I think the piece pretty much speaks for itself, but here are a couple of paragraphs that stood out for me:
How practical versus idealistic should the approach to college be? I’m somewhat torn, and past columns have reflected that. I applaud proposals to give young people better information about how various fields of study match up with the job market and about projected returns on their investments in college. And for students who want college to be an instant pivot into a job with decent pay, a nudge toward certain disciplines makes excellent sense.
But college is about more than that, with less targeted, long-term benefits that aren’t easily captured by metrics. And some of the reforms being promoted right now lose sight of that and threaten to lessen the value of a degree.
It’s worth following the links in that quote; each piece raises some important questions. And I applaud the warning with which he closes:
I’d sound yet another alarm. Scratch the surface of some of the efforts to reform state universities and you find more than just legitimate qualms about efficiency and demands for accountability. You find the kind of indiscriminate anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular among more than a few right-wing conservatives.
And isn’t it funny how Pat McCrory, NC governor, “just happens” to specifically call out “gender studies” as a major that the state shouldn’t be offering/paying to subsidize. So random!
Frank Bruni:
A completely unsupported stereotype that receives no critical examination. One could easily “spin” it the other way and say, given the educational reforms of the last hundred years, it is now possible, even likely, to graduate from college without becoming educated at all. So, quite to the contrary, it is the college system itself that is anti-intellectual, relying more on indoctrination than the free exchange of ideas, and anti-elitist, allowing students to cobble together whatever sort of classwork the student desires in order to become “educated.” The conservative indictment of education is that it does not foster intellectualism and is largely democratic (as opposed to elitist) in its curriculum.
As a result, in response to market forces, the college system caters to its customers (read: students) to offer a greater number of products (read: classes/majors, etc.) to compete for the students borrowed money. All of which leaves a growing number of students with little to show for their money spent, except for a large bill and no certain means by which to repay it.
-Jut
Which sounds like the kind of indiscriminate anti-conservative bias and leftist snobbism popular among more than a few members of the main stream media. Perhaps Mr. Bruni would like to provide actual evidence for his assertion.
Or, Richard, since you applaud it, perhaps you would.
Well, the debate between college as place for disinterested learning (learning for its own sake) vs. utilitarian learning (learning for practical purpose) has been going on since the Enlightenment (and debates between “town” and “gown” since the 1100s!), and the institution has uneasily balanced both for that time.
Jut- you are conflating two very different conservative critiques of the university. The first (the Allan Bloom model) states that, since the “classics” (the cultural canon) sit alongside postmodern disciplines (gender studies/cultural studies/film studies/ethnic studies, etc.), students aren’t really getting educated. That is an intellectual, elitist conservative critique that has nothing to do with Bruni’s article. The conservative critique he refers to is the inability to comprehend collegiate education serving anything except utilitarian purposes. This uses neoliberal, free-market principles to judge a college education and rejects the more ineffable character-building aims of the liberal arts. That is very much an anti-intellectual, anti-elitist critique (i.e. gender studies serves no utilitarian purpose, whereas the other is that gender studies cannot develop critical faculties as well as reading Virgil in Latin), and one that’s been around universities, especially public ones, for some time.
Ron:
First, please note the qualifier some in the sentence that precedes the one you quoted. It is significant, since neither Bruni (nor I, if you’ve read my comments on other threads having to do with this question) think that all efforts to reform state universities are anti-intellectual, etc. It is telling that both you and JutGory would choose to leave that out and respond as if Bruni is making some kind of totalizing argument.
ETA: I realize that I have perhaps misread your and JutGory’s objections to what Bruni wrote and I applaud. I thought you were responding to the idea that he saw anti-intellectualism behind all efforts at reform; instead, I see now, that you are probably responding to the phrase “more than a few.” That will take a little more time to respond to than I have right now, but I still think the next paragraph is to the point of your question:
For evidence, see what dkblake (and thanks for that, dkblake) wrote, though I would also point out that it’s about more than the “ineffable character-building aims of the liberal arts.” If men and women can, in general, work in places that are more egalitarian when it comes to gender than, say, the office my mother worked in as a single mother in the 1970s, and if there are more protections for people who find themselves discriminated against because of gender, that is because of the theoretical/intellectual framework laid by people doing women’s and gender studies–even if not necessarily in departments bearing those names. To object to gender studies as a discipline that ought to be supported by the state is like suggesting that the state ought not to fund basic scientific research, only some of which ever ends up having any practical, economic, market value.
And just to be clear: this is quite different from saying to someone who wants to major in gender studies that they ought to be clear-eyed about how much it will cost them to graduate and what the employment prospects are for people with that degree.
That’s completely wrong dkblake. Whatever it may be, the argument that universities should be funded to increase employability and reduce unemployment is NOT a free market neo-liberal one. If anything it’s very close to Keynesian.
If you want to see the free market view have a look in the employment and individual responsibility thread, where Robert is arguing unemployment is none of the governments concern and everyone else thinks its a priority that the government act to reduce unemployment.
dkblake:
Perhaps, I am. However, I am only conflating them is Bruni already has. He said, “You find the kind of indiscriminate anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular among more than a few right-wing conservatives.” If anything, that statement needs quite a bit of unpacking. But, he never does that. That is part (perhaps most) of my complaint. His failure to do so creates a sort of straw man. There are legitimate critiques coming from “right-wing conservatives,” but he seems to want to create caricatures of those stupid conservatives who do not want to pay homage to their intellectual betters.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
No, he made it clear that it is the critiques by “right-wing conservatives” that are anti-intellectual. We all know that that is true (which is why he felt no need to elaborate) because we all know that right-wing conservatives are anti-elitist and anti-intellectual.
