Higher education, like many industries, is currently experiencing a number of traumas relating to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Not surprisingly, many “very serious” people have made a number of pronouncements about higher education, ranging from why the institution is in such a financially precarious state entering the pandemic (it’s almost certainly lack of public funding) to what the future of higher education will be.
Stephen McBride has written one of the latter articles for Forbes titled “Why College is Never Coming Back,” and, folks, it’s one of the most shit-brained screeds I’ve ever read in my life.
There are many dubious tiers to the bullshit layer cake constructed by McBride, but one brief paragraph is so asinine that parsing it is enough to demonstrate the author’s lack of credibility to write about the subject with any authority or expertise (and I’m pretty disappointed that a Forbes editor let the piece run, even if it probably is just them reposting McBride’s blog).
McBride writes: “For example, [colleges] could hire world-class professors to create online courses for, say, $200,000/year. Each professor might teach 250 students per school year, which works out to roughly $800 per student. Tack on the cost of running the online course, plus a profit for the college, and you could probably charge each student $3,000/year.”
Being my most generous, I would say that McBride is being disingenuous and sandbagging his readers on costs. But the ideas there are so blatantly insolvent that it makes me question whether he has any idea how universities (or even payrolls) actually work in the real world. Here’s four reasons why.
(1) McBride underestimates the cost to institutions
First off, that $200,000 salary, unless you’re treating these “world-class professors” as consultants, will require an additional tens of thousands of dollars in payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc., all benefits expected by “world-class” professionals.
Also, who will be creating and grading the assessments? As my colleague James has said (although I think he borrowed the phrase from a friend), “I teach for free. I get paid to grade.” There’s a reason why most “world-class professors” have a legion of graduate students to TA for their classes—grading is awful, and it’s extremely time consuming. Moreover, those TAs often run discussion sections and conduct most of the office hours. And even those TAs are often not responsible for grading more than 90 students a semester (often it’s more like 50-75). Just the TA portion is a 20+ hour/week job. Schools would almost certainly have to pay much more to deliver this content than McBride asserts.
(2) McBride underestimates to cost to students
Perhaps the most shit-brained part of this is that he thinks it would only cost $3,000 per student per year in tuition, a number he arrives at by adding $800 in supposed tuition costs ($200,000 divided by 250 students) to “the cost of running the online course, plus a profit for the college.”
Are you serious, Stephen?
Does he think that students only take one course per school year? Or does he think that one “world-class professor” can teach 250 students every subject they need to know?
Instead, applying reality to the situation, most students take 4-6 courses per semester, roughly 10 courses a year, which would be $30,000 in tuition costs. In many ways, McBride is proving his detractors right. College cannot be as cheap as he thinks it should be without some serious outside capital in some way (either via public funds or an endowment).
(3) McBride misunderstands what a typical “world-class professor” does
I have been fortunate enough to know and study under some truly world-class professors. I mean that not as a euphemism—some of them are well-known in the field of history on basically every continent. Has McBride spent much time around them?
Most “world-class professors” got to the positions they did by spending a significant amount of time researching, teaching no more than two classes per semester (often less), and typically teaching fewer than 100 students a school year, often with the assistance of teaching assistants. That reality fundamentally misaligns with McBride’s vision of how a “world-class professor” would operate in his model.
(4) The “world-class professor” envisioned by McBride is likely highly problematic
McBride never comes out and says it, but I’m assuming by “world-class professor” he means a full-professor at a top university. In 2017, full professors in the U.S. were 81% white and 66% male. (Indeed, white males made up 54% of the full professors.)
Effectively, McBride’s plan would squeeze out most women and people of color from the profession.
In all, McBride demonstrates an amazing capacity for foolish statements and uninformed arguments in such a short space. And, for that, I applaud his efficiency. But his plans for the future of college? He needs to go back to school and figure out how the real world works.
P.S. If there were any doubt in your mind that McBride is a huckster shill, check out the last few lines of his post: “Get my report "The Great Disruptors: 3 Breakthrough Stocks Set to Double Your Money". These stocks will hand you 100% gains as they disrupt whole industries.” What a jackass.