Barack Obama’s Imprint on Higher Education

Read responses to Michael S. Roth from Danielle Allen, Janet Halley, Raynard S. Kington, Anthony P. Carnevale, Marta Tienda, and Jamie Merisotis.

As the young Barry Obama was getting ready to leave home for college, he paid a visit to Frank, a contemporary of his grandfather and a poet, who cautioned him about the dangers of American education: “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.” So I shouldn’t go to college? Obama asked the old poet. “No. I didn’t say that. You’ve got to go. I’m just telling you to keep your eyes open. Stay awake.”

Obama recounts this exchange in Dreams From My Father, published in 1995, as he was about to begin his political career. While the adult Obama came to believe deeply in the value of higher education and certainly reaped its benefits, he never lost his suspicion that colleges might be too clever at training him to “manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.”

The Obama Issue

In this special issue of The Chronicle Review, we turn our attention to the accomplishments and disappointments of the past eight years. See the whole issue here.

• Obama’s Betrayal of HBCUs
• Free Public College: Utopian No More
• Making History

As president, Obama’s intellectual curiosity, rhetorical prowess, and appreciation of complexity — hallmarks of a liberal education — stand in sharp contrast to the willful ignorance, oversimplifications, and crude expressions of hate that pollute our political atmosphere. The youngster who asked if he should even go to college is today very much an insider when it comes to understanding the virtues of broad, contextual learning. This president, after all, invited Roger Boesche, historian of political thought at Occidental College and Obama’s former professor, to the White House. This “wonderful, wonderful professor,” the president noted, “sparked my general interest in politics.”

Boesche’s classroom helped lead Obama to his life’s work, which led to the presidency, and one of his first moves there was to significantly increase financial aid for college students. Cultivating an educated citizenry is important to this president, yet ambivalence about higher education has run like a red thread through his tenure. Remember, Obama famously declared that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art-history degree” (after which he wrote an apologetic note to an art-history instructor).

More significantly, Obama’s administration has had an appetite for disrupting the complacency of colleges that have long claimed that what they do is too subtle and nuanced to be measured by governmental officials. To be sure, the administration was going after “bad actors,” but their interventions weren’t confined to the nasty for-profits that use federal loan guarantees to protect a steady revenue stream.

Over the last eight years, federal officials have grown ever more impatient with the reluctance of colleges to assess the education they provide, perhaps suspicious, as old Frank put it, that these institutions have merely gotten good at teaching students to “manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.”

The most important effort by the administration to assess higher education is the College Scorecard, a website released in September 2015 that allows families to access basic data about almost all American colleges and universities. While the U.S. News & World Report ranking emphasizes how much money a college has, how much it spends on students, and what its peers think of it, the Scorecard focuses on different kinds of information: Which college will most likely help me graduate? Which will not force me to borrow too much? And which will allow me to get a job that pays well? Choosing a college, the president is fond of saying, is among the most important choices a young person could make — and “folks” should go into that knowing how much it is likely to cost and how big a payoff they are likely to get.

Better data might seem like an unequivocally good thing, but it can also be terribly misleading. The Scorecard did not take into account part-time four-year college students, nor the approximately 60 percent of community-college students who do not attend full time. Many students pursuing a bachelor’s degree — more than a third — transfer from one college to another, and these undergraduates also went unaccounted for in the Scorecard. (In fairness, the administration was hampered by restrictions on access to student data: Only those who receive financial aid are in the data set used by the Scorecard. Data on other students is not accessible under current law.)

But there is more at stake than just the way the data is sliced. It is a mistake to reduce a successful college education to graduation rates and salaries. Furthermore, this narrow focus incentivizes selective colleges to accept only the people most likely to graduate instead of taking a risk on students with less-than-perfect résumés. Even worse, this kind of metric incentivizes colleges to say somebody “completed” a program without paying too much attention to what was learned. When colleges are penalized for not graduating everybody, many will simply make graduation the reward for paying tuition — even with borrowed money.

Finally, the focus on the salaries of graduates rewarded colleges for steering their students away from lines of work that might be less remunerative. Is it a failure for a college to educate people who want to become teachers, firefighters, or nurses rather than bankers?

