Education and the Coronavirus: Trying to Look on the Bright Side

Sean Gabb

Whether the Coronavirus is the Spanish Flu come again I cannot say, and will not try. We shall have some grounds for knowing by Easter, and may have confirmation next year, when the annual mortality figures are published. Something I can say, however, is that the response to the Virus will have large and continuing effects. Many things will return to normal after the lockdown. Much else will not. As ever with those things that change, there will be a new set of winners and losers. And, where education is concerned, I can hope that I shall stand in the queue of the winners – not, I suppose, anywhere near the front, but somewhere in it, modestly and gratefully picking up such additional crumbs as may fall to me in the market where I earn much of my regular income.

As a private tutor, I have been teaching on-line since 2008. I discovered, when I was made redundant from my university, that Deal was a nice place for living and for spending money, but that almost no one in East Kent wanted to learn Greek or Latin. I therefore went on-line. At first, I saw this as an inferior substitute for the “real thing.” Then, as I made the necessary adjustments, and as the technology steadily improved, I realised that it was a liberation from the chore of travelling from home to do what I could do just as easily from home – and that I could often do better from home.

But allow me to set out in a more formal manner some of the benefits of on-line tuition:

First, as said, it abolishes the need for travelling. This applies to both teachers and students. I am a two-hour commute from London, which is the biggest market in Europe for my services. It is over an hour from Tonbridge, where I am involved in holiday revision courses. Even now, when I qualify for a third off, the price of railway travel is an unwelcome cost. My students in Tonbridge, and in the London institution where I have been persuaded back to mainstream work, often travel long distances. One of my London students comes from Nottingham to learn Greek. There are many potential students who, for reasons of age or poor health, or the cost of travel, are put off learning. On-line teaching is the obvious solution.

Second, it abolishes the need of a physical location for teaching. Some years ago, I was advised to rent an office in Ashford to meet students. I thought about this, but held back because of the increase in my on-line teaching. I saved on rent, on insurance, and again on travel. My London institution is bursting at the seams. Finding classrooms for all the courses run taxes the administration to its limit. There are daily hard looks when a class runs over its allotted time.

Third, it allows teachers and students to share material directly within a lesson. I have been doing something like this in my mainstream teaching since 2004. I hate PowerPoint. Instead, I connect my own computer to the ceiling projector, and make notes as I teach in Word for Windows. At the end of the class, I copy and paste these into an e-mail and send them off to all the students. On-line teaching takes this one step further. I can make notes on a shared whiteboard, and the students can copy and paste for themselves. They can also add their own material. This is useful for teaching a language, when a teacher can write sentences, and students take turns to translate them back and forth. Sometimes, we can pause for a quick search of the Internet. For example, I recently got into a debate with one of my private students about the relationship between the Greek ὁτι and the Latin ut. A few days ago,we discussed the etymology of κροκόδειλος, a word and spelling we had found in Herodotus. In each case, we could both agree within thirty seconds.

Until Tuesday the 24th March 2020 – just over a fortnight ago – there was a rigid division between my private tuition and my mainstream teaching. The former was branching off in all manner of unexpected and creative directions. The latter was just as it had always been, but with nicer photocopiers and electronic registers. On that Tuesday, however, I suspected my London classes would go down because of the spreading panic over the Coronavirus. I added my webcam to the bag on wheels I nowadays take when I go out to teach, and I sent an e-mail to all my students. Sure enough, my first Greek class of the day had only a half attendance, but was nearly full when I fired up Google hangouts. We read our section of Protagoras, and agreed that it went very well. It was the same with all the other classes. Before the last class, I had a text message to say that the building would shut at 10pm that evening until further notice, and that all teaching would now be on-line.

The past few weeks have not gone entirely as I might have wished. One class I had to teach with some students on a Hangouts meeting, one student on Skype via my tablet, and another student via my landline on speakerphone. Some students have been wholly defeated by the technology. There have been failings on my side. I know how to manage an on-line class with just one student. Managing a class of twelve is still a work in progress. But the system works. All my mainstream teaching is now finished until after Easter, and every lesson was somehow delivered. During the holiday, I will give training to those students who need it. We will reopen later this month, until further notice, as an on-line institution. Falling out of bed at 9am, I will shamble down to the basement and, revived by coffee, I will begin earning my daily crust –reading classes in Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Cicero, Vergil, Lucan, and variously less-advanced classes in the Greek and Latin languages.

It is ridiculous that, in 2020, I should report this as progress. With the exception of my Greek and Roman inscription classes, which have been put off until the British Museum reopens, everything I teach needs just a talking head and some means of answering back. The technology that enables this has been mature for at least a decade. Yet it is the present emergency – whether based on a real or an inflated fear – that has produced a chaotic emigration on-line.