However, when left-wing liberals talk about reforms, they are, of course, engaging in a high-level dialectic on pedagogy. We know that because they are left-wing liberals.
Sarcasm aside, I enjoyed the article (though I only skimmed the other links). I just found that his use of an inaccurate stereotype of conservative critiques on educational reform undermined his argument. That he threw it in without elaboration only made it look even more gratuitous.
-Jut
Bruni seems to want to make the point that a University or College is not necessarily a vocational school and that there are a great many benefits – or at least should be – besides learning skills that make you suitable for employment.
He’s right. It should be. The humanities are where we find the morals, ideals and aspirations that we need and use technology to pursue ever since Ugg the caveman found out how to make fire. It’s how we pass these things down from generation to generation. And when one could finance college by working in the school’s food service and spending the summer washing cars and changing oil at a car dealership, get some money from one’s parents and take out a loan that amounted to 1/3 of your first year’s pay to finance the rest that was fine.
Let me propose to you that it is NOT conservatives that have changed academia to the point that getting a degree in the Humanities will run you about 4x the annual salary of the job you can expect to get when you graduate. It is academia, undeniably a bastion of liberal philosophy and activism, that has exploded the size of school administration such that they challenge or even outnumber the actual teaching faculty. It is not conservatives that have caused tuition rates to rise at twice the rate of inflation. Liberals claim that conservatives see university as purely a place to get employment training and degrade the other aspects of it? I challenge that this is true – but if it is, it is not the fault of conservatives. I suggest that it is the fault of the people who control those schools and who have done not nearly enough to hold costs down, to the point that people are forced to concentrate on getting employment training there because they can’t afford to do anything else.
F.A. Hayek, Why I Am Not a Conservative (1960)
I like the idea that higher education is more than vocational training. But the enemies of this point of view are not narrow-minded conservatives. The enemies are the posh student union. The new track and field house. The atrium built on the side of the campus art museum. The gorgeous landscaping and plantings. The 24-hour pan pizza emporium added to the cafeteria.
If we want the freedom to cater to the life of the mind, we need to discipline the desire to cater to a lot of other stuff. Alternatively, perhaps the salons of the future won’t be in dorm room bull sessions, but here – on the internet.
Education: Make it pay – or make it cheap.
Nonsense. Strawman argument.
Ron:
Granting, for the moment, your contention that academia is “undeniably a bastion of liberal philosophy and activism”–something that is not borne out at the community college where I teach, for example–that bastion would exist amongst faculty, not administrators, and certainly not the high-level administrators (college presidents, vice-presidents, trustees, etc.) who make the decisions that lead to the obscenely high cost of a college education for everyone. It is not liberal philosophy and activism that has led to the business model of education that Bruni writes about, which began to be implemented at least a decade before the current economic situation; nor is it liberal philosophy and activism that has led to the “students-as-customers/consumer” approach to everything from the things nobody.really pointed out above (which are indeed driving up the cost of four year institutions) to, at some schools, approaches to classroom practice and pedagogy.
A couple of other related ideas:
Individual administrators who make these decisions/implement these policies may be liberal or conservative or libertarian or who-knows-what, but the idea that one ought to treat education like a business–which is different from saying that there are ways in which a business-like mentality is necessary in managing education–is a conservative idea (in the larger, not narrowly political meaning of the word conservative).
I would hope that everyone on this blog understands education to be a progressive force, in the sense that it is about creating ever greater opportunities for people to enter and succeed in civic life, not in the sense that it should further only politically progressive ideas and ideologies. So, for example, I am sure we would all agree that it is a good thing that even women who hold the most deeply conservative of values can expect to be treated equally in the workplace. Whether that actually happens or not is something else; I am talking, for the moment, about the women’s expectations. (And the same would hold true for Black conservatives, etc. and so on.) And I would hope we could all agree that higher education has played an important role in making those expectations something we can now take for granted.
By definition, that kind of progressive movement is going to be threatening to both the right and the left, because the left, no different from the right, is also bound up in the status quo. You can see this in terms of the women’s movement and how women were told that their concerns needed to take a back seat to whatever left-wing concern was considered more global/pressing/whatever. Nonetheless, it has not been people on the left (by and large; I am sure there are exceptions) who have fought hardest against the academic disciplines and institutions–tenure among them; but that’s a more complicated argument for another post–that have most obviously enabled or otherwise brought about these kinds of progressive changes.
I might be mis-interpreting you, but while education enhances opportunities in the sense that you have more of them if you are more educated, the expansion of universities has lead to more professions requiring credentials and has really restricted the chances of people who are unwilling or unable to access university education.
Far too much to unpack and get into here, so let me (as reigning arch-conservative and repression-lover, bite me RonF and alex you johnny come latelies) throw this one into the mix:
I do not think that you will get very far, in terms of advancing understanding, by looking at what the liberals want and what the conservatives want and which faculty groups are liberal tools and which administrators are right-wing dupes etc etc. There is much truth in almost any description you come up with of the American campus, because there is so much diversity (yes, even political diversity, though you may have to look a little harder for it than you like).
Rather, I think that a meaningful analysis of the situation must fall back on a kind-of, but not really, conservative framing: public choice theory. I’m not going to do a public choice theory based analysis of the university scene (it would take too long, and I would gain no power thereby…ba dum bump) but if you look at the historical events through that lens, I think you reach some meaningful conclusions that do not depend on ideological positioning for their credibility.
