, Kipling, Melville, Nabakov, Shaw, Whitman, and others. 

I found myself wondering whether Barnes & Noble sold any books by the authors who are celebrated at Starbucks.  It is a college bookstore, after all.

So I went upstairs to the store's tiny "fiction and literature" section and looked for works by these famous writers.  Most of them I couldn't find: no Kipling, no Nabakov, no Whitman. 

I did see some comic books, however, in a section titled "graphic novels."  And I saw a hell of a lot of  $20 LSU T-shirts, $70 LSU sweatshirts, and hundreds of LSU ballcaps, selling for $25 a pop.

I also saw $9 LSU wine glasses and $27 LSU waterbottles. And I saw a pile of stuffed animals depicting Mike, the LSU tiger mascot.

In fact, as I scanned both floors of LSU's bookstore, I realized that Barnes & Noble's campus address isn't a bookstore at all; it's a T-shirt shop.  Yes, it sells some textbooks in an obscure corner, but most of the space is dedicated to overpriced souvenirs. 

I am not saying LSU students should be reading the authors who are memorialized at the Starbooks coffee shop.  I've read some Faulkner, some George Bernard Shaw, some of Henry James's excruciatingly dull novels. In my opinion, students can skip all that.

But I find it unsettling to see LSU students swiping their credit cards to buy exorbitantly priced junk and $5 lattes. Why? Because I know many of these students are purchasing that stuff with their student-loan money. 

If these students graduate and can't find good jobs--and many of them won't--what will be their best option? For millions, it will be to sign up for a 25-year income-based repayment plan. That's a high price to pay for an LSU T-shirt.

Preparing for an academic career? Better have Plan B in your back pocket

As reported by the Star Tribune a couple of weeks ago, the University of Minnesota will not accept new students into many of its liberal arts programs in the fall of 2021.

The university is stopping admission in twelve programs, including history, political science, theater arts, and gender studies. New enrollments will be limited in 15 other programs.  No program outside the university's college of liberal arts will be affected.

Universities across the nation are making similar decisions--cutting or reducing programs in languishing liberal arts disciplines.

Interest in the traditional fields of liberal arts has been declining for decades, and job opportunities in these disciplines have dwindled.

I recall sitting in Professor William Stott's graduate-level American Studies class at the University of Texas more than 30 years ago. Professor Stott handed out the vitae of about a dozen candidates for a history professor's job at UT. Every applicant had a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school: Harvard, Yale, Brown, etc.

Dr. Stott didn't have to say anything to make his point. How can you compete with a Harvard Ph.D. holder for a professor's position with your doctorate from a less prestigious public university?

I took the hint and went to law school. And I have never been sorry.

Without question, there will be fewer faculty positions for liberal arts professors in the years to come.  Many of these positions are in second- and third-tier liberal arts colleges that are experiencing enrollment declines--especially those located in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic states.  

If you take out student loans to get a Ph.D. in history or political science, you will find yourself in serious trouble if you can't find a position in your chosen field.

You may think a Ph.D. will get you an excellent job of some kind, even if you can't find one in academia. But you may be wrong. Employers may be reluctant to hire an employee with a doctorate in medieval history, thinking that such a person is overqualified or will be unhappy working in a mundane bureaucratic job.

Paul Campos, writing about the job market for lawyers in his brilliant little book Don't Go to Law School (Unless), advised law students with mediocre grades at bottom-tier law schools to consider cutting their losses dropping out before graduating:

 [G]iven the state of the legal market, most people at most law schools who find themselves in the bottom half of their class after the first year would be better off dropping out.

As bad as it would be to have student loans and no degree, he pointed out, it might be worse to take out more loans to get a J.D. and then be unable to find a job.

These are volatile and unstable times for American higher education--especially graduate education. Don't be lured into an expensive master's program or doctoral program with a vague sense that another university degree will somehow improve your job prospects.

You could be wrong--terribly wrong. And if you wind up with a graduate degree, no job, and six-figure student-loan debt, you will have doomed your financial future and perhaps the future of your family. 

A cushy professor's job: You probably won't get one.

SUNY chancellor Jim Malatras chirps cheerily while college enrollment applications plunge 20 percent

 College enrollment applications plunged 20 percent at the State University of New York, an enormous college system with 64 campuses. The coronavirus pandemic bears most of the blame.

But SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras is upbeat.  The coronavirus "invites us how we can do better," he assured the public a few days ago.

 "Let's ride the wave," he chortled. After all, SUNY is "on the cutting edge of the new student-focused approach." 

Of course, Chancellor Malatras can afford to be upbeat. He makes $450,000 a year and gets a $60,000 annual housing allowance. 

Where did this bozo come from? Did SUNY do a national search before it hired Mr. Malatras?

No, it did not.  According to Nicolas Tampio, writing in USA Today, Malatras is a crony of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Newspaper headlines referred to him as "Cuomo loyalist Malatras," and "Cuomo aid Malatras," Tampico observed. Malatras was formerly Cuomo's director of operations and one of the governor's advisors on New York's COVID response.

I feel so much better. After all, Cuomo's administration did a great job managing the coronavirus pandemic--especially at the nursing homes, where COVID deaths were underreported by 50 percent.

Merryl Tisch, SUNY's board chairwoman, stoutly maintains her board acted wisely when it hired Malatras without a national search. Why?  