But this is how large institutions make radical shifts to embrace new technology. Entrepreneurs hunt for new markets, or for new ways of serving established markets. Large institutions will keep with what worked in the past, so long as it just continues to work in the present. New technologies are adopted after others have discovered the more obvious mistakes, but they are seldom adopted in ways that remake an institution and what it delivers. They are instead added as a supplement, and, after so many promises and so much investment, the managers will ask why the benefits are so marginal. Radical change happens only in an emergency. Facing the prospect of total failure, large institutions will hurry to catch up. The managers will tell each other that this is for the duration, that there will be a return to normality. Sometimes, there is a return to normality, sometimes not. Sometimes, there is an unstable compromise, where elements of the new are allowed to continue beside parts of the restored old.

For British higher education, this third is the most likely result when the classroom doors finally swing open. I expect – assuming I still have any of my jobs – to find a webcam among the permanent furniture of my classroom. Students will be marked present if they are there in person, or if they choose to log in from somewhere else. Since fear of infection will remain long after the Coronavirus has gone away, many will not come back in person. Others who do not fear infection will finally have realised that learning and personal attendance are not necessarily connected. Students will be recruited from further away, and will be given discounts for choosing to learn on-line. When all the students in a class choose to learn on-line, teachers will be shut into little booths, rather than given classrooms.

This will, though, be an unstable compromise. The possibilities of education have been fundamentally transformed in the past twenty years. But these have so far been transformed outside the mainstream. Whether enabled by state funding, or by students unaware of the possibilities, the mainstream providers have not changed in response. British universities, in particular – and I will not speak of universities elsewhere, because I have no personal experience of them – are in poor shape. They have top-heavy and expensive managements. They are heavily in deficit, and they keep up cash flow by welcoming armies of students who should be doing something else to follow courses that are worthless in themselves, or that have been aimed at the lowest common denominator. They have just two remaining marketable assets. They have their brand names, and they have the privilege of certification.

Sooner or later, a British university will understand the lesson of the present emergency. It may not do so all at once, but gradually, covering every stage with managerial euphemism and short term promises to the entrenched interests. But it will downsize. It will turn every department that does not absolutely require personal attendance into a virtual provider. Certified courses will then be offered on-line at heavy discounts. Courses that cannot be presently offered for reasons of cost will then become viable.

For example, I teach a Latin module at one of the universities close to where I live. We need at least a dozen students for the course to run. Every year, half the students say they would like to learn Greek as well. My department is unable to justify the opportunity cost of classroom space and the other costs for a course that might have no more than six students. Take out the opportunity costs, and Greek might find its way into the curriculum. Let it be offered on-line, and dozens or hundreds of students might subscribe from abroad.

The first university to go even partly on-line will make the sort of profits Direct Line Insurance made in the 1980s, when it opened with a call centre rather than a network of local offices. Other universities will follow. They will have to follow. Costs and prices will drop further. Competition and the influence of independent review websites will do something to drive up quality – for the usual suspects, any market scrutiny would cause an improvement. Given present and likely technology, the final equilibrium may see universities as market places and guarantors of quality, and as awarders of certificates. Within these markets, self-employed teachers will offer services to students throughout the world.

Now, I am not describing some fantasy, in which Gaze Theory will be dropped in favour of Greek. So far as there are students with funding who want it, Gaze Theory will continue to be taught. At the same time, a wider diversity of subjects and methods of delivery will have been enabled. This may or may not bring on a secondary recivilisation of the universities. But it will make one possible. It will be an improvement on what we have at the moment.

A further point: I have said nothing of the schools. These face similar general difficulties, and a similar present emergency. Millions of children and their parents have discovered in the past few weeks that learning and schooling are not the same thing, and that one can often compromise the other. This being said, there are large differences between the schools and the universities, and a separate treatment

Here, then, is my potential benefit from the response to the Coronavirus. My women and I are under house arrest. My present employments tremble in the balance. My Easter revision courses have vanished like the steam from an e-cigarette. Ditto my examination marking. For the moment, these actual losses are partly offset by an early trickle of A-Level Latin students who would normally come to me after September. In the longer term, I can hope to offset the potential losses of employment by a more flexible education market, where the division between private and mainstream tuition will have passed away.

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‘Some College, No Degree’ Jobs and the Trouble with the Credential Treadmill

The types of jobs available before and after the Great Recession starkly differ. With the after-effects of the economic slowdown thanks to the coronavirus, the pattern could be repeated.

Many of the jobs usually held by less-educated Americans before the recession have disappeared, while workers with at least some college education disproportionately occupy growing industries, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce (CEW). In their popular 2013 report “Recovery: Job Growth and Education Requirements Through 2020,” CEW concluded that around two-thirds of all jobs in 2020 would require some college education. CEW’s 2013 report is their most recent one and aggregates all the relevant education and economic data in one place.