At the risk of being presumptuous, I think I speak for everyone when I say, “Huh?”
Surely you know what public choice theory is, if I’m not mistaken you’re the one who told me about it, admittedly a gazillion years ago.
I actually don’t know what public choice theory is–and if I should be hanging my head in shame for that, picture me doing so. (Wikipedia, in this instance, was not my friend, since even the introduction was too technical for me to grasp at this time of the night.) But I am also not sure which part of the discussion you are suggesting would be illuminated by it.
No, it’s fairly obscure so no need for head-hang-shaming.
Very simply (and probably misleadingly so, I’m not really the person to expound on this which is one reason I didn’t), public choice theory is the idea that in analyzing incentives, it is important to look at the outcomes in terms of power that accrues to individuals, rather than simply in terms of ideologies or preferences. Very often the power incentives in a situation are unaligned, or even oppositely aligned, with the ideological or preference incentives that one would expect to see in a controlling role.
Here’s a situation that, although it has an ideological tinge, has become a commonplace. You are the executive of a branch of government tasked with fighting some civic evil. Scrofula. You’re in charge of the Scrofula Eradication Ministry. You (honestly and sincerely) hate scrofula. All the people in your ministry feel the same way. You guys make and distribute “Scrofula: Not Even Once” posters to every school. You fund research initiatives. You have conferences every year, often in terrible cities like Portland, for SEM staff worldwide. (I don’t know what scrofula is so these examples are a little bland.)
Here’s the thing. If scrofula decreases by 100%, you don’t have a job any more. Your personal power goes to zero. Oh, a grateful administration might find you a sinecure in another bureau, or might even take your obvious majestic prowess and give you another killer to fight, starting from scratch again. Or they might throw you out on your ass. You really don’t know; whereas you DO know that the head of the SEM gets a $260,000 salary, a cute receptionist, and a lot of first-class plane travel. Even if it is to Portland.
If scrofula declines by 10%, on the other hand, you know exactly what happens: you get praise and admiration in the press, you get a few percentage points of growth in your departmental budget, you get a second, cuter receptionist, and the trips start being to relatively less awful places like Seattle.
If scrofula increases by 100%, you’re back to uncertainty: you MIGHT get a huge budget bump, extra staff, etc., or Obama might come out and give a grim-faced press conference where he talks about obstructionist elements and the need for a clean slate and when you come into work the next day your keycard doesn’t work and people pretend not to know you.
Public choice theory doesn’t say that you’re a prick, or that you don’t really hate scrofula – but it does say that you are more likely to pick actions that lead to the 10% drop in scrofula, rather than the wild gambles of eradication or contagion, because *that is the outcome that increases your personal power*. You’re not, probably, consciously choosing it – you just tend to not really believe the promise of the new scrofula-be-gon powder and approve a LIMITED trial rather than an immediate nationwide dusting. Again, no malevolence required (you scrofula-preserving TRAITOR…)…just you being rational about things.
That is one tiny example – the idea is applicable across a very wide range of situations and is ideology-neutral. Hopefully the example is clear enough to give you a nudge about how you could look at some decisions about higher education – the theory is EXTREMELY applicable to outright politicians. (What are the rewards to a politician who holds State U to a zero percent increase in per-capita spending? A modest reputation as a budget hawk, and a huge reputation as an Education Hating Monster Who Wants Our Children To Die. What are the rewards to a politician who gets State U a ten thousand percent increase? A modest reputation as a budget buster, and a huge reputation as That Great Guy Who Wants our Babies To Succeed. Note, the theory is absolutely neutral as to what State U’s budget change OUGHT to be – maybe the place sucks ass and ought to be shut down with fire, maybe it is the new Alexandria and ought to get a thirty thousand percent increase…but the incentives to the politicians will usually operate as specified above.)
I went and looked at the Wikipedia page for the topic, by the way – ignore the first paragraph which is technical and talks about the taxonomy of the idea within political economics. Who gives a shit about that? Come on, Wikipedia.
It gets a LOT more readable as you go, and does a better job than I did above of explaining it, so it’s worth a read. Start at “Special interests” and you miss most of the turgidity.
Thanks for the explanation, Robert. I can see how that has some explanatory power for some of the things that happen in higher ed, especially, but not only, administratively, but, to go back to your example, scrofula is a thing that is not ideologically bound. How we react to it might be, but tuberculosis of the lymph nodes–that’s Merriam-Webster’s online definition–or perhaps more precisely the bacteria that causes it, exists outside of ideology. You might argue about what to call it, how to respond to it, etc., but if it’s there, you can’t say that it isn’t. I don’t think you can say the same thing for education, and so while both administrators and faculty might be inclined to make choices that will keep their jobs on track and growing (if I have understood you correctly), independently of their individual political ideology, what they are making those choices about is already ideologically contested territory.
???
I thought the scrofula was a kind of tree providing the raw materials for thneeds.
nobody.really: Here.
We cannot SIMULTANEOUSLY
-Keep costs under control;
-Send vast #s of students to college;
-Without much selectivity or regard for their capabilities or undergraduate education (many folks are not smart enough to benefit from much advanced education; many others are generally smart enough but are too poorly educated prior to entry. Half the country has an IQ below 100.)
-Without limiting their class and major choices (or at the very least providing them VERY high quality advising, which almost nobody does)
-Without limiting non-academic stuff like big gyms and fancy museums (CCs are much better here) and
-Without trying to ensure that they will produce students which the country desperately needs.
We can do some of those, but not all of them at the same time.
In an ideal world we’d do a better job funding out state Us; would give vast #s of academic-based and performance-based scholarships to four-year programs; would funnel the middling folks into a CC to see what happens after a year; and so on.
