We really need to transform our thinking about higher education in this country. Instead of asking kids what college they want to go to, we should ask them what career do they want to pursue and help them make a higher ed/vocational training plan that fits their goals. Instead of pushing the dream school, we should be helping them discover the right job and the most affordable path to attaining it.
With that speech over, let’s look at some data.
Professor Scott Galloway at NYU Stern and his team assembled a data set of which colleges will survive, thrive, and perish because of the pandemic. Like retail stores, many of the perish were already on life support and might have closed with or without the pandemic. We have already seen local consolidations from UMASS taking over New England Law and Quincy College, BU taking over Wheelock, and Hampshire and Newbury Colleges closing. Mt. Ida already closed.
Galloway has Simmons and possibly even Brandeis as struggle schools. BU will be challenged due to the loss of international students who are cash cows for many programs. Clark, MCLA, Mt. Holyoke, and Bard round out the list of struggling or challenged schools. Many will close.
Prof G has also proposed a big reform. Reinvesting in the big land grant colleges and state schools and making them more affordable while driving down costs and admitting more students. Making the hybrid model permanent could seriously reduce costs. Locally there’s already similar partnerships between Regis and Middlesex Community College and North Shore and Salem State. Where students can crush prerequisites at community college rates and then transfer for the last two years. I had a debate partner at U Chicago who did this and was much smarter financially than I was for doing so.
These colleges are also following the path of Liberty University and hastily reopening becoming super spreading red zones. From UNC to BU. All because like many businesses, they do not have an alternative revenue stream to in person activity. Many parents will ball at paying high end prices for remote learning that frankly is identically subpar from institution to institution.
Like subprime mortgages, nearly everyone has been lured at the tender age of 18 into taking on a government backed loan on a depreciating asset they may ultimately be unable to pay. An Atlantic article almost seven years ago takes about killing Pell Grants and FAFSA and the student loan industrial complex and folding the savings into direct aid to public colleges and universities.
The government should make higher ed as debt free as possible at as many institutions of possible while admitting as many students as possible. The public’s do not need to play to US News. They should play to the taxpayer.
We should also reinvest in trade schools like Ben Franklin and the Petersen School and offer public subsidies to attend them and/or create public alternatives. Community college should be totally free. We need to reform higher ed as an economic mobility engine again, and create as many afford paths as possible for as many living wage jobs as possible. Our mindset has to shift from dream school to the reality of the job market.
This is all true and yet seems to miss what is to me the more important crisis — the structural failure of the economic model that governs most or all colleges and universities.
The parallel to the 2008 collapse of subprime mortgages is apt, but not because students borrow too much (there is no alternative). The structural issue is that the cost structure of colleges and universities remains unchanged while we have systematically removed the revenue necessary to support it.
At the heart of the issue is our collective decision to essentially stop funding research. Every institution that grants advanced degrees depends on research funding to sustain itself. For generations, such funding was the foundation stone upon which the rest of the institution was built. We have collectively slashed research funding to colleges and universities while research costs have skyrocketed. That mismatch is the core of the issue.
The costs of research are skyrocketing for a variety of reasons, all of them valid. Our academic research community is NOT filled with greedy professors demanding seven-figure compensation packages. It is instead a game of musical chairs, with the number of funded chairs decreasing as the cost of each chair explodes.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities depend on marquis names to attract new students. Marquis names demand top-notch facilities. Top-notch facilities demand top-notch funding. The vise constantly tightens.
Historically, the deal academic researchers made was to teach classes, especially undergraduate classes, in exchange for the opportunity to perform their world-class research. The funding from that world-class research paid nearly all the bills, so that tuition and expenses, especially undergraduate tuition and expenses, were kept manageable.
That all changed when the research funding was cut off. The result was that tuition and expenses exploded, putting an ever-increasing burden on undergraduate students. Facility and payroll costs climbed relentlessly, and the only way to pay the bills was to force students and their families to borrow.
In some states, collegiate athletic programs became a major funding source — bringing its own failures and scandals. Athletics have essentially no relationship to academics — college athletic programs exist because their host schools desperately need the money.
I think that universal access to colleges and universities following the European or German model is the right answer. Higher education is, like healthcare, a basic human right. An educated and literate electorate is a crucial requirement of a modern first-world civilized nation.
If taxes are the price we pay for civilization — and they are — then health care and higher education join national defense as the place where we invest the resulting public money.
Absolutely. I still favor research funding to private institutions, but I also favor an endowment tax that can fund community colleges and Pell Grants phased out in favor of fully funded tuition free public universities. I second everything else you said. I think part of the grand bargain we need to make is forcing these public institutions accept a larger pool of students in exchange for bigger funding and lower tuition. State schools should be public goods for their residents, not cash cows for spectator sports or international students. Let the privates compete for that.
The publics should be like the CUNY of old or how the California system used to be, a cheap or debt free mechanism for working class kids to get a world class education and join the middle class. I’d also favor non-college post secondary options a lot more generously. The Cal model is actually pretty similar to Germany’s, which also funds and values vocational education much more than we do.
“An educated and literate electorate is a crucial requirement of a modern first-world civilized nation.”
I agree. That’s also why I have problems about discussions of higher education as only about jobs.
We can afford real, quality free public education that is not only tied to jobs. And we can also afford a jobs guarantee.
I don’t see either of those things happening soon and my students need options that can work for their lives today. I absolutely want that future, and I would add find the non-college options and career paths too. I back guaranteed jobs and free public higher ed.
What I don’t back is continuing to pour money down the drain on subsidizing private tuition at mediocre mid tier schools that offer the worst ROI to debt ratio for their graduates.
The free market would close those places if our tax code didn’t exempt them, if Pell grants didn’t sustain them, and if their debt wasn’t secured by government.
So I view that as part of my public good/no more bailouts or corporate welfare agenda.
Galloway was interviewed on On the Media last week. Some of his points: elite colleges could easily double their attendance with online classes, but they artificially keep enrollment low because they are selling exclusivity, and colleges and universities are increasingly becoming engines for extracting wealth from middle class people and directing that money to themselves.
The breakdown by income of student enrollment at our top institutions is just appalling.
“At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html
His stuff is great. I do think he misses that the exclusivity of their credentialing *is* their brand, but his concept of a Michigan or UCLA letting in hundreds of thousands of students is a good one. Online/on campus hybrid is the way to do it while cutting down on the housing and admin costs.
Hampshire College has not closed.
No facts about the future, obviously.
Hampshire should be reabsorbed into the UMASS system. It would be a win win. They get a bailout, and low income kids across the Commonwealth can access an experimental based alternative education usually reserved for the wealthiest few. It’s also the kind of school where the alumni won’t be wealthy by design since they tend to go into creative fields rather than business. Bard should be absorbed into SUNY. I think expanding the Mass state college and university system is a no brainer. They should admit anyone academically capable of graduating.
Hampshire cannot be reabsorbed into anything because it was never part of another system in the first place.
I agree it is a logical fit from Hampshire’s POV. Apparently not from UMass’s, which was cool to the notion when the ousted regime pitched it several years ago.
My reference point is The Evergreen State College, a Hampshire-like school that is part of the Washington state school system. You need a deep understanding that multiple models of learning serve the public best.
PS Hampshire grads do quite well, as a group, I think.