Sunday Night Journal — May 1, 2011
I spent most of the 1980s working in software development at a company that
built high-end computer graphics systems. Then as much as now the computer
industry was very fast-moving and competitive, with technological advances
happening at a head-spinning pace, companies appearing and disappearing like
mushrooms, and winners and losers shifting places constantly. In 1990 I left
the company and the industry, partly because I didn’t think I had the ability
and drive to keep up with the very demanding environment, and took a job doing
considerably less interesting, but also less difficult, work at a small
college.
That was a pretty striking change. I had not been around an academic
institution for a while (although I had once thought myself on the path to an
academic career) and after the intensity of a high-tech company I felt somewhat
as, I suppose, a New Yorker might feel on relocating to a small Midwestern or
Southern town. By the standards I had left, the technology was absurdly, in
fact shockingly, antiquated and unreliable. (It soon became clear that I was
only exchanging one sort of pressure for another—trying to do too much with too
little—but that’s another story.) Looking at the little school through the eyes
of someone who had been in the thick of technological ferment, I thought it
oddly isolated and unaware of the greater world. And I began to look at the
whole higher education environment from a perspective very different from that
of the student I had been years earlier, a perspective shaped by observation of
the business world.
I was struck by the fact that the college, and higher ed
in general, was a business—certainly not a thought that had ever crossed my
mind while I was a student—but a rather strange business, one that didn’t quite
admit that it was a business, and didn’t quite behave like one, but
nevertheless would ultimately live or die by its ability to sell its
“product”—a college degree—to its customers—students and parents. I remember
the surprise with which I realized that the admissions counselors, whom I first
regarded as gatekeepers, were actually salespeople.
After having observed not only the institution but the general landscape for
six months or a year or so, I came to the conclusion that if higher ed were a business like any other there would soon be a
“shakeout”—the disappearance of a number of less successful competitors, who
would either go out of business or be absorbed by larger institutions—among
colleges like the one I work for: small private liberal arts colleges of decent
but not first-rank reputation, without hundreds of millions of dollars in the
bank. There were just too many of them, competing, in the post-baby-boomer
world, for too few students.
I also saw, though, that the shakeout was not likely to happen, for a number
of reasons, the most important of which was probably the existence of the
federal financial aid system, which made possible the survival of institutions
which could not afford to operate on the tuition its students could afford to
pay. Private schools have to compete with those run by the state, and of course
there is no way that the private ones can match the low tuition rates of the
state ones, which are supported directly by government money and don’t have to
rely on tuition to cover the costs of running the place. It’s a bit like trying
to produce automobiles in competition with a state-run company that, can sell
them for less than it costs to build them, making up the difference with tax money. Government financial aid is
essential in bridging that gap—as if the government ran its own car company and
sold cars cheaply, but gave money to people who want to buy another brand. (A
crazy-sounding system, yes, but of course it wasn’t designed that way—as with
most such things, it just sort of grew.)
Well, it appears that the possibility of something like that shakeout is
looming into view. Everybody interested in the subject knows that college
tuition prices have risen faster than other prices over the past twenty years
or so, and that a year at a private college can now cost anywhere from $20,000
to $50,000. I have seen a number of discussions lately about the possibility
that we are in a higher-ed “bubble,” in which prices
have continued to rise because people think that the item—like tulips in Holland
in 1637, Internet
stocks in 1999, real estate in 2008—will continue to become more valuable.
Ordinarily “bubble” refers to speculation: people expect the price to continue
to rise, so even if what they’re paying now seems unreasonable, they expect to
be able to sell it for even more. A higher-ed bubble
isn’t exactly the same thing, but the willingness to pay these enormous costs
does, mostly, rest on the belief that the degree will enable the holder to earn
considerably more money than he or she would without it. But what if that
ceases to be the case? The possibility is beginning to seem very real.
That’s all by way of introducing this
excellent treatment of the bubble and, along the way, of the general
condition of higher education in general. I won’t try to summarize it; if you
are at all interested in this subject, you should read it. A couple of notes:
The idea of “college for (almost) everyone” is fundamentally flawed. If
higher education is to mean anything at all, it has to make demands on those
who are fairly gifted intellectually, which means it will be out of reach for
many. We have been trying to pretend that this is not true, but it is. The only
way to square that circle is to “dumb down” the work required, which we have
been doing for several decades now. This in turn is one of the things that may
produce the collapse of the bubble. “All have won, and all must have prizes” can
be enforced as an edict from the queen, but no one is fooled into believing
that all are equally capable: the prizes will be regarded as meaningless, and
other ways will be found of discovering and rewarding those of greater ability.
And if the prize must be bought at a pretty exorbitant price, but is worth
little or nothing, people will no longer want to pay for it.
Possibly worse is the implication that only “brain work” of the kind that
genuinely requires extended education is worth doing. There’s nothing wrong
with rewarding those who are more gifted (in whatever respect) and/or work
harder. There’s nothing wrong with some occupations being more rewarding
financially than others. Such hierarchies are natural and can only be eliminated by totalitarian means, if at all. But the disparities have to be reasonable, and those
at the lowest level can’t just be considered insignificant, if not useless, and
consigned to poverty. A decent society must do its best to provide a place for
everybody. I don’t think it’s wrong if the engineers make more than the people
who clean the building, and the CEO makes more than the engineers. But I do
think it’s wrong if the engineers are affluent, and the CEO makes tens of
millions every year, while those who clean the building struggle to
survive. If we care about preserving our democratic republic, this is not only
morally but pragmatically wrong.
On the one hand, there’s the dumbing down (which
of course starts at the earliest levels of schooling). On the other, a sort of attempted
smartening up, in which higher ed attempts to make
itself essential where it really does not belong, offering degrees in practical
fields with no appreciable abstract intellectual content (“recreation management,” etc.)
or any skill which could not be learned as well or better on the job.
And then there’s the distortion of the educational mission, well-described
here:
The university as an institution has historically
been defined by its allegiance to high principles such as the pursuit of truth,
the acquisition of knowledge as a basis for a free society, and the
transmission of the ideals of civilization. … Another way of accounting for
what has diverted higher education from its central task is that it has been
captured in the last half-century by interest groups that have a strong
commitment to using the university for various kinds of social transformation
that have thin connection to the foundational principles of the institution.
It strikes me that this was a sort of return of
the original mission of the university, which was very much bound up with
understanding, supporting, and advancing the Christian faith. The faith
supplied the foundational justification for the institution’s existence and
mission, and was the vision which united all its efforts. Now the faith is secular
progressivism, and as may or may not have been the case in the Middle Ages,
some believe while others pretend to believe and laugh behind the backs of the
pious (only tenured faculty members are likely to dissent openly).
I’m not even touching on the the whole question of
vocational vs. liberal education. That’s almost a lost cause. Many people in
higher ed, possibly most faculty, do not fully grasp
the hard-nosed and brutal economic calculation which brings most students to
the university. When that calculation begins to show a negative return on the
investment, trouble is coming. I’m not necessarily
predicting that the bubble will burst. But idea that a bubble exists is probably
one of the things that cause it to collapse, and in this case the idea is spreading.
Light On Dark Water 
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