Higher education isn’t floundering in a crisis from which it will recover, but lurching through a fundamental transformation, and it’s time we recognize it. We can no longer cling to the desperate optimism of a few years ago, when we hoped that we could weather the downturn with enough belt-tightening and furloughing, muddling through a few grim years to emerging back into a state of normalcy that looked mostly like what we used to know. There’s no need to review the sad litany of multi-million dollar budget cuts and their horrifying consequences. The stories of libraries frozen in time, of schools scrambling to find rooms with enough capacity to hold classes doubled in size, of once-essential functions reclassified as expendable are too common, repeated in every kind of institution in every state. Let’s just stipulate that things are bad. Very bad. But as bad as things are, let’s stop peering forward anxiously, hoping for a sign that things are looking more like they used to. Though it’s a natural enough desire in its comforting sameness, it ignores the changed economic, political and cultural realities within which higher education exists. We won’t be going back to where we were. The new normal, assuming some future period of relative stability, will look very different from the old normal. No amount of institutional fetal positioning, “fat trimming,” or breath-holding will carry us through to daylight, and backward-looking, fighting rear-guard actions, and railing at the injustice of change all distract our energy and attention from actively shaping the future of higher education.
For starters let’s admit that we, higher education faculty, bear some responsibility for the current situation. Not the recession (though Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities look frighteningly like Mortgage-Backed Securities), which, by slowing the flow of federal, state, county and municipal tax dollars, has simply made obvious the unsustainable nature of higher education in the United States. We’re responsible, at least in part, for the construction of luxury dormitories to lure students away from other institutions. We’re responsible for tenure and promotion systems that too often encourage the pursuit of personal prestige over teaching and learning. We’re responsible for the massive transformation of perfectly good liberal arts colleges into aspiring universities. We’re responsible for pyramid schemes that abuse low-paid, non-benefitted, contingent workers in order to sustain high salaries for those who teach the least. We’re responsible for allowing students to amass crippling debt in pursuit of their education. We have, at least tacitly, supported institutional empire-building, intellectual exceptionalism, and naked exploitation. Too often we have left the running of our institutions to others, criticizing their actions from our snug, self-imposed sidelines.
If we want to improve the situation instead of waiting to see what dystopian future others impose upon us, we must understand how higher education fits into the big picture. Let’s first accept that we are addicted to public money. We get it directly through billions of tax dollars and indirectly through billions of dollars of student financial aid. The GI bill transformed higher education in the US, and the Higher Education Act of 1965 intensified the importance of federal dollars. Few institutions can afford to ignore this money, but, unsurprisingly, we resent the pusher. Institutionally we squirm under often ham-fisted federal regulation, and individually we cultivate ignorance of the implications for our students and ourselves, leaving concerns about filthy lucre to a handful of staff and administrators. Though it may not seem like it, we’ve largely been left alone, asked to prove nothing more than good faith in exchange for the cash. We’re seldom asked to prove that we’ve taught anyone anything. Headcounts of graduates aren’t direct evidence of learning. So we shouldn’t be surprised when shrinking pots of money lead to more questions about what taxpayers get in exchange for all those dollars. The current spotlight may be on for-profit institutions, but the growing demand for proof of some return on investment won’t stop there. If there’s any safe bet about the future of higher education in the US, it’s that demands for accountability, for evidence of effectiveness, will increase.
It’s not as though we can’t prove our value. We just generally don’t bother to. It takes time, money and effort to go beyond GPAs and assess what students have learned, and we’ve been reluctant to allocate those resources into something as unglamorous as proving that we do what we claim we do. Institution-wide assessment programs are still the exception rather than the norm, and that lack of evidence-gathering has left us with a big hole in our arguments about the intrinsic value of higher education. We ask our students to support their positions with relevant evidence, but too often we simply assert that “Of course higher education makes you a better person/citizen/employee.” It’s time for us to practice what we teach, to do meaningful research, to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and to accept that “we say so” is no longer sufficient assurance of educational quality. This self-examination is critical not only to making the argument to our fellow citizens about the wise use of their tax dollars, but also to our own allocation of increasingly scarce resources. We don’t know where to put our money, time and effort if we don’t know what really helps students learn. We need to transform our institutions’ operations around the core principles of proven effective instruction and genuine expansion of knowledge instead of the pursuit of individual and institutional prestige at the expense of students and untenured faculty.
