Investment in Learning

The Individual and Social Value of American Higher Education

Howard Bowen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560008880
• eBook ISBN: 9781351309905
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The value of higher education has been under attack as seldom before in American history. We are told of the overeducated American, of the case against college, and of the failure of education to contribute significantly to the reduction of inequality. In this environment, republication of an exceptionally comprehensive and judicious analysis of all that has been learned and not learned about the consequences of American higher education comes at a most appropriate time. Investment in Learning more fully covers the various aspects of this subject than any yet to appear. Howard Bowen is optimistic about higher education, but his viewpoint is based on profound knowledge of both the economic and social aspects of education. Unlike some economists who insist on a strict cost-benefit analysis of expenditures on higher education in relation to outcomes, Bowen argues that the non-monetary benefits are far greater, to the point that individual and social decisions should be made primarily on those broader indicators.

Cameron Fincher, in his new opening for the book, notes that "Publication of Howard Bowen's Investment in Learning was like a break in a long summer drought. . . . It was a comprehensive rebuttal to return-on-investment studies with negativistic findings." And in the foreword to the book, Clark Kerr simply says, "Howard Bowen is better prepared to survey the overall consequences of higher education in the United States than anyone else."

The Setting

The two chapters of Part One serve as an introduction to later chapters that analyze the consequences of American higher education in detail. Chapter One describes the functions of the higher educational system, applies to it the idea of efficiency as a ratio between outcomes produced and resources employed, and considers methodological issues relating to the study of outcomes. Chapter Two examines the goals or intended outcomes of higher education and concludes with a catalogue of specific goals. This catalogue is regarded as a list of hypotheses about the outcomes of higher education. The remainder of the book investigates the degree to which each goal is in fact achieved.

1

Efficiency and Accountability in Higher Education

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Ann Landers

In 1977, American higher education was carried on in about 3.000 institutions, which employed a full-time equivalent instructional staff of about 500,000 persons and an additional 800.000 or more other workers. They served 11.3 million students; about 6.8 million were full-time. They spent annually about $42 billion for operating purposes and another $4 billion for capital improvements, or a total of $46 billion. To this cost must be added the forgone income (Bowen and Servelle, 1972, pp. 31-32; Carnegie Commission, 1973a, pp. 49-53) of the fulltime students, which amounted to perhaps $34 billion and their transportation, books, and miscellaneous expenses of perhaps $4 to $5 billion. The grand total of all these institutional and student costs was around $85 billion, an amount equal to 5 percent of the GNP or nearly equal to the annual national defense outlays.

When an industry reaches such financial magnitude, many people are bound to ask whether the outcomes are worth the cost. Today, this question is being asked with some insistence, not only by the general public, legislators, donors, and parents but also by students and even by educators themselves. This does not imply that higher education has lost the confidence of the public. As shown in many polls, it consistently ranks near the top in public confidence among major social institutions (Harris, 1974; Citicorp, 1975; U.S. Department of HEW, National Center for Education Statistics, 1976, p. 205; Procter and Gamble, 1976). Nevertheless, as people consider the state of our society, they are well aware that higher education has not yet brought on the millennium. America seemingly has not achieved the depth of learning, the richness of culture, the moral tone, the refinement of taste, the rise of economic productivity, the spread of responsible and enlightened citizenship, or the domestic tranquility that educators in their glowing rhetoric had promised. Ignorance appears to be rampant, values seem crassly materialistic, and wisdom is not equal to proliferating social problems. Moreover, especially since the student unrest of the 1960s and the change in campus mores, certain of the outcomes of higher education have been regarded by some as negative. A more immediate and explicit recent criticism of higher education is that it is educating more people than the economy can absorb in the kinds of jobs customarily reserved for college-educated men and women. A favorite journalistic theme is the alleged inability of college graduates to get jobs, or the failure of higher education to prepare its graduates for the world of work. And many legislators and other public leaders express deep skepticism about the social and economic value of higher education. These doubts have been reinforced by a series of scholarly and critical books and articles with rather flamboyant titles, among them, Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education (1964); Ivar Berg’s Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (1970); Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1972); Kenneth Arrow’s “Higher Education as a Filter” (1973); Caroline Bird’s The Case Against College (1975); James O’Toole’s “The Reserve Army of the Underemployed” (1975); Lester Thurow’s Generating Inequality (1975); and Richard Freeman’s The Overeducated American (1976). Without exception, beneath these sensational titles lie useful as well as provocative analyses and critiques (though we do not subscribe to them in to to). American higher education faces real problems and it can benefit from constructive criticism. However, the recent public discussion of higher education has been one-sided. It has focused attention on problems and weaknesses and minimized or ignored the strengths and undoubted contributions to American society. In the present state of public opinion, evidence of the benefits of higher education—not rhetorical flourishes—is being demanded. The burden of proof is on the educators. The fashionable words are “efficiency” and “accountability.”

