Anya Kamenetz. . . Pt. 2

See Pt. 1 here.

When Anya Kamenetz is not doing exclusive interviews with Bill Gates or his pals in the Billionaire Boys Club, she spends a lot of her time picking the brains of people who have knowledge of subjects for which she knows nothing, e. g., education, educational history, educational theory.  Anya then portrays those knowledgeable experts and university teachers that make up a big chunk of her virtual rolodex as a kind of benign, though irrelevant, caste of Middle Ages knowledge monks who stand now as stumbling blocks to the kind of capitalist disruption to higher education that she is paid to advocate for.  

"Disruption" allows the kind of exploitative bloodsucking that turns institutions of learning--at least the ones that serve the poor and middling classes--into corporate revenue streams that offer bogus degrees to those who are desperate enough to believe they are getting something of worth for their Pell Grants.  Kamenetz loyally represents her high-rolling patrons' corrosive strategy with a calcified arrogance and vapid boosterism that read like press releases for any new dangerous product line hawked by a Madison Avenue ad firm, as in her most recent paean to college corporatism in the New York Times. 

The most recent product rollout from HigherCorpEd comes in the form of distant education taken to its logical conclusion.  In Anya’s advertisement for the brave new world of ultimate learning alienation, students hooked to a web-based computer screen race through canned and computer-generated assignments in order to take tests that measure their “competence” in skills that the global economy might need if they existed and if there not were not already an oversupply of privileged graduates like Anya (Yale Class of '02), whose real college educations put them in a different league from students who have had their “competence” for a four year college education measured out mainly by standardized tests taken over a matter of weeks.

For this new autodidactic and corporate-exploited underclass, which is made possible by high tech corporate marketeers, business efficiency zealots, and paid promoters like Anya, gone will be disciplines, subjects, course time requirements, and especially those expensive old school monkish professors (or their desperately underemployed sharecropping adjunct counterparts). College for the lower caste will be devoid of the kind of well-educated professoriate that Anya depends upon regularly to compensate for the vast knowledge gaps that her texting, Facebooking, and Twittering cannot fill for subjects that she is assigned to write about by her megarich patrons, who fund corporate foundations (Gates, Pearson, and Lumina) to buy off higher education policymakers with generous grants.

If the majority of college offerings for the unwashed herd can be made dependent upon the hardwired accelerated obsolescence of computer technology, the advantages to the Gates Empire and to Apple are obvious.  Less obvious are the advantages for the corporate student loan business, which created the Lumina Foundation to increase the number of lower class students who are dependent upon student loans to get worthless matchbook degrees.  And for Pearson and CBT/McGraw-Hill and the College Board, etc., there are the oceans of cash to be made from canned curriculum and standardized testing/scoring at the college level. 

If Anya Kamenetz had any clue about the devastation that has been created in K-12 by the backwards-gazing zombies that comprise the corporate education reform movement, surely she would think twice about selling her soul to these long term losers and predatory d-bags.  Education is not a business, and anyone who treats it as such is not an educator.   But then that is far below the calling of the pampered, positivized pitchmen for the new age fascism that is brought to you by Capitalists Without Borders, or national socialism without loyalty to any government.

Anya Kamenentz, Beautiful Shill for Corporate Higher Ed, Pt. 1

A drastic shortage of college educated workers is the latest fabricated educational crisis by the hedge fund swindlers from Wall Street and the corporate foundations.  Here is the astonishing bullshit news as presented on the website from the diploma mill, College for America, which is the exploitative moneymaking scam for Southern New Hampshire University:

In a city, a business opens a new plant. The expansion brings 500 additional job openings to the area. 22,000 individuals apply. Only 150 applicants are qualified. Even in this difficult economy employers struggle to find workers with the skills they need. Too many employers have employees who lack the skills necessary to advance and keep their firms viable. 

A college degree no longer signals sound basic skills in oral and written communication, quantitative literacy, and collaboration. Graduates often lack the fundamentals. Key employees seek advancement. Yet without a degree, which often is too difficult to complete in traditional settings, many are held back. 

