This month marks the 50th anniversary of The Chronicle, a fitting occasion to step back and take stock of the world we cover. We wanted to know what keeps people in higher education up at night, to assess the major transformations that have taken place over the past 50 years, and to glimpse the ideas and arguments that might shape the next 50.
Here, in a series of charts, we present the results of a survey sent to 1,000 Chronicle subscribers to solicit their views on the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the academic enterprise. Nearly 250 people responded. We promised anonymity in exchange for candor. And below, nearly 50 faculty members, presidents, administrators, and higher-education thinkers respond to a questionnaire about those issues:
What has been the most significant change, positive or negative, in the past 50 years?
The creation of federal and state financial-aid programs for low-income students has played a critical role in democratizing higher education and is an example of bipartisanship at its best. It’s truly been a game-changer. — Dan Greenstein
The large increase in the share of the population that goes to college — and the credential inflation that’s accompanied it. — Bryan D. Caplan
The most significant development in higher education is the reorientation, since the late 1970s, of affirmative action from a policy intended to redress historical imbalances and inequalities to one committed to celebrating so-called diversity and multiculturalism.
As a result, universities have done little to no work considering antiracism as a scholarly and institutional imperative. In the absence of talk about history and power, increasingly corporate forms of governance have crowded out more democratic and civic-minded forms of community-building in higher education. Moreover, actual people of color, welcomed into higher education on the wings of “diversity” discourse, often find themselves at institutions that remain hostile to any but the most token contributions from their nonwhite members. As a result of these twin factors — corporate controls and “colorblind” (i.e. history-blind) liberal multiculturalism — campuses across the country find themselves dealing with student unrest, dramatic imbalances in the numbers of black and brown faculty, and lingering racism among teacher, student, and staff populations. — N. D. B. Connolly
The single most consequential change has been the steady erosion of the notion that it is both good public policy and a wise investment for the country to spend dollars on the education of its citizens. Fifty years ago, there seemed to be something approaching consensus around this issue. That consensus no longer exists, and this is reflected in both the decline in state funding and the rhetoric that we hear from many politicians and many in the media. — Brian Rosenberg
The most significant change in higher education in the past 50 years has been the increasing role that contingent workers play on campus, particularly in teaching students. From graduate employees to temporary instructors to semipermanent adjuncts to postdoctoral fellows: More teaching today is done by non-ladder faculty members than was the case a half-century ago. In this, as in so many other respects, the American academy has mirrored the larger economy. As American jobs have become increasingly precarious, so have the positions of academic instructors. Academics were always under the illusion that the university was somehow separate from the rest of society, protected from its mores and manners, its ways of doing business. Now we’re seeing just how dangerous that illusion has been. — Corey Robin
Neoliberalism, period. Nothing has created so many changes as this single philosophy or reshaped the enterprise for the worse. It has turned higher education from a public good into a commodity and private benefit. — Adrianna Kezar
The rise and fall in government investment in research and sciences. — Jonathan Holloway
The development and expansion of open-access colleges and universities — where any student is able to enroll regardless of income, age, or race — has fundamentally altered our notion of who is educable. — Joni E. Finney
The most significant change has been our expanded geographical awareness, and it is a positive one. It is no longer viewed as sufficient, by most of my colleagues, to teach America and Western Europe as if they were the world. — Jeanne-Marie Jackson
The decades-long march to college-for-everyone at age 18 has actually closed off rather than opened up options for young adults. As recently as the 1970s, a teenager had a number of options after graduating from high school: Get a good-paying job right away, enlist in the military, find an apprenticeship in a trade, or go to college. A teenager today really has only two of those options: military or college. Less than 1 percent of Americans serve in the military, so most go to college. In the early 1970s, less than half of high-school graduates in the United States went on to college the following fall. Today nearly 68 percent do.
Don’t get me wrong: A postsecondary education is absolutely critical to success in the 21st-century economy, but at a time when Americans are living longer, will work longer in many occupations and careers, why do we still believe that college needs to happen between 18 and 22? The cultural obsession that parents, school counselors, policy makers, and the media have with college — and usually a four-year institution — right after high school has sent way too many students off to campuses not prepared emotionally or academically for the rigor of higher education, nor with an express purpose for being there in the first place. — Jeffrey J. Selingo
The most positive change has been the inclusion of students from all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Higher Education Act, in the mid-1960s, more families across the United States have been able to realize the value of higher education and its importance to their children’s future. Millions have been able to access higher education who might not have before. — Freeman A. Hrabowski III
The exorbitant cost of higher education is the most negative development of the past 50 years. In 1966, public higher education was free or cheap as a result of policies that actively tried to reduce costs and expand access. But for the past 30 years, costs have risen astronomically. — Alyssa Battistoni
Three changes stand out:
The ratio of those attending public versus private institutions has continued to increase. A century ago, in 1916, the public-to-private ratio was roughly 40 to 60. Fifty years later, when The Chronicle appeared, the ratio had reversed itself to roughly 62:38. Today it is closer to 83:17. If the current political mood should persist for a system of free public higher education, I suspect the ratio may well increase to as much as 95:5 in another 50 years.