The Obama administration may have done more than any of its predecessors to highlight the importance of college education, but, as with the Scorecard, it has often done so in the most reductionist terms. A college’s graduation rate is obviously important — but so is what one learns on the path to graduation.

In the wake of the Great Recession, federal officials were all too willing to see higher education reduced to a training program that “should” lead to a higher income. This is perfectly understandable. The administration had reason to promote college as a tool to fight unemployment and as a weapon to fight wage stagnation. But there was a missed opportunity to link this narrow economic argument to broader but still pragmatic learning goals, including an emphasis on developing citizens for meaningful political participation.

“A Crucible Moment,” for instance, a 2011 report by the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force that was submitted to (and substantially funded by) the Department of Education, rejected the false choice between job preparation and liberal education:

The call for educational reform cast only as a matter of work-force preparation mistakenly adopts a 19th-century industrial model for complex 21st-century needs. Reframing the public purpose of higher education in such instrumental ways will have grave consequences for America’s intellectual, social, and economic capital.

The long-term economic effects of putting short-term training ahead of “learning how to learn” are unlikely to be positive. The legacy of the Obama administration could have been to connect deep work-force development and extensive college access explicitly to broad learning goals and civic education. Carol Geary Schneider, former president of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, called for colleges and universities to play a “central role in educating every college student to become these engaged citizens and to help reinvigorate our dispirited democracy.” Instead, by reducing higher education to a simplistic, essentially short-term “return on investment,” the administration only deepened the civic recession that continues to plague this country.

If the Obama administration had reductionist tendencies with respect to higher education’s “return on investment,” it had expansionist tendencies when it came to ensuring equal access to educational opportunity for all students.

The prohibition against gender discrimination in Title IX had previously been used, among other things, as a tool against sexual harassment in the workplace and the classroom. When I was a student in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not uncommon for male professors to use their classroom authority to initiate sexual relations with their students. Of course, teachers often didn’t see it that way, thinking their evident charms just encouraged young women to act on their desires. But once activists and authorities put these abusive relationships in the spotlight, it became clear that many women did not have the same educational opportunities as men because of the sexual pressures to which they were subjected. Sexual attention from those in official positions on campus was a form of harassment, and the Office for Civil Rights could be engaged to battle the problem.

Building on this activist work, one of the Obama administration’s most significant legacies will be its use of Title IX and the Office for Civil Rights to deal with sexual assault on campus. “Students across the country deserve the safest possible environment in which to learn,” Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. declared in the spring of 2011. “That’s why we’re taking new steps to help our nation’s schools, universities, and colleges end the cycle of sexual violence on campus.” Three years later, President Obama made this work even more personal in launching notalone.gov, a website to help survivors of sexual violence: “We need to keep saying to anyone out there who has ever been assaulted: you are not alone. We have your back. I’ve got your back.”

As we come to the end of the Obama years, there has been a predictable reaction against the lowering of evidentiary requirements to find someone responsible for assault (“preponderance of evidence” rather than “clear and convincing”) along with general complaints about the ability of colleges and universities to protect innocent people with adequate due process. It is clear that universities must find ways to protect the presumption of innocence that every accused person deserves, even as they protect the rights and well-being of those who have been assaulted.

Questions of how consent is communicated and how to judge intent, especially when large amounts of alcohol are involved, are among many areas of ambiguity within the Obama administration’s effort to make colleges responsible for dealing with the sexual behavior of their students. For many critics there is a basic bottom line: Sexual assault is a crime. Use the criminal-justice system and not the code of student conduct, they say, to determine if a crime occurred and what the consequences should be.

I find this criticism simplistic and out of touch with the realities of student lives and the criminal-justice system. At Wesleyan we work closely with local law enforcement so that if a survivor of sexual assault wants to pursue a criminal complaint, she or he has a clear, workable path to do so. But cooperating with the criminal-justice system in no way eases the burden on colleges to create a more equitable campus climate. Federal officials in the Obama years have been right to remind us of this burden in case the voices of students are not coming through clearly enough.

Investigatory guidelines and the spectrum of a college’s responsibility in regard to sexual harassment and assault will doubtless continue to evolve after Obama leaves office. Colleges should make it easier for students to report assaults and have confidence in a process of adjudication. Those who are accused of violations must have their rights respected, and more sophisticated and caring support should be given to those who report assaults.