[Because the board] felt it was imperative to act now in a reasonable and deliberate and socially aware moment to protect the SUNY system across the full array of challenges and help produce a model for sustainability in a post-COVID world.

What the hell does that mean? Did chairwoman Tisch pull that sentence out of her butt? Or did some hack in SUNY's public relations office pump out that swill?

But perhaps I'm too hard on Chancellor Malatras. After all, SUNY pays him half a million bucks a year to be a cheerleader--not Debbie Downer.

But here is some advice to New Yorkers about their college choices. Make up your own mind about your post-secondary education, and don't take out too many student loans to pay for it. Don't just listen to some clown blather on about his university's "student-focused approach" for spending your borrowed money.

Don't borrow too much money to "ride the wave" with Chancellor Malatras.

The Parent Plus Program was a policy blunder that hurts low-income and African American families: Shut It down

Our government's Parent PLUS Program is an insidious scheme to lure low-income parents into taking out student loans so their kids can go to colleges they can't afford.

 Insider Higher Ed's Kery Murakami tells the story of Ewan Johnson, whose mother owes $150,000 in Parent PLUS loans--money she borrowed so her son could get a degree from Temple University in strategic communications and political science.

As Johnson related, he comes from "a low economic background." Will his mother will ever pay off her Parent PLUS loans? I doubt it.

Johnson's mother is one of 3.6 million parents who collectively owe more than $96 billion in Parent PLUS loans. For the most part, parents aren't taking out these loans so their kids can attend elite
private schools like Harvard. "Rather," as Wall Street Journal reporters Andrea Fuller and Josh Mitchell observed, "they include art schools, historically Black colleges and private colleges where parents are borrowing nearly six-figure amounts to fulfill their children's college dreams . . "

Indeed, African American parents are hurt the most by the Parent PLUS Program. The WSJ reported that 20 percent of African American parents who took out Parent PLUS loans in 2003-2004 defaulted on their loans by 2015.  

Default rates for some colleges are exceptionally high. A New America study found that 30 percent of Parent PLUS borrowers at 15 institutions default within two years!

Should all this debt--nearly $100 billion--be forgiven? President Biden proposes to knock $10,000 off of every federal student loan, but it is unclear with his plan includes people with Parent PLUS loans. 

Policymakers worry that forgiving all Parent PLUS debt will unfairly benefit wealthy families who have the resources to pay back their loans.  Sandy Baum, a student-loan expert, said that forgiving all Parent PLUS debt would be "outrageous."

Hardly anyone suggests that we just eliminate this dodgy government boondoggle that exploits low-income and minority families.  

So why don't we just make one straightforward reform? Let's allow parents who wrecked their financial futures so their kids could attend the wrong college to discharge their Parent PLUS loans in bankruptcy. 

College professors are burned out by the coronavirus pandemic: Hey, join the friggin' club!

 College professors are burned out by the coronavirus epidemic. According to Liz McMillen, Executive Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Faculty members are stressed, sometimes extremely so; they're tired and anxious about a required return to campus; they say they are neglecting their research and publishing. They aren't sure that their institutions have their safety as their top priority.

In short, as the cover of The Chronicle's special issue proclaims: "The Pandemic is Dragging on. And Professors Are Burning Out."

I'm not surprised. Professor Gary Dworkin, the leading researcher on teacher burnout, has linked the phenomenon to feelings of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and isolation.

Professors have certainly been isolated during the pandemic. Almost all face-to-face learning shut down last spring, and instructors were forced to teach their classes online--whether or not they wanted to or were trained for teaching with computers. Not fun.

And many professors have good reasons for feeling hopeless. University budgets are being cut, programs slashed, instructors laid off.  Two of my colleagues at prestigious private universities had their retirement benefits slashed--not a good sign for the future.

Finally, some faculty members are probably feeling that their work is meaningless. Many universities adopted pass/fail grading policies during the pandemic, which tends to erode the rigor of teaching and learning. If students believe they will pass a course with only a minimum amount of work, most will slack off; and if a professor is required to assign 100 grades under a pass-fail policy, that professor will likely pass every student who has a pulse.

But hey, things are tough all over. Minimum-wage workers, people in the hospitality industry, small-business owners are all suffering.  Parents with small children are stressed to the max as they try to juggle their jobs with daycare. Many of these folks do not have health insurance.

Professors, after all, have paid health care and retirement benefits. If they are tenured, they have rock-solid job protection. And most of them have flexible work schedules.  I don’t think there is one tenured professor out of ten who goes to the office on Friday or shows up at work before 10 AM on a Monday morning.

As for all that neglected research and publishing that Editor McMillen mentioned, I'm not buying it. 

First of all, a lot of stuff gets published that is totally worthless except as a stepping stone to tenure. We could save thousands of trees if the professors published less--especially the professors in education and the soft-science fields.

In any event, I'm not convinced that the pandemic has slowed down productive research that much.  Admittedly, some researchers must do their work in laboratories or the field. The coronavirus probably impedes their progress.

But what prevents a professor from going to work on the book that's perpetually described as "in progress"? After all, a lot of profs are teaching at home in their pajamas. Maybe there's a little time for writing during the day instead of watching The View. Whoopi's not going to help you write that bestseller.

In short, esteemed scholars, stop your whining. 

Despite what you might think from reading The Chronicle of Higher Education’s special issue on professor burnout—it’s not all about you.