As Higher Education Grows More Crucial, How Can It Be Improved?

Close to 90 percent of today’s high-school graduates are expected to attend college at some point in young adulthood. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll all graduate, have a good experience, or learn a whole lot.

With this in mind, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences formed a commission to recommend changes that would improve the quality of higher education and the lives of the students who seek it. The commission released its final report, “The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America,” this week. It offers recommendations for improving educational quality, raising completion rates, reducing inequality, and making college more affordable.

The Chronicle caught up with Michael S. McPherson, one of the commission’s co-chairs, to hear more about these goals — and how they can be achieved at a time when higher education is under widespread assault. The conversation with Mr. McPherson, president emeritus of the Spencer Foundation and a former president of Macalester College, has been edited and condensed.

Q. The report states that education isn’t the solution to every problem but is often “the best tool we have at our disposal.” A few years ago, that would have struck me as being beyond debate. But now I wonder if the public would even agree with it. Higher ed is under attack, both culturally and financially. How do these recommendations fit into that reality?

A. There is a fair amount of public-opinion evidence of people’s doubts about higher education, which are of course echoed in their doubts about a variety of institutions in society. At the same time, most people, if they have children, want their kids to go to college. And many people who have not completed a college degree want to go back if they can figure out a way to do it. There are obstacles that make that difficult for them, and that may lead to resentment, but the underlying desire to become more educated is still pretty strong.

So while people may indeed have vocal complaints about higher education and doubts about it, those aren’t sufficient to stop them from wanting to get it.

Q. Who are you hoping will take action based on these recommendations? Is this really a moment when you can gain traction with DC policy makers?

A. We intend for it to be a report that lots of people can be involved in. First of all, we do have a set of concrete recommendations for the federal government, in good part on potential reauthorization issues. We want to reach institutional leaders, and we think that institutions can collaborate in various ways that they don’t now do very well. State governments are important players as well. We don’t expect them to reverse the funding trends of recent years, but we would like to at least see them stabilize.

And we need to put the money where it will do the most good. When you think of areas like state student-aid programs, are those being targeted to the people for whom it will really make the most difference in their college opportunity?

The same kind of question arises with regard to how the states decide on different levels of funding for different institutions. That’s inevitably a political process, but the question of whose lives are going to be changed by these dollars is really important.

Q. Could you give an example of a way in which an individual college could take action to advance these goals?

A. Take an institution that has a large fraction of its undergraduate teaching being done by people who are off the tenure track, adjuncts, or contingent faculty. Recognizing that this is a phenomenon that’s here to stay, we need to professionalize this activity, because these are the people who are delivering the education to the students. Certainly some of the things you’d want to do will cost some money — but one thing college presidents do is raise money. But there’s also a lot of waste involved in running so many short-term people through so many programs rather than establishing a more orderly way of doing business.

Q. So: putting instructors off the tenure track on contracts, offering them professional development, that kind of thing?

A. Right. Three-year renewable contracts rather than going semester to semester, assuring people of their salaries even if at the last second a class gets dropped, providing people with benefits. And providing people in those roles with pathways to improvement in their situation. That is, people who do a good job will be recognized, people can get professional development, people can get some kind of voice in university affairs.

Q. One critique we hear of higher education is that it changes too slowly. How can you confront that obstacle to improving quality?

A. We were asked to think in a generational time frame, like 25 years out, and so one of the things we deliberately stayed away from is, How are we going to solve today’s problems? And what “today’s problem” is has changed a number of times over the two years that we were working on this. One of the most interesting things we did was commission Moody’s Analytics to model a 10-year program of national investment in students who have a relatively low probability of college success. If we made the sort of investments that the City University of New York makes in its ASAP program to change the number of students who graduated from their college programs — associate or bachelor’s — over 20 years, that program would more than pay for itself in purely economic terms.

Q. The AAAS report dips its toe into the more-distant future, talking about increasing social division and robots taking over jobs. It doesn’t seem that you all are envisioning things getting any easier for colleges — or the world. Tell me more about that.

A. One of those potential futures is one in which the world is kind of consumed with natural and human-made disasters — there’s not much upside in that world. But in the others, you know, the use of much more sophisticated technology in teaching, we’re not there yet. The current state of online learning is not what it needs to be in order to be effective and delivered at high quality. But if that comes about, great. I mean, it may not be great for individual institutions, but we’re not in the institution-preservation business. We want to serve students and serve society.

How it gets delivered may change, but what’s fundamentally needed to have an educated population is not going to change. The big lesson here is not whether the future’s going to be great or whether the future’s going to be dismal, but that in any plausible future we can see, higher education is going to play, if anything, a larger role than it has in the past.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.