The Uncertain Future of American Public Higher Education

Student-Centered Strategies for Sustainability

Daniel M. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030017934
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030017941
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This book addresses the costly non-sustainable policies, programs, practices, and priorities currently driving the tuition crisis in American public higher education. In this era of growing competition among public colleges and universities for more students and higher rankings, their leaders and governing boards have lost sight of student-centered missions in favor of more and greater non-education related amenities, facilities, programs, and practices that have added substantially to the cost of a college degree without increasing its quality. This book is an appeal to all interested taxpaying citizens, public officials, governors, governing boards, and university presidents to take a second look at these costly decisions and begin a new era of placing the higher education needs and interests of students above all. We have created this tuition crisis; now we must solve it.

© The Author(s) 2019

Daniel M. JohnsonThe Uncertain Future of American Public Higher Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01794-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Daniel M. Johnson¹

(1)

University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA

Daniel M. Johnson

End Abstract

The accelerating pace of societal change in the USA and globally is calling into question the stability, efficacy, and sustainability of institutions and social structures we have long taken for granted. One of those institutions happens to be among the most important, one upon which our economy and society depends i.e., the colleges and universities that make up our American system of higher education .

For more than a quarter century in senior leadership positions at several major universities, I’ve fought for, defended, and worked to strengthen the defenses of those universities against the pressures , challenges , and attacks that come from our critics, our legislatures , the media , and even some of our closest friends and donors . But these challenges to American higher education , no matter how strong our defenses, continue to grow stronger, louder, more threatening and are taking a toll that needs to be recognized, openly discussed, and addressed by the leaders of our institutions and policy makers at all levels.

Now, in my post-administrative days and more on the “outside looking in,” I see these challenges from a different perspective, perhaps a little more clearly and certainly more holistically. Inside the administration , the problems and challenges made up my daily schedule and while these were always difficult they were seen as part of my job description as president; it was the world taken for granted. I took them one-at-a-time hoping to forestall a mini-crisis and to get through the workday in time to host a dinner with alums, donors , civic groups, or a campus guest. The general strategy was to break the problem into small pieces or units and work at solving or eliminating smaller, less-than-crisis challenges .

What I see today gives me much greater concern than when I was in the middle of it all. From this “outside” more holistic perspective, the cracks appear much larger, the current paradigm seems much weaker, and the sustainability of higher education , at least public higher education as we know it, is being called into question.

Unlike the nation’s Liberty Bell with its single large crack, our system of public higher education and the paradigm that provides the conceptual, pedagogical, legal, regulatory, and financial structures for advanced learning and certification has multiple cracks—some large, some small—all seriously weakening the infrastructure , the very framework, and foundation upon which our public colleges and universities currently rest.

Given this picture, we must ask the obvious question: Is the current higher education paradigm sustainable? Am I misperceiving my old institutions and the system I fought to defend? Are we in a collective state of denial, whistling past the graveyard, hoping to hold out another year, another decade and pass this looming crisis on to the next generation of university leaders and higher education policy makers?

In his landmark essay, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn , ¹ elevated the concept of “paradigm” and brought it into the thinking and writings of the academy. Although Kuhn focused on the sciences, the strength of the paradigm concept has been shown applicable to other fields and disciplines. American higher education , viewed holistically, exhibits many of the characteristics of a paradigm . Kuhn and others have, for example, described paradigms in the following ways that apply to American higher education :

Achievements, that for a time, provide a model…

Concepts and practices that define a …discipline at any particular time…

Distinct, established patterns…

common methods and standards that frame the object of interest…

Examples of actual practice—

which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together—

provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions…

Commitment to the same rules and standards…

The significance of Kuhn’s work for this candid assessment of public higher education in the USA is the insight he provides into the way paradigms change. Paradigms do change, not only in science, as aptly described by Kuhn , but in other fields and disciplines. The achievements, practices, methods, standards, and models in any field, as in science, can and do shift with the pressures from new insights as well as the changing environmental context in which the field exists.

