What is Wrong with American Higher Education?
I am not the only one in higher education who has pondered the complex and expensive system we have set up in this country to educate our young or anyone who aspires to get credentialed. I started teaching at Michigan State University in 1987 as a graduate assistant. I will be retiring next year. That is close to 40 years of teaching here in the US. I could say that I have had one of the ringside seats watching and observing what transpires at our universities, the pecking order at higher education institutions, the constant rearranging of the deck chairs, and some of the fancy salaries paid to the ever-increasing number of administrators at universities that are now run by a managerial class as if these are businesses.
The number of articles that Google excavates when I type “What is wrong with American higher education” is literally in the thousands. But one that caught my eye was Richard Legon’s short essay in 2019 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, Richard Legon lists the woes of higher ed: “diminishing public confidence driven by perceptions of out-of-control prices, soul-crushing debt, murky value, lack of integrity, favoritism for the wealthy and white, on-campus assaults, athletics scandals, ‘going out of business’ signs, and a shockingly impractical preparation for a rapidly changing world of work.”
At a small state university in Missouri, and then one in Virginia, where I taught and where I led a department, I was involved in exercises of changing the curriculum, both the general education curriculum, as well as the area-specific ones, and very little came of it, except as an exercise in rearranging the chairs on the gigantic, barely moving, slowly sinking higher ed ship.
I recall that the University System of Georgia set up a College 2025 commission in 2017. This was at the behest of Governor Kemp, who wanted college graduates to be “career-ready.” The results from that committee’s work reflect both what is wrong with big education bureaucracies and establishments and what is the easy way out, given the many, many vested interests in higher education. The four focus areas the commission identified were — “adaptability, essential skills, lifelong learning, and partnerships.” There was little that was creative, innovative, or practical in that prosaic report, ensuring that no vested interest would be hurt. It was just another “safe” report by committee members who did not want to stick their necks out.
I got my BA in India in 1977 from the University of Bangalore — a triple major in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology in three years, which entailed taking six courses in each of the major areas, two courses in English, two in languages (India has 22 official languages, and Indian children/students are expected to go through the K-12 levels learning three languages — English as the link language, the local language as the primary language [mine was Kannada], and a third that could be any other Indian language. Many preferred to take Hindi or Sanskrit. We also had to take, if I remember correctly, two classes on “Ethics.” The total of 24 courses would add up to the US measure of 72 credit hours. It cost my father about $100–200 (in 1975 rupee/dollar value) to send me to college, including the cost of books. I lived with my parents in Bangalore, took the bus, or rode my bicycle to college, but some of my classmates lived in the St. Joseph College dorms. I don’t recall what they were paying to live and eat in those dorms.
The General Education Design Principles that the USG committee proposed do not deal with the number of credit hour issues, the cost of delivering those credits, or the overall cost of attending a college.
After the release of those design principles, the universities most concerned about adapting them were the smaller, unsteady regional-level universities. The big ones — the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, for example, seemed not to be invested in the committee’s recommendations that only the troubled and financially unstable smaller USG institutions seemed to take to heart.
It did not seem that the USG, tasked with designing and implementing organizational strategies for both higher education relevance and the cost of delivering it, had carefully worked out a plan to reduce the complexity and expense of the system in place. Given the general nature of the advice in the report, individual universities are left to fend for themselves in operationalizing the vague, abstract guidelines.
What issues and problems were not taken into consideration? Cost, increasing tuition, length of college education, unnecessary and ineffective courses students have to take, universities becoming “care centers,” and the burgeoning and expensive administrative setups.
What might the committee have considered?
· Reduction of credit hours from the 120-credit range to an 80–90 credit range, thus reducing the number of years to graduate with a BA/BS from four to three years.
· Reducing the General Education credit hours from the current 42–60 credits to about 30–36 credits. These general education courses include English language and literature courses, arts and humanities courses, social science courses, natural science courses, math courses, foreign language courses, and wellness courses. Others have written how these general education requirements are a “deadweight loss.”
· Removing foreign language requirements would help because studies show that learning foreign languages in the late teen years or their early 20s is difficult/ineffective, and most students do not remember/use what they learned in college almost immediately after taking those courses.
· Removing the general electives requirement, which has an 18-credit hour requirement. Students end up taking a mishmash of low-level courses, and the joke about “classes on basket weaving” stems from this clutch of general electives courses.
· Focusing on strengthening major requirements.
· Making Gen Ed courses relevant: for example, students should be able to or required to take one course in writing (“Dotting the i’s and Crossing the t’s: Precision, Simplicity, and Rigor in Writing”); two courses in Communication (“Speaking Well, Communicating Effectively, Across Platforms,” and “Relational Communication: Conflict Management at Home, Work, and Beyond”); one course in Economics (“Earning, Saving, Securing: Across the Lifespan”); one course on scientific reasoning (“How We Do Science: Collecting Data, Gathering Information, Ensuring Reliability and Validity”), and one on AI — threats, opportunities, future; three courses in the social sciences (History: “Our Past, A Global Glance,” Political Science: “Governing Ourselves in Different Ways,” and Sociology/Psychology: “Institutions in Society,” and “Idiosyncrasies in Individuals”); one course in Health and Wellbeing (“Taking Care of Our Bodies, Our Mind: Nutrition, Exercise, Contemplation”); and maybe one course in personal security — from the entrapments of the web to the entrapments in physical space.
· If we were to offer a couple of courses that deal with futurology/strategic thinking and planning and environment/sustainability, it could bring faculty across the campus to teach such interdisciplinary courses. I read somewhere that there was an office in the White House till the time of President Carter that dealt with monitoring the present and forecasting the future. I read Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” while I was in college. That we have been focused on the “complain, claim, and criticize” DEI matters and not on strategic thinking over the past decade goes to show that from the White House on down, there has been little careful thought paid to how we educate our young. Here is an interesting article on “strategic foresight,” that can help universities fashion their course/s on strategic thinking, planning for the future, etc.
· We can also reduce the number of classes that we offer in the major. There is much repetition and overlap in our own communication studies courses, and it must be so in the case in most of the humanities and social sciences courses/programs because we do not have “building blocks” in these areas as in the sciences and math but “fields” that are marked and marketed according to whimsy and “possession”.
As to the exorbitant costs of higher education, it is because we have made universities and colleges dispensers of care: we are now charitable and disaster relief organizations; we are now triage and emergency medical care facilities; and we are now psychiatric wards and sanitariums dealing with our “walking broke in mind, spirit, and bank balance”. The diversity, equity, and inclusion dynamics over the past decade further exacerbated and speeded up this conversion of higher education institutions into rehabilitation and conversion therapy centers. We, therefore, have administrators galore, whose salaries have increased much faster than the salaries of those who teach.
Then there is college sports and the resulting cost of educating our children — fancy stadiums and fancy salaries — the highest-paid employees in every state of the union is either a football or a basketball coach at one of their large state universities! How many universities earn money from sports, and how many lose? An interesting opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed offers data, including data from a university in which I taught, that should make us consider seriously the nature and costs of sports and athletics in American universities and how the ordinary student ends up paying for it.
That this expensive education system, the costs of which the individual student bears, is then reflected in the mountain of debt they have piled up and the unconscionable cocking the snook by the Biden Administration, which has written off massive amounts of student debt, ignoring the Supreme Court mandate that they not do so.
It is a tangled web we have woven, but I think changes will come to higher education simply because the world “outside” is galloping, and the “center cannot hold”. Then there is Artificial Intelligence…