The Problem with "The College Experience" | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

before I run out of time and I have two professors here I want to ask you guys what is going on at college because we talked about a lot here and but I've been on a college campus in quite some time it's just what I read but I do want to just ask you about certain statistics because one thing that I think you might agree on is that there has been and people may not be aware of is that there has been a sea change at who is running the college it used to be the professors right and now it's administrators some of the numbers I find mind-boggling Yale has 5307 undergrads and 3 500 administrators yeah um Stanford has 10 896 managerial and professional staff these are not the professors ten thousand first of all what do these people do What do the 3 500 and the 10 000 people do at Yale in Stanford I'd love to know have Adam Dan well I think it's a very important issue so what's happened in the last generation or generation in uh and a half there's been a sea change of transformation in the American University I would say a consumer Center transformation where the student has effectively become the consumer and and the college experience quote unquote has become the center of what college is about as opposed to education and this has had a number of negative effects perhaps most important colleges now many colleges many universities are now run like businesses and I just want to get this statistic out because it's very crucial about 70 percent of professors are non-tendered track that means they are paid very low that means they don't have any job stability really often times and that means they don't have any benefits in in the 1970s that number was a round of reverse roughly 70 to 75 percent of the professoriate were tenured so now when you run the college like a business you basically move away from the educational purpose which I think Lynn and I would agree is is the purpose of college and I think Bill you oftentimes talk about you know college students shouting down speakers things like that I think are profoundly connected to the college student being considered a consumer that they're there to have an experience and they pay a ton of money for it and they get an enormous debt for it so they're sure as hell going to have fun and I think if we want to and that's fun speakers oh no no no it is for some people but I think that uh it's more about drinking and doing drugs and having sex and it's less about education so I think if you wanted to you know change what you're talking about and and for professors to have more of a role you need to change what college actually is but what do these people do what are they doing I just want to know I I read recently like the tech industry just had a big bloodbath and they fired up a whole bunch of people and then it came out a lot of them admitted they did nothing well they like they weren't even pretending we didn't do anything they have me what do these people do they have meetings meetings they write memos they oversee the enforcement of regulations regulations they cultivate alumni for donors and they kowtow to their clients the students because as Danny says it's a consumer driven thing that's going on what they don't do is educate anybody they don't write any books they don't produce new knowledge but I just want to make a quick final point I think you see this in the larger American economy the rise of so-called jobs where a lot of where a lot of people are sitting at their desk all day being changed to the last tyranny in American Life the workplace uh and not really producing much or doing much and so I think what you see in the University mirrors what's happening throughout the society as a whole

Channel: Real Time with Bill Maher

Views: 629,374

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Id: QGP1O38ynns

Length: 4min 13sec (253 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023