Having worked for almost three academic years now in a teaching position, after spending a number of years doing a doctorate, after spending a number of yours doing bachelor’s and a master’s degrees, I can say that I have some insight on how the university system has changed over the years. Oh, and has it changed or what! Some of it is for the better, sure, but a lot of it is for the worse, like way, way worse.
What’s better these days than let’s say ten or fifteen years ago? So, to start with the positive things, I think students are more collegial these days than they were, than we were, as students. Now, I could be totally wrong as I haven’t been a student in like over ten years. Oh, and by that I mean I haven’t been a student who’s studying for a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. Both are what’s considered an undegrad here, in case you happen to be a reader from a country that has a different system. So, yeah, a postgrad here is someone with a master’s degree and pursues a doctorate, which is completed in like three or four to six or seven years, depending on whether you do it full time, part time or something in between. I started out half a year funding and basically did all the grueling stuff back then, so that all the empirical parts were done in that time. The rest of the time, well, I was either employed, doing other stuff, full, part time, or simply unemployed, doing basically nothing, just hoping to get more random contracts, until I somehow managed to scrape it all together during couple of short contracts and grants. But, anyway, to get back on track here, that was very different from being an undergrad. There were no classes that I could attend as my situation kept changing. So, yeah, I kept to myself, doing my own things, mostly just reading stuff, mixed with writing and working out, if I wasn’t actually working on something completely unrelated. To be fair, that’s not very different from anyone else’s experience, considering that as a postgrad you basically focus on such matters. You don’t go to parties, to drink, to womanize, or the like, as you do, as I did, as an undergrad, because that was a ton of fun. Right, anyway, as I was saying, I think the vibe is still much more positive among students and it seems like the atmosphere is more laid back these days. I have a feeling that like there’s more room for different types of people. That said, I realize that it might have also been the case back then and it was just me who didn’t hang out with a more diverse crowd. As a teacher, you encounter all kinds of people, because you don’t get to choose who you deal with.
That’s what I think is good these days. What about what’s bad these days? Well, to stay on the students, they are under way, way more pressure than they were, than we were back when I was a student. To be clear, the system is more or less the same, with three years reserved for the bachelor’s degree and two years reserver for the master’s degree, for a grand total of five years. You still also get extra time, quite readily, no problem, so that hasn’t changed, like almost at all. It’s slightly stricter, okay, okay, but you are sort of still allowed to take your sweet time, just as many did and just I did back in the day. But how is it worse then if it’s more or less the same? Well, it’s all the little things. It’s all in the details. They’ve made everything just a bit stricter, here and there, so that you have just a bit less time for this and that, meaning that, okay, maybe you get away with one thing, so that you go overtime just a bit, like a semester, maybe two at tops, but anything more than that and you better not run into anything that might delay you further. So, in other words, there’s just less tolerance for just about anything, which means that if you are simply unlucky, things can get very, very stressful.
Now, my foreign readers will probably be chuckling by this point, because the system probably appears to them as a pretty sweet deal, especially because the students aren’t paying any tuition, except that student union fee, which isn’t that much. On top of that, they get money to study, which is, I admit it, pretty sweet deal. But it’s not that sweet a deal, if you know any better. I mean, you get more money by simply being unemployed. Plus, basically all of that money you get as a student simply goes to cover the living costs, meaning that a lot of the students need to work at the same time. Now, that’s far from ideal, not because making money isn’t good for them, but because, remember, they want you in and then out in five years, no loitering. But, if you work to make ends meet, it’s only likely that you aren’t going to make it in five years.
That’s exactly what makes it stressful and I’d say more stressful than it was back in the day. How so? Wasn’t that also the case years ago? Well, that kind of was the case also when I was a student, but most people banked on working their asses off during the summer. That tended to work out just fine, so that you could then focus on your studies full time during the semesters. That wasn’t always the case, nor for everyone, but, to my understanding, that’s less and less the case these days. There’s just fewer summer jobs, which means way more competition for those that are available. That then pushes students to work during the semester, which makes studying more difficult to focus on because you’re at work instead of attending classes.
You can, of course, supplement your studies with student loan, but, well, I never did and what a smart choice that was. Okay, it was not really a choice as I never even considered that, because I was able to make enough money each summer and happened to have relatives who made my life easier one way or another. In fact, I’ve never taken a loan, because I think taking loans and any kind of gambling is stupid, because what’s common between the banks and the casinos is that the house always wins. Neither is your friend. Neither cares about you. Remember that and don’t think you should be their friend, nor care about them either. I think Bertolt Brecht managed to put it nicely, how it is actually the banks that are out to rob you, even if you think that you are out to rob the bank, as he (84) points out in ‘The Threepenny Opera’:
“What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?”
How do banks do that? Well, that’s interest for you. They ask you to pay them money, in addition to the money you need to pay them back. That’s how they rob you. That’s like moneylending 101, since like, whenever it is that it became a thing.
Then there’s the requirements. As the competition for jobs seems to become tougher and tougher each year, you need to do better and better during your studies. Oh, and I don’t mean that you need to get top grades in just about everything. If only it were that simple. It’s rather that you need to stand out from the crowd. That’s the notion of distinction in Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ for you. You need to accrue not only what he (13) calls educational capital, but also what he (13) calls cultural capital, or rather, you need to be able to turn the former into the latter, so that you aren’t just someone with an academic degree, among others who also have an academic degree. If you want a shorter take on that, take a look at his ‘The forms of capital’, which I’ve covered in the past in an essay that deals with how capital isn’t just money.
