The Cooperative University: A Radical Shift of the Higher Education Model

 Universities have become unaffordable, inaccessible, and out of touch with what society actually needs.  There have been many potential solutions to these problems, with online education being the most plausible, in my opinion; however, I believe these ideas fail to get to the root of the problems of our current educational system.  What is needed is a radical shift in how we conceive of higher education.

 Students do not have autonomy over their educational experience.  Students are passive actors within a system that has allowed tuition rates to skyrocket, syllabi and teaching models to become out of sync with reality, and budgets and institutional investments to fail to meet students’ ethos.  I propose a cooperative model for higher education.  A cooperative university would address many of my complaints of our current higher education model. 

According to the International CooperativeAlliance, 

“A co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.” 

Is this not what college should be?  

 

The cooperative university, informed by the cooperative movement, would be founded in the RochdalePrinciples:

1. Democratic Member Control

Every member gets one vote and an equal voice.  University policies and budgets are determined by voting members rather than a Board of Regents.   Students, then, are active participants in shaping their educational experience.  Students, faculty, and staff come together to democratically decide the governance of the university.  Those representing the university in positions of governance are held directly responsible to its voting members. 

2. Voluntary and Open Membership

Acceptance into the university will be open to people from all backgrounds and identities.  The membership system will be established in a way so as not to perpetuate the knowledge-based oppression of people of lower socio-economic classes.

3. Member Economic Participation

A cooperative university is an investment; everyone has a share of ownership.  There is not tuition, but member charges.   Any surplus resources are reallocated back to student and faculty development, and the development of the university.  All funds, including faculty salaries, student scholarships, etc., are approved by the membership. Members are required to contribute “work hours,” which could range from sitting on operational or budgetary committees, to attending or teaching classes, to contributing to course projects.  These contributions develop a sense of ownership and community, help to keep costs lower, and offer students marketable experience. 

4. Autonomy and Independence

The curriculum and learning format are decided by all members.  Because decisions are made on a “one member, one vote” basis, students have just as much say as professors in determining their education.  During the first week of classes, the students and instructors decide together what will be included in the course.  Students will have a say in what they learn and decide what is relevant to their lives outside of the classroom.  In this model, if it works correctly, those with the most experience tend to be acknowledged; if an instructor has experience in his or her field, they will be able to propose what is being talked about and studied in the field, and that will hold some weight.  Students can then take that information to make informed decisions on what they’re learning, and alternative opinions or dissensions can be more easily addressed.  Furthermore, students have the power to determine the requirements for graduation, the direction of their education, and the ability to create their own majors. 

5. Education, Training and Information

Because students are active participants in the operational activities of the university, they will gain concrete, real world experience to prepare them for the job market while they are in school.  Students will graduate with knowledge in business management, financial literacy, and the ability to work with others. 

6. Co-operation among Co-operatives

Alongside cooperative education, students will live in cooperative housing.  Analogous to dorm life, co-op housing will supplement students’ education with the social aspect of college.  Co-op housing can provide an intellectual community to extend classroom discussion, provide networking opportunities, and also foster friendships and a social life for students.  Furthermore, members of the university would be encouraged to utilize cooperative banks, food markets, etc. 

7. Concern for Community

The cooperative university will maintain a commitment to progressive, social justice activities and the development of the greater community through policy and direct action.  It will be a place for diversity of identity and thought.  Furthermore, while upholding high standards for its members, it would be open to anyone with an interest in the cooperative movement and a desire to learn.

Do you think a cooperative university would work?  How could we incorporate some of these principles into the current system?  Are there any elements of this model that would not work?  Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Disclaimer: a conversation with my friend, +Ryan Dougherty, largely inspired the ideas presented in this post.  

Kim Kardashian and College: Why Now?

When I'm asked why I go to college my response is always something along the lines of, "to get the kind of job I want, I need a college degree". Notice I have no specific job title in mind, instead I'm after a "category" of jobs. There are a million different ways to label the category of job I want, from "high-skilled", to "white collar", and beyond. However, the most apt way to describe it in my mind is "secure". Not in the sense of the word that I'll never get fired, but secure in the sense that ensures my continued employment as I age.