Federal expenditures for higher education have mushroomed from roughly $8 billion in 1966 (in constant dollars) to $77 billion last year. And as is so often the case, control and regulation follow the money. Colleges and universities are today drowning in federal regulation. — G.T. (Buck) Smith
Affirmative action. Before about 1970, the number of racial minorities on the nation’s campuses was very small. With the advent of affirmative action, this number grew rapidly. But the benefit accrued not only to those who gained admission to good programs. It also benefited the colleges and universities themselves, setting in motion a slow cascade of changes that have altered forever the landscape of practically every department and program. Professors read, studied, and assigned new authors (Chinua Achebe, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston) and new topics (postcolonial studies, Native American mysticism, sweatshops, the Black Panthers). Universities added or strengthened new departments, especially ethnic studies. Scholarship became more interdisciplinary, in part because we heard about what was going on in the department next door and found it interesting. — Richard Delgado
If I were a social scientist, I would track the money and say that colleges have become such massive financial centers that big decisions are made more with an eye to cash flow than to the quality of education.
But I’m a humanist, and so I would choose multiculturalism and judge it a decline, not an advance. The promise of multiculturalism in the humanities was that it would yield a richer, more accurate sense of tradition and merit. But there’s no evidence that college students know more about African-American literature, for instance, than they did in the Dead White Male days. Instead, multiculturalism has brought incoherence into the curriculum and identity politics to aesthetic and moral judgment. — Mark Bauerlein
The most significant change has been the development of online learning, which has become universal in less than a decade. The consequences have been both positive and negative. On the positive side, it makes possible access to knowledge by people in many different circumstances, and allows faculty members to learn more about what works in teaching. On the negative side, this style of teaching and learning does not work well for courses that require regular, continuing dialogue and probing, analytical discussions, including courses in philosophy and literature. — Nannerl O. Keohane
The development of a consensus that colleges and universities are businesses and should be run like businesses, that students are consumers and faculty members are employees delivering services to them. — Greg Britton
The broadening of access has been the most significant positive change: The assumption that women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian- Americans, and other students from underrepresented backgrounds have just as much of a right to higher education as white males; the assumption that institutions of higher education have a responsibility to prepare these students for leadership in business, the professions, in community and national affairs; the assumption that talent can be found in students from families of the most modest means, just as it so often is in students from families with significant resources; the assumption that American society, and the larger world, will benefit from extending educational opportunity more broadly than had previously been the case. — Nancy Weiss Malkiel
Digital resources have had a profound effect on both research productivity and teaching effectiveness. I marvel at how easy it is to remotely access any article I want through links provided by the university library system.— Steven G. Brint
The rise of the rule (and role) of law has been the most significant change in the past half-century. Higher education has evolved rapidly from operating in essentially a pre-juridical world — with little to no accountability under law — to the complex, legalistic “compliance university” of today. This has been both positive and challenging. On the positive side, the rule of law has improved fairness, equality and safety, inter alia. However, the rise of external accountability under the law has also caused higher education to become increasingly legalistic, sometimes to the detriment of educational goals and academic freedom itself. — Peter Lake
The most significant change has been the added presence of black people and other minorities on predominantly white college campuses. This change facilitated the growth of a new black middle class that has made its way into many traditionally white spaces that once were off limits to black people — and many still are, at least informally. The unfinished business of higher education is to continue what the civil-rights movement started: the incorporation of black people and other minorities, diversifying not only the student bodies but also the faculties of the nation’s colleges and universities. — Elijah Anderson
The greatest change has been the democratization of access. The number of postsecondary institutions nearly doubled between 1950 and 2010, going from roughly 1,800 to 4,500. There was a concomitant growth in enrollment numbers, going from roughly 2.3 million to 21 million. — Earl Lewis
The burden of paying for college has shifted from the state to the individual student. Who should pay?
