Steven Douglas Maloney

The American University is not dead, and it may not be dying – but it is definitely heading into a dark and unknown future.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has declared tenure dead.  The Delta Project’s studies on trends in college spending provide some bleak data (unless you are a college athlete).

The numbers seem to suggest something like the following model is playing out in higher education:

1. Public funding per student has decreased dramatically for higher education
2. The fundraising of elite private research institutions has been dramatically improved over the past ten years
3. The difficulty for other higher ed. institutions to provide comparable educations to scale of the higher institutions has been damaged by their inability to raise funds the way the elite private universities have, making it harder to justify the current level of public subsidy of the public, much less seek ore money to maintain their relative place in the academic universe.
4. To cut costs, universities have had to reduce the number of tenure offers and cut public service expenses out of their budget, making their product even less attractive to public investment.
5. Students have been asked to subsidize more and more of their own education, requiring higher education institutions to focus on competing for student money through improved exercise, entertainment, dining and residential facilities in order to secure more students.
6. The maintenance of all of these campus life elements requires a much larger core of administrators, who are tasked with attracting student money to the school and keeping students connected to giving to the school as alumni.
7. The increased spending on facilities, administration, admissions, alumni support, has forced instruction into a holding pattern.  Research that funds itself is encouraged because ti pays for itself and then some, but academic work in sector that do not attract funds is supported only insofar as it is needed as a means of attracting students the way that having an olympic-sized swimming pool attracts students.
8. The glut of students who have self-paid for their advanced degrees creates a glut of teaching talent that is heavily invested in not giving up in making a career out of what took half a decade and a home mortgage worth of debt to accomplish.

In short, I endorse the hypothesis that while yes, the higher education system is in a very bad way, I do believe that Universities are generally structured to maximize the objectives that Universities ought to be pursuing.  Yes, building fancy facilities for entertainment, exercise, and whatnot for students is distasteful when you have faculty who make less than a greeter does at Wal-Mart.  But without the student, parent, and alumni money that comes in off such investments, it is not at all clear to me that the University could afford to purchase more of its more nobler aims.

Given the tumult and the tight budgetary situation nationally, there is not a lot of room for entrepreneurship, because there are not a lot of public or private investors in this climate who could afford to absorb the cost of an intriguing risk that does not pan out.  I think the picture is going to have to change by a number of small entrepreneurial moves in  higher ed. until either they add up to something that changes the momentum in some way, or until an idea catches fire enough that investing in it no longer seems risky.

Another dynamic at play here is that the patrons are actually unhappy.  Peter Levine notes that millennials have a historically low amount of trust in other people.  I have noticed over the past few years that students are getting more and more libertarian in their politics.  When I ask about it, I hear a common theme of frustration that they have been thrust into roles of carrying political institutions for older generations without many of the tangible benefits older generations received from participating in those systems.  Most of my students believe there will be no social security for them when they retire, believe that health care costs will be generally worse fro them than their parents, believe that they have to carry a higher debt load in order to run a profitable household than past generations and have a general sense that most of society is more than happy to stick them with living through the difficult times of covering programs to control the “skyrocketing” costs of prescription drugs while no one lifts a finger for the increased cost of attending college, which has increased in cost at a rate that puts prescription drugs to shame and has gone from guaranteeing a respectable job in the workforce to being a ticket in a national employment lottery – you have to have one to play, but there is no guarantee you will win anything at the end of the day.

We appear to have a situation where the public will not invest in education because it is more concerned in distributing the state’s patronage to older citizens, which has created an education system which has had to cut spending on public service, and saddled students with costs, and is raising a generation of young people who have had less opportunity for public engagement and what experience they have had has been watching older generations use political institutions to shift costs unfairly onto their backs.

You get what you pay for, I guess.

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