(My own pet peeve: in a country of 300+ million students, there “aren’t enough” qualified USians to fill our own grad schools, so all of that money and developpment tends to selectively benefit a lot of non-US people. Does the US government not understand that this is cyclical, and that we are going through a cycle of decline? We need a bit of protectionism here. Oh well.)
Public choice theory doesn’t say that you’re a prick, or that you don’t really hate scrofula – but it does say that you are more likely to pick actions that lead to the 10% drop in scrofula, rather than the wild gambles of eradication or contagion, because *that is the outcome that increases your personal power*
…. Well, at least now I have some explanation for why a number of commenters at SFGate cling to the belief that people who work for agencies serving the homeless in San Francisco actually want there to be homeless people. Some rational explanation, I should say, since the explanation I’ve had recourse to previously falls somewhere between “tinfoil hat conspiracy nuts” and “sinister clone-spawn of Margaret Thatcher and her stone heart.” (I still have no explanation for why they think people working with the homeless are getting rich off the deal, given that I know most folks in such agencies barely make enough to rent a single bedroom in the Outer Mission.)
It doesn’t need to be linked to a specific financial benefit; the “gain” can be personal or even emotional. And it doesn’t need to be linked to a specific limitation of duties. It can also be linked to the expansion of duties.
For example, say that someone sets up an Scrofula Rights committee, and the committee members realize that they have either managed to secure rights for scrofula folks or that there aren’t any real Scrofula Rights issues to address.
Do the committee members pack up and go home? No, not usually. Rather, they tend to change the job from “protect scrofula rights” to “protect the committee’s existence” and will take action accordingly (finding scrofula issues where none exist, addressing non-scrofula issues even if the members aren’t ideally suited, etc.)
that’s a public choice issue as well.
I’m on a committee where sometimes we get in the debate where folks say “well, if we do X then nobody will come before us.” To which I reply: who cares? our job is to “do X,” not to “get jurisdiction over people” or “increase membership.”
And sometimes that let’s-keep-this-party-rolling behavior is actually beneficial. The March of Dimes beat polio, or funded the research that beat polio; they didn’t write themselves out of existence, they found other worthy causes to champion, and preserved the institutional memory and its competencies.
Richard, you’re quite right that the things being decided are often framed ideologically even if the processes are non-ideological. In my view, which is admittedly limited, public choice theory is a good “go-to” explanation for why things happen the way they happen. Digging deeper/making more connections is always on the table, though; sometimes the go-to doesn’t sufficiently explain the observations.
Elusis,
So I was going to reply to your comment about the people “getting rich” serving the poor and compare to the California prison guards union, and how they’re notorious for defending their employment and privileges despite the fact that being a corrections officer isn’t the most lucrative career. Basically about how it fits into public choice theory, that maintaining job security and guaranteed employment is incentive enough to get the union to push for laws that result in more incarcerations, whether that serves the public good or not.
Then I made the mistake of doing a Google search to check California prison guard compensation and make sure I wasn’t saying something foolish. And holy crap, what a bunch of overpaid bloodsuckers! It’s impressive that that organization can be even more awful than I had thought. It’s like peeling back layers of an onion. An onion made of public funds and human misery.
Ahem, regardless!
“Social workers who serve the homeless are in it to get rich” is a pretty ridiculous statement. Maybe there are a tiny, tiny percentage of people who have huge salaries in that field (e.g. professional grant writers), but as you say, the overwhelming majority aren’t in it for the money.
It is less ridiculous to say, “Social workers who serve the homeless and call for increased funding to help their cause are not immune to second order effects that result in better job security and more employment opportunities in that field.”
Social workers who are voluntarily serving the poor are probably doing it for the benefit. They’re just not doing it for the monetary benefit.
Say you asked Sally Socialworker whether she’d stop doing social work and move to a similar job for an extra $500/year. She might well say no–and if she says no, you can assume that she’s getting more than $500 non-monetary benefit from staying at her job.
It would be accurate to say that most people who select and stay in a particular career, over other options, are doing it because the benefits to them are greater than the alternatives.
kohai:
Kohai, define your terms, please, before you malign corrections officers. What constitutes “overpaid”, for that job?
Suppose I offered you a job, at annual base salary $X. The job would involve working nights, weekends, holidays, and unwanted overtime on short notice when other officers were sick or on leave. (Yes, you’d be paid for the overtime, but there’s a point where overtime begins to break you down, where you start to make mistakes, and it’s absolutely not worth it beyond that point, no matter what the dollar figure.) The shift work will make it more difficult to go to school, or work a second job. The job would involve being shut in with, among others, the most murderous, desperate men now living, men who will constantly be working intelligently to suborn you and your fellow officers, trying to bribe you, bribing your fellow officers. These men will get to know you, get to know where your family lives and works and goes to school, and will pass that information to members of organized crime on the outside. These men will threaten you directly, and sometimes attempt to kill you with makeshift weapons and their bare hands. The job would involve exposure to HIV, Hep-C, and other bloodborne pathogens, so that within 48 hours of starting work, the Red Cross would consider you permanently ineligible to give blood. The job would expose you to civil liability; it would be routine that you be sued for doing your job correctly, and your interests might not always align with your employer’s, so you’d need a civil attorney, and you’d be paying him or her out of your own pocket. Your risk of divorce, alcoholism and heart disease would go way up. Your life expectancy, even post-retirement, would be years lower than average for someone of your class, gender, and genetic lottery. The job would have no social prestige (less than cops, or teachers, or soldiers), would be hard on mind and body, and would give you very few skills applicable in the wider world, or in a post-retirement job. And, after you took the job at salary $X, and worked it for ten or fifteen or twenty-five years, legislators would work actively to reduce your compensation, and sometimes succeed, but even if they didn’t, you would have to spend your own time fighting to keep the deal the way it was when you agreed to it.