The students themselves. Education subsidies are at best transfers to the well-off. — Bryan D. Caplan
Forty years ago, the average student graduated with debt equivalent to the price of a new midsize car; controlling for inflation, on average, that is still the typical debt burden. Of course, to the degree possible, we should aim to lower that burden. Higher-income individuals should shoulder a greater financial responsibility than lower- or modest-income families and individuals. — Earl Lewis
More than 100 years ago, the big debate in America was whether we should make a high-school education a universal right for all Americans. That single act is mainly responsible for the preponderance of the U.S. in the 20th century. Now, the same argument must be made about a college degree. — Eduardo J. Padrón
Higher education should be financed, as it has been over time, by: 1) federal and state investment in financial aid, teaching, and research; 2) institutional sources, including philanthropic giving; 3) students and their families. This model works, but only as long as each leg of the three-legged stool does its part. — Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin
When my father went to Berkeley in 1960, all he had to pay was an athletic fee of $5, and the UC system was the greatest public university in the world. But tuition costs are so high, and so many youths go to college and never finish, that it’s hard to ask everybody else to pay the bill. I say let each state work out its own balance of the public-private burden. — Mark Bauerlein
Students should pay, but only for credentials that are much shorter, easier to complete, and affordable than the current bachelor’s degree. And they should have a much wider range of financing options than simply taking on debt. — Ryan Craig
Without state funding, higher education simply recreates the existing system of social stratification, especially by class and race. — Troy Duster
Those who cannot pay for their tuition and are qualified should be admitted tuition-free; others should pay on a sliding scale. — Joyce Appleby
If the state projects itself as the arbiter of the American dream, and if the American dream is the nation’s unparalleled provision of equal opportunity for its residents to rise up or stay up through hard and intelligent work, then the state should pay for college. I can be the hardest worker, but if I cannot afford to attend expensive colleges, then I am at a disadvantage. The state cannot have it both ways. Either the American dream of equal opportunity exists, or it does not. — Ibram X. Kendi
If you believe in democracy, if you believe in a strong middle class, if you believe in giving immigrants and working-class Americans the chance to rise above poverty in American society, then you absolutely must have a publicly funded educational system. We rob all of our futures by making public education unaffordable. — Cathy N. Davidson
The biggest misconception the public has about higher education is:
That education is exclusively about providing a short-term economic benefit to the individual and the state. This is wrong on two levels: Economic benefits are not best measured in the short term, and the benefits of education far transcend any particular economic value. — Brian Rosenberg
The public tends to hold colleges and universities responsible for matters that are, in fact, beyond their control — notably the degree of socioeconomic stratification in our society; increases in costs connected with government disinvestment and consumer demands; and the rising level of psychological distress among young people. — Judith Shapiro
That college is a four-year sabbatical from life that happens between the ages of 18 and 22. The fact is we are all lifelong learners, and helping people understand that landscape would go a long way in making our system function better. — Margaret Spellings
The public believes that a high- quality education costs far more than it needs to. A really good education takes time, attention, and formidable resources, including educators who themselves are highly educated. All of these cost a lot. But they are worth the expense in both economic and noneconomic terms (though that in no way exempts higher education from striving to lower costs).
Another big misconception is the enduring myth of the ivory tower — that colleges and universities are inward-looking bastions cut off from, and not contributing to, society. Nothing could be further from the truth. We must continue to dispel this myth by building bridges between theory and practice whenever and wherever possible. — Amy Gutmann
That we are here for the students. In reality, there are many competing interests in higher education, and some of what we do clearly is not in the best interests of students. — Peter Lake
That a school’s selectivity is still seen as the key definer of success. Imagine if we judged and ranked our schools not by the number of prospective students they turn away but by their ability to grant access and ensure student success. — Michael M. Crow
That it is an extension of high school — in which students expect to be cared for, and parents expect to be involved or consulted, the way both parties were during high school — or that it looks like some combination of The Paper Chase and Dead Poets Society (why do film portraits of the classroom, whether in college or high school, always have to be so excruciatingly twee?) — with passionate discussion in the seminar that spills over into the quad that spills over into the dining hall that spills over into the bar. The truth is that higher education is neither as infantilizing nor as romantic as people think. — Corey Robin
That it’s full of armchair Marxists. — Alyssa Battistoni
There are three misconceptions: who’s going to college, why many students don’t finish, and why more people need credentials if there are already so many un- and underemployed graduates. Many people do not realize that the average college student is not 18, living on campus, and going for a bachelor’s degree. Too many have the idea that students drop out because they don’t belong in college, which just isn’t the case. And people generally assume that a “college” education refers to a B.A., when so often what the work force needs are credentials that testify to specific skills. — Dan Greenstein
That education must benefit society because it benefits the individual. — Bryan D. Caplan
That faculty members indoctrinate students to believe what they believe rather than exposing them to a range of different perspectives and intellectual traditions and teaching them to think for themselves. — Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin
