The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges

Derek Bok

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691177472
• eBook ISBN: 9781400888344
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Why efforts to improve American higher educational attainment haven't worked, and where to go from here

During the first decade of this century, many commentators predicted that American higher education was about to undergo major changes that would be brought about under the stimulus of online learning and other technological advances. Toward the end of the decade, the president of the United States declared that America would regain its historic lead in the education of its workforce within the next ten years through a huge increase in the number of students earning "quality" college degrees.

Several years have elapsed since these pronouncements were made, yet the rate of progress has increased very little, if at all, in the number of college graduates or the nature and quality of the education they receive. In The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, Derek Bok seeks to explain why so little change has occurred by analyzing the response of America's colleges; the influence of students, employers, foundations, accrediting organizations, and government officials; and the impact of market forces and technological innovation. In the last part of the book, Bok identifies a number of initiatives that could improve the performance of colleges and universities. The final chapter examines the process of change itself and describes the strategy best calculated to quicken the pace of reform and enable colleges to meet the challenges that confront them.

PART ONE

The Challenge

CHAPTER ONE

Graduation Rates and Educational Attainment

UNTIL RECENTLY, GRADUATION RATES WERE NOT widely regarded as a national problem. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fewer than 5 percent of young people entered college, and less than half of those enrolling graduated. Yet few people cared. Finishing college was rarely a matter of great consequence, since students did not need a degree to enter the vast majority of occupations and professions.

As the economy grew in size and complexity, college education became more important to the economy. Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, the percentages of young Americans who finished high school and graduated from college were above the levels of other countries and large enough in relation to the needs of the society that increasing the number who earned a degree did not seem a matter of much urgency. Until late in the century, dropout rates were seldom even considered a responsibility of the college. If students failed to stay the course, their departure was widely attributed to their lack of ability or perseverance, not to any failing on the part of the institution.

During the 1980s, however, Americans grew increasingly concerned about the nation’s ability to compete successfully in global markets. By this time, rates of increase in the gross domestic product had become the principal measure of the nation’s progress. Since economists identified the skills and knowledge of the labor force as important contributors to economic growth, policy-makers began to look more carefully at the performance of our educational institutions. Many state legislatures started to examine the benefits achieved by their appropriations to higher education and tried to make their colleges and universities more accountable by requiring them to submit detailed reports on their performance. Graduation rates were one of the outcomes included in almost all of these reporting requirements.

The problem of graduation rates attracted even more attention following the publication in 2008 of a book entitled The Race between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.¹ The authors emphasized the importance of education not only for economic growth but also for equality of income and opportunity. In America, they claimed, the failings of our educational institutions over the past several decades, including a prolonged stagnation in college graduation rates, were a major reason for our sluggish economic growth and increasing inequality of income. These concerns were amplified by surging college enrollments in other industrialized countries that allowed many of them to overtake and even surpass the United States in the educational levels of their younger workers.

Research on college completion also revealed the large and growing income and racial gaps in the rates at which students were graduating from college. Among high school graduates academically qualified for college study, far more students from high-income families completed a bachelor’s degree within eight years than did those from low-income families. This vast and growing difference was accompanied by rising income inequality, a problem that came to attract increasing attention in the twenty-first century.

Responding to these trends, President Obama declared to Congress in 2009 that the United States must regain its historic leadership in the educational attainment of its people.² To achieve this goal, he declared that America needed to raise the share of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds earning a “quality” college credential to 60 percent by 2020. Since the existing percentage of college-educated Americans barely exceeded 40 percent, achieving the president’s goal within little more than a decade would require a mammoth effort by all concerned, especially colleges and universities.³ The percentage of Americans with college degrees had been increasing for several decades at a rate of roughly 0.5 percent per year, aided by growth in the college-age population.⁴ Now, the percentage would have to rise at least four times as fast.

DO WE REALLY NEED SO MANY MORE COLLEGE GRADUATES?

The call for a massive increase in college degrees echoed a widely shared view among business executives and policy-makers that America faces a shortage of highly educated workers, and that the problem will likely get worse if something is not done to increase the number of college graduates. The most authoritative estimates available, those of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, project that more than 60 percent of all new jobs created by 2018 will require at least some college education.⁵ Anthony Carnevale, the widely cited director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, has foreseen an even more serious problem, declaring that America will experience a skill deficit of roughly three million jobs by 2018 if the number of college graduates does not grow faster.⁶ Already, the shortage of educated workers has helped to lift the earnings premium for college graduates to levels not seen for the last one hundred years.⁷

Reports of a serious shortage of highly skilled employees have continued to appear since the recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008. Most of these claims have been based on surveys of employers. For example, in 2014, the Business Roundtable projected shortages of college-educated workers even greater than those anticipated by Professor Carnevale. According to the Roundtable’s “action plan,”