For you to take that job and work it for thirty years until you could retire at age 55, what would $X have to be?
It’s very fashionable, these days, to talk about how cops and teachers are overpaid. I know a lot of cops and a lot of corrections officers and a lot of teachers. None of them are living in mansions (well, one is, but he inherited wealth). Some are living with large families in small houses. I just chatted with one retired officer who is looking for work, any work, in his sixties because his retirement system has not given him a COLA in ten years.
So, define your terms. What’s an “overpaid bloodsucker”? Are you cherry-picking the top earners? Are you going with averages? Are you factoring in costs? If the top earners seem awfully high, are you saying that officers shouldn’t be compensated for overtime?
Grace
Plus, liberals would keep insisting that the absolute worst of these people must be kept alive and safe, by you, for their entire lives, guaranteeing not only malevolence and proximity, but also removing the for-what-its-worth incentive structure for good behavior that keeps many of the merely bad people acting reasonably civilly.
I’d put a smiley at the end of that if it didn’t suck so hard.
But, one, shift work is not some bolt of lightning surprise; the prison needs to be staffed 24/7, and you’re not any more likely to suddenly have to work a random midnight-to-dawn shift than anybody else working in a place that runs 24/7. You get a schedule and mostly you’re going to keep to it and work your 40 or 37 or 52 or whatever the standard is; if you are pulling overtime shift after shift after shift, it is either because your state is run by innumerate idiots who do not comprehend that a permanent time-and-a-half stopgap costs more than a permanent staffing adjustment, or because you are jumping on overtime availability and being that super-useful boon of the harried scheduling master, the Guy Who Wants All The Hours.
Two, the fact that you might have to spend some of your own time defending your existing contracts and arrangements might strike a visitor from Planet Swedenia, where everyone gets six weeks of vacation and the wise all-powerful Everybody’s Worker Union does all the repping, as a tremendous injustice, but even in California, which is not exactly Galt’s Gulch, it’s kinda par for the course for, ah, everyone. Every time *I* get a new contract, I face an implicit or explicit rate renegotiation; the quantity of tears I can muster for prison guards forced to do the same with no assistance other than the most powerful union still standing, is finite.
Prison jobs ARE dangerous and unpleasant and damn well ought to command a solid premium for those reasons. And (at least in California – I don’t see how your friend from somewhere else with a different, worse, deal is in any way relevant) they sure as heck do. Starting salary, for a job that requires only a high school diploma and a few months of training, is in the $40 to 60k range. Retirement at 55 (after, I assume, a solid 3o year stint, during which the number of layoffs you’re going to dodge will have been…let’s look up 1980-2010…ONE. One layoff. In 2012. When the state was hemorrhaging blood.) at 85 percent of base salary in a defined-benefit plan – the mid-five figures, in other words, at BOTTOM. Plus medical, for life, Seven weeks – eat your heart out, Planet Swedenia! – of vacation, five of them paid – and unused vacation cashes out directly at retirement. Take a mere month of paid vacation each year, and take eight months of salary on retirement day. (If you’re worried about Charlie Manson getting you on the day before you retire, bank your two weeks of unpaid leave for the last half of your career, and just take the last eight months as an extended pre-retirement retirement.)
People at the end of their careers are not atypically making between $100k and $200k per year. You asked about $X…$X could be less than that.
But obviously the state has to offer this kind of gold-plated plan in order to attract people to do the job at all, right? They are probably hard-pressed to fill the avai…oh, I tell a lie. For 900 slots into the training academy each year – four months, paid – they have 120,000 applicants. The annual turnover rate, i.e., people voluntarily leaving the job, is less than 2%.
Quality control inspectors for combination brothel-distilleries have a bigger turnover than 2%. (“I just got so damn tired of being so damn happy all the time.”)
I kind of think they’ve at least compensated for the downsides of the job, when they have 133 people applying for every opening. Maybe they could scale it back just a smidge, have maybe 50 people applying for every slot. Even 25.
All of that stuff, though disconcerting maybe to the balanced-budget types, is just money. I think the real emotional recoil from the California prison guards, is the absolutely vile legislative agenda that their union has not only embraced, but proactively forwarded. They’re doing the equivalent of going around injecting people with scrofula, frankly. Advocating more sentences and more time for trivial offenses. Fighting AGAINST experiments in non-incarceration approaches to some non-violent crimes. Producing propaganda movies to defend guards accused of trivial things like staging fight clubs between inmates. Killing SIX TIMES as many inmates in California as were killed by prison guards in the rest of the US combined – and wrongdoing is rarely genuinely punished, because the union in essence runs the department. Little stuff like that.
Not to be a dick about it. I am actually on the side of the cops and the teachers etc. in many respects, and I sure feel that they ought to earn a competitive wage for their skills and their work – though prison guards have an easier, and less important, and less skilled job than either.
But “overpaid bloodsuckers” appears if anything to be too goddamn kind.
Circling back to the vague neighborhood of the original topic, this story is interesting:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/starbucks-wal-mart-offer-classes-101300918.html
(Side note: when first I pasted that, it was five screens worth of tokenized gobbledygook following the URL, which I had to edit down and then verify “yeah, this truncated URL will still get you there”. Get it together, Internet people. That doesn’t help anybody.)