That requirement to stand out from the crowd is, in itself, pretty tough on the students, but that’s not all there is to it. So, how to put it as simply as possible? Okay, so, there’s this tendency to streamline just about everything. There are fewer and fewer courses available to the students, which, in turn, means that everyone ends up taking the same courses. It’s pretty tough to distinguish yourself if you’ve taken the same courses as everyone else. You can, of course, expand your horizons through your minors if your major is pretty streamlined, but the thing is that this tends to apply also to those minors. I’d say that all subjects suffer from the streamlining. On top of that, the combinations that you can do are restricted, which makes it even more difficult to stand out from the crowd.
But why the streamlining? Why not offer a wider variety of courses to the students? Well, now it’s all about the money, or economic capital, as Bourdieu would put it in both of the aforementioned works. You need it to pay teachers, ideally teachers who have plenty of that cultural capital. You can manage with a handful of teachers, sure, but even if they are very good and knowledgeable, they can’t do everything, nor know it all. Ideally you’d have wide and diverse staff, but that’s not the case. I think that there’s some diversity, and by that I mean people who specialize in different things, not just various background factors, but the students don’t get to benefit from all the diversity and expertise as the staff simply don’t have enough time to teach their own specialties. All their time goes to teaching a limited set of courses. In other words, there’s a chronic shortage of staff, especially teaching staff, which then means fewer courses and less variety. From a student’s perspective, that means that it’s more and more difficult to accrue that cultural capital and to distinguish yourself from everyone else.
When I studied, this was not the case. Sure, everyone did a shared set of courses, but there was still plenty to choose from in addition to them. If you didn’t fancy this, you could opt for that. The thing is, however, that it’s less and less up to you these days. That wide variety no longer exists. Or, if it does, it’s more like self study courses and even that is limited by the number of existing staff members and their areas of expertise.
Plus, when you think of future employment, it doesn’t hurt to know more. In my experience, you rarely get to do your thing, on your own terms, so it’s good to know more, a bit of this, in addition to a bit of that, because chances are that you end up being asked to do something that isn’t your thing. If you can’t do that, because you didn’t take any courses on that, well, too bad, sucks to be you. But, again, the problem is rather that nowadays it’s more like that’ isn’t’s not even an option for you.
That means that you have to figure out things on your own, without any guarantee that it will pay off. You won’t get any study points for such, that’s for sure. You also end up spending time on something that you could have spent on something else, perhaps working, so this isn’t ideal either. That’s just added stress, as if you needed more of it.
I only started doing more, much more on my own while working on my doctorate, which I’d now think of as great preparation for whatever it is that I do now. I was gonna write that it was like an apprenticeship, but that’s not exactly accurate, because I wasn’t an apprentice. I didn’t have a master that I served. I just figured things out on my own.
Anyway, I have to do less, way less reading these days in order to do what I do, because I didn’t simply do what was expected of me while working on my doctorate. It just never worked out for me. To be clear, I initially tried to live up to the expectations, like get to work and do a good job, but that got me nowhere. I put that initial half a year funding into really good use, grinding like crazy, doing pretty much everything that was expected of me, but no one wanted to reward me for that, nor for any progress I made later on. It made no difference, whatsoever.
So, I was like, you know what, I’ll do whatever I want then, the way I see fit and I can’t give a damn what people in the academics think of me. When you make zero money from that, it’s not like other academics can punish me for that in any way. They can’t take away that zero money as zero minus zero is still zero. At least that way I was making progress. Okay, the doctorate wasn’t getting done any faster. That simply stalled after the first six months. But, I kept myself in shape and I was learning a lot, like a ton, mostly stuff that had little, if nothing to do with my doctorate, but, still, some of which I could incorporate into my doctorate when I returned to it, while working on whatever that had nothing to do with the doctorate, while the rest didn’t make the cut. It was not pointless though. It didn’t go to waste. In fact, that’s what I think ended up being the most valuable to me and I can now use all that to my advantage. Plus, even if it doesn’t do me any good professionally, it still does personally and that’s what matters to me the most when it comes to learning. I don’t learn stuff just to know more, so that it has specific work life purpose. Instead, I learn stuff so that I can make use of it in my own life in general, where and when I find it useful.
Before my doctorate that I was simply lucky to have had the opportunity to study a bit of this and a bit of that, in addition to what was expected. The current students aren’t as lucky. As if their lives weren’t tough enough already, now it’s up to them to figure things out way, way earlier than I did and it might not help them at all right now, perhaps only later on.
To end this, I was going to write on what I was supposed to be writing, but with the teaching work, dealing with students, I thought it would be apt to deal with some discourses that pertain to their lives, if only for a moment. This was mainly on the discourse of neoliberalism and how that’s connected to how universities operate these days, but there’s plenty of other discourses intersecting on campus. I hope address some of them some other time.
References
- Bourdieu, P. ([1979] 1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital (R. Nice, Trans.). In: J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–58). New York, NY: Greenwood Press.
- Brecht, B., and K. Weill ([1928] 2005). The Threepenny Opera (A. Hartl, Ed.; J. Willett and R. Manheim, Trans.). London, United Kingdom: Methuen Drama.