But the extent to which employers are actually requiring more college education than in the past to fill good jobs isn’t so clear-cut. CEW’s methods for defining how much college education is “required” are hotly disputed. Moreover, employers often complain that college graduates are ill-prepared and don’t have the skills needed in the workforce. Graduates aren’t happy about how costly degrees have become, either.

Contrary to what advocates for requiring 16 years of education may say, there’s strong evidence that young people don’t always need a four-year degree. For many good careers, a shorter college program or even no college can set them on a good path.

Looking Outside of Four-Year Degrees for Middle-Skill Jobs

Taking CEW’s methods at face-value, more clarity is needed for their claim that two-thirds of today’s workers need some college education. The CEW report isn’t saying that 65 percent of the workforce needs a bachelor’s degree—a “college education” means a vocational or professional certificate, an associate degree, or a bachelor’s degree. Almost half (30 percent) of the jobs included in their 65 percent figure need only an associate degree or a vocational or professional certification. The other 35 percent require at least a bachelor’s degree.

Still, this is remarkable growth from 1973, when only 28 percent of jobs were held by those with some college. Some of that increase is due to growth in high-skill sectors like STEM, health care, and community services (largely social workers and counselors). But some of this alleged increase in educational demand is also due to an increasingly educated workforce competing for jobs that have historically required less education.

Using CEW figures, let’s focus on those jobs that can be safely categorized as mostly not requiring a formal degree. In total, 54 percent of today’s jobs, according to CEW, require “some college, no degree” or less. This category mainly covers professional or vocational certifications, and most of them are concentrated in sales & office support, blue-collar jobs, and food & personal services. However, what’s tricky about CEW’s report is that it never says any one job requires one specified amount of education. For example, for a job like “parking enforcement workers,” the report estimates required education level based on the education levels of those currently in those types of jobs—finding that 60 percent of parking enforcement openings require less than a bachelor’s degree.

Essentially, CEW assumes that whatever education a worker has was necessary for the job they hold.

How do those jobs pay? Other CEW data indicates that 44 percent of all “good jobs” (defined as jobs paying at least $35,000 annually for younger workers and at least $45,000 annually to older workers) are currently held by workers without bachelor’s degrees, and most of them have only “some college, no degree” or less.

Consider some examples. In blue-collar occupations, which comprise more than 30 million jobs, a first-line supervisor of production and operating workers makes an average salary of $62,660. Of those 553,000 supervisor jobs, about 71 percent of workers have “some college, no degree” or less. Electricians are another strong example, accounting for 582,000 jobs, making $55,190 on average, and 75 percent of them don’t hold an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

In sales and office support, which account for over 42 million jobs, 66 percent of them are held by those with “some college, no degree” or less. For example, there are around 408,000 jobs for manufacturing and sales representatives. They make a median salary of $61,660, and 48 percent of them have “some college, no degree” or less. Another example is legal secretaries, for which there are over 231,000 jobs, paying an average wage of $48,600, and 61 percent of legal secretaries have “some college, no degree” or less.

Those are only a few examples of the many well-paying jobs that often don’t require a degree and that are growing at average or above-average rates. Their wage growth is impressive, too. Blue-collar jobs, for instance, have recently seen faster wage growth than white-collar jobs. Moreover, other research shows that less-educated workers can achieve upward mobility when they transfer similar skills to higher-paying sectors—such as from food services to professional office services.

Still, a growing share of good jobs—even in middle-skill sectors—are going to those with more education. Why is that the case?

Nicole Smith, chief economist at CEW, contends that many middle-skill jobs now require some college because of upskilling—workers today needing more skills to fill the same job than a generation ago. “Take the example of an auto mechanic,” she said. “In the past, the job mainly required labor-intensive tasks that usually didn’t require any more than a high school education and on-the-job training. Today, auto mechanics are often working with software and technology, which requires more specialized training.”

But, according to Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Case Against Education, it’s precisely that increasing reliance on technology that makes many of today’s jobs easier than they once were. The implication, then, is that formal education is less important today. “Are these jobs getting more cognitively demanding? Much of the evidence suggests they’re getting less cognitively demanding,” he said.

Credential Inflation and Overeducation

Another explanation for the growth in education level for middle-skill workers is credential inflation. To be clear, that a college degree or some college education has substantial benefits for workers is indisputable. As mentioned earlier, the share of all good jobs going to those with some college education or more has substantially grown.

But much of this trend is a consequence of an increasingly educated workforce, not necessarily evidence that more degrees and certifications are needed to fill today’s jobs.

