RE: Why college football will be dead in 20 years
Before this is dismissed out of hand entirely the article does a good job of raising the attention level to certain trends which will change our way of life, although the direct connection to college football remains to be seen. I hear a healthy dose of skepticism in your posts, but I also hear some denial.
In the state of Georgia they are conducting an experiment to educate some of the better students at home via courses taught on line and produced by an ACC school. The cost of educating that student at home is 3,000 per year per student. The cost of educating that same teen traditionally is over 11,000 per student. With the state budgets across the country under stress these kinds of options will be experimented with. Facing educators in Georgia for the upcoming year are more drawbacks in employment opportunities, cutting of arts, closing of schools, and furloughs. In my experience what happens at the grass roots level eventually affects the institutions further up the food chain.
The greatest threat to University enrollment is the high cost of getting that watered down degree. Fewer people will be able to afford that expensive degree in a world of automation, cheap labor, and corporate streamlining that all diminish job prospects. Educators are in denial about this. History, state funding, and tenure have dulled their brains to risks that the future trends pose against their profession. Like many government employees they feel entitled (and this is not a knock against them it is rather a product of the culture which developed them).
I'm sure that city workers who retired in Birmingham, AL and Detroit, MI never ever believed that one day in the midst of their retirement that their monthly check would be reduced from a meager $1,200 a month to $300 a month. Could you handle that?
We had an education major at Auburn who graduated Summa *** Laude and spent a year finding a job, and then the only one she could land was in inner city Miami. Not only was this young woman a stellar individual but a former tutor for our athletes. You would think that with her grades, high performance rating, and some political pull she would have had a top choice job, and that within months of graduation.
Many of us here are either retired or in the midst of our careers. We are insulated from the changes in our world by what we perceive as the reality of our security. I'm not being an alarmist, but rather a realist, when I say that in life there is no security only change and adaptability.
As I have written before college football realignment, which is why we are posting on this board, is about survival, not greed. State funding has already been cut to most colleges. There are a growing number of graduates who aren't entering the work force. The mentality of most Universities is to raise costs rather than to try to increase enrollment by lowering them, and if they do try to increase enrollment they still don't reduce the tenures and salaries of the most expensive aspects of their payrolls. Instead, they tend to furlough the low level employees of the schools first and put their payroll on freeze. These measures, ridiculous as they are in practice, have not stemmed the problems, and won't. Enrollment will be down because jobs can't be promised. Departments will be cut. Corporate grants will be more depended upon and fought for. The overall quality of the professional educator's life will start to diminish. Heck, it has already happened in medicine why would anyone think it is not coming in education too.
The truth is we live in a world with an endless supply of labor at a time when automation and technology mean we need even less of a work force. Folks that is a crisis. And it is one that states will respond to with more automation and technology (which will further diminish their tax bases). Add to that the fact that our economic models are threatened because of this and that fiat currencies cannot maintain value in such an environment and we face much more serious issues than this article suggests and over exaggerates pertaining to college sports. In fact the very tax based models of our governmental systems is under great duress because of this shift in both culture and demographics. Our 19th and 20th century approach to these kinds of upheavals is still socialist in thought and the governmental models bear this out. But the truth is that without economic productivity by the majority of the tax base the model can not be sustained. The national debt, the debts of our states, and our municipalities all bear testimony to this. But instead of encouraging a reduction in population, a balancing of needed skill sets in the workforce, and an integration of technology with the above in an orderly and supportive fashion, we are charging into a future of higher inflation due to stressed commodities required for life with a burgeoning population globally, and an international business model that sees itself as bound to no state or ideology outside of their corporate structure (which means they try not to support the social underpinnings of government with taxes).
Instead of socialism or any form of state based security for the public, we are already witnessing the disintegration of the lower forms of government and therefore support structures at the grass roots level. What we are headed for is an operational model of social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, the biggest, the strongest, and the meanest. It will come to the United States last, but this is a model that will be imposed upon us by globalization, and not by ourselves per se. Why? We will have nearly 8 billion people globally competing for food, fuel, and water by the middle of the 21st century. The pentagons defense strategies for the 21st century were in part based upon the defense of potable water supplies. In our new world it is the human being that will be valued least, and therefore their education, or anything that might advantage one over another. The elite will be interested in maintaining advantages, not spreading them. We already see this in education. There are a few elite schools out of which the execs are groomed and then there are the numerous state schools that train mid management if you are lucky and otherwise prepare the working class. High school gets you nothing if that is the extent of your education.
What I expect to see is higher education's further dependence upon corporate support. Therefore they will become essentially high tech trade schools that train the support staff of the corporate structure while a few select schools train their leadership. The future will look more like a feudal system than any other form of government, with your corporate inclusion being your ticket inside the castle that affords some measure of security, as long as you are productive and cost effective. Otherwise, you will be on the outside where you own no land and are prohibited from subsisting off of the land of the corporation.
(This post was last modified: 07-24-2013 12:01 PM by JRsec.)
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Why college football will be dead in 20 years
