Is Higher Education Headed in the Wrong Direction?
Thoughts on a Tyler Cowen column
Full disclosure: being a full professor is a pretty sweet job. The glib way of putting it is that I get paid to go into a room and think. Then I go into another room and tell people what I think (and what other people think and what I think about their thinking). And then they write down what I think. Finally, I grade them on how well they have regurgitated what I and other people were thinking. It’s a very ego-soothing job!
That said, the past few years have been hard in the ivory tower. The growing bureaucratization of the academy has been a cognitive drag. In order to appease every university directive, my course syllabi are beginning to resemble the terms-of-service agreements that folks never read when they are updated. The push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), while well-intentioned, has been institutionalized in such a way as to make it seem more like an exercise in performativity than anything else. All of the trends I identified in The Ideas Industry — the erosion of trust in expertise, the polarization of public attitudes, and the rise of a plutocratic class that believes in disruption über alles — are still there in one form or another.
My point is, I agree with a lot of what economist and blogger Tyler Cowen says in his latest Bloomberg column — but I am not entirely sold on his conclusion:
The various “political correctness” scandals on college campuses, such as a group at Stanford recommending against the use of the words “American” and “immigrant,” get a lot of headlines. But there are more gradual, less visible changes that also contribute to the declining status of the US system of higher education.…
[Cowen’s drivers include: an overemphasis on the hard sciences instead of the social sciences and humanities; the mental health crisis among America’s youth; the reallocation of skilled human capital away from careers in the academy; and overall work-life balance issues.]
Many of these variables do not change much in a single year, nor do they make for clickable headlines. But in the longer run they may pose a greater danger to the health and influence of the US system of higher education….
Yes, American academia is in crisis. But the headlines don’t give a sense of the depth of that crisis.
If anything, Cowen misses a few issues, like explicit state efforts to censor university instruction, the decline in international students affecting the bottom line of universities, and the adjunctification of higher education.
That said, there are two ways in which I think the situation is not quite as dire as Cowen suggests. The first, paradoxically, is that higher education is not uniquely vulnerable to the dysfunction that Cowen identifies. The Ideas Industry drivers affect everyone, and as I argued in the book, universities can cope better than other sectors. Goodness knows that the private sector and public sector suffer from excessive bureaucratization and issues with work-life balance. I am unconvinced by Cowen’s claim that the grass is greener somewhere else.
Second, the optimist in me is not persuaded that the trendlines will continue to go south. The mental health crisis will hopefully fade as pandemic restrictions continue to recede and people remember/learn what it is like to interact with other people in public settings. International enrollments are starting to climb again. Basic research at universities will continue to generate valuable ideas.
Higher education is not in a great place right now. But no sector of the country is in a great place right now, and I am hopeful that the trendlines have stopped moving in the wrong direction.
What do you think?
I've been retired for several years after teaching English at Gallaudet for decades and serving as a trustee at Wabash College. I even taught part-time at George Mason forty years ago, when it was a rather unprepossessing commuter school. And my son is an assistant professor teaching finance at a major research institution, despite my advice to do anything else.
I think Bopaul's (sp?) disease & demographics have come together disastrously. Higher ed costs have risen faster than incomes, hitting underendowed private schools and under-supported red brick state schools especially hard, even has state support has declined. In turn, schools have come to rely more and more on part-time faculty, reducing quality. The decline in the college age population has made the industry a buyers mkt. Admissions offices used to process applications; now they recruit, aggressively. UGRDs aren't any worse prepared than 60 years ago; they just respond to what the market offers. There's also a market inside institutions, as disciplines compete to attract students. Given rising costs, students focus on preparing for the world of work, and many schools unable to afford under-enrolled disciplines eliminate them. Even a lot of the seemingly senseless hassles like huge syllabi come from these changes as depts try to control quality and outcomes and retain students.
All these changes make teaching a good deal less rewarding, especially in now unpopular disciplines, and will increasingly lead more and more disciplines to change and schools to close. But I'm not sure they're all together bad for students. I don't think many ever again looked at a poem after surviving a required English class, no matter how much I enjoyed talking about it. To be sure I'm more than a bit dubious about the value of business majors (my son loathes them & MBA candidates--he's at the university because of research opportunities), but insofar as they prepare people for useful, prosperous lives, who am I to complain?
I am not convinced that the mental health crisis will fade as there has not been a concerted action in recognising the mental health effects of pandemic restrictions on the generation of 18-25s. To be isolated from peers in the period of life when some of the most meaningful connections were meant to be formed will leave prolonged effects and a crippled social network for the cohort that was affected the most, and there is also a very sobering way of interpreting state reactions to the pandemic: when the lives of old people were at risk, the state could magically pull itself together and create restrictions - yet, when the lives of younger people are at risk, from, let's say, climate change or increasing inequality, which could be tackled with higher taxation and better investment strategies, particularly the lockdown of international capital flows to prevent capital flight, suddenly the state is at the mercy of market forces. It is disillusioning and sobering - where is the empathy?
I agree though, I don't think higher education is at a particular risk, but that is easy to say from an institution that has existed for over eight centuries.