That college is a cure-all for what ails elementary and secondary schools, communities, and the home environment. Too many students and their parents expect their undergraduate years to spoon-feed them the experiences that will shape them for the future. They think college should happen to them, rather than take control and self-direct their own learning. — Jeffrey J. Selingo
There is a false dichotomy between a liberal education and a pragmatic education. Liberal education is often viewed as a luxury. This characterization runs the risk of enhancing inequity by perpetuating what Jefferson referred to as an unnatural aristocracy. — Lynn Pasquerella
That college graduates worked hard and left school with adequate skills and knowledge. — Mark Bauerlein
Its power. Both conservatives and liberals constantly overestimate the ability of the academy to transform the “hearts and minds” of students and consequently to influence national politics or policy. This is expressed in the popularity of books written by conservatives claiming that higher education is “brainwashing” students with liberal dogma and, on the other hand, in the faith that liberals repeatedly voice that more education is all that’s really needed to bridge the divide in a polarized America. — Robin Marie Averbeck
That elite schools are representative of the whole of higher education. It often seems that the set of people most engaged in discussing the future of higher education and the set of people who attended top-50 schools are one and the same. Of course, the top 50 are no more representative of the whole than the top 1 percent of earners is of the American work force. — Ryan Craig
That it is a meritocracy. The public has been led to believe that the best students, faculty, staff, administrators, ideas, and literature reside in the highest-ranked colleges and universities, and the worst reside in the lowest-ranked. Merit is a major factor, but it is hardly the only — or even the main — factor in determining placement and power. Personal pedigree and connections remain as important as merit, if not more. — Ibram X. Kendi
That college is expensive, wasteful, focused on trivia, and distorted by political correctness. — Nancy Weiss Malkiel
Because about 60 percent of the public do not have college degrees, many Americans misconceive college attendance as elitist. — Naomi Zack
The biggest misconception that academics have about higher education is:
That the university is about scholarship and education. It’s not. Elite universities are real-estate ventures and investment portfolios, with an educational operation on the side. Non-elite universities are about punching the clock and trying to get the kids through. — Corey Robin
That if academics put their heads down and just wait, things are going to get better. We need unified activism now. — Adrianna Kezar
Faculty members too often believe that their responsibility is limited to their specific disciplines and not also to the overall educational purposes of the institutions they serve and the broader needs of their students. Also, too few have a good grasp of how their institutions are actually financed and where the major costs are incurred. — Judith Shapiro
Academics think that we don’t need to prove our worth — and increase our worth — to the larger society. We always have had to do so, and never have our efforts been more important than now. — Amy Gutmann
Some academics teach as if their job were to train students to be professors like themselves. This shows a narrow understanding of the purpose and potential of higher education. Grumpy professors who belittle those phantoms known as “college students today” often do so by comparing all students with their own younger selves — without the self-awareness that back in the day when they were on their own paths to careers in academe, they were in the minority and not representative of their peers. — Cathy N. Davidson
In ways that almost always surprise me, many academics, in spite of their declarations to the contrary, tend to believe that their hard work will be rewarded and recognized on its own merits. They tend not to appreciate the fluctuating, market-driven, often inflationary aspects of how particular kinds of work get valued. They also tend not to see how universities’ own investments in work (at both the decanal and departmental levels) serve to regulate and prop up certain corners of the marketplace. White supremacy or gender or class chauvinism in faculty hiring can thus carry the consequence of furthering investments in fields and subfields that offer relatively anemic intellectual or civic gains. — N. D. B. Connolly
That higher education will continue to survive in something like its current form for the next 50 years and longer. — Richard Grusin
That our research endeavors contribute to the public good as much as we think they do. — Jennifer Hochschild
That only one kind of intelligence matters. — Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin
That higher education is different from all other industries and should be treated as such; that it operates according to its own internal logic rather than according to the social, economic, and political forces shaping the rest of the world; that academic work is different from all other kinds of work. — Alyssa Battistoni
That there is no other way to a deep intellectual life except through the system. — Mark Bauerlein
Many feel that academia is a struggling sector. The opposite is true. We academics provide a service that most young people feel is necessary for a good life. Faculty salaries went up a little even during the Great Recession, as did average spending per student. Opportunities to publish research have increased dramatically since the 1980s. As subfields proliferate, there is more, not less, room at the top for people who are ambitious. Those who teach in research universities do experience many competitive pressures, but they also have a level of freedom and autonomy that few other types of salaried employees know. — Steven G. Brint
That college is immune to the forces of the economy. Higher education-professionals continue to believe that they should get a raise every year, even when critical civil servants (like police) go years without a raise. — Walter M. Kimbrough
There are still some faculty members who imagine that we can opt out of larger public debates and conversations from our perch in academia. Some still frown on colleagues, especially junior colleagues, who produce work that is too “popular.” — John L. Jackson Jr.
That faculty members are the most important factor to the learning experience of students. Their peers are. — Dalton Conley
Has the exchange of ideas on campus become more or less free than it was 50 years ago?
