So if colleges are shifting from full-time professors to low-cost adjuncts, why aren’t costs going down? Are colleges just hiring “assistants to assistants to assistants”?
Those are the types of questions I’ve been asked over the past few months as I’ve hit the circuit of conferences and media interviews to help promote my new book, American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know. In my 27 years as a Chronicle reporter, I’ve spent nearly all my time talking to people who live and breathe higher-education issues, so I was often surprised and sobered by the questions and concerns of the people I met as I talked about the book at events or on radio call-in shows.
Many of them wondered what it is that makes college so much more expensive than when “we went.” (After all, there were administrators back then too.) I heard a lot about adjuncts, about misplaced spending priorities, and about “oppressive” student debt. And I heard people challenging the narrative of colleges as noble enterprises of mobility.
A woman I met following a talk at the University Club in Washington, D.C., for instance, argued that the conventional wisdom about American higher education as a ladder of socioeconomic mobility might actually be, well, pretty much bunk. Except for the period right after World War II, she insisted, the ideal that colleges can be true engines of mobility has been compromised. She wasn’t arguing that colleges don’t give graduates a leg up. She was saying that the leg up isn’t nearly as available as we like to think it is.
Considering the expansion of higher-education opportunity nationally, I’m not sure her take is entirely fair. But her comments certainly broadened my perspective and showed the frustration with higher education that is out there.
‘The Piece of Paper’
In my book I write that college has come to be seen more as a product than a process, and comments I’ve heard on my book tour suggest that costs play into that. A caller to a public-radio program named Ben, for example, said he knows how easy it is to do very little in college and get away with it. And now he’s worried that his brother will also have that experience because he’s one of those higher-education “customers” who is paying a lot to go to college and feels entitled to passing with good grades.
Until that call, I don’t think I had fully considered how much the student-as-customer mentality might be playing into the issue of grade inflation. Clearly this has implications for those in academe trying to imbue the college experience with more rigor.
Many people questioned whether it pays to get a four-year college degree instead of attending a trade school. As Carly from Grayslake, Ill., put it on WBEZ, in Chicago, “Skills are much more important than the piece of paper.”
One of my favorite comments came from “Susan, from the North Shore of Chicago,” who said she was heading out to visit her twins, each of whom she was sending to an East Coast liberal-arts college. As she put it: “I’m constantly having to justify why we did something so seemingly irresponsible.” She joked that she had told them they would have to “marry for money.” But before she got off the air, she did give an impassioned defense of a liberal-arts education. “It’s really about the quality of your life,” she said.
But callers like Susan have been rare. More typical were people like Devin, who during a C-Span show described student loans as “the most oppressive form of loans” and noted that many young people are unable to buy cars or houses.
I often defended student-loan debt as “good debt,” likening the average student debt of about $29,000 to the cost of a new Ford Fusion. But as I was reminded by Kathleen of Clearwater, Fla., those graduates are living with student-loan debt, and they may need to buy a car. Kathleen said she had gone $30,000 into debt for her associate degree. “I’m not sure it’s all worth it,” she said.
‘How’ vs. ‘Where’
I was also challenged about my book’s conclusion, where I draw upon some Gallup findings that suggest “how” you go to college matters more than “where” you go. To that, Tony Sarabia, the host at WBEZ, said, OK, that all sounds great, but do students in 300-person lecture halls or MOOCs get that experience? And if how students go to college matters a lot, how do we reconcile that with the growth of distance education, where those relationships are harder to foster? I said that they could be just as good online. But in reality, I do wonder in how many cases they really are.
On one of the radio shows, the host, Laura Kanoy, asked why I wasn’t more pessimistic. As I told her listeners, I do think colleges are starting to get the message about families’ concerns about costs, return on investment, the need for rigor in teaching, and the importance of getting their financial houses in order. It’s “put-up or shut-up time” for colleges, I said, and college leaders are starting to realize that. At least I hope so.
I admit that there was a question that pretty much left me sputtering. It came near the conclusion of my talk at the Faculty Club at the University of California at Berkeley in January. Along with a host of interested university people and some new and longtime sources in the Bay Area, the audience included a half-dozen students from Minerva.
Minerva — part of the “disruptive innovation” hitting higher education that I discuss in the book — is an upstart institution, based in San Francisco, that aims to be an alternative to elite colleges by having its students take all of their courses online but travel in cohorts from city to city during their four years.
Prompted by my host, Carol T. Christ, a former president of Smith College and now head of Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, I had just finished listing the litany of economic, demographic, political, and technological challenges that colleges face when a first-year student from Minerva, Kayla Cohen, raised her hand and asked: Do the American students applying to colleges know about these issues?
Hmm? Do they? Maybe. But as I think about the students now eagerly anticipating the start of their college experience, particularly those about to graduate from high school, I sort of doubt it. Let’s hope they’re not disappointed by what’s to come.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