I have a grandpa that illustrates this need perfectly. My mom's dad is named Jerry. Jerry is a great guy that for years worked his butt off, raising five girls.  Jerry never set foot in a school after he was old enough to drive and worked constructions jobs all his life. Jerry did fine for a while, but physically he broke down and was forced to retire at around sixty years old. At one time, this was a perfectly acceptable age to retire. However, modern medicine has blessed Jerry with the ability to live well into his eighties and hopefully beyond. This is a fantastic blessing, with one important catch: Jerry didn't earn enough before his body broke down to support him for the rest of his life. Physical labor takes its toll on the body and leads to early retirement. This is a huge problem considering life expectancy has increased by twenty-five years since 1930.

However, does this mean I should forgo physical labor entirely and jump right into college? The answer is more complex than I initially considered when I made the jump to the University of Michigan directly out of Traverse City West Senior High. To best answer that question, I should have considered "what is my best asset right now, and how does that compare to what is in demand?".  Now that may sound like an argument for trying my hand at prostitution, but I promise you it's not. Instead it's me taking an objective assessment of my skills and using that assessment to take control of the "Jack Flynn brand". The "Jack Flynn brand" is my own personal weighing of my supply of skills against the demands of the professional world. I may better at reading than I am at drilling holes in the ground, but if the world places more value on my nominal ability to drill holes, I'd be a fool not to take advantage. No one is better at this than Kim Kardashian. She clearly has very limited traditional skill, but she has parlayed what she does have in social capital into a ton of money and a fun lifestyle. This is because the Kim Kardashian brand is in incredibly high demand and low supply.

Assessing your own value is the tricky part of this calculation. As a nineteen-year-old male, my physical value is likely to never be higher than it is right now. I have about a decade of peak physical condition before my physical skill set begins to decline. Therefore, my highest value in physically intensive, blue-collar labor is right now. So why am I not in North Dakota pulling in 14k a month as a welder?

 (Right is an actual photo from the rigs repair website. They're desperate to pay people that much) I'm nearly qualified; with a high school degree all I need is a couple of months training. It clearly is more valuable to me than spending 25k a year at school. Truly, I have no better answer than I simply never considered it. It would be easy to spend 5-10 years of my life working a blue-collar job before returning to school and securing my long term future. In fact it would probably have been prudent to do that, as I could have left school debt free at age 30 with a wealth of that invaluable "real world experience". Instead, I followed the crowd and went to school right out of college.

What all this adds up to is just another decision college-bound high schoolers have to make at age 17 or 18. While it is important to secure a long term future for yourself with a goal of retiring comfortably, that doesn't mean avoiding challenging physical work all together. Assess your own personal skill set, and match that to the world's needs before mindlessly jumping into college with the rest of your friends. Control your own brand.

Learning how? Learning where?

If you are a regular reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, or even the New York Times' "Education" section, you have been bombarded with articles about MOOCs.

I actually don't think you are a regular reader of any of those things -- good for you! -- but it might be worth thinking about MOOCs. Just in case you've managed to avoid the discussion, you might want to know "MOOC" stands for massively open online courses (or sometimes massively online open courses -- we aren't entirely sure ourselves). These are courses with tens of thousands of students in them at any given time. For realz, guys. A course in finance regularly gets more than 100,000 students! Quit whining about the size of your STATS 250 lectures.

Well, maybe not.

Let's backtrack. When I was asked to be a guest blogger here, I wanted to write about education, but I didn't want to write about MOOCs. See, I'm a nerd and I am bombarded by discussions about MOOCs. "Enough effing already!" I've been saying. I'm not opposed to MOOCs or the styles of teaching involved: I've been webcasting some of my courses live since 2009, and I don't think a student's physical presence is always necessary for meaningful learning.

Students in my POLSCI 101.

And I think the idea of proving educational access to people who wouldn't otherwise have it is totally awesome. But a lot of people feel very differently about it.