If we can’t manage this, if we can’t prove to others that what we do has value and deserves vigorous support, no economic upturn will reconstitute budgets, and no amount of righteous indignation will bring back the old normal.
For starters let’s admit that we, higher education faculty, bear some responsibility for the current situation. Not the recession (though Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities look frighteningly like Mortgage-Backed Securities), which, by slowing the flow of federal, state, county and municipal tax dollars, has simply made obvious the unsustainable nature of higher education in the United States. We’re responsible, at least in part, for the construction of luxury dormitories to lure students away from other institutions. We’re responsible for tenure and promotion systems that too often encourage the pursuit of personal prestige over teaching and learning. We’re responsible for the massive transformation of perfectly good liberal arts colleges into aspiring universities. We’re responsible for pyramid schemes that abuse low-paid, non-benefitted, contingent workers in order to sustain high salaries for those who teach the least. We’re responsible for allowing students to amass crippling debt in pursuit of their education. We have, at least tacitly, supported institutional empire-building, intellectual exceptionalism, and naked exploitation. Too often we have left the running of our institutions to others, criticizing their actions from our snug, self-imposed sidelines.
If we want to improve the situation instead of waiting to see what dystopian future others impose upon us, we must understand how higher education fits into the big picture. Let’s first accept that we are addicted to public money. We get it directly through billions of tax dollars and indirectly through billions of dollars of student financial aid. The GI bill transformed higher education in the US, and the Higher Education Act of 1965 intensified the importance of federal dollars. Few institutions can afford to ignore this money, but, unsurprisingly, we resent the pusher. Institutionally we squirm under often ham-fisted federal regulation, and individually we cultivate ignorance of the implications for our students and ourselves, leaving concerns about filthy lucre to a handful of staff and administrators. Though it may not seem like it, we’ve largely been left alone, asked to prove nothing more than good faith in exchange for the cash. We’re seldom asked to prove that we’ve taught anyone anything. Headcounts of graduates aren’t direct evidence of learning. So we shouldn’t be surprised when shrinking pots of money lead to more questions about what taxpayers get in exchange for all those dollars. The current spotlight may be on for-profit institutions, but the growing demand for proof of some return on investment won’t stop there. If there’s any safe bet about the future of higher education in the US, it’s that demands for accountability, for evidence of effectiveness, will increase.
It’s not as though we can’t prove our value. We just generally don’t bother to. It takes time, money and effort to go beyond GPAs and assess what students have learned, and we’ve been reluctant to allocate those resources into something as unglamorous as proving that we do what we claim we do. Institution-wide assessment programs are still the exception rather than the norm, and that lack of evidence-gathering has left us with a big hole in our arguments about the intrinsic value of higher education. We ask our students to support their positions with relevant evidence, but too often we simply assert that “Of course higher education makes you a better person/citizen/employee.” It’s time for us to practice what we teach, to do meaningful research, to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and to accept that “we say so” is no longer sufficient assurance of educational quality. This self-examination is critical not only to making the argument to our fellow citizens about the wise use of their tax dollars, but also to our own allocation of increasingly scarce resources. We don’t know where to put our money, time and effort if we don’t know what really helps students learn. We need to transform our institutions’ operations around the core principles of proven effective instruction and genuine expansion of knowledge instead of the pursuit of individual and institutional prestige at the expense of students and untenured faculty.
If we can’t manage this, if we can’t prove to others that what we do has value and deserves vigorous support, no economic upturn will reconstitute budgets, and no amount of righteous indignation will bring back the old normal.