Contrary to CEW’s estimate of a shortage in degrees, other economists think there’s an over-supply of degrees. The Economist estimates that 26.5 million Americans—two-thirds of all bachelor’s holders—are doing work that was mostly done by workers without bachelor’s degrees in the 1970s. They also conclude that a substantial amount of this change can’t be explained by upskilling within jobs, since wages in many of them have remained flat or even declined. That reality causes a dynamic where those with less education are being crowded out of jobs they should be qualified for by others who are over-qualified, thus forcing them to credential up to compete.

“Essentially, CEW regards credential inflation as logically impossible,” Caplan said. “If you go into the data thinking that, of course you’re going to find degree shortages. Many others find high levels of credential inflation.”

Similarly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2016 that only 36 percent of workers were in jobs that typically needed more than a high school diploma for entry, nearly half of CEW’s 65 percent figure. Meanwhile, some 61 percent of working-age Americans have at least some college education. This large difference is because, rather than using CEW’s method and assuming each worker needed their level of education to get their job, BLS uses census data to assign typical requirements for entry into each occupation.

BLS further found that substantial shares of workers—around 50 percent for those with “some college, no degree”—held jobs where they weren’t seeing any wage premium compared to their equivalent peers with only a high school diploma. In other words, their college degrees/certifications weren’t getting them anything.

“Countries have skill shortages, not degree shortages,” Andreas Schleicher told The Economist. Schleicher is the head of education research with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. While a degree may offer economically valuable skills, it does not guarantee those skills and isn’t a perfect substitute for on-the-job training, particularly in middle-skill positions. There are many jobs employing workers with various types of bachelor’s degrees—communications, arts, biology, physical and social sciences—where more-experienced high school graduates make higher or comparable salaries.

Challenging the Popular Narrative

It turns out that measuring the average earnings benefits of college education is not the same thing as measuring true demand for college education in the labor force. While the former lends itself to a simplistic narrative that “more college is better,” the latter complicates the picture by factoring in things like degree inflation. Nonetheless, workers with no formal degree occupy nearly half of America’s good jobs and can still make a great living. Despite the credential treadmill, the “college or bust” narrative is a myth.

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Australia: Labor party warns some universities face collapse as international enrolments plummet

Tanya Plibersek has called on the Morrison government to provide low-cost loans and guarantee universities’ funding, warning some are at risk of collapse due to falls in international enrolments during the Covid-19 crisis.

Ahead of the education minister, Dan Tehan, taking a support package to cabinet to be announced as early as next week, Plibersek told Guardian Australia that there are “now serious concerns that without federal government action some leading institutions could collapse”.

Universities, many of which rely on international students for more than a third of their revenue, are currently engaged in cost-cutting including asking staff to use up leave and instituting hiring freezes.

But representatives of the sector have played down the risk, with Universities Australia chief executive, Catriona Jackson, insisting they are “not asking for a bailout” from government, only “support to help us weather the period ahead”.

Labor wants the government to provide universities with certainty by guaranteeing “proper funding for Australian students”, including paying at least the commonwealth grant scheme funding for the next three years based on projected student numbers before the 2019 budget.

Plibersek also proposes “low or no-cost loans to provide stability in coming months”.

“Australian universities are under immense pressure,” she said. “For years, universities have used income from international education to help fund their world-leading research.

“The Covid-19 pandemic, and global travel restrictions, have led to a crisis in this funding model, with income from international students plummeting over recent months.

“Australia cannot afford to let our universities fall off a cliff. The federal government must act now to shore up our universities.”

In addition to employing almost 260,000 people, Plibersek cited universities’ role in developing new treatments, cures and equipment and educating doctors, nurses and health experts, as reasons to support them.

“They are absolutely critical to dealing with this urgent health crisis – and will be just as critical to our recovery in the years to come,” she said.

“If the federal government fails to act now, some universities could collapse, which would see vital research cut, thousands of jobs lost, and leave students hanging in the middle of degrees.”

Group of Eight universities tend to derive the most revenue from international students, although are considered very unlikely to fail due to their large asset bases. The greater concern is smaller regional universities that also derive a large proportion of revenue from international sources, such as Federation and Central Queensland universities.

Jackson said that Universities Australia has “been talking with government since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic about ways to best support university students and staff, research and teaching, and have greatly appreciated the collaborative approach”.

“Universities are not asking for a bailout,” she told Guardian Australia. “Rather we are seeking government support to help us weather the period ahead, and come out the other side able to play our part in economic and community recovery.”

Luke Sheehy, executive director of the Australian Technology Network group of universities, said he “anticipates the government will consider additional funding for [the sector], and that would be welcome”.

“We hope that it will allow us to look after students and staff, and continue to conduct vital research including to combat Covid-19.”

Sheehy noted universities would feel the greatest impact in the second semester, when international students from the northern hemisphere begin studies in Australia.

Guardian Australia contacted the Group of Eight universities, Regional Universities Network, Federation and Central Queensland universities for comment.

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