A lot of my colleagues -- people who teach y'all -- are saying MOOCs are downright evil. They are, at best, cheesy attempts at pandering to get more applicants and fundraising dollars; at worst, they are a nefarious scheme to do away with existing faculty. I'm not endorsing this. I'm just reporting the view. But just for a reality check, a recent Facebook update from a colleague read "Stop this insanity!" It's not that my colleagues are lunatics: if it's true, as this widely reported controversy implies, that the administration asked a department to consider a MOOC course as satisfying a requirement, then some of the worried people are right.

OK, all of that was a long preamble to asking, whaddayouguysthink? Here's why your view matters: there are a lot of folks here at UM who think that although MOOCs are interesting and potentially very cool, residential education (what you are going through) is superior. Tons of faculty say, "That's just the way it is. Period." A significantly smaller number of us are saying, "Residential education is superior, but not automatically. We need to figure out what is the value-added our students are getting that you wouldn't get though a MOOC."

And, you know, guys, I actually don't know. We don't know. We have some ideas. But this post is really a very, very sincere plea for your views. Why does it make sense for you or your parents to pay the unimaginable bucketloads of money you pay for you to go here, as opposed to grabbing bunch of courses from Coursera or EdX (for free!) or even the University of Phoenix (for a lot less money)?

The Golden Ticket mindset: millennial college disconnect

My parents are in their late sixties. They went to college in the seventies and for them, that degree was golden. My mom went into computer science right as computers were appearing, and paid off her student loans almost overnight. My dad went the ever-secure route of engineering through Michigan State and now manages his own team at RDS.

And so, even though costs have skyrocketed, their belief that a college education was still a golden ticket to the middle class life was transmitted to me, and I approached college as if any degree from the prestigious U of M would give me smooth sailing from then on. What my parents failed to grasp, and what I was unable to grasp, was that the college investment has changed.

In my parents’ 20s, a college degree was rare and therefore valuable. In 1970, a little over one-tenth of the population over 25 had college degrees; that proportion has nearly tripled today. The investment was costly, but that investment would be returned many times over due to the job opportunities it afforded. College equaled job.

My oh-so-millennial situation is more amorphous, but few recognize it as such. People are still optimistic. They treat college like it is still this golden ticket to a job and a good life, when the truth is that only select concentrations and skills return the now extremely weighty investment that is a prestigious four-year college. No one told me when I was going in that I would need something specialized and marketable. I would rather have had my dreams crushed early before investing in them, than later when it's too late.

I agree with James Surowiecki’s idea that this is like a “higher education bubble”—a “cost disease”. The cost of a degree has been going up faster than peoples’ incomes, and Americans are borrowing money to spend more on an education than it is actually worth. Wages for college grads have fallen over the past decade, yet people have become more willing to pay for that four-year degree. The golden ticket mindset—generalized too all college—is still there, but the reality is not.

Inflation is the result. According to Vedder, we are turning out more college grads than there are professional occupations for them, and because the market is flooded, we have engaged in a costly credential inflation to certify job competency and in so doing have lowered the actual generalized worth of the bachelor’s degree.

But no one tells high school seniors this. There is a huge knowledge gap—students assume no gap exists between job availability and grads applying for jobs. Seniors should sit down and look at what they are planning to go into and whether or not a pricy university is expected to give them a return on their investment. If not, other routes toward employment and development of marketable skills might be the wiser use of the student’s time and their family’s money.

I say that and it sounds logical, yet due to this supply of grads creating demand in the market that allows bartenders to even require a BA, will a student be screwed without being able to slap that BA on a resume? Students are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this. Students do not want to get saddled with the debt of a degree which isn’t worth the money. Students also do not want to hit the job market without a degree while a bachelor’s degree is the standard. College education is not the wisest decision for many, yet without it they are even worse off.

Because college education is a business, the market will hopefully eventually sort this out. But in the meantime, millennial grads are forced to slog through a shallow job market lugging their load of student debt, and, if they’re anything like me, they also have parents at the sidelines watching in confusion and disappointment.