Without question, campus environments have become much more free, even in this moment when people talk about the chilling effect on free speech brought about by allegedly hypersensitive students who are unprepared for the “real world.” What people fail to understand is that there have been several radical demographic changes over the past 50 years. Many more people have access to higher education than ever before — cutting across lines of race, gender, ethnicity, and social class. This means that many more things will be in tension than before, and that many more things will be contested. Tension and contestation are not equivalent to less freedom; they are declarations that normative ideas are going to be challenged. Too often, it seems, people are bemoaning the end of free speech when the real problem is that they don’t like the free speech they are hearing. — Jonathan Holloway
We are living in the greatest era of freely available speech in the history of higher education. Network technologies have broadened the scope of public discourse on and around campus. With greater democratization of access and plurality of viewpoints, some people erroneously believe that we have become less tolerant. In fact, we have merely become less tolerant of unchallenged hegemonic views. — Tressie McMillan Cottom
Over all, considerably more free. The much greater diversity among students provides a wider range of perspectives, while advances in knowledge across all the disciplines have opened up new ways of thinking about virtually every aspect of what it means to be human. That campuses work against racism, homophobia, and misogyny is not political correctness that silences, but an embrace of our human differences that invites more people in. Like everything else, the effort to include can be taken to extremes that curtail freedom of inquiry and expression, and when that occurs, academic freedom and freedom of expression must be upheld. — Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin
It’s cyclical. Waves of political correctness hit campuses in the late ’60s, ’70s, and late ’80s. Now we’re seeing another such wave. I predict things will go back to normal in a few years. In any case, the internet has been a boon for all forms of dissent. Today’s most intellectually isolated professor has better opportunities to share his ideas than 99 percent of professors had in 1966. — Bryan D. Caplan
It has become both more and less free. More, in the sense that communications technologies have enabled dialogue that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago. Less, as with the broader society, in that our ability to personalize our sources of information can create digital walls between factions and make it harder for us to truly listen to and understand one another. — Dan Greenstein
Fifty years ago, students debated war, co-education, racial desegregation, and governmental involvement. Today students debate income inequalities, geopolitics, inclusion, and tolerance. What has changed in the intervening 50 years is the speed with which incidents on one campus jump from being a local event to a national or international occurrence. The digital age has shrunk geography but has not necessarily improved understanding. — Earl Lewis
The exchange has become, if anything, a bit less free. Public discourse, the notion of the public square, is central to democracy and was central to colleges’ identity. But now there is a tension as college presidents have to worry about state legislatures, trustees and donors holding back funding. There is much self-censorship. — Richard Greenwald
Oh, much, much more free than in 1966. You can set up a table in the quad with a sign saying “Affirmative Action Is Contrary to Liberty,” and people will step up and genuinely want to hear why. Administrators and professors will welcome a lecture titled “Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage” or “Less Diversity, More Unity.” Nobody will denounce you, no one will jeer. Yes, certainly, nowhere in America do we have such a lively marketplace of opinion; nowhere are people less afraid of saying the wrong thing and being shamed or bullied or shunned. — Mark Bauerlein
The First Amendment and free expression are in serious danger on our campuses, largely due to almost unforgivable levels of ignorance about our constitutional history and basic principles of free expression. An entire generation of learners, when polled, shows a lack of understanding of the basic laws and principles of the land and how to work with them. — Peter Lake
How can we avoid a two-tier system of higher education?
Higher education will be stratified as long as economic and racial inequality persists across society. — Alyssa Battistoni
The issue is not whether there should be a two-tier system but whether everyone can get into at least one of those tiers. — Naomi Zack
The answers are as obvious in principle as they are difficult to implement in practice: much better and more equally distributed K-12 schooling (starting, actually, with pre-K); a broad system of financial and other support (mentoring, advising, teaching in groups and in other ways that are pedagogically more exciting than lectures); disseminating information about applications, Fafsa forms, and other student aid; perhaps cluster admissions so that a cohort of nontraditional students can matriculate together; unremitting focus on reducing the barriers to completion once a student is admitted to a school. — Jennifer Hochschild
Let’s be clear. We already have a tiered system of education, which has been identified for some time now as a reproducer of privilege and a contributor to widening racial inequities. We need to look deeply at incentives. We need to reward institutions — through how we measure and fund higher education — that expand opportunity rather than reinforce privilege. — Dan Greenstein
We need innovative new credentials that are much shorter, easier to complete, and affordable than the current bachelor’s degree. While this won’t change the two-tier system, it will significantly improve the prospects of students in the second tier.
In time, it may be that hearing that your friend’s daughter intends to pursue a degree will sound as old-fashioned and elitist as hearing today that she’s coming out as a debutante (which is to say, expensive and unnecessary). — Ryan Craig
Provide greater funding for the least-well-funded students. Wealthy institutions, for example, could be made exempt from receiving Pell Grants and instead could pay the cost of Pell Grants for those students. — Walter M. Kimbrough
The entire system of providing financial aid needs to be reformed. Fewer state dollars should go toward subsidizing the children of the affluent at public institutions, and fewer private dollars should go toward merit aid.
