How bad, or good, are our universities?

I am not so much impressed by the faults and failings of the university—they are real enough, but largely the product of frightening trends toward inequality in American society that the universities can combat only to a limited degree. It’s more the survival of the university that amazes and concerns me. It’s one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.

That is an excerpt from this essay in the NY Review of Books, which looks at four recent books on the state of American higher education.  The author, an Ivy Leaguer for decades, isn't impressed with most of the criticism, including from Hacker and Dreifus, whose book highlighted the university where I work as one of the best returns on the investment.

The author is a tad unfair when he writes

Universities are not so isolated from the tragic past, but they still make a claim to speak with eloquence across the centuries. They often fail, they need reform and course correction, but they are not, at their best, merely venal and self-serving. They deserve better critics than they have got at present.

Unfair to the critics.  And unfair to how much in reality universities have indeed become venal and self-serving.

He does have a great point in noting about the likes of the Ivies:

reminds me of the time I lived in rural Virginia and drove some distance on Sundays to buy The New York Times: the storekeeper would squint at me as I handed over my $5.00 and declare, “‘T’ain’t worth it.” While he was probably right about the Sunday Times, I doubt that many students (or their parents) will really pass up admission to the Golden Dozen for a place at Ole Miss. For both the wrong reasons and the right reasons, America’s elite colleges will continue to be coveted (Harvard just reported a record 35,000 applications for its next freshman class).

Critiquing the likes of Harvard is not only a wasteful exercise, but incorrect too.  Every time I go to a conference, or watch an interview on C-Span/BookTV, I can see so easily the phenomenal game that the Ivy scholars bring to the discussions.  Even if those faculty are rarely around thanks to sabbaticals and other deals (which Hacker & Dreifus, and Taylor write a lot about) they make it possible for the talented and the driven to aggregate at a place called the university.  There are plenty of advantages in such agglomeration, infinitely above and beyond a simple diploma. 

If I had a son or daughter who is college-ready, then of course I would want that child to attend the best possible university based on this academic quality and not based on any cost-benefit analysis.  So, yes, I agree with the author that Ole Miss can't stand a chance against the Ivies.

But, therein lies the issue--an Ole Miss or my own university wasn't set up to become an alternative to Harvard!  These other institutions have missions that are distinct from those of a Harvard or Stanford.  But, even these universities think and work as if they are nothing but a Harvard-lite.  The focus on "research" at third-rung universities is a classic example--most of the research publications that faculty from third-tier universities are in third and fourth rate journals, which seem to have brought into existence only to serve as an outlet for the great pretenders.

It is the mission creep that is awful, and this occurs mostly at public institutions, whether they are community colleges or state universities.  Community colleges, for instance, have gotten to be very expensive because for the past couple of decades they have been hiring faculty with doctorates and awarding them additional pay for that unnecessary qualification.  Should we wonder why they have become expensive then?  It is like going to a heart specialist to get treatment for a common cold!

It is also this mission creep that Hacker and Dreifus point out, though they could have been a lot more focused on this argument.  The proliferation of academic majors and programs at smaller universities like mine, as if we are a Harvard with the capabilities to offer such a vast array of courses and programs is mission creep that arose out of trying to pretend that we are Ivies.

The Ponzi scheme called higher education is "Academically Adrift"

Today is one of those days that I am wearing dress-shirt and a tie.  Oh, yes, am wearing pants too :)  Students are bound to be surprised.  Some faculty colleagues, the ones who talk to me (editor: there are a few, still? awshutup!) might wisecrack that perhaps somebody died, more so because of the color of the tie--black.  If such a remark comes up, my response is ready: yes, I am mourning--the death of higher education.

Here is one more reason to add to the list--this one resulting from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) study:

Forty-five percent of students made no gains on the CLA during their first two years in college. Thirty-six percent made no gains over the entire four years. They learned nothing. On average, students improved by less than half a standard deviation in four years. "American higher education," the researchers found, "is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."

Apparently the worst culprits include some of the fastest growing majors across the US--"business"

Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

Makes sense, give that it is the world of business that taught us about Ponzi schemes :)

So, who gets messed up the most in this scheme?

