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Community Learning Coaches

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Bill Brantley
July 16, 2019

A Proposal to Help Education in Rural Population Areas by Solving the Adjunct Faculty Crisis

 

Several of the Democratic Presidential candidates are advocating some variation of free college. Either paying for the first year of college or tuition-free attendance at the local community college, the idea is to make college affordable for low-income families. Sounds like an effective solution to helping rural populations gain the skills to compete in the coming Fourth Industrial Age economy.

Free college is not the best answer. Opposing free college may sound strange from someone with a Ph.D., three master’s degrees and who has taught college courses for nearly twenty years. But, it is my experiences as both a college student and professor that led me to think of another solution.

The Problems with the Free College Solution:

  1. A traditional college education will take too much time—A fulltime student will need at least two years to obtain an associate degree and four years for a bachelor’s degree. There are part-time options, but that will only extend the length of time needed for the degree. Students—especially adult students—will need to sacrifice years of prime earning opportunities until they are skilled for the workplace.
  2. Students must leave their communities to attend college—Community colleges are probably more available to low-income students than state universities and colleges. For many rural areas, there are education deserts in which students will need to commute to their classes.

There are online options, but this depends on the availability of broadband. In many rural areas, the broadband Internet may not be available. The lack of broadband Internet also exacerbates the education deserts problem.

  1. Universities are not designed to train people for workplace skills they need now—Community colleges and trade schools are the best equipped to teach students technical skills. Universities and colleges specialize in liberal arts education. A liberal arts education is valuable for teaching critical thinking skills and preparing students for leading people and organizations. However, a liberal arts education takes longer to acquire than most technical skills.

However, your typical college professor is rewarded by his or her research productivity. Tenured professors are rewarded for the number of research articles published, and research grants acquired. Teaching is not as valued and even discouraged if teaching interferes with the professor’s research output.

The adjunct faculty perform most of the undergraduate teaching for colleges and universities. The number of adjunct faculty hired over the last fifteen years has risen dramatically. Seventy-five percent of college professors are non-tenured. A recent article in The Atlantic describes the shocking reality of adjunct teaching.

“To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.”

It was after reading this article and reflecting on my own experiences as an adjunct faculty member that I came up with the following proposal. I am still working out the details, so what follows are broad sketches of my idea.

The Community Learning Coaches (CLC) Proposal

  1. Determine which rural communities need help in reskilling the population for new jobs. The new skills can be how to run an additive manufacturing business, a vertical farm, a renewable energy plant or similar Industry 4.0 job.
  2. Create a training center with state-of-the-art classrooms, satellite Internet broadband and an Internet café. These centers will be in targeted rural communities for easy access by the population.
  3. From among the adjunct faculty population, hire community learning coaches to live in the towns and run the training centers. The CLCs will determine the educational needs of the local people, create courses, deliver training and coach students into self-learning experiences. The CLCs will be given room and board along with a decent wage as they work to help the local population increase their opportunities in the new economy.
  4. The CLCs will be trained in the latest training techniques to help the local students rapidly improve their knowledge, skills and abilities. The CLCs will be supported by a national network of educational experts linked through online communities.

My proposal solves several problems at once—first, CLCs help to prepare rural communities to thrive in the new Industry 4.0 economy. Second, CLCs help to alleviate the issues that adjuncts face in the current university teaching situations. Third, universities and colleges can continue to concentrate on their primary mission of research. Diverting the money that would have paid expensive college tuitions to build community training centers staffed by CLCs seems to be a better use of federal tax funds.


Bill Brantley teaches at the University of Louisville. He also works as a Federal employee for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. All opinions are his own and do not reflect the views of his employers. You can reach him at http://billbrantley.com.

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