9 ms·

Agreed, unionizing will backfire. There are simply to many PhD's for the number of teaching positions.

• Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Unionizing might well backfire, but I'm not sure there are too many PhDs, if quality education were actually the important metric (it isn't, of course). Ideally college classes would be taught in small groups, but we have classes taught in groups of hundreds to thousands (particularly at large state universities). This has certainly let the universities hire fewer faculty members, shove the lower-division courses off on underpaid adjuncts, etc., but somehow this economy of scale hasn't made it down to the tuition level. Tuition and fees continue to increase, while the number of instructor hours per student continues to decline. Why is that? All of the savings (and more) have been eaten by the administration monster. If there was ever an area ripe for disintermediation higher education is it. As soon as someone figures out a good way around the accreditation roadblock universities as we know them are toast. Most likely we'll wind up with a two-tiered system, with free or low-cost MOOCs (or MOOC-like things) on the low end, and a return to personalized instruction on the high end. What we have now is McDonalds education at Michelin guide prices. That can't last.