notes from a meeting with a Prof. in the Education dept.

I just finished meeting with Prof. Thurston Domina in the Dept. of Education. Last week he participated in a teach-in sponsored by “Defend UCI” (http://defenduci.blogspot.com/), which I attended. His work focuses on how higher education policy can produce and/or mitigate social inequalities. What follows are my notes from the meeting, including my questions and his responses (as accurately as I can portray them from memory).

- At the teach-in, Prof. Domina talked about how higher education policy “trickles down” and “trickles out.” I asked him to explain this further. First he explained how we can understand higher education as a significant “sorting mechanism.” Some of his earlier research focused on the “consequences of degree attainment,” especially intergenerational consequences. Based on a study of a program that allowed poor women to attend CUNY (poor=women who otherwise would never have attended without a program to create and fund the opportunity), Domina found that getting a BA created significant effects related to the future income of the participants. More interestingly, however (in my view), were the intergenerational effects. Basically, these women raised their children differently. They spoke to them differently, disciplined them differently, and in general treated them differently. Also, these children were themselves much more likely to attend college, (this is the “trickling down”).

- Another big point of emphasis was on how higher education plays a big role in high school education. Changes in college access dramatically change high school life for people. Basically, kids make a decision early on “I need to go to college if I’m going to have any success in life,” and their subsequent decisions and goals are all derived from this in some way. This is how higher ed. policy “trickles out.”

- This lead to discussion of what he called “educational segregation.” In the 1940s and 50s, about 5% of adults in the US had a BA, and it was pretty evenly distributed across the country (i.e., most towns had their doctor, a few lawyers, a few teachers). Now, about 25% have a BA, but the distribution is completely lopsided. As you can probably guess, major coastal cities and areas like the Research Triangle in NC have about a 50% concentration, whereas most of the middle of the country is still under 10% (I found this hard to believe, but he was clear on this). Once again, a “trickling out.”

- This discussion of varied concentration brought up some interesting terms, namely what he considered the basic idea that “concentrations” of “human capital” increases “productivity.” When I pressed him on these terms, he said something to the effect of “There’s nothing wrong with leftist critiques of such terms, and I see the need for people to be out there doing that; but, I’m a sociologist, and in my field I am comfortable with these terms.” He went on to say how economists’ descriptions of higher education are very accurate. (cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield).

- This lead me to ask the question: “Does thinking in these economic terms force us to think of “human capital” and “productivity” as having its value insofar as it produces “material capital,” i.e. if we start thinking of the university as a “concentration of human capital” that creates “productivity,” then aren’t we on a slippery slope to concluding that the only sort of “productivity” that we are after is quantifiable, calculable, (and so maybe not necessarily, but certainly sufficiently) MATERIAL productivity? (once again, cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield). Another rephrasing of my question: must higher education policy be a “spoke in the wheel” of a certain economic or political policy? Can we promote higher education as ‘intrinsically’ good and still be free market capitalists? He balked a little bit at my question, but started off by getting back to some empirical info: namely, that the expansion of higher education in the US had significant egalitarian effects. Yes, its true that this lined the pockets of the rich, but it is a “false choice” to consider it as essential to one political/economic system or another. “Higher education policy can have an ambiguous position.” REALLY? CAN IT? I understand the pragmatists view that “hey maybe we can say that the university has been sucked into free market policy, but one could argue against this as well; the fact is that it still helps a lot of people, so lets just focus on counting how much ‘help’ it has created,” but this just sounds downright defeatist.

- He did go on to talk a lot about Prop. 13, which I won’t get into too much since Taylor’s post on Martin and taxation pretty much covers everything we discussed.

- My next question for him was about his thoughts on the “hybridization of the university,” namely, how will this “trickle down and out?” He said that faculty have largely bought into the idea that research is the most important function of the university. Hybridization has turned the university into a research factory. His view is that the most important function of the university is providing a quality undergraduate degree, that the emphasis should be on teaching. He concluded, somewhat disheartened, that perhaps the future of the university will be a separation of the research and teaching functions. (This does not bode well in my opinion since we are already seeing a marked increase in undergraduate courses taught by temporary lecturers, who are paid pennies. A full scale separation of the research functions and teaching functions of the university would lead to a much lower quality undergraduate education, and a research institute geared entirely toward getting funding—essentially, a business).