It’s for worthless, talentless, unemployable leftists who need make-work jobs.
19 Replies to “Again, Education is NOT for the “Students””
I’d bet this situation exists in every government funded entity in Canada,to one degree or another, from education to health care.
The bureaucracy rewards empire building, not efficiency.
Don, you beat me to it, and I agree wholeheartedly. Campus Presidents and Deputy Ministers do their best to hide this as exposure would diminish their fiefdoms.
It’s hard to believe, but when Memorial University of Newfoundland went to the provincial government or yet more money, the government noted that,with 18000 or so students, Memorial employed 3100 administrators; and 2100 staff who possibly do something useful. When I gave this figure to a lady connected with the University of South Indiana she collapsed in laughter. At least Memorial has a tuition freeze so it is not the students who are paying (yet) for this nonsense.
That would be 3100 administrative staff and 2100 academic staff. My guess is a minority of administrative staff are administrators.
the worst thing is they had to get an auditor to point it out.
” we find these truths to be self evident” —-not us!!!!
They have a pay scale problem…When a person has reached the top of their pay scale the only way to get more money is a promotion into Management….Just need to reduce the Management Pay scale below all others, or cut all pay scales 50% and they all have a new goal to achieve before they get bored & greedy.
Common Core is Communists Goals Indoctrination and Brainwashing no wonder Obama the Fink and the leftists NEA oppose Home Schooling
This. I’ve worked at a couple of private firms that have this as well (usually law and engineering, for some reason) and all kinds of games get played in order to give someone a market-fair salary when the salary bands don’t match up.
I have no idea why they bother. Allowing people to negotiate their own salaries seems like less trouble, since the band system is so corrupted it’s not doing anything useful anyway.
The Management side has pitfalls like evaluations fitting the bell curve (improving) ..Or you jam an employee into the administrative hell of promotion or termination. Scales work.
Pay Negotiations:
The best advise I ever received: Never ask for more money than your Boss’s… Boss makes. Your boss can sell that to his boss & get a raise himself…It works!
This is endemic. I mentioned recently that our fire fighters(though they fight very few fires) just negotiated another raise far in excess of inflation. In our fire department we have 40 regular firemen (average salary: $91,00/yr)and in charge of these 40 are an additional 17 captains.
These ‘smaller town’ firemen make the same as a Vancouver fire fighter, despite housing costs being 1/3 that of Vancouver. Their reasoning: “We get paid for what we know, not where we live”.
Taxpayers? Pssshh.
Worse than this is the fact that these Universities are graduating greater and greater numbers of “Environmental Studies” graduates who would be essentially UN-employable except for Obama’s radical expansion of the EPA, and New “Climate” regulations. The Universities churn-out useless degrees … and their Political operatives invent work for them. THAT is what Climate Change is all about. It is about CHANGING America from a PRODUCTIVE country … into a REGRESSIVE one. Redefining PRODUCTIVITY as Federal REGULATORY overreach and oppression.
Education as currently configured is a bubble; or a bubble within a larger bubble. The cost/benefit calculus is currently shifted away from most “higher” education degrees. Those employed in academia, in their hearts of hearts, know this and are grasping at the lifeboat of administrative sinecures while the gravy train lasts. Once students and their parents realize they are being hosed, the whole rotten structure will collapse like the Dutch tulip bulb fiasco.
This is also true of that other socialist sacred cow: Universal health care.
The one that frightens me the most is the tuition for full-time undergrads.
$42 thousand a year? Good grief! That’s enough to buy a nice Subaru!
What value are those students getting for their money? A bunch of profs and instructors that say, “I’m expensive. Hand it over, young lad.”?
What a waste of money.
[ Problem number three: “mind-numbingly boring.” All teachers who have been through Cultural Marxist Re-education Centre Number One – aka their local teacher training college – know that actually teaching kids stuff not only stifles their vital creativity but that it doesn’t actually work because it just doesn’t, it’s like this thing called “Chalk ‘n’ Talk” which is really bad, m’kaay? ] http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/08/04/the-chinese-are-right-respect-is-the-last-thing-our-children-need/
Web based degrees are 1/4 of the cost of campus based ed – there’s the reason
I think I read this idea on a link from SDA awhile ago:
In any organization or profession, there are those who are dedicated to the actual original goals of the organization. In education, this is educating children. In health, this is healing and maintaining the health of people. Many who enter those professions are initially in this category. Unfortunately, there is another type. They are more concerned with maintaining the organization than the original stated goals and activities of the organization. (I will stick to teaching in my example, as it is where I spent 30 years.)
