Class Degrees by Watkins Evan;

Author:Watkins, Evan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2008-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Class Processes 101: The Purpose of Competition

A letter to the editor appearing in the Sacramento Bee of May 16, 2002, from Curt Augustine, the executive vice president for the California Coalition for Construction in the Classroom, suggests that a college-degree-for-all mentality remains very much the norm, contrary to what William Blank and a great many other reformers had anticipated during the 1980s and 1990s. “I read with dismay”, Augustine writes, “but not surprise, of the closure of Sacramento City College’s welding program”, a closing announced in a Bee story dated May 3. His letter continues,

This is one more unfortunate example of how many of today’s educators disregard the needs of students and businesses. At a time when contractors cannot find qualified welders and are forced to bring in out-of-state and foreign welders to finish projects, our schools should be opening more programs. These closings are not solely in community colleges. Since 1982, 60 percent of high school technical education programs in California have closed.… According to the state Employment Development Department, the construction industry has the need for 16,000 new workers a year, yet contractors cannot find enough trained workers today.

Financial support goes to colleges and universities for academic programs, and everyone is encouraged to attend college and get a degree even when his or her prospects may be minimal in contrast to how “industry education programs lead students to high-paying jobs and unlimited opportunities”. Augustine lays much of the blame on educators for the decline of training programs. Eager to reproduce their own academic environment, they refuse to acknowledge the completely different needs of business and indeed of students, many of whom would be better served by vocational training for careers in industry trades.

Augustine’s complaints have been echoed many times since the 1990s. Nevertheless, his narrow sense of blame and his contempt directed at “foreigners” make it easy to overlook a crucial point about the wider and wider area occupied by an academic environment. This is not only a matter of the pervasiveness of college expectations among students and their parents or the media mantra of “get a degree”, but it also becomes an issue of expanding and controlling physical space. The circumstances of the California housing market have been the immediate occasion for many administrators within the University of California system to consider initiatives for supplying or extending some form of university subsidized housing to the huge number of employees required to keep a large state university system running efficiently. Without such available housing, the argument runs, staff members cannot possibly afford to live within even remote commuting distance from the campuses where they work. Nor is the problem confined to staffing. At campuses such as Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and UCLA, beginning faculty also face severe housing dilemmas only partially resolved by programs such as guaranteed mortgage funding and faculty housing. These specifically California concerns reflect part of an increasingly familiar story. Relatively low-paid workers supplying a whole range of in-person services very often must live in remote circumstances from their location of work.

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