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Volume 38 Issue 8
January 23, 2001

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Quality education lost in race for big numbers

LEGEND'S VIEW
MESA LEGEND
Submitted January 23, 2001

Imagine a perfect world where people were paid based on the importance of their role in society – the title, "adjunct faculty" would be a prestigious, sought-after and well-rewarded title.

Unfortunately, we live in the Maricopa Community Colleges district.

We don’t get to see a world that reveres teachers as a precious commodity, and we won’t see the days when academic institutions become better and better following an exponential curve.

We live in the most prosperous time in history, but we are not making crucial investments in our teachers.

We may never see these days because the administration have become content with benefiting from prosperity and growth in numbers, and with short-sightedness, neglecting the future.

Have we reached a point where there are too many teachers?

Is the market saturated with teachers?

That is how teachers are treated.

Instead of acting on the opportunity to draw finer teachers to MCC by offering financial incentives, teachers are offered the bare minimum.

If this is not acceptable to the instructor, the instructor is simply replaced by a teacher that is willing to accept the wages that won’t increase.

This creates the opposite attraction; instead of drawing the best instructors, it draws instructors who are willing to settle, instructors that are in need, instructors that are already stretched thin and struggling to make ends meet.

How much attention can an instructor give to a class when they themselves are struggling to cover the costs of living?

At least this creates sympathy for students who are also working two jobs and going to school full-time.

Why would the administration settle for this type of system?

MCC is the largest community college in the country.

Why settle for being the biggest when you could be the biggest and the best?

Is it because locally the MCCD has a monopoly?

What incentive does the district have to improve?

Who cares if MCC has better instructors than the Carson Valley Community College District?

If you don’t like the community college, you can always go to ASU and pay four times the cost, but that is the only local competition, which is really no competition at all.

The administration must find a motivation within itself to create prestige in the title of "adjunct faculty."

They must have the integrity to motivate themselves to invest in the future.

They may continue the current McDonald’s-style revolving door for instructors who are willing to keep their mouths shut and be content with scraps from the table.

As students, we are grateful to those instructors that are willing to put up with the administration’s decision to sit back and collect checks for being in the right place at the right time.

Without their determination and tolerance it would not be possible to sustain a community college. It is the dedicated instructors that are the back bone of this institution.

It’s a wonderful thing to see the MCC administration reside on the throne of education, in the fastest growing district in the country with no competition, and repeatedly drop the ball.

They could have better instructors, who have the availability to give the students not only the time that they deserve, but also what they are paying for.

MCC could be a revered school with national academic recognition, a school that teachers would be drawn to out of pride instead of need.

But it will never happen as long as the administration continues to be satisfied with numerical student growth due to good weather.

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