While Thelma Teacher is spending all her weekends and free time devising plans to help her students learn, across the hall, Orville Activist is more concerned with the organization itself than with teaching. He may have come out of college like that, or he may have morphed into it along the way. Either way, at present he is more concerned about what teaching theories are “trending” than what actually works for his students. He attends the weekend union seminars, and becomes more dedicated to the organization than the goals of the organization. He is the type that tends to climb the ladders of authority in any organization (after all, THAT is where there loyalties and energies are focused). So while Thelma spends her career in her little room nurturing children’s minds, Orville ends up in head office setting policies. At one time, there were many Thelmas to balance the Orvilles in education. Today, thanks to the meme in our colleges that teachers must be “agents of change” and “shapers of attitudes” there are far more Orvilles than ever. Another influencing factor – he is held up as a model for young teachers to emulate, while Thelma toils quietly away from the limelight.(And at this point, let me voice my deepest, most heartfelt thanks to the many Thelmas, unabashedly male and female, who cared enough to shape me as they did. I fear their ilk are not as common as they once were.)
Feel free to apply this principle to health care, politics, or whatever. The larger the organization, the more closely it will conform to this pattern.
Dang – “their!” gotta start rereading before typing the captcha.
Good one first timer. I too was part of an organization (not a teacher) in which there was an immutable culture, mostly brought on by the Human Resources empire. The fundamental business of the profession became unimportant to the point of dismissiveness, and then neglect. Empire-building and hiding from hard work were rampant feature of this culture. Those who remained in the non-management positions were becoming ever increasingly more cynical as their superiors were inventing ever more asinine policies and conventions to justify their existences. Most of their initiatives were tailored to the Politically Correct vision, a staple of the brave new HR world. I can’t help but theorize that this revolutionary “Best Practises” HR is a sneaky way for political correctness to infiltrate any given organization. Best Practises my azz. It was a square peg in a round hole all the way.
I’d bet this situation exists in every government funded entity in Canada,to one degree or another, from education to health care.
The bureaucracy rewards empire building, not efficiency.
Don, you beat me to it, and I agree wholeheartedly. Campus Presidents and Deputy Ministers do their best to hide this as exposure would diminish their fiefdoms.
It’s hard to believe, but when Memorial University of Newfoundland went to the provincial government or yet more money, the government noted that,with 18000 or so students, Memorial employed 3100 administrators; and 2100 staff who possibly do something useful. When I gave this figure to a lady connected with the University of South Indiana she collapsed in laughter. At least Memorial has a tuition freeze so it is not the students who are paying (yet) for this nonsense.
That would be 3100 administrative staff and 2100 academic staff. My guess is a minority of administrative staff are administrators.
the worst thing is they had to get an auditor to point it out.
” we find these truths to be self evident” —-not us!!!!
They have a pay scale problem…When a person has reached the top of their pay scale the only way to get more money is a promotion into Management….Just need to reduce the Management Pay scale below all others, or cut all pay scales 50% and they all have a new goal to achieve before they get bored & greedy.
Common Core is Communists Goals Indoctrination and Brainwashing no wonder Obama the Fink and the leftists NEA oppose Home Schooling
This. I’ve worked at a couple of private firms that have this as well (usually law and engineering, for some reason) and all kinds of games get played in order to give someone a market-fair salary when the salary bands don’t match up.
I have no idea why they bother. Allowing people to negotiate their own salaries seems like less trouble, since the band system is so corrupted it’s not doing anything useful anyway.
The Management side has pitfalls like evaluations fitting the bell curve (improving) ..Or you jam an employee into the administrative hell of promotion or termination. Scales work.
Pay Negotiations:
The best advise I ever received: Never ask for more money than your Boss’s… Boss makes. Your boss can sell that to his boss & get a raise himself…It works!
This is endemic. I mentioned recently that our fire fighters(though they fight very few fires) just negotiated another raise far in excess of inflation. In our fire department we have 40 regular firemen (average salary: $91,00/yr)and in charge of these 40 are an additional 17 captains.