By some estimates, the economy will create 54.8 million new and replacement jobs between 2010 and 2020 with 65 percent of all jobs requiring some level of postsecondary education and training. Unfortunately, we may fall short by as many as 5 million workers who do not have the post-secondary qualifications needed to meet this goal.⁸

Employers expressed particular concern over shortages of workers with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the so-called STEM subjects. In 2013, a poll, sponsored by the Bayer Corporation, of 150 talent recruiters from Fortune 1000 companies found that 89 percent of respondents reported “fierce competition” for STEM graduates and alleged that only half of the participating companies were able to fill job vacancies for STEM majors “in a timely manner.”⁹

Is There Really a Skills Gap? Despite the concerns of employers and the projections of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a number of analysts dispute the very existence of a “skills gap” in the economy and question the forecasts of a growing shortfall of college graduates over the next several years.¹⁰ Some economists claim that such projections overlook the fact that large numbers of jobs currently occupied by BAs could be performed by employees with lesser credentials.¹¹ Other analysts point out that the demand for college-educated workers diminished during the first decade of this century, and that the average earnings of BAs (not counting those with advanced degrees) actually declined slightly, which they would hardly do if a genuine shortage existed.¹²

The most detailed attack on claims of a skills gap has been mounted by Peter Capelli, chair of the Wharton School’s program in human resources at the University of Pennsylvania. In a paper published in 2014, Capelli pointed out that only 5 percent of employers indicated that they planned to raise their pay to cope with shortages of skilled employees.¹³ With respect to STEM graduates, he cited figures showing that half of the engineering BAs take jobs in other fields, and that 30 percent of those who do mention the lack of employment opportunities in engineering as the reason. Although recent engineering graduates are less likely than most BAs to be underemployed, 22 percent held positions in 2010 that did not require an engineering degree, and an additional 7 percent were without a job.¹⁴ Other analysts agree that the earnings of engineers have risen only modestly, not at all what one would expect if a serious shortage existed.¹⁵

After considering the evidence, Capelli concludes that employers are complaining about a nonexistent skills gap because they prefer having a surplus of qualified workers on which to draw rather than having to increase wages and provide more in-house training.¹⁶ Since there has been no dearth of qualified candidates since the recession of 2008, Capelli claims that many companies wait to fill job openings in the expectation that ideal replacements will eventually appear possessing sufficient work experience to “hit the ground running” without a need for higher salaries or added training. Under these conditions, he concludes, “whether it makes sense for society as a whole to send a higher percentage of high school students to college expecting that they will all earn the same [earnings] premium, in the absence of any evidence of increased demand for college-level skills, is not obvious.”^17*

Well-known difficulties in estimating future economic fluctuations add to the confusion over the future educational needs of the economy. Estimating labor market trends, like predicting movements in the stock market, has always been an uncertain enterprise. Sharp differences of opinion over the likely effects of new technology make current projections of future job requirements even more problematic. Thus a recent study by two Oxford professors concludes that 47 percent of the jobs in America are now at high risk of displacement by machines, but that “computerization will mainly do away with low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future.”¹⁸ On the other hand, author and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that advanced technology is already beginning to displace highly educated workers in fields such as law, radiology, and medical diagnostics, and that “we are running up against a limit both in terms of the people being herded into colleges and the number of high skilled jobs that will be available to them if they manage to graduate.”¹⁹

The Immigration Solution. Even if a shortage does exist in subjects such as science and engineering, and even if the need for advanced skills grows more acute, it may not be necessary to solve the problem by massively increasing the number of people graduating from college. Instead, America could meet its needs by increasing the supply of well-educated immigrants. Large numbers of able young people regularly come to the United States to complete their education, and many of them want to remain here to work. Already, immigrants account for 15 percent of America’s workforce, including one-third of all employees in STEM occupations and half of all employed engineering doctorates. The supply of highly educated workers could easily grow more rapidly if immigration restrictions were eased.

This situation may not last forever, once leading suppliers, such as India and China, develop their own economies sufficiently to offer more attractive career possibilities to their most talented graduates. Still, America could probably adjust immigration limits to meet the demand for highly educated talent for at least another generation or two, especially in STEM fields, a step enthusiastically supported by high-tech employers in Silicon Valley.²⁰ By responding in this way, policy-makers could avoid the risk of encouraging more young Americans to earn college degrees only to find no need for their skills.

At the same time, immigration would do nothing to increase the career prospects of employees who have seen their earnings stagnate or even decline over the past several decades. For generations, the American Dream has portrayed the United States as the premier land of opportunity where those who are willing to work hard enough can realize their ambitions, however humble their origins. This belief has been an important factor in maintaining social solidarity and securing acceptance of the existing economic system despite its high levels of income inequality. In recent years, howe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One The Challenge
• Part Two Sources of Influence
• Part Three The Way Forward
• Notes
• Index