Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”
Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :
bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.
bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.
bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.
{ 26 comments }
ptl 10.21.10 at 10:59 am
future? for arts and social sciences, but for a very small elite? (I bet they’re glad they abolished tenure, not that its protections were that great.)
Steve LaBonne 10.21.10 at 12:36 pm
Health care and education are both subject to the kind of market failure that can cause competition to drive prices UP rather than down (while simultaneously decreasing the quality of service, even when attempts are made to disguise this fact with glitz). Too bad the market theologians are too simpleminded (and /or corrupt) to think their way past Econ 101 cliches.
Pat Capps 10.21.10 at 12:44 pm
We’ve gone through ‘Lucky Jim’ through ‘Changing Places’ (where we had a glimpse of the future) to ‘I am Charlotte Simmonds’. Reviews of the latter seem to depict it as exaggerated and stereotypical. If you work at a ‘top rank’ British University, you’ll know the world it depicts has been coming for years. We can now say for certainty that it is now 11 months away.
By the way, this font was last used in ‘Lords of Midnight’ on the Spectrum in about 1985.
Harry 10.21.10 at 2:02 pm
Schreker’s analysis is incomplete. First, all higher ed, including the for-profits and the privates, are massively subsidized by federal aid that goes directly to students, GSLs, and tuition tax breaks. There are huge barriers to entry to elite status, and high demand regardless of the quality of the instruction, for positional good reasons. Second, the public universities best equipped to withstand massive shocks to state fiscal situations are those that have reduced their dependence on state governments, not the reverse. Third it is worth noting that until recently elite publics have often done better under Republicans than Democrats because, as Pat Brown once said, the Democrats have many public sector constituencies they want to reward, whereas the only state-supported public services the republican constituencies care are the elite universities their kids attend on the public dollar.
In the current environment relatively few elite (flagship) publics are really feeling the pinch because there are multiple funding sources, and high demand (because the positional goods are provided at a massive, if reducing, discount). We, for example, have endured a small, temporary paycut, but are still hiring more tenure-track faculty than are leaving/dying/retiring, and, yes, we are raising tuition but to levels that will still be very low comparatively, and will still be subsidised by tax breaks and GSLs.
Yes, universities have had to adapt to the external environment. Yes, that’s basically bad. What was the alternative, though? (that’s not a rhetorical question, I’d like a convincing answer).
Steve LaBonne 10.21.10 at 2:12 pm
To add to what Harry said, state universities that were just below the flagship level are reacting by making a big push to move into the elite stratum (which inevitably involves making them even less dependent on state support). Thus the University of Cincinnati (which my daughter attends), the second-banana public research university in Ohio, is in the middle of a billion-dollar fundraising campaign with the explicit (and wildly optimistic) goal of becoming the best urban public research university in the country. (I’m not sure whether the qualifier “urban” is a sneer at OSU or at the overgrown suburb called Columbus, but it’s cute either way.) Given the realities this was the only way they could react- they can either move up or down but were unlikely to be able to simply remain in place (and they’ve already been making strenuous efforts to move up for at least a couple of decades).
Matt M 10.21.10 at 3:28 pm
It seems to me that the shift in funding of (public) institutions on a wide variety of outside money rather than state money, as well as shifting to fund those programs that serve some economic function, creates an oddly shaped university. To talk of academic programs, institutions are likely to favor those departments that can generate external funding, since the program is being subsidized.
In favoring externally-funded disciplines though, universities are making commitments to cost-share, as a condition of accepting the external funding (this is particularly the case with the NSF in the US). However, those conditions add up over time, and ultimately draw on the general budget (e.g. outfitting a new lab, constructing a new museum, paying for benefits for researchers, etc).
And to follow up on Steve’s point, it’s often too tempting to decline outside funding, since that would prevent the institution from achieving its lofty goals to beat its competitors. This leaves the institution without the ability to address the needs of those programs that, even if they are deemed to have “no immediate economic functionâ€, achieve excellence in other areas on campus.
I’d say that more promising aims for institutions to: self-consciously fund only those areas that meet strategic needs for the university (which for big flagships, there are quite a few of these); and to avoid accepting funds that commit an institution to mission-bloat and budget-bloat, even if it’s a boat-load of cash.
Tom T. 10.21.10 at 4:13 pm
One has to imagine that similar articles about educational decline were written when the Ivies dropped requirements for Latin and Greek.
The reduction of tenure-track faculty may be a bad thing for any number of reasons, but I’m not sure that instructional quality is one of them. My experience 20 years ago was that much of the teaching was typically handled by graduate TAs, who were afflicted with much of the same problems of low pay, bad working conditions, and lack of academic freedom as adjunct faculty. Maybe other schools aren’t like that.
