The Degree Mill Part Deux

The GI Bill is probably the biggest motivating factor for many to join the Army. However, it did not factor into my calculus at the time of my enlisting. As my contract wore on, however, I began to become more honest with myself about where I was going in the future, or not going, as it were. For those who don't know, I did not go to college after high school. I went to several vocational schools. Perhaps I will tell that story later. But, as I sit here on this deployment staring my future in the face, I constatntly think about how I may have missed out on something, or that going back to college will somehow fill a void. Or, that I just need to proove something to myself. But, the current state of acadamia crushes my Sorkinesque fantasies and leaves me with nothing but the cold hard reality. That is what this, and the previous essay, is about. Wrestling with the idea of going back to college, what that actually entails, what I may actually get out of it, and do I actually have what it takes to live up to my own standard. I don't know. It haunts me. Perhaps I should give up the quixotic quest. Here is part 2 of my continually evolving thoughts on the subject–I'm sure many more are to come.

For most of the 20th century, large corporations—from AT&T to GM—ran their own robust in-house training programs. They did not expect new hires to arrive ready for rubber to meet the road; they invested in shaping their workforce for the long haul. By the 1990s, however, corporate training was reclassified as an overhead expense to be sacrificed to the almighty shareholder gods. So, more and more, the responsibility for professional preparation and development was outsourced to universities, and the concomitant cost shifted to individuals through debt. This mass redirection of students into the college system fueled the exponential growth of mid-level institutions—schools neither elite nor vocational—that now function less as centers of scholarship and more as logistical operations to churn out their widgets; diploma mills in all but name.

In this new model, faculty quality is treated simply as a cost to be minimized. Roughly 70 percent of faculty nationwide are adjuncts, earning a median of just $3,700 per course[1]—often without benefits—while full-time professors earn a median of $83,980[2]. This “adjunctification” mirrors the corporate retreat from in-house experts: instructional labor is casualized, disposable, and tasked with supervising throughput on the conveyor belt rather than fostering deep intellectual growth. The result is predictable: minimal mentorship, minimal innovation, and courses designed for efficiency over excellence.

Meanwhile, administrative payrolls swell. Since the 1970s, the number of administrators per student has grown dramatically—up 24% from 1975 to 2005[3]—and surely even more since then, even as the share of full-time faculty stagnates. Compliance officers, recruitment teams, marketing departments, and student services now make up a significant portion of the budget. These roles serve the institution’s true function: processing as many students as possible and handing them to employers as pre-screened applicants ready to navigate even more bureaucracy. The mid-level college is not a modern Athens—it is a modern factory.

This state of things shapes the reality of the curriculum. Hard sciences, engineering, and high-level humanities like philosophy are minority pursuits; in 2022, humanities accounted for just 8.8% of bachelor’s degrees[4], while business/management took 18.8%. Business degrees alone have grown by 60% in two decades[5], while majors in communications, hospitality, and health administration dominate catalogs. These are fields pure corporate training—designed to look practical, but delivering neither the rigor of elite programs nor the specificity of trade school skill sets.

The drift of mid-level colleges into diploma mills was not accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of corporations abandoning training, policymakers pushing universal college attendance, and institutions optimizing for scale rather than scholarship. Reform won’t fix this. The whole apparatus needs to be dismantled and the mid-level tier entirely replaced with a simple two-tiered system: elite research universities focused on theoretical mastery in fields like physics, philosophy, and hardcore computer science; and robust trade/tech schools providing targeted, market-aligned training in everything from welding to cloud engineering. This model preserves the intellectual mission of the university while delivering practical skills without the debt trap. The mid-level college, stranded between these two missions, is not just underperforming—it is structurally unnecessary.  And, lastly, which seems to already be happing, corporations must spin-up their once defunct in-house training.  It is obvious to me that this is a much better solution as they themselves would know what they need from their employees more than Podunk State could ever dream of.

References:

[1] “Spotlight on Adjunct Faculty in 2024,” Cengage, https://blog.cengage.com/spotlight-on-adjunct-faculty-in-2024

[2] “Postsecondary Teachers,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/postsecondary-teachers.htm

[3] “Professors in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_States

[4] “Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/bachelors-degrees-humanities

[5] “Proof Points: The Number of College Graduates in the Humanities Drops for the Eighth Consecutive Year,” Hechinger Report, https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year