Given that there are business schools everywhere (I’m thinking of opening one in the garage), what the heck does it mean that big employers are starting their own mini-B-schools and sending management trainees there instead of just dunking them into State U for a few credit hours? OK, there’s an argument for trade secrecy – Starbucks U can talk about the secret ratio of cobra venom to yak dung to cockroach semen in their blends openly in their ‘Making Terrible Coffee For Terrible People’ class, whereas they’d have to speak in ellipses to talk about it in just regular old management school – but surely that’s a fairly limited scope of material. Most management training is fairly universal in application. “Don’t set people on fire unless it is really, really cold or you really hate them” and “The pile of money ought to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller” are not narrowly-tailored bits of wisdom.
It’s not like Starbucks and Wal-Marts are found only in places where there are no public universities. I went to a public university for business school; it was not run by Einstein on a model first derived from Aristotle, but it was and is a damn fine institution that gave huge value on the dollar. And if you swung a Wal-Mart from the main parking lot, you would crush any number of Starbucks, so they could send their people there, they really really could.
How come it isn’t good enough?
Maybe because that way the money stays in-house? Why pay State U. tuition when you can pay yourself tuition?
First, Grace, thank you for that.
Robert, regarding the phenomenon of “Starbucks U,” one benefit to companies of doing things this way is that they don’t need to deal, especially at the undergraduate level, with all the messy degree requirements that need to be met if you’re going to get a BA, and, if you’re going to deal with a graduate school, you don’t need to deal with the way the school’s standards–in terms of course and other requirements–need to meet the requirements of its accrediting agency. At my school, there was a huge debate over whether we should offer an AA custom-tailored to Verizon employees that would have different, and slightly fewer requirements, than the AAs we offer generally. I’m pretty sure we ended up not doing that, though it is long enough ago that I don’t remember how we accommodated Verizon’s desire not to spend money on things that were not directly connected to their workers’ employment. I’m not criticizing Verizon for that per se–I understand entirely why, as a business, they might feel that way–but that is what their request for a different kind of AA was motivated by, largely speaking.)
Re: the link @31 – I’ve been at McDonalds’ Oak Brook HQ campus that contains Hamburger U a number of times. McDonalds’ has quite a large installation there with numerous buildings, a lot of landscaping, numerous office buildings, a small hotel run by Hyatt, etc. They also have Ray Kroc’s old office recreated with all the furnishings, papers, etc. just as they were when he died set up in the lobby of Hamburger U, numerous historical artifacts from the very beginning of McDonalds’ to the current day set up in an exhibit on the 2nd floor, etc. They must have at least 40 acres if not more. In Oak Brook, Illinois, which is one of your pricier suburbs nationwide. That is some damn expensive real estate. They must be paying some fabulous property taxes. That’s a lot of hamburgers and fries. Which you cannot buy on campus, BTW, but there’s a McDonalds’ close by (next to the Oak Brook Shopping Center, which has some pretty expensive places to shop) that is often used by McDonalds’ to test out new products and processes.
Oak Brook is also home of Butler National, which used to host the Western Open, the second-oldest PGA tournament. The PGA withdrew it because Butler National (named after Paul Butler, the founder of Oak Brook) does not admit female members and a big fuss was made about that at one point (the PGA couldn’t do that to the Masters at Augusta National because the Masters’ isn’t a PGA tournament). Butler National at the time basically said “Well, we don’t need the PGA”. But lately rumor has it that the younger members are looking to change their membership standards – as much for just being able to attract new members in the door as anything else.
Grace @ 29,
Sorry for the delay in replying to your comment. It’s been a busy couple of days for me.
I’m not maligning corrections officers as a profession. I’m specifically talking about the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), which is my preferred Exhibit A for horrible public sector unions. Seriously, do a Google search on them. A vast array of groups, from Mother Jones, to Reason Magazine, to the Wall Street Journal, to the LA Times, the Huffington Post have covered what makes that particular organization so awful in California politics (usually focusing on their push to maintain high incarceration rates, even for non-violent drug crimes, and a constant push to prevent any accountability for guards who are abusive).
As for individual members of the union – that is, the people who do the day to day work of guarding prisons – I have no reason to believe that the majority of them are anything but decent people. They are doing important work that is, as you mentioned above, not a little dangerous and unpleasant, work that most of us would not volunteer to do at any price. So I want to retract the “bloodsuckers” term I used above. They are not bloodsuckers, most of them are just ordinary people doing a necessary job whose employer happens to be the state. The union that represents them is the bloodsucker.
As far as my comment about “overpaid,” I stand by that with regard to California prison guards. I have no particular opinion about whether guards in other states are overpaid, underpaid, or just right.
Let’s say the state needs to hire people to guard its prisons. It will need to pay a premium if it expects to find any volunteers, given the unpleasant and risky conditions that you mentioned above, Grace. If guarding prisons doesn’t pay any better than digging ditches, then the state will quickly find its prisons going unguarded.
So I’m perfectly fine paying prison guards a premium for their work (and having my taxes go up as a result!). However, Robert points out that the number of applicants for every opening is quite high, seemingly more than enough to entice people to fill those roles. If the state sets the compensation for being a corrections officer so high that it gets swamped with job applications, then that seems pretty close the definition of “overpaid” for me.
Now I’m willing to back that off in the face of some evidence. Robert didn’t source his numbers for California, so maybe he made them all up. I don’t know. I hope not. If it turns out he did, then that might change my opinion.