And do students really compete on grades? The Ivies basically don’t give out any Cs any more. Do other schools still use a broader grading range?
StevenAttewell 10.21.10 at 6:25 pm
Yeah, when I look at what the U.K universities are marching towards, and I look at my own university, I’m not optimistic. There’s a very strange generational similarity to this – people of my parent’s generation and after, both in the U.K and in California, enjoyed a tuition-free education based on the concept of equal opportunity. That seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of low taxes for that same generation.
Incidentally, one particularly venomous brand of snake oil is the idea that higher fees plus aid for the needy is somehow more “progressive.” That’s not true in California, and it won’t be true in the U.K.
http://realignmentproject.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/rebuilding-the-public-university-against-high-aid-high-fees-model/
Davis 10.21.10 at 7:37 pm
This argument has its causality crossed. The American universities with fancy facilities are not competing for more tuition dollars. Instead, they are competing for “better” students — student metrics like average test scores, % graduating in 4 years, etc. are the most important factors in US News rankings.
Yes, this hurts instruction, and as Steve LaBonne says, it drives tuition upward. It isn’t clear to me what role state funding has played in this, but, the rankings-pressure has a bigger impact on cutting costs on unranked items.
Harry 10.21.10 at 9:52 pm
Davis is right (as is Steve L) — the very elite privates see elite undergraduates as a long term investment (and a good one), and sub-elite publics know that there is a little room to move into the elite public category. Being in that category enables you to compete for out-of-state and international students as well as research funds. For more on Davis’s point see Zemsky Wegner and Massy…
BUT, elite undergraduates are a much better investment in the US than in the UK, because i) they can accumulate much more wealth, ii) the infrastructure of extracting money from alumni is much better developed and there is a culture of donation (in the Uk I know a number of wealthy people who still, bizarrely, think that when they give money away it should be to people who are more disadvantaged than they are), and iii) their past investments are already paying off.
And being in the elite public category in the US is a better deal than in the US because there’s a lot more research funding to compete for.
jon livesey 10.21.10 at 10:21 pm
“…people of my parent’s generation and after, both in the U.K and in California, enjoyed a tuition-free education based on the concept of equal opportunity.”
Sure, but it was equal opportunity for a much smaller segment of school leavers. When I went to University in the UK, tuition-free, roughly seven percent of school-leavers made it to an institution that called itself a University.
When you get to forty or fifty percent, can you really expect the taxpayer to foot the bill? What’s the marginal benefit to the economy, or to “society”, in getting from 49% to 50%? At what percentage does going to University cease to represent a significant improvement in the intellectual stock of the economy and become a mere rite of passage?
StevenAttewell 10.21.10 at 10:41 pm
Jon –
Yes, I can. Firstly, because if we’re talking 50%, then a majority of the people have spoken. Secondly, because higher education is a human right (“higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”). Thirdly, because there are compelling reasons for education that go beyond the economic.
Pete 10.21.10 at 11:11 pm
” higher education is a human right (“higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of meritâ€).”
That doesn’t say anything about what level the merit requirement should be set at or what proportion of people should go to university, just that the admissions process should be merit based.
Gene O'Grady 10.21.10 at 11:15 pm
On nos. 11 and 12, the percentage of high school graduates who could go to UC or the better State Universities (actually most of them were still colleges) in the 50’s and 60’s was significantly higher than today.
Somewhere around here I still have an angry letter my father sent me in 1966 when Pat Brown was losing to Reagan in the governor’s race about it being the campus conservatives that had done Brown in. Which rather makes Mr. Attenwell’s point.
Given that he may have exaggerated a bit and written somewhat in anger, his point is still one that people should remember when they talk about the sixties.
engels 10.21.10 at 11:20 pm
Normally wouldn’t you think that the more people there are who have access to a particular public service the _easier_ it is to justify its being funded out of general taxation?
By Jon’s logic if the only public libraries in Britain were all in Tonbridge Wells it would make sense to have British taxpayers up and down the country paying for them, but since we’ve got them in most towns in the country it doesn’t.
Epikhairekakia 10.21.10 at 11:54 pm
@Tom T: “My experience 20 years ago was that much of the teaching was typically handled by graduate TAs, who were afflicted with much of the same problems of low pay, bad working conditions, and lack of academic freedom as adjunct faculty. Maybe other schools aren’t like that.”
