Disruption in higher education

Technology has disrupted the 'traditional' job market. Whereas once we were employed in in long-term roles, geographically close to where we worked; post-internet, work has potentially become global (Volkin, 2020). This has hit many sectors, including higher education (Christensen, 2008), resulting in a disrupted social structure and industry (Millar et al., 2018). 

Along with disruption come gig workers. Gig work tends to result in decreased worker terms and conditions, driving out costs for the promise of flexibility (Lawlink, 2020; Oldfield et al., 2021). Here in Aotearoa, neoliberal policies promoting a free market with little government intervention have impacted on permanent employment in our universities. Our casualised university staff are now our Academic Precariat, increasingly resembling gig workers (Oldfield et al., 2021), now described as “microentrepreneurs of the self” (Le Grange, 2020, p. 4) or “on-demand workers” (p. 6). However, we need to consider who holds the power in the relationship: the university, or the academic. 

The estimated casualisation rate in the academic workforce as high as 40% (Oldfield et al., 2021).  In my experience, just pre-Covid, there were something like 30 teaching staff in one school I taught in, and only about five were employees. While it is difficult to determine who is a contractor and who is an employee - as it is not really talked about - I suspect that the true percentage of contractors is likely closer to 75%.  

While no academics are paid well, contractors are generally paid poorly. For example, remuneration of 50 hours to deliver a course is pretty common. That is a week and a quarter to: set up a course; organise assessments; deliver 15 weeks of course work to the cohort; coach; deliver pastoral care; mark the assignments; bank new ideas for next time; and do the admin. Ouch. It appears that 'disrupting' higher education only meant reducing what people were paid for the mahi. And, to further put the contract hours into context, tutors would theoretically be able to deliver two courses every three weeks, minus 4 weeks for leave... so 16 courses per year; thus eight per semester. Delivering eight courses in a semester would be a huge load: I deliver three, and it is comfortably busy.

Driving cost out of businesses tends to work in the short term, but not in the long term. For example, AirB&B doesn't have a depreciation model: buildings are expensive and risky to replace, yet AirB&B doesn't factor in those costs. The same with Uber. Yes, the car as an asset will take five years to be 'consumed' via the process of doing business, but the business model doesn't take that into account. Commercialising education the same: it doesn't allow for upgrading of assets; development of academic staff; learning for learning's sake; and good quality longitudinal research. These disruptive models don't take the cost out of doing business: they IGNORE the cost of doing business, pushing the cost of maintenance, insurance and depreciation off on the contractor. It is only after one full business cycle that the model begins to fall over from a lack of future investment contingency: 20 years for an AirB&B; 5 years for a car; 10-20 years in higher education. 

Perhaps the 'disruption' in the education sector (Christensen et al., 2008) has arisen in Aotearoa (a) because as a society we want more knowledge workers, so we were able to increase throughput (b) because we pushed a quarter of the cost of education off onto our learner tax-payers directly in the form of 25% fees - the government pays the remaining 75%; and (c) we are paying academics as gig workers so have reduced salary, leave, research conditions, and development costs, and (d) we are as a society underfunding future investment in education. Other less intended results seem to be the potential for less high quality, longitudinal research, and fewer replicability studies. 

We lack a future-focused educational strategy. And we are potentially making learning for pleasure a salariat-only possibility.

Sam and Kris

References:

Christensen, C. M., Horn, M.B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. McGraw-Hill.

From Behind the Speaker’s Chair. (1902). Strand Magazine: AN illustrated Monthly, 21(7), pp. 79-80. George Newnes.

Lawlink. (2020, March). The gig economy – a changing workforce. https://www.lawlink.co.nz/article/the-gig-economy-a-changing-workforce/

Le Grange, L. (2020). Could the Covid-19 pandemic accelerate the uberfication of the university? South African Journal of Higher Education, 34(4), 1-10.

Millar, C., Lockett, M., & Ladd, T. (2018). Disruption: Technology, innovation and society. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 129, 254-260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.10.020

Oldfield, L., Roy, R., Simpson, A., Jolliffe Simpson, A., & Salter, L. (2021). Academic Activism in the Wake of a Pandemic: A Collective Self-Reflection from Aotearoa/New Zealand. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, & Consultation, 10, 215-227. https://doi.org/10.1027/2157-3891/a000027

Volkin, M. (2020, March 27). Why the gig economy will drive the future of employment. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2020/03/27/why-the-gig-economy-will-drive-the-future-of-employment/#6218d5d44f52

* Kris Porter kindly supplied some of the material for this post