Future of Higher Education

Perspectives from America's Academic Leaders

Gary A. Olson, John W. Presley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594517969
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259404
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by leading education experts and by university presidents, provosts, and other leaders nationally recognized for their innovations, the 22 original and provocative chapters in this new book comprise a wide-ranging examination of the many challenges faced in fashioning the university of tomorrow. Authors offer their research, predictions, concerns, and advice on topics ranging from university finances, student access, changing technologies, and the philosophical underpinnings of college education. They address the multiple challenges facing higher education today, offering ideas and solutions. Contributors include Warren Arbogast, Gretchen Bataille, Lee Benson, Rita Bornstein , Sally Clausen , Reed Way Dasenbrock, John A. Dossey, Jean Dowdall, James L. Fisher, Judy L. Genshaft , Henry A. Giroux, Ira Harkavy , Michael Hoad, Freeman A. Hrabowski, Stephen K. Klasko, James V. Koch, George Mehaffy , J. Hillis Miller, Gary A. Olson , John W. Presley, John Puckett , Michael Rao, Charles B. Reed, Rollin C. Richmond, Roseann Runte, Neil J. Smelser , Sheila M. Stearns, and Randy L. Swing.

Part One

New Aims: Rethinking Higher Education’s Objectives

A Tale of Two Rankings: Reengineering Higher Education

Reed Dasenbrock

There is a kind of Dickensian best of times/worst of times flavor about American higher education today. Various international rankings of universities have appeared in recent years—inspired by the success of the U.S. News and World Report rankings of American universities—and American universities dominate the top of those rankings. For instance, the rankings by the London Times Higher Educational Supplement list Harvard as the best university in the world, with six of the top ten universities, thirteen of the top 21 (two are tied for 20^th), and 15 of the top 30 as American. Fifty-six of the top 200 and 92 of the top 400 are American, so this domination at the top extends some distance down. The THES rankings have a strong Anglophone cast to them (the first non-English language university is Todai, the University of Tokyo, at 17^th), but the other well-known international ranking, from Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, is actually slightly more Anglophone centric, with Todai still the first non-English language university at 20^th, and is also even more American-centric, with the top three universities, eight of the top ten, seventeen of the top 20 and 22 of the top 30 coming from the United States. Jiao Tong’s rankings are of the top 500 universities in the world (actually 510, I presume because of ties), and American universities comprise 166 of those 510.

Moreover, although I personally find the apparent precision of these ranking systems quite spurious, it is hard to disagree with the perception that the best American universities are remarkable institutions which are the best in the world. The quality of the facilities, from world class labs to recreational facilities worthy of a five star hotel, the quality of the students, with an admissions process dizzying in its complexity, and the quality of the faculty, with average salaries for full professors close to $150,000 at the top institutions, is stunning. If one views higher education as an industry, American higher education is perceived to be the best in the world, and it remains the most desired commodity in international trade in its sector: even after the shortsighted tightening of foreign student visas after 9/11, more foreign students come to the United States than to any other country, and America is exporting its model of higher education, through the network of “American University of” in many countries as well as through institutions rapidly being set up in the Persian Gulf under American tutelage and on American models.

Yet, underneath this complacency-inducing panoply of apparent triumph, not all is well in Mudsville. There is a different set of international rankings out there, which measure not the reputation of individual universities but the actual success of each nation’s educational system in producing an educated populace. If the assumptions of the international rankings of individual institutions is that difference is what matters, the assumptions of these international rankings of nations is that similarity is what matters. As opposed to looking at where individual institutions are placed in a hierarchy of prestige based on differences in quality among them, these rankings look at where nations rank in their success at creating a more broadly educated population. It should occasion no surprise that the different approaches yield different results, but what should occasion concern is the remarkably different standing of the United States in the nation-by-nation approach.

