Some Pluses, Many Negatives for Higher Education

As American higher education begins its 378^th year, we can rejoice that our universities have several strengths, but lament their growing number of weaknesses.  The beginning of a new year is a good time to reassess the system.

Let us begin with the strengths:

1. A large portion of adult Americans have had higher education experiences, giving the U.S. an adult population relatively high in literacy and acquaintanceship with higher forms of learning;
2. For many Americans, higher education has assisted them in achieving the American Dream, moving up the economic ladder;
3. American university research is responsible for many scientific breakthroughs and commercial innovations that have given us longer and more prosperous lives;
4. America has more higher education choice than any other country -literally thousands of options, mostly somewhat distinctive, offering different curricula and campus cultures.

Offsetting -maybe more than offsetting–these considerable
strengths are a much larger number of deficiencies:

1. American
   higher education is becoming exceedingly expensive, with costs to users rising
   faster than family incomes, an unsustainable condition;
2. The
   federal college student financial assistance program is Byzantine and
   dysfunctional, contributing both to the tuition cost explosion and to a higher
   education bubble that cannot be sustained forever;
3. Academic
   rigor has almost certainly declined over time, and there is good evidence that
   colleges add little to student civic knowledge or critical thinking skills;
4. There
   is a complete disconnect between the realities of job markets and the number of
   students leaving the universities, so a growing number of students are
   graduating into low-income jobs, but with large student debts;
5. A
   majority of entering full-time students at four-year schools fail to graduate
   in four years, and a large minority either never graduate or do so only several
   years later than planned;
6. The
   use of technology to bring about lower-cost, higher-quality educational
   offerings has been slow to come to higher education;
7. Colleges
   are slow in adopting to changing curricular needs, and slow to eallocate
   resources to better uses;
8. Many
   schools have lost sight of their primary teaching/research missions and devote
   too many resources or attention to commercial ventures, intercollegiate
   athletics, obsessions with student or employee skin colors, sexual orientation,
   etc.;
9. While
   promoting diversity in skin complexions, colleges are increasingly intolerant
   of unorthodox ideas, particularly those of a conservative or libertarian
   orientation;
10. Vast
    amounts of college resources are underutilized: many teachers teach too little,
    many buildings are empty too often, and too many administrators form unwieldy
    bureaucracies;
11. Much
    faculty research is on trivial topics that few are interested in, even scholars
    in the academic discipline in which the research is being conducted;
12. Colleges,
    ostensibly devoted to expanding knowledge, either fail to gather or actively
    suppress some important information about their own performance, making it
    difficult for consumers to select the best school for their needs;
13. There
    are increasing scandals in higher education, sometimes involving the payment of
    excessive amounts to key university personnel or other examples of what
    economists call “rent-seeking;”
14. A
    better than decent case can be made that higher education no longer on balance
    promotes egalitarian ideals and the American Dream, but increasingly promotes
    greater income inequality and reduced
    intergenerational income mobility.

Each of the 18 points above could be amplified by many
pages of elaboration, but that goes beyond this tour de horizon. What is most discouraging to this writer, however,
is that despite growing recognition of the problems, the amount of progress has
been relatively scant.

In 2005, then Education Secretary Margaret Spellings
created her Commission on the Future of American Higher Education, which after
a year of hearings and reports, issued its own rather critical assessment of
the state of U.S. colleges and universities. I was a member of that commission,
and was pleased at the attention its deliberations and recommendations
received. Several Commission proposals dealt with some (but not all) of the
deficiencies mentioned above. It did its job reasonably well, I think. Yet
relatively little has happened.

Why?  While with
some of the system’s deficiencies, such as the measurement of academic
achievement, there is a severe information (lack of knowledge) problem, in
other cases (e.g., the underutilization of faculty and buildings) the issue is
incentives -there is little financial gain to key personnel from cutting costs,
for example, or forcing students and faculty to use facilities in July or on weekends,
etc. (As I write this my university is on an eight day closedown -what would be
the reaction if Wal-Mart, Google, or the New York Stock Exchange closed down
the entire time between Christmas and New Year’s?)

The most disturbing thing, however, is the amount of callous
selfishness and near fraudulent behavior that has occurred. Most reprehensible
to me is how colleges lure students to their institutions who they know full well
will likely not graduate and/or get a good job, and how these schools utilize
taxpayer largess in the form of loans to consign them to a financially shaky
future. This is as much a moral as an economic problem.

While universities fiercely fight change, it is coming
nonetheless -belatedly, somewhat tumultuously to be sure, but it is at hand.  While the exact form that change will take is
unknown, possibly hundreds of schools will close during the tumult and shouting
of the coming decade, and many professors and staff will lose their comfortable
jobs. But the current system is not sustainable, and the government lacks the
resources to prop up this inefficient and overblown system much further;
dis-investment, not more investment, is needed.