The former issue is politically difficult and not helped by the misguided “free public college for all” movement. The latter can begin to be addressed only if the government stops using antitrust laws to prevent colleges from collectively exploring alternatives to the current, unsustainable system. — Brian Rosenberg
The government should stop giving tax breaks to private and elite public institutions. Tax-free endowments in effect provide public support to elite private schools like Chicago, Duke, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. If those endowments were taxed, the revenue generated could be put to better use supporting institutions with large enrollments of African-American, Hispanic, and first-generation college students.
Indeed I would encourage these wealthy elite universities to work with their wealthy donors to help fund basic expenses at needier, nearby public universities and colleges, rather than putting their names on fancy new buildings or, as in the recent highly publicized case of the estate gift of a librarian from the University of New Hampshire, a scoreboard for its football stadium. — Richard Grusin
First, money from the federal government’s campus-based aid programs — Perkins Loans, the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, and work-study — should be awarded to colleges in part on the basis of how well they graduate Pell Grant recipients above the national average, as well as students who are the first in their families to go to college.
Second, institutions should be rewarded for keeping down their net price for low-income students. According to New America, nearly two-thirds of private colleges charge a net price of more than $15,000 a year to students from families making less than $30,000.
Bonuses should be given to colleges that graduate large percentages of Pell recipients, and institutions that charge high net prices to needy students should be forced to match a portion of the Pell Grants.
Finally, institutions that do the best with low-income students should get access to additional federal student-loan dollars, with lower interest rates. If students must take on debt, let’s at least give them access to better loans. — Jeffrey J. Selingo
Until we address the issue of equitable preparation for college and reinvest in the funding of K-12 as well as college, it’s going to be very difficult to avoid a two-tier system. We are also starting to look at less traditional measures that suggest a student’s actual potential, rather than their educational experience. — Rebecca Chopp
We should shift all of higher education to a lottery system. I honestly don’t understand what people, particularly at elite universities, think is gained by their teaching, or their studying with, only the most highly prepared students from the most elite schools. — Corey Robin
We should create an admissions process that measures students’ desire to know as opposed to measuring how much they know. Those students with the greatest desire to know should be at the most-selective colleges. Those are the students I want in my classrooms — not students who are skilled at taking tests or doing mindless busywork.
We should value oral communication as much as written communication. We should value one’s everyday-life problem-solving skills as much as abstract-math problem-solving skills. If we truly value diverse student bodies, then why not diversify what it means to be skilled and intelligent and qualified? — Ibram X. Kendi
What advice would you give a family member who wants to become an academic?
Don’t! It’s not a healthy or supportive career. And I do not mean compared with some past ideal. I mean it has become unattractive. We care about students and teaching and our subject matter, but that cannot overcome the day-to-day dismal realities or put food on the table, a roof over your head, or pay your medical bills. — Adrianna Kezar
According to recent studies, to be an academic you have to be willing to work a minimum of 60 hours a week (a number that increases, not decreases, after tenure), and you must spend vast amounts of time alone doing your research and writing, class preparation, and grading. Does that appeal to you? If not, think about another profession. — Cathy N. Davidson
If they truly feel the passion to teach, they should embrace that passion to the fullest. — Eduardo J. Padrón
I’d give them the advice that I was given by a faculty member when I was a wide-eyed prospective student. She told me and a group of other would-be political theorists that academe was being proletarianized, that there was no guarantee we’d get a job after graduating, and that if there’s anything else we could do, we should do that instead. All seven of us enrolled that fall. She was right, of course. But I don’t regret it. — Alyssa Battistoni
There are very few callings in life that are more maddening, more difficult, and more ultimately satisfying than being a professor. If you’re called to answer big questions and inspire new thinkers, there’s nowhere you’d rather be. — Margaret Spellings
If you have a passion for teaching or research, being a professor is an ideal job. But be warned: Academic politics are intense and treacherous, because the stakes have never been higher. — Naomi Zack
You must love to write emails. — N. D. B. Connolly
The bigger question is not about a family member, but whether we can continue to attract the brightest people in our country to careers in the academy when there is so little job security. If not, what will that mean for the future of teaching and the creation of knowledge? — Rebecca Chopp
It’s a tough road. Know what you’re getting into. If you have a desire to teach, to have impact on lives, teach high school, as there is a real need there. — Richard Greenwald
Do it. These are exciting times. The new generation of students is more open-minded, curious, and flexible than any other in recent history. — Richard Delgado
When my son expressed interest in pursuing a Ph.D. in history, I resisted the idea. But after thinking it over, I advised him that if he loved studying history so much that he was willing to live on a limited income and have his labor exploited for the next five to seven years, with no expectation that he would end up with a tenured position like mine, then he should go ahead and do it. He decided to pursue other options. — Richard Grusin
One in the family is enough. — Tressie McMillan Cottom
Go for it! (Easy for a senior, tenured professor to say, perhaps.) — Martin Finkelstein
Enter with your eyes open, your head in gear, your back strong, your spirit healthy, and your skin resilient. — Jacqueline J. Royster
If my son follows in his father’s footsteps, I have to disown him. If he wants to become an academic, he must pursue the natural sciences. — Mark Bauerlein
You’ve been given absolute power: What is the one change you’d immediately enact?
