Postbaccalaureate Futures: New Markets, Resources, Credentials

Edited by Kay Kohl and Jules LaPidus. Phoenix, Ariz.: American Council of Higher Education and Oryx Press, 2000

CARY NELSON

WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE TERM "lifelong learning" it sounded rather pleasant. As the current motto for continuing education, it adds an upbeat, friendly connotation to what seems an increasingly pragmatic movement. Americans, the phrase suggests, will be encouraged to continue reading and thinking all their lives. Surely that will be a healthy change for a democracy. For those of us in higher education, it might mean a second chance to reach students we had failed to inspire during their four undergraduate years. Perhaps people will want to take another philosophy course at age fifty. To meet this new need, we might even require more faculty members.

Think again. Lifelong learning refers to a lifelong treadmill of job training and retraining. As higher education takes on this dystopian mission, it will become steadily and more intricately tied to global capitalism and the workforce needs of corporate employers. Think of lifelong learning as the password to the education treadmill, not as a practicum in the life of the mind.

If you want to see this brave new world hailed with braggadocio, consult Jeffrey Kittay's University Business, a magazine devoted to the pleasures of selling out. Run by former liberals turned into corporate shills, University Business may have the only national magazine staff that sheds tears of joy every time news from the proprietary University of Phoenix drops out of the fax machine.

A more balanced-and surprisingly soberaccount of these economic and social developments can be had in the book presently under review. Postbaccalaureate Futures is by no means a critique of corporatized higher education. It is written rather by contributors who believe closer relationships between campus and industry are inevitable. They are concerned with facilitating these trends and maximizing their economic benefits. In the process, they help us understand what makes higher education a potentially attractive investment. As Howard Marc Block puts it in an early chapter, "who wouldn't want to compete in a market where the 'competition' is hardly competitive?" Because higher education is a fragmented industry, new investors have a real chance of stealing market share. What's more, the market is exceptionally predictable: "the University of Virginia has a clearer vision than Taco Bell of how many customers it will have in six months."

The twenty contributors to Postbaccalaureate Futures-who include upper-level university administrators, government officials, leaders of educational organizations, and entrepreneurs-all believe that the needs of lifelong learners cannot help but reshape higher education as a whole. Stephen Mitchell, James Van Erden, and Kenneth Voytek put it bluntly. For individual workers, they write, "continuous learning is necessary just to stay in place." For the "proactive lifelong learners" (a phrase from an essay by the editors) who act on this knowledge, a traditional degree program and discipline focused more on knowledge than job skills is one of the major "barriers to operational excellence": "rigid course sequences, academic calendars, degree requirements, and other requirements are institutional impediments to participation in KSCs [Knowledge Supply Chains]."

They offer a chilling alternative: "The ultimate solution to this bureaucratic roadblock may be a degree or certification awarded through a thirdparty broker." Jules LaPidus calls them "'credit banks' where educational credentials accumulated over time and from a variety of sources can be stored and perhaps `cashed in' when a sufficient number have been accumulated." That would be one result of what Kay Kohl here calls "the erosion of traditional universities' credentialling monopoly."

Along the way, other changes will accumulate. Kohl predicts an increasing "modularization of curricula" as institutions seek coursework more adaptable to changing job requirements. What is heralded here as "the diminishing half-life of skill and knowledge" will compel us to "reduce learning transfer time" and to "focus the curriculum only on skill gaps." For "one-third of all jobs are in flux each year, meaning that they have recently been created or soon will be eliminated from the economy" and "by 2020, most individuals in the workforce will need to prepare themselves for as many as seven or eight careers."

For universities to meet these needs they will have to cede significant control over degrees and curricula to industry, the contributors agree. One essay goes further: "[s]hared staff or college staff located at company facilities are still better." Moreover, "constant analysis helps to reduce total system costs and cycle times, improve quality, and increase product or service functionality," so faculty can expect relentless surveillance and evaluation of the effectiveness of the services they are performing for corporations. This Orwellian vision makes post-tenure review sound comforting.

Do we have a choice in implementing or resisting these changes? Toward the end of the book, Myles Brand, the president of Indiana University, reminds us of an earlier prediction that 11 traditional campuses will disappear in favor of wholly technologically delivered higher education." Alan Bassindale and John Daniel offer some astonishing statistics from other countries: Turkey's Anadolu University has 578,000 students enrolled in distance learning degree programs focused on job training. The Indira Gandhi National Open University, an exclusively distance teaching "megauniversity," comes in a close second, with 431,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Not surprisingly, Kohl warns us that American institutions as well 11 need to be perceived as responsive to the education needs of postbaccalaureate learners in the labor force if they are to retain public support."

Postbaccalaureate Futures is not a brief for resistance, but neither does it cheerfully celebrate this future in the style of University Business. The University of Phoenix is included here, to be sure, but in a relatively neutral and highly informative account that makes clear how and why it has succeeded. The truth is that many of Academe's readers already know why the corporatization of the university needs to be both shaped and resisted.

This book, written knowledgeably from within corporatization, will make both its fans and its critics better informed.

Cary Nelson teaches English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is second vice president of the AAUP.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Nov/Dec 2001
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