Perhaps you’ve heard by now that the Ohio State University has succeeded in trademarking the word “The,” a move that attracted widespread news coverage and equally widespread ridicule. (“Whose brilliant idea was this?” wrote one professor to a university spokesperson.) As silly as it seems, the move is not a joke. It’s just the most recent manifestation of the brand mania that has overtaken higher ed in recent decades.
Since the 1970s, American colleges have devoted considerable effort to imitating private corporations’ strategies to establish and exploit brand identity. Legally enforced trademarks have been at the center of this strategy, initially focused on college names and symbols. By the 1990s, the practice expanded to include taglines proclaiming institutional mission and program names, implying that universities’ core activities are distinctive and proprietary. The term “the first-year college experience” is now registered to the University of South Carolina, as if it denotes something unique to that university rather than a common feature of higher education.
Competition has long been viewed as a key to the greatness of the American college. But developments over the last half century have knocked the balance between competition and cooperation out of whack. These changes include rising tuition; the use of merit aid and other discounts to drive enrollment; the increased importance of rankings; soaring student debt; a surge in revenue-seeking activities, such as patenting and corporate partnerships; increases in revenue-containment strategies, such as the use of contingent faculty; and uneven or declining support at the state and federal levels. Researchers have used terms such as “privatization,” “market-oriented,” or “neoliberal” to characterize this larger transformation. The pursuit of institutional advantage at the expense of the health of the larger sector is both a consequence and a driver of these changes.
The excessive competition may be bringing the whole system down. As that happens, even the institutions with the strongest brands will suffer.
There was a time, not so long ago, when colleges tried to tackle the challenges of higher-ed administration cooperatively. When the Higher Education Act was originally proposed in the 1960s, legislators debated whether to route aid primarily to institutions, helping cover expenses (and thereby lowering tuition), or to students to directly offset their tuition costs. To the disappointment of most higher-education leaders, Congress chose the latter approach, creating an incentive for colleges to compete for students carrying financial-aid dollars.
At that time, many higher-education leaders opposed using financial aid as an incentive for student recruitment. Instead, they supported measures that would standardize the calculation of students’ financial need. The College Scholarship Service was created in 1954 to provide a shared formula for assessing need. In 1958, a group of 23 Northeastern colleges met in what was called the “Overlap Group” to coordinate their analysis. For a time, this practice meant that a student applying to multiple institutions in the group would receive a comparable financial-aid offer from each. This practice successfully limited the diversion of institutional resources from low-income to high-income students — and did not raise tuition overall.
But in 1989, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the “Overlap Group” for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, arguing that coordinating financial-aid offers was a form of price-fixing. Two years later, the government brought a civil suit against a subset of the “Overlap Group,” the Ivy League and MIT. The eight Ivy League universities entered a consent decree, agreeing not to share financial-aid information for 10 years in exchange for the government dropping the suit. MIT went to court, and lost. The memory of this experience continues to make members of the Ivy League wary of acting in concert.
Leaders are more interested in defining the distinctive qualities of their institutions than in debating what higher education writ large should be.
The 1990s also ushered in a radical change in the use of financial aid: Through the use of “merit aid” and other discounts, aid became part of student recruitment. Despite an abundance of research demonstrating that merit aid favors students from upper-income families, most schools abandoned need-only financial-aid policies in order to compete for students with high SATs and GPAs and to achieve high yield rates, which in turn helped improve their spot on the increasingly important U.S. News & World Report rankings.
The few schools that held on to the ideal of need-only aid were those with strong national reputations that had already achieved high spots in the rankings. But these institutions would find other ways to use financial aid to draw students. In 2001, Princeton University eliminated loans from its financial-aid packages. In short succession, other leading institutions found ways to increase their affordability. Now a small number of well-resourced private institutions provide what public universities were created to offer — free or low-cost, high-quality higher education.
Practices that make once-exclusive universities financially affordable are in themselves good, but they cannot offset the impact of rising tuition in the increasingly resource-strapped public sector. Worse, such policies encourage the leaders (and alumni) of the most prestigious institutions to focus on raising money to compete with a small number of peer institutions to offer the most generous financial-aid packages — instead of advocating for policies that could increase affordability across the higher-education sector.
In turn, high-school students with access to enough information about how higher education currently operates all aspire to attend the same schools, driving up applications and driving down admit rates. This increases the prestige of a small number of schools and forces the rest to compete for the remaining students with tactics that may not improve the quality of students’ education. Taken together, these trends weaken the sector — and the society that depends on it to create educated adults.
Ever since Harvard president Charles Eliot popularized the elective system in the late 19th century, college ceased to be a uniform experience. Harvard’s embrace of electives introduced healthy variation into the American system, a great source of its strength. It also introduced a sustained discussion of what college education should be — a discussion that, while never completely settled, produced some widely shared ideas and practices across the sector.
That debate is becoming a historical relic. As leaders focus primarily on their own institution’s competitive advantage, they are more interested in defining the distinctive qualities of their institutions than in debating what higher education writ large should be. When colleges revamp their general education programs, they want to create distinctive “signature” programs, not strengthen common elements of a college education.
This trend threatens the value of an undergraduate degree. Like the high-school degree before it, the bachelor’s may cease to be a meaningful signal of educational attainment. Graduates, whatever their actual achievement, will have difficulty establishing their worth without advantages such as personal connections, internships, or institutional prestige.
There are already indications that this is happening: Institutional reputation and choice of field seem to have a growing effect on the financial returns of a college degree, while more college graduates are seeking advanced degrees to gain an advantage in the job market. If these trends continue, it will be disastrous for all efforts to use higher education as an instrument of social mobility and a means to greater social equality.
We need to curb the focus on competition for institutional advantage and shift our attention to the health of the educational sector as a whole. This major reorientation will require leadership from our most prestigious institutions, not because they are the wisest, but because their brands are secure. Since they need not be concerned about reputation, these colleges are well-positioned to reignite conversations about the meaning of college.
These institutions should create alliances with less wealthy neighbors to share resources, perhaps by providing access to costly journal subscriptions and rich library collections, providing their recent Ph.D.s with postdoctoral fellowships to teach at partner schools for three years, allowing students from nearby institutions to enroll in classes, and supporting faculty research at those institutions. They should instruct their government-relations teams to lobby for policies that benefit the sector. They should more aggressively challenge the application of anti-trust legislation to limit cooperative action that helps higher education as a whole. And they should withdraw from activities, such as rankings, that we know to be damaging. By doing so, they would fulfill their core mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge for the good of society.