Maximize access while minimizing loan burden by awarding all undergraduate financial aid by need. — Amy Gutmann
I would abolish the idea that there is a set time for everything. The great project of the 19th century was to train farmers to be factory workers and shopkeepers to be middle managers. Putting everyone on a rigid time schedule was important to that transition and became the job of compulsory public education. Hence the school bell was the symbol of education in the 19th century. A timetable is not conducive to learning, though. Outside of school, who learns on a timetable? Why is college four years? Some learning might take three years, some five. One course might take 15 weeks, another three. One course might best meet for three hours a week, another for one hour a day. — Cathy N. Davidson
End government funding. — Bryan D. Caplan
I would require all university administrations to immediately recognize and start negotiating with all unions of all types of campus workers. — Corey Robin
We tend to offer solutions before we fully identify the problem. Consider the flawed way we track students. We have no single, fully authenticated way of tracking them from institution to institution. If a student enters a two-year school but leaves early and graduates from a four-year school, the student is recorded as a dropout at the originating school and a graduate at the degree-granting school. That must be fixed, because it skews the data and could lead to poor policy decisions. — Earl Lewis
Free community college across the United States, because lack of access and affordability keeps many talented and skilled individuals away from college and further away from obtaining 21st-century jobs. — Eduardo J. Padrón
I would ban parental funding of higher education, which is to say disincentivize the intergenerational transfer of wealth and start shifting the burden to a combination of state funding, modest student contributions, and scaled-down institutional infrastructure and operating costs. It’s utopian, I know, but you said absolute power. — Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Get rid of all rankings. They have encouraged a herd mentality for the past three decades that has led colleges to chase prestige at a high cost to students and their families. — Jeffrey J. Selingo
Higher expectations. — Margaret Spellings
Make every selective college adopt a “sister school” at the two-year-college level and be responsible for student achievement. Every professor would have to teach one course per year at the sister school. — Mark Bauerlein
Major governance reform in higher education. One-percenters dominate boards and senior leadership, essentially creating higher-education policy for the remainder of society. — Peter Lake
I would find a way to incentivize hiring administrators who provide institutional rather than purely business leadership. Most great university leaders were (or are) also outstanding academics. — Steven G. Brint
Double the value of Pell Grants. — Walter M. Kimbrough
Concentrate resources — mentors, campus visits, and the like — to encourage high-school students to prepare for college. — Joyce Appleby
Make formal preparation for teaching more central to doctoral training. — John L. Jackson Jr.
A bigoted policy is commonly defined by intention. So unconscious bigots skate by, and conscious bigots hide their intention. If given absolute power, I would immediately redefine the prevailing definition of bigoted policy by replacing intention with outcome. A bigoted policy would be any policy that has produced an unequal or disparate outcome, no matter whether the progenitor or executor or defender of that policy intended for an unequal outcome or not. In higher education, we’d look to outcomes as opposed to intentions to determine if a policy is sexist, racist, ethnocentric, elitist, homophobic, nativist, and the like. — Ibram X. Kendi
I would take immediate steps to address the lack of diversity among tenure-track and tenured faculty. Professors of color — especially Hispanics and African-Americans — are underrepresented on college campuses even as campuses are becoming more diverse. Around 30 percent of undergraduates are members of a racial or ethnic minority group, yet faculty of color account for an estimated 9 percent of full-time faculty. This is problematic in its own right but also has implications for student recruitment and retention as well as student learning. — Keisha N. Blain
Is there a phenomenon that seems crucially important today that will be largely forgotten by 2066?