However policies and procedures evolve in the future, I am confident that a key aspect of Obama’s legacy will be his administration’s insistence that colleges and universities are responsible for abusive aspects of student culture that prevent women (and members of LGBTQ communities) from having access to the same benefits of higher education as most men do.

Colleges can no longer turn a blind eye to sexual assault without fear of consequences. As survivors came to realize that they “are not alone,” they forced colleges to take sexual assault seriously as a civil-rights issue. Part of this was just shining a bright light on the problem; for example, requiring the publication of assault statistics. At my own university, there has been a sharp increase in the number of reported sexual assaults. This is a painful, painful process — but a necessary one. Colleges that have few to no reported incidents of sexual assault are today viewed not with admiration, but with justified suspicion.

In January 2014 I attended a White House conference on college readiness. The highlight was Troy Simon, then a Bard College sophomore. Growing up in post-Katrina New Orleans, Simon still couldn’t read at the age of 14, but he found a mentor and turned his life around by making a commitment to education. The Posse Foundation helped him find his way to Bard, and he is now heading to Yale Divinity School. At the White House conference, Simon introduced Michelle Obama, who reminded the audience of the importance of her own college education:

Neither of my parents graduated from college, but they always encouraged me to pursue my education and told me that college was possible. And I know that there are so many kids out there just like me: kids who have a world of potential but need some encouragement and support to make it through college.

That day we heard lots of dispiriting statistics about inequality in America. But there was one statistic that underscored the potential of higher education to make a difference: Ninety percent of low-income students who completed a program after high school were able to move out of poverty. Numbers like that led Michelle Obama to launch the Reach Higher initiative, which aims to “inspire every student in America to take charge of their future by completing their education past high school, whether at a professional training program, a community college, or a four-year college or university.”

In his first months in office, President Obama announced a series of measures that he described as “the most significant efforts to open the doors of college to middle-class Americans since the GI Bill.” In vowing to reverse the trend that had made colleges — public and private — less and less affordable to more and more people, he articulated a “North Star goal” for the country: to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

Eight years later, the United States has seen only modest gains in educational attainment, and there is little change in our relative position in this regard. Does this make the Obama legacy a failure? I don’t think so. The Obamas have made a strong case for the value of higher education, and they’ve done it during a period of disinvestment by states in their university systems and intense criticism of higher education generally. Silicon Valley gurus and higher-education journalists (who themselves have college diplomas) write about the oddity of students getting degrees that don’t have a direct connection to their jobs. Pulling the ladder up after they’ve already made the climb, they claim not to see why future students would want the same opportunities that they’ve had.

The headwinds against higher education are strong, and they aren’t all economic. As Jonathan Cole notes in his recent book, Toward a More Perfect University, there is a deep deficit of trust in American higher education, despite the fact that our universities remain great forces for scientific, economic, and cultural innovation. If you type “is college” in Google, what very likely pops up (before you hit the search key) is “worth it?”

The administration was wrong to narrow the value of a college degree to a salary-based return on investment, but there would be even more skepticism about higher education without the Obamas’ support for “reaching higher” through learning. Sure college should prepare people for work, but it can do so in the context of preparing them for life beyond the university. American thinkers like Benjamin Franklin and W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Addams and Martha Nussbaum would agree.

The Obama administration has largely stood against the tide of false populism that would deny a college education to young people because of our “new economy.” The willingness today on the part of some to limit higher education to only certain students or to constrict the college curriculum to a neat, instrumental itinerary is deplorable; and to succumb to it would run counter to a deep American tradition of broadly pragmatic, liberal learning. When training replaces education, to quote the old poet Frank, “they’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity.” Real opportunity comes from learning to learn.

What Frank told Barry Obama about college is still relevant today: You need to go, and you need to stay awake — though today our students would say “stay woke.” The most important higher-education legacy of the Obama presidency is to remind Americans that college can be for all of us and that all students should have equal access to an education without fear of discrimination or violence.

Read responses to Michael S. Roth from Danielle Allen, Janet Halley, Raynard S. Kington, Anthony P. Carnevale, Marta Tienda, and Jamie Merisotis.