The U.S. ranks 16th among developed nations in percentage of sub-baccalaureate degree holders. By 2018, the U.S. will require an additional three million workers with college degrees, and 63 percent of all jobs will require some college. Access to traditional higher education and its guarantee of mastery of relevant skills is at an all-time low. Without radical change, the U.S. will see its competitive strength continue to wane. By building competencies rather than credits and reducing the cost burden, the College for America breaks down the barriers to college-level education for millions and is poised help put America back in its position of global leadership.

Since there is no mention of where these 22,000 mostly-illiterate applicants were turned away, I went googling.  What I found was something quite different. I found this from the Toledo Blade from 2012:

After an early glitch to a listing for hourly employees in Detroit, it only took four hours for Chrysler to meet its applicant quota earlier this year. Also earlier this year, Hyundai made news when it said it quickly collected 22,000 applications for about 900 jobs at a plant in Alabama. 

And then there was this from Bloomberg News in 2012:

Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL), the world’s second-largest carrier, received 22,000 applications for about 300 flight attendant jobs in the first week after posting the positions outside the company.

So it would seem that the truth, as we have to come to expect, is exactly the opposite of what these scammers present as fact: the shortage is REAL JOBs, rather than capable and educated workers.  

In terms of the 3 million additional workers with degrees needed by 2018, the U. S. Dept. of Education clearly indicates there is no problem.  In fact, there will be a surplus of college degrees in most fields:

During the 2013–14 school year, colleges and universities are expected to award 943,000 associate’s degrees; 1.8 million bachelor's degrees; 778,000 master's degrees; and 177,000 doctor's degrees (source, source, source, and source).

In fact, there is a troubling oversupply of college graduates now "mal-employed":

Paul Harrington, director of Drexel University's Center for Labor Markets and Policy Studies in Philadelphia, said that trend coupled with what he calls “mal employment,” masks the struggles many new college graduates face.He said mal employment — college graduates working in jobs that don't require a college degree, estimated to be as many as 40 percent in recent years — is troubling.

“All the economic gains associated with getting a college degree stem from getting a job in the college labor market. If you don't, there is virtually no payoff (in earnings),” Harrington said. “If you're an engineering major and you work for a financial institution as analyst, I'd call that college labor market. But if you had a biology major and you're a shoe salesman, I'd say you're not in the college labor market.” 

The supply of new college graduates has grown much faster than anyone anticipated, from 1.23 million in 1999-2000 to 1.7 million this year.

Of course, if you are a company like Microsoft seeking to hold down labor costs while finding new ways to deepen dependence upon computer technology, or if you are in the college loan business, then an oversupply of college students is just the ticket to more wealth. 

Enter the Gates and Lumina Foundations to lead in the promotion of an oversupply of college grads from online diploma mills.  These behemoth foundations are in the lead on channeling this new river of revenue, with the education industry's personal promoter, Jeb Bush, along with Red State governors, in hot pursuit as well.  

With Lumina founded to promote the interests of the college loan industry and the Gates Foundation founded to promote tech solutions even where there are not problems, these two heavyweights are fueling the further development of the lower end of the college caste system, whereby those with little pay the most for the education that is worth the least.  

Anna Kamenentz has emerged as a chief spokeswoman for this new global corporate exploitation scheme to turn college for the poor into an limitless blood source for the corporate vampires.  See her in action here from 2010:

Somehow Anya expects us to equate the value of digital texts AND canned curricula to save faculty from costly consumption of time for class preparation. Apparently, with faculty costs outweighing all other university expenses, we need to concentrate on cutting costs even if we must carve up the golden goose at the same time we expect to gather its eggs.  No more of those old school knowledge experts required, at least in colleges for the non-privileged.

The result? A university taught by academic sharecroppers with Pearson or McGraw-Hill canned courses that students plug into in order to pass "competency" tests. Welcome to Corporate College for the poor.