A Whole New Perfect Storm

In my inbox this morning I find an email from Eran Ariel of WhiteSmoke, suggesting that if we "are interested in providing immediate enhancement to the clarity and professionalism of students’ writing, WhiteSmoke can help." As their PowerPoint presentation shows, WhiteSmoke is essentially an amped-up grammar-checker that improves enormously on Word: catches far more problems, is far more accurate, and gives writers far more constructive advice.

This reminds me of the buzz on WPA-L over StraighterLine, which cwerry on Kairosnews describes as "an alliance between the largest online tutoring company (Smarthinking), one of the largest media/publishing companies (McGraw Hill), the largest learning management company (Blackboard), and a number of partner educational institutions." (See also Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed piece.) What they're offering is a solution to what StraighterLine CEO Burck Smith calls the "perfect storm" facing higher education these days--"budget cuts, surging enrollments, lower endowments, increased competition and needier students"--through the online outsourcing of developmental and gen ed courses. As cwerry writes:

StraighterLine promises to help universities cut costs, manage higher enrollments, expand revenue and course offerings, reach new markets (such as foreign students) and increase the quality of education. They offer 'turnkey' courses in developmental writing and composition (as well as business and mathematics) that cost $399 per class, with 24 hour, seven-days-a-week access to teachers, and up to 10 hours one-on-one instruction (with the option of more teacher contact if the student pays for it). Students will get 'instructional support that is more convenient, more immediate, and more consistent' than regular classes. The explicit model for such teaching is the call center, with its sophisticated tools for optimizing "utilization capacity."

As Burck Smith writes on his blog, the goal of this initiative is to "transform the cost structure of higher education":

The StraighterLine model only provides general education courses. By working with partner colleges, StraighterLine can carve out these high enrollment courses. The courses that are the best candidates for standardization and commoditization at volume. In this way, students that successfully pass StraighterLine courses can receive real college credit at a fraction of the cost of traditional college courses… If all goes well, in 3 years or so, StraighterLine will be a primary provider of general education courses.

Note the keywords there: "standardization," "commoditization," "pass courses," "receive real college credit," and "at a fraction of the cost." StraighterLine is not interested in taking over the liberal part of a liberal education, the business of liberating students from prejudice and fear to critical thinking and creativity; they recognize that there is a part of higher education that is "lesser," inferior, a part that most universities and colleges aren't crazy about having to deliver anyway, and so should be eager to outsource:

While there certainly are some teaching functions that are best not outsourced--particularly those that require a high degree of socialization, such as most teaching of elementary students--there are many functions that can be easily outsourced. For instance, math, science, and writing fundamentals are essentially the same across schools, states, and countries. Most schools are already comfortable with outsourcing at least some elements of education--many schools that offer distance-learning courses do so through third-party providers, and textbooks and courseware are the result of outsourcing content development and delivery.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these are the courses that are technically speaking "college prep." In countries where only a small elite attends university--most of the world, in fact--these courses are taught in high schools, and universities devote all their undergraduate attention, energy, and money to teaching in the majors. In the US, so-called "college-prep" high school students take these courses too, and AP or CLEP out of their equivalents in college. The problem arises with open admissions, or generally the democratizing impulse to make higher education available to as broad a spectrum of the American populace as possible, including those who didn't take college-prep classes in high school. Those students now have to spend two years, fully half of their college experience, getting up to speed for college-level coursework.

And you know, the outsourcing or "call center" impulse does seem to make a lot of sense here. To the extent that we see gen ed courses in "math, science, and writing fundamentals" as sheer rote learning, why not outsource them to Asia? The $3500 we at the University of Mississippi pay adjuncts per FYW course provides a few full-time people a barely adequate lower-middle-class income here in Oxford; but a lot of colleges and universities, including the community college branch campus in town, pay less than $2000 per course, which means that a married person can earn just barely enough to stay above the poverty line by teaching a 4/4, but once that couple has a baby, the adjunct has to teach a 5/5 to hit the poverty line. That same money, say between $14,000 and $18,000 a year, is an upper-middle-class income in India, enough for a nice apartment and great vacations. A lot of Indian college graduates would be happy to do it for a lot less than that.

But, you say, what about quality of education? If quality of education is defined in terms of standardization and commoditization, passing the courses and saving money, no problem. I'm sure Indian call-center workers could be trained to do just as good a job answering student writers' questions about WhiteSmoke corrections as they do answering tech support questions for Microsoft.

I'm in the middle of a book by Daniel H. Pink called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. His argument is that the information age, ruled over by "left-brain" knowledge workers, is essentially over, and we're entering a new age, which he (inadequately, I think) calls a "conceptual age," involving a spreading "right-brain" concern with design, story, the big picture, empathy, play, and meaning. Two of the big reasons this is happening: automation and globalization. Many of the high-end professions that used to require a graduate degree and superior logical and analytical skills are now being computerized and outsourced to Asia. More and more functions traditionally performed by doctors and lawyers, for example--diagnosis and creating legal documents--are now increasingly being performed by computers, run either by clients themselves or by call centers in Asia. Pink suggests that Garry Kasparov is the John Henry of the information age: having bragged in 1987 that "no computer can ever beat me," he was beaten by a 1.4-ton chess-playing IBM called Deep Blue just ten years later, in 1997; and having wrestled a successor to a draw in 2003, he now predicts that it will only be a few years before computers beat every chess Grand Master every time. Chess, of course, is the quintessential left-brain information-age knowledge-worker game: all logic and strategy.

In the world of FYW, automation is WhiteSmoke, and globalization is StraighterLine. To the extent that FYW is teaching students to write letter-perfect papers, there is no reason for anyone in this country to keep expecting to get paid to teach it. It can already--or will be soon--be taught much more efficiently and cheaply by computers and call centers in Asia.

I'm not being snarky here. I do believe that there is a standardizable element to writing instruction, and I recognize that the current trend toward automation and globalization of information-age functions means that those elements will increasingly be taken away from us. Nor do I think this is a terrible thing. If the standardizable element of writing instruction is what we call "current-traditional rhetoric"--the teaching of mechanics and structure according to universalized rules, or what Burck Smith calls "writing fundamentals"--it is no great loss to have that taken away from us.

To the extent that there is a real danger here--a "perfect storm"--it lies in the likelihood that university administrators will blithely equate all writing instruction with the teaching of mechanics and structure according to universalized rules and want to outsource all of it. Obviously, the field of writing studies has developed a long list of interactive and systemic concerns, from rhetorical situation to social justice, that could not and should not be standardized, commoditized, or outsourced; and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves faced with a choice between complete capitulation (letting administrators outsource all writing instruction) and dividing and (not really) conquering--that latter entailing some kind of compromise solution where, say, Comp I is outsourced but Comp II is not, or FYW is outsourced but WAC/WID is not.

But if Pink is right, that as the global economy continues to automate and outsource knowledge work we are going to see a growing need for creativity and empathetic integration in design, story, and play--if, in other words, the humdrum knowledge-worker jobs in cubicles that standardized writing instruction prepares our students for are increasingly sent to Asia--we're going to have to make the case that the value FYW adds to a university education lies not in correctness but in creativity, not in perfect papers but in play, not in formulaic argumentative structure but in story. We're going to have to argue that in pursuing liberal ideals in education--educating the whole person, and indeed the whole community--we are not just clinging to an outmoded ideology but actively and effectively preparing our students for the workplace of tomorrow.