These ‘smaller town’ firemen make the same as a Vancouver fire fighter, despite housing costs being 1/3 that of Vancouver. Their reasoning: “We get paid for what we know, not where we live”.
Taxpayers? Pssshh.
Worse than this is the fact that these Universities are graduating greater and greater numbers of “Environmental Studies” graduates who would be essentially UN-employable except for Obama’s radical expansion of the EPA, and New “Climate” regulations. The Universities churn-out useless degrees … and their Political operatives invent work for them. THAT is what Climate Change is all about. It is about CHANGING America from a PRODUCTIVE country … into a REGRESSIVE one. Redefining PRODUCTIVITY as Federal REGULATORY overreach and oppression.
Education as currently configured is a bubble; or a bubble within a larger bubble. The cost/benefit calculus is currently shifted away from most “higher” education degrees. Those employed in academia, in their hearts of hearts, know this and are grasping at the lifeboat of administrative sinecures while the gravy train lasts. Once students and their parents realize they are being hosed, the whole rotten structure will collapse like the Dutch tulip bulb fiasco.
This is also true of that other socialist sacred cow: Universal health care.
The one that frightens me the most is the tuition for full-time undergrads.
$42 thousand a year? Good grief! That’s enough to buy a nice Subaru!
What value are those students getting for their money? A bunch of profs and instructors that say, “I’m expensive. Hand it over, young lad.”?
What a waste of money.
[ Problem number three: “mind-numbingly boring.” All teachers who have been through Cultural Marxist Re-education Centre Number One – aka their local teacher training college – know that actually teaching kids stuff not only stifles their vital creativity but that it doesn’t actually work because it just doesn’t, it’s like this thing called “Chalk ‘n’ Talk” which is really bad, m’kaay? ]
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/08/04/the-chinese-are-right-respect-is-the-last-thing-our-children-need/
Web based degrees are 1/4 of the cost of campus based ed – there’s the reason
I think I read this idea on a link from SDA awhile ago:
In any organization or profession, there are those who are dedicated to the actual original goals of the organization. In education, this is educating children. In health, this is healing and maintaining the health of people. Many who enter those professions are initially in this category. Unfortunately, there is another type. They are more concerned with maintaining the organization than the original stated goals and activities of the organization. (I will stick to teaching in my example, as it is where I spent 30 years.)
While Thelma Teacher is spending all her weekends and free time devising plans to help her students learn, across the hall, Orville Activist is more concerned with the organization itself than with teaching. He may have come out of college like that, or he may have morphed into it along the way. Either way, at present he is more concerned about what teaching theories are “trending” than what actually works for his students. He attends the weekend union seminars, and becomes more dedicated to the organization than the goals of the organization. He is the type that tends to climb the ladders of authority in any organization (after all, THAT is where there loyalties and energies are focused). So while Thelma spends her career in her little room nurturing children’s minds, Orville ends up in head office setting policies. At one time, there were many Thelmas to balance the Orvilles in education. Today, thanks to the meme in our colleges that teachers must be “agents of change” and “shapers of attitudes” there are far more Orvilles than ever. Another influencing factor – he is held up as a model for young teachers to emulate, while Thelma toils quietly away from the limelight.(And at this point, let me voice my deepest, most heartfelt thanks to the many Thelmas, unabashedly male and female, who cared enough to shape me as they did. I fear their ilk are not as common as they once were.)
Feel free to apply this principle to health care, politics, or whatever. The larger the organization, the more closely it will conform to this pattern.
Dang – “their!” gotta start rereading before typing the captcha.
Good one first timer. I too was part of an organization (not a teacher) in which there was an immutable culture, mostly brought on by the Human Resources empire. The fundamental business of the profession became unimportant to the point of dismissiveness, and then neglect. Empire-building and hiding from hard work were rampant feature of this culture. Those who remained in the non-management positions were becoming ever increasingly more cynical as their superiors were inventing ever more asinine policies and conventions to justify their existences. Most of their initiatives were tailored to the Politically Correct vision, a staple of the brave new HR world. I can’t help but theorize that this revolutionary “Best Practises” HR is a sneaky way for political correctness to infiltrate any given organization. Best Practises my azz. It was a square peg in a round hole all the way.