New discoveries, new knowledge, changing economics , new technologies , and even new ideologies can induce paradigm change. These changes, as Kuhn points out, can be constructive or destructive. With sufficient pressures from these changes, existing paradigms together with their standards, methods, rules, applications, and models are discarded, literally squeezed out, in favor of a new paradigm which more favorably embraces the changes. The failure of the existing paradigm—in this case, higher education —to meet the challenges of heightened expectations, negative public opinion , reduced legislative support, new delivery technologies , unacceptable cost–benefit ratios, and less attractive demographics bring substantial growing pressures for change. Kuhn’s lesson applies: With the passage of time, anomalies accumulate within a field to the point that the entire paradigm itself is required to change to accommodate them. Structures and systems become anachronistic and can only sustain a limited amount of dissonance; when that limit is reached, structures and systems that make up the paradigm change or cease to be relevant. In Kuhn’s parlance , this is a paradigm shift.

It is increasingly apparent from the rapidly expanding body of critical research, public opinion surveys, media coverage, and the agendas of higher education meetings, conferences, and associations that these anomalies and anachronistic features are bringing increased pressure and a paradigm shift is increasingly likely, if not imminent. Some argue that the shift is already well underway in American higher education . Clearly, the current higher education infrastructure lacks the strength it had a decade ago. Wave after wave of challenges and crisis after crisis are taking their toll. For many of those close to the front lines, there is the feeling that the dam is about to fail, that the twentieth-century structures, policies , subsidies , regulations, and programs that made possible the growth and development of American higher education in the twentieth century are failing in the twenty-first century and are in need of reconstruction and reform.

If we continue to apply Kuhn’s insights, we might reasonably conclude that a paradigm shift is not a threat to the need for higher education , per se, but rather the manner and mode in which it is provided and continues to evolve. The current models, modes, and manners by which higher education functions, particularly public higher education, are costly, ineffectual and have been increasingly so for the past quarter century. The dissonance and dysfunctions are more evident every year with each new cohort of university students and every new budget cycle. The high cost of tuition and fees alone, with their annual increases outstripping inflation , is more than sufficient evidence of the failure of the system to meet the higher education needs of an ever-larger population . But the high cost of tuition is not the only dysfunction; it is only one of a myriad of challenges and pressures that are increasingly evident and are now interacting exacerbating the combined impact of these anomalies .

Among these challenges are the methods by which we measure university performance and account for its various functions; the growing chasm between the needs of the workforce , marketplace , and the curricula of our universities; the costly maintenance and growing obsolescence of our campuses ; our failure to adopt effective teaching methods in favor of long-discredited modes; and the ancillary activities being added to the university experience that detract from learning and add to the costs students must pay or finance. These anomalies are bringing ever greater pressures that will, of economic and political necessity, bring a disruptive paradigm shift in American higher education. And that shift may well be underway.

These are cracks in the American paradigm of higher education that contribute to its very uncertain future. They are clearly visible to anyone reasonably close to or who cares about our nation’s colleges and universities and the students they recruit every year. But this concern is not only about the impact of the costly dysfunctions on our universities and students; it is also about America’s standing and leadership among other nations. It is about the demands of the knowledge economy and how we prepare future generations to find meaningful roles in an economy that is being driven by artificial intelligence, robotics, and the explosion of digitally based enterprises and industries.

It might be somewhat misleading or disingenuous to refer to these dysfunctions as cracks when clearly what was once a simple hairline fissure two or three decades ago has now become a huge hole or, worse, a gaping wound. Whatever the preferred metaphor, it is clear we have rapidly mounting problems that, if left unaddressed and unreformed, threaten not only the affordability and cost-effectiveness of American higher education for our nation’s students but our leadership in the increasingly competitive international world of higher education. There is far too much at stake for future generations and our place in the world to ignore these huge cracks in the paradigmatic infrastructure upon which American higher education rests. There is an arms race in global higher education , and it can’t be led or won using th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Tuition Crisis: The Costs and Financing of Public Higher Education
• 3. Seat Time Academic Credit: What Does It Really Measure?
• 4. Tenure: Lifetime Employment in a Fast-Changing World
• 5. Campuses: Overvalued, Underused, and Very Costly
• 6. Lectures, Textbooks, Academic Calendar, and Administration: An Agenda for Change
• 7. Duplication of Programs: Where Do We Draw the Line?
• 8. Intercollegiate Athletics: Challenge to the Academic Mission
• 9. Presidential Selection, Salaries, and Moral Leadership
• 10. Student Demographics: The Coming Changes and Challenges for Higher Education
• 11. University Governance: Structures, Roles, and Responsibilities
• 12. Accreditation: How It Works and Is It Working?
• 13. Attacking the Problems: Student-Centered Strategies for Governors, Governing Boards, and University Presidents
• 14. Epilogue: Theoretical Perspectives on Change
• Back Matter