Was this at an Ivy? If so, why do people think they’ll get a better education there than at an elite public? I was taught by precisely one non-tenure-track instructor for half a term in my four years in an honors program at one such institution, and at least half of my courses involved senior professors teaching classes of 15 students or fewer.
y81 10.22.10 at 1:14 am
I am mostly with Tom T (@ 7). In the absence of some principled vision of who should be educated, or what young people should learn, or what universities should offer other than lectures (e.g., football? eating clubs? political debating societies?), or who should do the teaching (experienced researchers in their 50s? 25 year olds immersed in the current literature?), all of which today’s academics conspicuously and consistently fail to provide, why shouldn’t the university curriculum be driven by the demands of the market? Just asserting without proof that 1981 was the pinnacle of academic excellence isn’t very convincing.
Omega Centauri 10.22.10 at 1:35 am
I’ve got a bit of an experiment going on in my family. I have twin boys taking the same major, one in a UC flagship campus, and one in a run of the mill (admissions standardswise) UC campus. So I may have a rare opportunity to compare the results. So far it looks like they both give out similar average grades in class. The flagship campus’s main strategy for academic success is to put their highly selected students in a class, give them challenging material, and force them to compete with each other. In the middling status campus, the GPA may be similar, but that is simply the process of weeding out the unfir/unprepared at work. In neither case do I think the faculty gives much priority to undergraduate education. I expect my son at the elite institution to learn alot because he will learn primarily from his peers, and be forced to work hard to compete with them. I hope my other son won’t slack off and earn easy A’s.
There is no doubt in my mind, that many currently middleclass families are having to make major compromises on their kids education, because of the cost. I doubt this was very much the case a decade ago. I think the class threshold for being able to afford a good quality education has risen to the 80-90th percentile.
Steve LaBonne 10.22.10 at 2:42 am
Certainly true of me. My daughter is in the honors program at Cincinnati because she was a National Merit finalist and all such there get free tuition and room for all 4 years (they’re still in the portion of the status-climbing process in which they have to buy top students). Without that scholarship she would have to be borrowing massive amounts of money, which I simply would not allow (not that she wanted to, she understands the consequences.)
leederick 10.22.10 at 8:37 pm
I really dislike the way the CT bloggers have been so willing to take a pop at vocational subjects in these threads.
Most people doing vocational subjects are very well served by universities. We can sneer at journalism and sports science students, it is a pretty bad choice to do a vocational degree that isn’t very likely to end up as a vocation and qualifies you for little else – but the problem there is students being sold a pup by academics and university marketing departments. Most the growth has actually been in traditional vocational topics like those allied to medicine, engineering, law, accountancy (and yes, most business studies degrees are basically rebranded accounting degrees with a bit of economics and organisational psychology thrown in), planning, architecture, education, social work – I’d also include IT degrees. These give a perfectly good education, and give you more more confidence in making an easy move to the labour market than a pure subject – which is very important if you don’t come from the top economic stratums. There’s nothing wrong with people making academic choices with one eye on their future economic security, for many it is a choice between doing this or not attending university.
Frankly, the problem isn’t market oriented subjects, it’s in the academic ones. We have lots of people wasting an opportunity to improve their lives by studying very weak academic degrees. If you want me to name names, particular areas of the soft sciences (psychology, archaeology, environmental science), social sciences (politics, sociology) and humanities (english studies, critical studies) have seen very large and regretable recent growth. Mainly because they don’t appear too difficult at first glance, and students are mislead by universties about their career prospects – the old journalism/sports science problem which is much more widespread in academic than vocational subjects. I’m glad this trend looks set to be reversed.
Steve LaBonne 10.22.10 at 9:02 pm
leederick, speaking as one who has been out of academia for a long time now and who therefore can’t be accused of a conflict of interest, I believe that many vocational undergraduate degrees actually serve students poorly in a world in which people no longer can expect to work at the same job for their employed lifetimes, or most often even for a solid decade. Too many of these programs give students training, on a fairly low intellectual level, for the FIRST job they expect to hold, but by no means the intellectual chops to adapt to the changes sure to occur thereafter. If that’s what you’re looking for, in the US you can and should get it much more cheaply at a community college.
hellblazer 10.23.10 at 9:06 pm
Sees Bitzer at comment #20, despairs. My guess is that some history degrees provide rather more valuable training than a fair chunk of maths degrees in the UK. And I speak as someone with a maths degree from the UK…
James Conran 10.27.10 at 10:28 pm
‘higher education is a human right (“higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of meritâ€)’
I think we are all more likely to accept food as a human right than we are HE. It does not follow that charging for food is a violation of human rights.
Substance McGravitas 10.27.10 at 10:39 pm
If food and education were not already provided for in government budgets all over the world you might have some sort of point.
Substance McGravitas 10.27.10 at 11:12 pm
Yeah, Marx would have sent everybody to the gulag because he was Russian.
Substance McGravitas 10.28.10 at 2:48 am
Know who throws bloggers in the gulag now? Microsoft.
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