The higher ed mess is mostly of our own making
So let's be honest, cease blaming others, and come together with some unconventional solutions
I’ve had it with the latest stampede of pundits and mainstream media busybodies telling us how to fix higher education.
As someone who has been in the business for over a half century and still dedicated to the institution, despite its galloping dysfunction and even a certain level of metastasizing corruption, I will say the following without mincing words.
We are in one stinking mess, and it’s almost completely of our own making.
It’s the same refrain that should be applied to the Epstein fiasco about which I wrote here in this space six weeks ago.
Higher ed and its burgeoning pathologies indeed R us.
Before I trundle out my laundry list of overly simplistic, fulsomely self-interested, and mostly misleading narratives about what’s wrong with the current picture, let me address the latest ridiculously distracting, totally off-base nostrums about “solving” the problem that have been slopped out there this past week on to the platform of public opinion by certain “thought leaders” who need to do a lot more thinking before trying to lead.
It all started with a column by the never retiring, curmudgeonly Washington Post columnist George Will in a piece entitled “Are There Too Many College Students”?
Now that fall has finally befallen us, Will writes, “is also when too many young Americans head to college, where too many of them will study too little under the undemanding supervision of faculty who teach too little. Colleges illustrate the seepage of rigor from American life”.
Will goes on to observe that college enrollment has increased by 29 percent since 1990, largely due to “’college for everyone’ rhetoric” together with irrational demand on the part of employers that new hires possess at minimum a bachelor’s degree.
He blazons a statistic that over half of college graduates are underemployed, citing a barrage of statistics indicating that as students they study and read far less at the same time as “grade inflation” has rendered the assessment of actual learning meaningless.
A comparable argument can be found in a recent op-ed from The Wall Street Journal by Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz. Entitled “America Needs Tough Grading”, the article points out .that at certain Ivy League schools four-fifths of all grades are either an A or an A-.
In a moralistic homily typical of a street evangelist haranguing skid row junkies to recant their vices, the authors admonish faculty:
..this fall, as professors sit down to grade their students’ first papers, we urge: Challenge your students. Don’t worry about being liked. Worry about being respected. Students will respect you if you respect them by being honest about the quality of their work and taking the time to help them do better.
Right. And, my esteemed counselors, have you ever considered why we got to this point in the first place?
In the previous sentence the authors admit the obvious reason why universities do not “challenge students”. They complain that “skyrocketing tuition has turned students into paying customers who expect to be praised, not challenged”.
Well, duh. Or is perhaps something even more obvious really going on?
Students see themselves as “paying customers”, strictly because the entire ecosystem of higher education in America from parents to legislators to administrators has encouraged them for many generations to see themselves that way.
Administrators and political paymasters rate colleges along with their faculty for the strengths in pleasing students as consumers.
Student evaluations, which almost every university insists on for salary reviews and tenure evaluations, have long been known to skew results toward making instruction a popularity contest rather than a summons to suck it up and hit the books harder.
The most common complaint on these evaluations from students is that too much work is assigned. Moreover, recent large-scale research suggests that student grade satisfaction is an overriding determinant of positive student teaching evaluations, not the quality of instruction, workload, or difficulty of subject matter.
Blaming faculty for not being “rigorous” in their grading is like impugning a Walmart cashier for not discouraging shoppers at the checkout line from buying too many potato chips, Mars bars, and Hostess cupcakes.
Guys, do you really think it’s the job of a lowly clerk to wag their finger at the customer and say, “turn around and put all that ultra-processed dooky back on the shelves, then dig into your wallet, drive a mile down the frontage road, and load up your cart with Brussels sprouts and endive at Whole Foods”.
Walmart is one of the most successful businesses on the planet because it delivers to the customer the basic commodity they desire at the best price. And for higher education, it works pretty much the same way.
The commodity is the degree, which is the key to gainful employment. For many students and parents it’s the piece of paper tout ensemble, not whether Johnny or Jenny learns anything of real and lasting value.
I can count countless incidents in my fifty years plus in the profession where some student, often flanked by a pushy parent, would sit in my office and whine about a B or B+ grade that might ruin the student’s life because it would impair their ability to get into Harvard Law School, so they can make six figures before they are 25.
“Credentialism”, as it is usually called, has been the driving force of American higher education ever since Congress passed the GI bill in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II when a national electoral consensus emerged that college was no longer a reproductive ritual of the Brahmin class, but a democratic entitlement for all.
Billions of dollars in the form of federally sponsored but largely inconsequential research on “best teaching practices”, “learning outcomes” mandates for universities from the US Department of Education, regulatory bureaucracies to enforce what over time came to be known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), and an insistence on virtually all stakeholders that universities serve as much as beta test sites for socialization as for the robust production of knowledge have all made credentialing, which ironically is not the real goal of study anyway, exceedingly more expensive and time-consuming than need be.
But the seven-hundred pound gorilla in the room about which none dare speak is not the profligacy of higher education spending on non-essential bling that detracts from its core mission, everything from high-paid compliance officers to fancy gyms to quasi-professional sports to “branding” consultants.
On the contrary, it is the sea change that is taking place throughout our so-called “knowledge economy” that is affecting what renowned management theorist Peter Drucker long ago characterized as “knowledge workers”. He defined such professionals as “high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services”.
The phrase “formal training”, so far as it concerns the knowledge economy, is now a bona fide vortex of controversy.
Almost a decade ago the prominent education writer and policy analyst Kevin Carey predicted in his book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere that digital educational technologies would replace traditional universities, supplanting the blind trust previously afforded to four-year degree programs. He also anticipated that both employers and students would gravitate toward demanding clearer proof of actual skills and experiences.
Carey was eerily prescient.
A number of studies, including one by the Society for College and University Planning, have shown clearly that since at least the 1980s the relative amount of tuition revenue steered toward classroom instruction has decreased significantly.
The widely reported trend – often associated with the phenomenon of so-called “administrative bloat” – raises the question of whether the “formal training” colleges and universities offer, employers demand, and government regulators at all levels increasingly micromanage, is not in many ways the crux of the problem itself.
Yet another data point routinely scanted in the debate over high education inflation is how much money is necesary to recruit a single student.
According to RNL Education Insights the average per student cost in the US is a whopping $2795 at private institutions. For public institutions it remains a hefty $495.
In Continental Europe the numbers are appreciably lower.
The main reason for this difference is the huge marketing and recruitment budgets American colleges and universities require to compete with each other in order to gain sustainable “market share” amid a shrinking demographic pool of traditional students.
A degree from an European institution comes with far fewer bells and whistles than it does in America, but the focus is on higher education as a public rather than what social scientists term a “positional” good, or prestige item.
Post-secondary learning long has been conscripted by various agenda-driven as well as hyperpartisan agents of influence to remedy income inequality in the United States, to fight the culture wars, to relieve corporations of their responsibility of training their own employees, etc.
Since the turn of the millennium – and to a certain degree years before that – Americans have gone out of their way to make higher education about everything except higher education.
All things considered, the rent is now due for all those things we want out of higher ed, and there are insufficient funds left in our account.
It is time we as a country stop making excuses and sloughing off the crisis of higher ed as someone else’s problem.
Otherwise, the “knowledge economy” will soon lose its vital “knowledge base”.