Those who wish to hold colleges and universities accountable demand that the outcomes of higher education be identified, measured in dollars, and then compared with the costs. Obviously they are asking a lot, for the outcomes are extraordinarily hard to isolate and measure. Yet, without some reasonably reliable methods of defining and assessing outcomes, all questions relating to the efficiency of higher education, all judgments about its progress, and all efforts toward rational allocation of resources to the higher educational system become futile. This book responds to the demand for efficiency and accountability. Its purpose is to assemble information about the outcomes of higher education and to reach reasonable judgments as to the value of these outcomes in relation to their cost (see, for example, Rossi and Williams, 1972).

American Higher Education as a System

We have chosen in this book to consider the outcomes of American higher education taken as a whole and considered as a consolidated system. The consequences of higher education may, of course, be explored at various levels of aggregation. For example, one may consider the outcomes from the work of a particular professor or department; explore the effects of different modes of instruction; assess the results achieved by a particular college or university; evaluate the outcomes of a particular class of institutions, such as research universities or community colleges; or attempt to appraise the outcomes of the entire higher educational system (Archibald, in Lumsden, 1974). The study of outcomes at each level has its uses, and complete knowledge of the subject would require simultaneous investigation at all levels. We have chosen the widest possible scope. We propose to concentrate on the broad significance of the entire system of higher education to the people whose lives it touches and to society at large. This approach leaves out much detail, but it does have major advantages. It facilitates direct consideration of the broad social impact of higher education. It adduces knowledge useful in considering state and national policy for higher education. And it provides perspective for the evaluation of particular institutions. Though the study of the entire system cannot substitute for the study of the parts, it is an essential aspect of the whole complex process of evaluating higher education.

In considering higher education as a nationwide system, we do not mean to imply that it is a tightly organized and monolithic structure. Institutions differ considerably in size, types of services rendered, sponsorship, and other characteristics. They range from two-year community colleges to major research universities and from tiny liberal arts colleges to great state colleges of 20,000 to 40,000 students. Their governance is widely diffused among independent private boards and quasi-independent public boards. There is much room for autonomy and variety. Nevertheless, American higher education is a system of considerable homogeneity. All the institutions are subject to varying degrees of control or influence by state governments, by various public coordinating agencies, and by the federal government. All of the institutions offer more or less comparable undergraduate instruction. They differ chiefly in the degree to which they are engaged in graduate and professional instruction, research, scholarship, artistic pursuits, and various public services. There is a well-established pattern of role models: Each institution tends to aspire to the status of the next higher institutions in the pecking order. Moreover, most faculty members bear the stamp of a graduate education dispensed by a few dozen leading universities. The institutions employ strikingly similar facilities and methods: The basic apparatus of libraries, laboratories, studios, counselors, campus life, teaching methods, and curricula do not vary greatly over much of the system. Allowing for differences in size, the campuses even look surprisingly alike. The system of higher education is also held together by an elaborate communications network consisting of voluntary accreditation, professional associations, public licensing bodies, statewide coordination, consortia, journals, innumerable academic meetings, easy mobility of students and faculty among institutions, categorical grants from government and foundations, and commonality of interest in their relations with government. Finally, the many institutions are interlocked and interdependent through a division of pedagogical and disciplinary labor that frees each institution from the responsibility of trying to meet all conceivable educational and research needs (Cremin, 1965, pp. 103-104).

Chapter Eight of this book is devoted to an exploration of the differences and similarities of outcomes among diverse types of institutions. As shown there, differences exist and are worth investigating, but the differences are overshadowed by the similarities. The colleges and universities of the United States are indeed a coherent system, not a disparate collection of unrelated enterprises and activities, and it is by no means absurd to consider the outcomes of the system of American higher education as a whole. Indeed, a frequent criticism of American higher education is that it is too standardized to meet the needs of its diverse clientele.

Functions of Higher Education

Before exploring the outcomes of higher education, it may be well to consider the higher educational system as an industry. It is an industry that has, over time, acquired certain well-defined functions. In performing these functions, it engages in “production.” As in other industries, production in higher education uses resources, which are transformed into end products called outcomes. The efficiency of the system is measured by comparing the outcomes with the resources employed. And accountability is achieved when the outcomes, as well as the resources used, are identified and measured.

