Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs (GS). Her bachelor's degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered...
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Some sidenotes on this article. It focuses on the for-profit college system that racks up student debt as its income source. I want to think about several other aspects.
Back in the mid-90s these kind of schools were exploding around SF-Bay to feed the ad agency industry's need for workers in graphic design. What they taught was how to use the latest software, media, and output systems. The entry level wage was about ten bucks an hour. A climber and former UCB art student I knew dropped 10k to get a 10/hr job.
Besides the other problems, the pace of obsolesence was so fast, you had to land a job in this industry within months of getting out of a program. If you didn't, your job skills evaporated. The whole industry was tied into the Mac, Windows, Adobe production cycle with their constant upgrades and releases. Of the very few face to face interviews I had, the only questions were what software I knew and which OS I used. Only one guy asked how I produced a particular effect, a fake woodcut look.
About this same time, the digitalization of film making (not just effects) was coming on line to reap that whirlwind. Meanwhile the internet drove a whole other group into web design where more giant bucks got made on the backs of ten dollar an hour clones in cubicals... Even that was too much, so many places started outsourcing to India and Taiwan. This was driving the local printing industry into the toilet, because Taiwan had the newest print technology (desktop to press via internet). Local publishers were also switching to overseas printing.
These digital design shops were part of the support industry for the dotcoms, and created the corporate identities and their virtual products.
It was a staggering thing to watch, a kind of madness headed to the abyss.
On the education side, it was interesting to watch this industry produce art workers who knew nothing about art. What a waste. The certificates and degrees from these for-profit mills certified that you knew the latest production systems and techniques and could therefore be seated in the production system and required little or no training, except in some of the specific detail that a partcular shop followed.
When Gates and others complain they didn't have a trained domestic work force this is what they meant. There are thousands of highly skilled people available, now probably doing other things. It's not just about lower wages, but also lower wages coupled with a highly specific and ever changing skill set. You can see that here:
``At the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Mass., administrators show off classes averaging 16 students using new computers and the latest software in the animation program. The school has a $500,000 sound studio, a 14,000-volume library, and a student-run art gallery.''
I have to wonder 14k volumes of what? Tech manuals on Adobe's latest media suite? This is called knowledge but there is nothing there. What you learn is an operator's manual. And these kinds of manuals are often proprietary, sold only under maintenance contracts or to these particular certification mills. This forms a closed feed back loop. Let's say software X system is used in some industry. The corporation that produces X, of course sells its documentation, but only to clients who buy a service contract. In the contract, only X certified technicians can be used for maintenance on site. The only way to get certified is by going to X special school for training.
This closed loop certification is also part of the manufacturing sector and usually focused on the computer controlled electronics---at least that is where I saw it in powerchairs.
I never went through the higher level of certification. However, judging from the lower level system, you learn nothing, and that is on purpose. If you actually understood the programming system and how it worked, you could with some skill, reproduce it or fix it without going back to the company. So they take the blackbox approach. Don't worry about what's inside, this is what the box needs for A input to produce B output. I think this is called procedural learning.
That is pretty much the whole mind set of corporatized education. Diane Ravitch mentioned something like it when she made the distinction between reading and comprension. I wouldn't argue that practicing a skill is non-essential, but it is only the first step.
There was an interesting piece on Democracy Now about the corporate assault on higher education mostly centered on Berkeley and BP.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/18/big_oil_goes_to_college_bp Here the issue is knowledge, but from a different angle, which amounts to how to manage, control, and direct scientific and technical knowledge. The model is very similar to the Novartis deal of fifteen years ago.
What I am looking for is not an expose, but an overview of what is going on. I think of the social sciences and some of the physical sciences as the eyes and ears of the society. These sense organs tell us about our world and its dangers. What the corporatization system does is blind us by corrupting the institutions we use to monitor our health, i.e. to see what is happening and take corrective measures.
The BP well blow out in the Gulf was a case study in how to keep the public blind, keep independent science and investigation blind, and therefore not take corrective measures.