It also might be that, of the 133 applications sent in for every opening, 130 of them are completely unfit for work as corrections officers. I’m willing to believe that good employees are hard to find, and that the number of applications might not tell us anything about the quality of the applicants.
Or maybe those numbers were taken right after the economic downturn, resulting in a huge influx of unemployed people who are applying to everything trying to find work, and that in a normal year the number of applicants is quite small. That also could be true.
Regardless, whether they’re overpaid or not, it’s a drop in the bucket of the overall state budget and probably my smallest complaint about the CCPOA. If the union reformed all of its other bad traits, but its compensation package stayed the same, then I’d be happy to shut my mouth over it.
“Regardless, whether they’re overpaid or not, it’s a drop in the bucket of the overall state budget”
It’s about 11% of the General Fund budget – up from about 3% 30 years ago. (In the same time frame, higher education has gone from 15% to about 9%.) A bit more than a drop in the bucket, though the trend is more worrisome than the base number.
(Source: http://www.cacs.org/ca/article/44 … I sometimes don’t cite when something is long damn enough already; if someone asks I can always dig it out of my browser history.)
That said, I agree that the “hey, let’s put potheads and jaywalkers in jail forever” stance and the “hey, sometimes prisoner deaths just happen, nothing to see here, move along” stance of the union are more distressing than just the pay situation. (I knew about the pay issues, but not the behavior issues, before your post and Grace’s attempted refutation.) And I’ll also agree that the bloodsucker crack does cling more credibly to the union than to the rank and file.
Robert @ 36,
Quickly before I leave work, I think the corrections budget that you linked to is a lot broader than you indicate. The budget overview here (http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Budget/Budget_Overview.html) indicates that it covers a whole lot, from prison guard pay to administrative costs to healthcare for inmates to the people who work on the parole board. I think (and here I’m not sure) that the “Adult Corrections and Rehabilitation Operations – General Security” section is the most likely to refer to prison guard pay for adult correctional facilities. That comes to about $3.3 billion in 2011-2012. Compared to the overall state budget totals I found (http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Budget/Budget_Overview.html) that’s about 4% of the General Fund, or less than 3% of spending if you include Special Funds along with.
That’s still reason to care, but it’s not quite as dire as the 11% figure you quoted above. Not that the CCPOA haven’t done their share to keep correctional spending up, of course.
Thanks for that comment, Grace.
They are doing important work that is, as you mentioned above, not a little dangerous and unpleasant, work that most of us would not volunteer to do at any price.
Yup. Robert made a teachers and cops vs. prison guards comparison–yes, prisons guards’ jobs are easier to do correctly and require less training/skills, but when you look at job satisfaction, prestige, unpleasant working conditions–I think most people would rather work as a teacher or cop than a prison guard. I know I would. Basically no matter how much you paid me, I would not want to work as a prison guard. (Maybe if you paid me $1 million, I would take it and retire in a couple years. But I’d still have to think about it.) But then, I currently have a decent job with decent pay. And that brings up another reason why maybe prison guards aren’t so overpaid: how much you pay the guards makes a difference in what % of them are able to be bribed. Some of them will never or almost never be willing to take bribes, and some of them will be willing to take bribes no matter how much you pay, but there are probably some who will be less susceptible to temptation if you pay them a good salary. (I’m not suggesting that there are equal numbers in the three categories; I think very few people are in the “most bribe-able” category. I’m less certain about how many of the rest are in the “least bribe-able” vs. the “bribe-able if they make less than $_” categories.)
And Kohai, I think it’s quite possible that many or even most of the applicants are not good candidates. There are probably higher standards than even most white-collar jobs in terms of getting character references, not having even any misdemeanors on your record, etc.
Are they being paid the exact right amount? I don’t know. But there are good reasons to be paying them more than you might at first expect.
That said, I don’t think their union should be trying to influence sentencing. I think that’s outside the scope of what they should be doing, even if they were advocating sentencing policies I was in favor of.
Richard,
You’re welcome, and thank you.
Kohai,
Thank you for your very civil reply, and for retracting “bloodsuckers” in characterizing corrections officers.
I won’t dispute or affirm your characterization of the particular union in this case; I don’t know anything about it, and haven’t the time right now to do the research.
About time someone injected some numbers into this, since I still don’t know what pay scale we’re discussing.
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/career_opportunities/por/pay.html
Apparently officers post-academy make $45,288, and the top of the pay scale comes in at $73,728. For work such as I described in my objection to your post, that strikes me as a decent living, but not extravagant. (Remember that this job is also going to limit employment opportunities for your partner if you have kids, because shift work makes childcare more complex. I work rotating shifts, which is the worst in this regard, because there’s no stability; I don’t know if the COs in California can rely on a stable shift assignment or not, and I’m done doing research on this.)
Robert:
Retirement from the page I linked: “Cal-Pers Retirement – 2.5% at 55 years of age”. That’s a bit cryptic. I’m going to guess that it means 2.5% of final salary or average of last five years or somesuch, multiplied by years of service, receivable upon retirement or age 55, whichever comes later. But that’s just a guess, and the devil’s in the details. For instance, that might be a percentage of base, or it might include overtime.
Supposing it’s base pay and you maxed out on salary, someone retiring today after thirty years of service in the conditions I described above, at age 55, would take home $55,296 annually. Nice, but not rolling in it, especially considering the quality of life after the on-the-job injuries, stress-induced heart attacks, and similar chronic health problems. And hey! Congratulations on making it to retirement, because about every three years one of the people around you got killed on the job, with “stabbing” being far-and-away the most common method.
Source?