Our Slipping Performance

Our lifetime has seen a precipitous decline in the relative standing of the United States in these comparative measures. The United States led the world from the founding of the American republic in 1776 until recently in the percentage of its young people who attended and completed higher education, but this is no longer the case. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative data annually in its Education at a Glance reports, and it divides the adult population into decadal age cohorts from 25 to 64. Americans aged 55 to 64 are the most highly educated population in the world their age, as 36% of Americans in that age cohort have an associate’s degree or higher, and the next highest country is Canada, just behind at 34.5%. But across the next 30 years, the educational attainment of young Americans has essentially stagnated, rising slightly to 39%, for an increase of about 1% each decade. In contrast, Canada has increased the educational attainment of young Canadians 7% each decade, or almost 1% each year, and the most recent data for young Canadians puts educational attainment at 54%, over 15% ahead of the United States. Canada’s increase, as startling as it is, is not as remarkable as that of many other nations. Fewer than 10% of the South Korean population aged 55 to 64 have an associate’s degree or higher, yet the latest figures for young Koreans puts their educational attainment at higher than 50%. Nation after nation has had startling increases in the educational achievements of their populations, to the point where the United States ranks only 10^th among the 32 OECD countries in educational attainment among young people, and only one country, Germany, has had a rate of increase in educational attainment lower than the United States.

So we have the world’s best universities, but as a society we are doing a much poorer job at educating our entire population than other advanced economies. Which ranking is more important? Higher educational institutions in the United States pay a great deal more attention to the institutional rankings than to the national comparisons; in fact, there is not a general awareness of where we stand in these national comparisons. But from the perspective of human capital economics the overall educational attainment of a nation is much more important because it is a much more significant driver of its economic performance and trajectory than having a sector of its educational system renowned for its prestige and quality. One of the questions that economists have been interested in measuring is what happens to the relative value of post-secondary education when a higher percentage of a nation’s population has advanced education. Somewhat to their surprise, the answer is that the relative value of higher education increases when it becomes more common: that is, the differential between the income of someone with and someone without advanced education increases as a higher percentage of a given workforce obtains that advanced education. The explanation for this paradox is what happens to the economy of that nation as the workforce becomes more educated. In a world economy in which many jobs are mobile and the best jobs are those which require the most education, a highly educated workforce is caught in a virtuous cycle, an updraft, in which jobs and industries relocate in those countries, reinforcing the advantages held by those with advanced education.

Now one of the remarkable aspects of this discussion, at least for those of us familiar with the vocational/liberal arts battles that have raged in American education for the past generation, is that the kind of degree seems considerably less important as a variable than the level of education. Obviously, certain occupational fields are in greater demand than others, and those fields allow a much easier entry into the workforce, but it isn’t the proportion of one’s educated population in, say, science and technical fields that matters as much as it is the overall proportion of one’s population that is highly educated. And while some aspects of this are not fully understood, the general picture is relatively easily explained given the mobility of the labor force, particularly the most highly educated segments of it. If a shortage develops in a particular sector of an economy, it is easier to find people around the world willing to move to that country to meet that need than it is to develop an economy that people want to move to in the first place. In other words, the specific needs of an advanced economy for highly specialized workers can be addressed given the attractiveness of living in such an advanced economy for workers around the globe. The shortages that are harder to address are for those occupations that do require advanced education but are needed so much more broadly that a sufficient wage premium for them doesn’t develop. Nursing and teaching are very good examples of these fields: the need for nurses and teachers can’t be outsourced, since neither sick people nor children are readily portable to places well supplied with nurses and teachers. And they are skilled occupations demanding post-secondary education. But the very fact that we need lots of them, indicating that the skills level needed are not extremely rare, seems to militate, in the United States at least, against our paying a high wage premium for those with this skill. (That is changing faster for nurses than it is for teachers: unfortunately, our own health seems like a more urgent concern for most Americans than the educational health of the next generation.) Nonetheless, such exceptions are exceptions, and in general terms, the fields that degrees are in is less important than the overall level of education. And anecdotal evidence reinforces this more abstract point: our parents may have been horrified when we announced that we were going to be liberal arts majors and not do something “more practical,” but in practice, it worked out. People with an advanced education find something creative and fulfilling to do with that education, and so the trajectories of individuals in which education leads to opportunity then aggregates at the level of the national economy into economic opportunity for regions and nations.

It should therefore be clear that having a high-prestige educational system as we do isn’t the same as having a high-performing one (in terms of educating the entire citizenry) and that having a high-performing one is of more economic utility in a knowledge-based economy than a high-prestige one. The nations with functional higher educational systems that are meeting the needs of a higher proportion of their citizens for post-secondary degrees and are therefore meeting the needs of their economy for a highly skilled workforce are doing better in the new knowledge and innovation-based economy than the United States is, even though a sector of its higher education system is perceived to be the best in the world. A high-prestige higher education sector may be a significant exception to the general decline of American competitiveness in the global economy, but a high-performing higher education sector would do much more to restore that competitiveness across the board.