American higher education engages in three principal functions: education, research, and public service. Education as here defined includes both the curricular and extracurricular influences on students. Its purpose is to change students in both the cognitive and affective aspects of their personalities and to prepare them for practical affairs. Research, broadly defined, includes the scholarly, scientific, philosophical, and critical activities of colleges and universities, as well as their creative contributions to the arts. The purpose of research is to preserve, acquire, disseminate, interpret, and apply knowledge, and to cultivate creative frontiers in arts and sciences. The clientele includes students, professional peers, various groups (such as government, business, farmers, labor unions, professional practitioners), and the general public. The public service activities include health care, consulting, off-campus lectures and courses, work performed by interns, artistic performances and exhibits, spectator sports, and so on.

The three functions of higher education are based mostly on a single unifying process— learning. Learning, in this sense, means knowing and interpreting the known (scholarship and criticism), discovering the new (research and related activities), and bringing about desired change in the cognitive and affective traits and characteristics of human beings (education). Learning is the chief stock-in-trade of higher education. It occurs in many subjects, it takes place in diverse settings, and it serves varied clienteles. As will be indicated later, learning yields important by-products that must be considered in judging the total outcomes of higher education.

Institutions tend to be categorized largely on the basis of their relative emphasis on the three functions of higher education. Community colleges focus on existing knowledge and dissemination through instruction; major universities emphasize new knowledge and dissemination to the professions and to the public. Other institutions, such as liberal arts colleges and four-year state colleges, lie between these extremes. But most institutions of all types engage in all three functions to some degree.

This multifunctional role of a college or university may be illustrated by the work of a typical faculty member. In a given week he or she may teach several classes, advise a graduate student on a research project, counsel with an undergraduate on a personal problem, discuss an intellectual issue with a colleague, invite a group of students to a social affair, write testimony for a legislative committee, give a talk to a local professional society, read a professional journal, record data from a laboratory experiment in progress, and block out a chapter in a new book. These varied activities represent efforts to learn the known and discover the new and to disseminate knowledge to students, the profession, and the general public. In the same way, an institution’s administrative and supporting staff and its buildings and equipment are allocable (in principle) to the three functions.

Not only are the three functions of education, research, and public service carried on jointly; they are often mutually supportive. Education may be enriched if it occurs in an environment of discovery, intellectual excitement, and contact with the real world and its problems. Similarly, research and public service may be enhanced when they are combined with instruction. This does not imply that every community college or liberal arts college should become a great research center. Nor does it deny that universities can overdo research and service to the neglect of instruction. It implies only that the spirit of inquiry and public service enriches academic enterprise and lends coherence and unity to the American system of higher education.¹

Production in Higher Education

In performing its three functions of education, research, and public service, higher education is engaged in the production of learning. The production of any good or service—for example, bread, gasoline, or medical care—requires valuable resources, consisting partly of various kinds of labor, capital, and land, and partly of goods and services purchased from other industries. Like all other producing entities, colleges and universities have management groups that decide on the types and amounts of production, on the types and amounts of needed resources, and on the way these resources are to be organized. Learning emerges from this productive process, to be available for consumption (or for use in production elsewhere).

The productive process may be regarded as the transformation of resources into goods and services, in this case, learning. The quantity and quality of the goods or service produced are determined by the amounts and kinds of resources used and by the way they are used. For convenience, the resources are often referred to as inputs, the goods or services produced as outputs, and the way they are used and organized as technology. The theory of production consists of the laws or principles determining the relationship between inputs and outputs as mediated by technology.

The production of a particular good or service (or family of similar goods and services) is seldom concentrated in a single firm. Rather, it is carried on in several or many firms referred to collectively as an industry. The separate decisions of the firms determine the organization of an industry as to size, number, and location of productive units. In reaching its decisions, each firm is influenced by the cost of available resources, by the known technological options, and by the prospective prices and sales potential for the outputs, taking into account the competition of other firms. As a result of all these decisions within any industry, particular resources are employed in given amounts and particular products are produced in given amounts. These products may be uniform in type or quality, or they may be varied as to intrinsic characteristics, appearance, packaging, and so on. They may be produced at different costs, they may appeal to different consumers, and they may sell for different prices. They are, however, close substitutes.

Higher education produces only a small part of all human learning (Machlup, 1962). Learning is ubiquitous and incessant. Virtually all of the experiences of life result in some of it. Indeed, it is hard to spend a single day without adding to our knowledge through current events, casual conversations, reading, watching TV, reflective thought, and so on. The family, the elementary and secondary school, the neighborhood, the workplace, the mass media of communications, the church, the armed services, the shopping center, the cocktail party, and the conference with one’s lawyer or physician are all, in a sense, educational institutions. Although higher education is only one source of learning among many, it successfully competes for r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• The Author
• Part One: The Setting
• Part Two: Consequences for Individuals
• Part Three: Consequences for Society
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index