The devil’s in the details on that one, too. I get to cash out my unpaid vacation at retirement, but I can only carry over a certain amount of time from year-to-year.
Source? Details? Because if that includes a lot of overtime (and I’m guessing that it does) then it doesn’t bother me; essentially, someone working enough overtime to get to numbers that high is working a second job. Someone at top step in my link, above, who worked EIGHTY hours a week at 1.5x overtime would be at about $180,000 for the year – and I hope it’s worth it, but it’s probably not. I’ve done 60+ hours of law enforcement per week for sustained periods, and it was very unpleasant and cost me time with beloved family members now dead. Not worth it, but people damn well ought to be compensated when they do it. (I sometimes think that beyond a certain amount of overtime the employee’s hourly rate should drop to normal and the employer should have to pay 2x, but into a fund which directly benefits no one involved. That would provide employees with an incentive not to abuse themselves, and employers with an incentive not to overwork their employees. But that’s just daisy dreaming stuff.)
What are you waiting for, Robert? Go get a job in sunny California! You’re smart, and a hard worker, and if the length of your posts is any guide, you do have some spare time. The corrections officers in California have it MADE, man!
Having engaged with you to this extent, on this topic, I’m going to try not to let you draw me in any further. Kohai has stepped back from his or her characterization of CA corrections officers generally, and that was what I was objecting to. You arguing that shift work is not a surprise is completely beside the point. The best point you made was:
That is the strongest argument I have heard for the death penalty, which I oppose on other grounds: the human cost on the people who must keep the living murderers away from the rest of us. As environmentalists know, there is no “away”; there is only choosing your poison.
Kohai:
Could be. All of the good police departments I have experience with are highly selective. In my own small city department, we recently rejected every applicant who made it through the basic physical and literacy qualifications and started over from scratch, and that’s not the first time. We’ll stay understaffed indefinitely until we find people fit to be good police officers, and they aren’t common. Lots of people apply who have problems with integrity, and many very admirable people I’d be honored to own as friends don’t have what it takes to deal with various other requirements (constant stresses of various kinds, willingness to fight and use lethal force if necessary, etc.) When I was first trying to get into this career, I applied at a small city slightly larger than mine, which was hiring for two spots, and there were about 300 of us. (Since then applicant pools have gotten a lot smaller, and, curiously, in the recent downturn they didn’t go back up in size.)
So, I would not infer anything from the size of the initial applicant pool, especially when comparing to other kinds of work. Police Departments SHOULD be highly selective, arguably more than they ARE NOW- police officers must exercise tremendous discretion in split-second decisions, routinely spend time alone and unsupervised with people at their most vulnerable, and, uniquely, are empowered to use force to arrest.
It would be more meaningful to count the size of the pool which passes the written test, the physical test, a simple criminal record check (no investigation, yet) and a short interview. You’ll be down to roughly 1/4 of the original pool, if you’re lucky. After that, you’ll end up disqualifying around 1/2 to 2/3 by the end of the background process, if our experience is any guide.
So 133 people would become 33 if you’re lucky, and then drop to 11 to 16. Then, lucky you! You get to pick one and see if you were right, five to seven years later, when the corruption usually starts to show up.
Grace
Cal-Pers retirement is 2.5% per year of service. Corrections officers get 3% per year of service; the recently hired drop to 2.5% if they retire at 55, 2.0% if they retire earlier.
I started running down sources for everything, but here’s the memorandum of understanding on their current contract (in negotiation, I think):
http://www.calhr.ca.gov/Documents/bu06-20110516-20130702mou.pdf
Everything ought to be in there, or if not, at the CA kitchen sink site:
http://www.calhr.ca.gov/state-hr-professionals/Pages/bargaining-contracts.aspx#bu6
Corrections officers are not police officers; in California they are “peace officers” and so are in the same administrative categories as cops for some purposes, but their duties are totally different, as are the qualifications for the job. So I’m not sure what the hiring experience of your department and others has to do with anything; you’re looking for law enforcers and curbside criminal lawyers, not turnkeys.
There’s no limit on vacation payout. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/19/local/la-me-prison-guards-20110419
Here’s a snarky opinion piece, which is where I saw that the medical benefits continue in retirement. I haven’t found anything on that, yay or nay, elsewhere. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576285471510530398.html
It is tragic when anybody dies on the job, and I’d put a little more weight on that when it’s someone like a correctional officer, doing an often thankless job and dying, sometimes dying so that somebody with nothing on the line at all can be smug about how their state doesn’t kill people.
But according to the BLS (http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0010.pdf) the average on-the-job death rate for all occupations is 3.5 per 100,000 workers annually. Your link shows CA correctional officers having 39 deaths in the line of duty…since 1903. There are 27,000 corrections officers in California; one guy died this year (auto accident), and the death before him was in 2005. If corrections officer is an AVERAGE job, they should be losing about one a year; it appears, conversely, to be extremely safe, at least in terms of death. So I think the “good luck making it to retirement” sentiment can probably be banked; the odds are overwhelmingly good.
No idea about the rigorousness of the application process, and how many qualified people don’t get into the correctional training program. Since the essential qualifications are a high school diploma or GED, clean drug tests, sound physical health, and no criminal history, I would GUESS probably a lot of qualified people get turned away, but I don’t see any readily-accessible statistics.
If I were in California and were 21 and had my physical health and only a high-school education, I would be glad to apply. However, I don’t have the health, would fail certain other screening criteria (*cough*), and have more education than that.
Also, as a matter of principle, I decline to work for any entity that believes Charlie Manson’s life is more valuable and deserving of protection and state resource allocation than mine own. He said snarkily.