Students saddled with thousands of dollars in debt and no valuable skills, certainly. Even worse, workers who never went to college in the first place, languishing in their careers for lack of a college credential. To them, the higher-education system must seem like a gigantic confidence game, with students and colleges conspiring to produce hollow degrees that nonetheless define the boundaries of opportunity.

Terrible.  Any way out?

Federal and state lawmakers should stop providing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies based purely on enrollment, and should start holding colleges accountable for learning. Lawmakers also need to shore up crumbling budgets, restrain college prices, and mitigate higher education's growing dependence on debt.
Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.
It has been a conspiracy of convenience. This study should bring the "trust us" era of American higher education to a close.

I like his polite phrasing--"conspiracy of convenience" .... Ponzi scheme is straightforward ;)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lot more to say on this--all related to the latest addition to research and books critiquing the state of higher education.  Check them out here and click here for an excerpt from the book

Quote of the day: about faculty and universities

I suppose back-to-school has gotten me thinking a lot about higher education!
The following quote is a beauty:

the radical ambiguity of a profession in which one is hired for one purpose, expected to carry out another, and prized for achieving a third: teaching, research, and prestige are independent variables, besides being incommensurable per se. The upshot is as lively a set of anxieties for the agents and the responsible heads of the institution as one could hope to produce by teasing hamsters in electrified cages. Hence the peculiar governance and subdued restlessness of the American university.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement, you might all the more be impressed that the quote is from "The Academic Marketplace,  a 1958 treatise on scholarly prestige by the sociologists Theodore Caplow and Reese McGee."

Yes, prestige is a strange beast.  And it was prestige, or the perceived lack of, that triggered a lot of commotion on campus during the dog days of summer :)  The passing of fifty years means that the more things change, the more they do feel the same!

Nicholas Lemann says that higher education crisis is way overblown

I disagree with Nicholas Lemann, but in the spirit of being "fair and balanced" (yes, Faux Noose!) here are the concluding words from his piece in the New Yorker:

We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken. We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are—like subpar schools for poor and minority children—and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that. 

The biggest problem I have with his essay is this: in this short piece, Lemann clubs together the K-12 system with the higher education system.  

But, the problems in each have very little in common.  These are the metaphorical apples and oranges ...  I can't figure out why he chose this route for his commentary ...

15 colleges worth their money ... and my colleagues protest?

A tweet from Claudia Dreifus led me to this story in the Washington Post, wherein the author notes about the 15 colleges worth the price, including the university where I teach:

Western Oregon University. Western Oregon, in the one traffic-light town of Monmouth, can value teaching over research, since it has no pretensions of reaching a higher tier. We found the students as bright as any we’ve met, and their professors bring out their best.

Consistent with their past remarks, I wonder if my colleagues will email their protests to WaPo :)

I think a huge "thank you" is in order from my institution and the faculty to Hacker and Dreifus; don't you, too?

Quote of the day: on American higher education

America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of GM.

Yep.
I have been writing and blogging about this for years, much to the displeasure of my colleagues :)

Anyway, that quote is from The Economist's Schumpeter column, where it is further noted that:

Two right-wing think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Goldwater Institute, have both produced damning reports about America’s university system. Two left-wing academics, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, have published an even more damning book: “Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It”. And US News & World Report, a centrist magazine, says in its annual survey of American colleges that: “If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”

The contemporary state of American higher education is under severe criticism from the right, left, and center; anybody feeling left out, please take a number and await your turn :)
So, ...

This luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals. The internet also poses a growing threat to what Bill Gates calls “place-based colleges”. Online, you can listen to the world’s best lecturers for next to nothing.

Again, as far as I am concerned, Schumpeter is late to this party. I have consistently blogged about how such a system cannot continue anymore, and have repeatedly pointed to the online mode too.  But then, nobody listens to me, and if they do it is only to tell me that I have no free speech rights :)

I really, really, hope that the reforms will come from within. Because, those imposed from the outside will completely screw up the liberal education that I so cherish.

BTW, I had a delightful conversation with Claudia Dreifus.  First I got an email from her; apparently she had read something really interesting in my blog.  In my reply, I gave her my cell number, and a couple of hours it was Claudia Dreifus at the phone.  Her email and phone call made my day :)