on the other end of the education spectrum

 I see that colleges and universities are painting themselves into one corner of their coffins as they work to adapt to post-covid-conditions.

My youngest kid straddles the conflicting options presented to young people these days: she sees that in many regards a college education is superfluous to what's going to be needed of people going into a future that won't resemble the present-day business as usual. Yet it is still touted as an ideal and a requirement in this present-day, a present-day that she must work through to get to that likely future. Her father (as an immigrant for whom education opened some doors) is unable to see the viability of non-college options, even though he was among the intellectual cohort who got hit and left by the wayside by the overgeneration of PhDs and the subsequent turn of higher education institutions away from funding faculty. So she walks an uneasy line.

The situation leaves her being of two minds. She's taking courses at the local community college and intends to transfer to a state university in the near future, but she's nimble in her thinking. Given an adequate build-up of impetus, she's willing to forego the status-marker that won't guarantee any sort of employment or deep capacity for making a livelihood, though she's not got a Plan B in place (mostly a result of being young and undecided, but also of being rather unsure just HOW to prepare for what's coming).

One increment of that above-mentioned impetus arrived the other day as she read the syllabus for the (online) Spanish class she signed up for. Everything has been moved to online at this community college, and one facet of the interface is remote proctoring of exams. Reading the fine print, she found that she was being asked to consent to installing a third-party's software that would have access to her webcam, her internet browser and screen, her microphone, and IP address. In order to take the course she must consent to be watched, if not by a live person, then by a bot that would track her mouse clicks, her eye movements, her actions, her surroundings. If any of her behavior during the taking of a quiz or test triggers suspicion, she would be flagged and, given "adequate" reason, accused of cheating. In addition,

The companies retain rights to much of what they gather from students’ computers and bedrooms. ProctorU’s privacy policy for test-takers in California shows the company shares reams of sensitive student data with proctors and schools: their home addresses; details about their work, parental and citizenship status; medical records, including their weight, health conditions and physical or mental disabilities; and biometric data, including fingerprints, facial images, voice recordings and “iris or retina scans.

This Washington Post article (whence the above quote comes) talks about schools' sudden rush to outsource what used to be a teacher's responsibility in a way that has resulted in, well, for lack of a better term, a "value-added product." It's pointed out that,  "the explosive growth [in this industry] casts light on what could be a pivotal moment for mass surveillance in the United States..."

Incensed and horrified by the requirement and the fine print, youngest kid did some digging. Of course the school states they won't "sell or trade students' data." The service-provider says essentially the same thing too, but they also go on to say, however, that all the data they collect goes to a fourth-party collector of "knowledge bases" (fancy term for database) but that the service

...uses a variety of services hosted by [other] third parties to help provide our Services, such as hosting our various blogs, help center, and knowledge bases, and to help us understand the use of our Services. These services may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP request.
We do not control third parties' tracking technologies. If you have any questions about these third-party technologies, you should contact the responsible provider directly. 

Somewhere down the line, though somebody is saying, "all your (knowledge)base are belong to us."

Also, young people are being acclimated to surveillance, they're selling their privacy out of fear that there are no other options for them. It's normalized and that normalization has been granted legitimacy "because of the virus" and the "extraordinary times."

In the Washington Post article, one student recognized that, "Everyone's giving up their freedom just for the virus."

Youngest kid is weighing her options - she's written to several deans and administrators at her school (why are there so many deans? That question prompted a side talk about administrative bloat required to suck up all the college grads in need of jobs). She's expecting them to blow her off, and admittedly she is considering remaining enrolled in the class but taking all the exams via VPN or on our old computer that's basically wiped of interesting information and can be propped in a plain white corner... She's not quite ready to give up on this path, but she's getting closer. She's getting closer and she's got a weather eye out.

It's interesting that the people locking us into this situation and even those casting a critical eye toward it don't see what this portends.

Consumer Reports' Bill Fitzgerald wrote, "The people who have the most to lose here are the students, and they're the farthest away from the decision. ...Students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to have their higher-ed institutions sell them out."

I actually see the students being closest to the decision. They might very well decide to walk away from it. They're already suspicious of corporate everything even though they use corporate products. I see that at least some members of the younger generations are assessing the benefits and the drawbacks of a lot of what's taken for granted as "required" for youth. More power to those who are willing to pull the rug out.

Here's to not walking willingly into the maw, and to every little bit of resistance to the global machine we can foster.