Is Prestige Limiting Performance?

The question I want to pose here and spend the rest of this essay on is a simple one: is there in fact a connection between the two sets of ratings that I began by discussing? Is the relatively low performance of our higher education system overall in some ways connected to the very success of part of that sector? Is our focus on prestige limiting our overall performance? I want to suggest that it is. We have been in essence getting what we have been paying for: the structure of American higher education reflects patterns of social investment. Those patterns are deeply inequitable in ways that both reflect and strengthen the patterns of stratification in American society; they have also been deeply illogical in ways that have not served the overall social purpose of a broadly educated citizenry. Let me touch on three examples: university endowments, the federal investment in higher education, and the place of athletics.

It is certainly one of the commendable aspects of American culture that we have a strong tradition of philanthropic giving, and American tax policy has recognized the importance of this activity in building a viable civic society in this country by giving tax benefits to those who give. All of us who give to our alma maters or to institutions that we didn’t even attend form part of a voluntary investment in higher education, which is commendable and is in large measure what has made those excellent institutions at the top of those lists so strong. Yet, the cumulative result of that investment has in my view become socially problematic: people give where they choose to give, of course, but that choice is driven much less by a perception of need than by a sense of wishing to be associated with success. The relevant Biblical text is not “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven”; it is instead, “to them that hath, it shall be given, to them that hath not, it shall be taken away.” So Harvard University’s endowment reached $37 billion at the height of the market boom, and nothing in tax law requires that this money be spent in any particular way or in any particular manner. University endowments can be and are spent entirely on projects benefiting that particular institution, so Harvard’s $37 billion—which though given by private entities (individuals, foundations and corporations) is structurally subsidized through the tax code by all of us—benefits only the 20,000 or so students who attend Harvard. A 5% payout from that endowment produces $1.85 billion, which is more than twice what my state, New Mexico, can afford to spend on the higher education budget for the more than 125,000 students in our higher educational system. So leaving aside tuition (Harvard’s tuition is between 10 and 40 times as much as the public institutions in our state, so this further deepens the difference), the tax code subsidizes the actions by which a private university can afford to spend at least ten times as much per student as a state can. (New Mexico, though a poor state, spends the highest percentage of its per capita income on higher education of any state, so the figures here are close to the national average.) Let’s imagine that in return for the tax subsidy that Harvard and its donors receive from all of the rest of us, we asked that 10% of that payout were to be spent on helping low income students attend public higher education, either nationally or in Massachusetts. In such a case, $185 million could be added to need-based aid: this could pay the average community college tuition for 92,500 students, or more than three-quarters of all community college students in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Commonweath takes on an ironic flavor in this context: our tax policy subsidizes islands of excellence—academic gated communities—that have no requirement to invest in the social fabric that surrounds them and precious little history of doing so.

Federal investments in higher education reinforce this structure of stratification even when they present themselves as developing countervailing forces to them. Since public education is primarily a responsibility of the states, there is little federal funding that goes to support the operational budgets of public institutions of higher education. Instead, the federal investment in higher education has focused on student financial aid, on helping students afford to attend higher education wherever they choose to attend. Although a portion of that aid does come in the form of direct assistance, through Pell Grants and through the federal Work Study programs, over the past 20 years the percentage of the average cost of attendance for a student that is funded through the maximum Pell Grant has slipped (from 77% in 1979 to 32% in 2000). [The recent increase in the Pell Grant through the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 and the Higher Education Opportunity Grant of 2008 is the most progressive piece of higher education legislation in many years, and it should help reverse this decline, at least in part.] The gap that this slippage has created has been filled by loans, and the loan burden of the average student has soared. In itself, the development of student loan programs in order to close this gap has been a positive development, and obviously we want to do what we can in order to make sure that students without the resources to pursue higher education are able to attend college. But making student loans in essence the centerpiece of the federal higher education policy has been a factor further strengthening the privatization of higher education. First, an increasing amount of those loans have been made by private lenders, with structural subsidies from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 New Aims: Rethinking Higher Education’s Objectives
• Part 2 New Assumptions: Reexamining the Philosophical Underpinnings of Higher Education
• Part 3 New Responses: Addressing the Changing Context of Higher Education
• Part 4 New Students: Rethinking Access to Higher Education
• Part 5 New Leaders: Preparing the University Presidents of the Future
• Contributors