In 2066 some enterprising doctoral student will unearth a news story about MOOCs. She’ll endeavor to write a dissertation on them. No one will know what she is talking about. MOOCs will barely register as a historical blip in 2066. — Tressie McMillan Cottom
Today there is so much emphasis on the need to invest in STEM. In 50 years, I imagine a new acronym in its place that talks about the integration of the digital and the biological; with it will emerge a powerful interest in what it means to be human. If I am correct, then philosophy, literature, art, and history may have once again grown in currency. — Earl Lewis
The adjunct faculty member. Forced to rethink the role of faculty for both financial and pedagogical reasons, higher education will develop over the coming decades a new faculty model that will include multiple pathways for academics who want to research, teach, or dabble in other careers and industries as free agents. — Jeffrey J. Selingo
We hear a lot of talk about the “education of the whole student” in 2016 — the idea that an excellent college education will nurture and develop a wide range of skills, both intellectual and social, and will take into account all of the myriad talents and capacities that students possess. I think this will become so integral a part of higher ed that we will forget it was ever up for discussion. — Mariko Silver
I hope that socioeconomic barriers and racial and sexual harassment and assault will no longer need to be the focus of our concerted efforts because public investments, institutions, norms, and social attitudes will have changed enough to free us from those evils. — Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin
Traditional academic publishing. This is not to say that university presses and peer-reviewed journals won’t continue to exist, but that their structures and putative prestige categories will look almost unrecognizable by then. Already I see a more finely graded range of respectable and responsible publishing options than I did as a graduate student, and already what it means to be “in the know” about publishing looks very different among junior and even associate-level colleagues than it does among the most senior. We will increasingly find ways of publishing quality work that is rightly evaluated as such, without a prohibitive paywall or years-long review queues. — Jeanne-Marie Jackson
While online resources continue to develop apace, we will see an end to “badges” and “unbundling” approaches to higher education once they are recognized as being most useful for the acquisition of relatively specific, technical skills by appropriately prepared users. Actually, that should not take as long as another 50 years. — Judith Shapiro
The introduction of digital online learning has been a source of high drama and much hand-wringing for many who worry about a decline in the quality of education. By 2066 — and I expect much sooner — online components will be taken for granted as an obvious benefit and necessary to successful teaching, learning, and achieving excellence. — Michael M. Crow
I think that concerns over the names of slaveholders and other longtime racists on the sides of buildings and on campus monuments will have been put to rest by 2066. This will come either through continued student activism or through the continued corporatization of American higher education. — N. D. B. Connolly
Interdisciplinary cluster hires as a universitywide goal. I haven’t seen evidence that they yield the benefits their advocates describe. Over the past three decades, virtually none of the highly cited work in the social sciences was produced in an explicitly interdisciplinary setting. Such work was produced by individuals or close collaborators out of their own study and insights. We have had interdisciplinary matrix organizations since the 1920s. But we have not until recently thought it was a good idea to reorganize universities around interdisciplinary clusters. This seems to be a faith-based idea. — Steven G. Brint
The library as we know it. — Greg Britton
What makes you optimistic about the next 50 years?
When I go into a classroom and feel the energy of students, especially students studying seemingly intractable social problems, I am encouraged by how open they are to introspection, critical thinking, and combining topics, themes, and disciplines that aren’t conventionally put in conversation with one another. There is an excitement and inspiration that comes from being in a vibrant classroom, which may be the closest one can get to a sacred space within the academy. — John L. Jackson Jr.
The students. Today’s students are engaged on campus and in the world, and they hold themselves — and the colleges and universities they attend — to high standards. — Mariko Silver
We are in the midst of a second civil-rights revolution and stand on the cusp of a major moment of human enlightenment, where a jump in the order of magnitude of educated people on the planet will occur. Sure, Lord Voldemort is everywhere today — violence, hate, debt, disruption, despair. We live in the moment before the moment, and I am radically optimistic about the long term. Neville Longbottom wins. — Peter Lake
Student and faculty activism around issues of inequality, violence, sustainability, and other global and national challenges are incredible signs of hope. — Adrianna Kezar
The academic labor movement is, without question, the thing that makes me the most optimistic about the future of higher education. It is where the supposed ideals of the academy are actively defended, and where academics are advocating for the university we want: an institution that is more just, more democratic, and more humane; an academy that, instead of speeding up the production of papers and publications, recognizes that good work takes time, security, and resources, and that genuinely supports thinking, reading, teaching, and learning as a result. — Alyssa Battistoni
The global circulation of students and scholars. And that one language, English, has emerged as the lingua franca of science, allowing for a greater-than-ever exchange of ideas across borders. This system, along with the great reduction of global poverty, has vastly expanded the pool of potential learners and knowledge producers, potentially ushering in a golden age of higher ed. — Dalton Conley
I’m optimistic about the ever-increasing interest in — and the growing recognition of the value of — interdisciplinary research in higher education. More academics recognize that using multiple methodological approaches and drawing insights from a range of disciplines strengthens, rather than weakens, scholarly work. Moreover, our students certainly benefit when we expose them to an interdisciplinary perspective. I imagine that in the next 50 years, interdisciplinary research and teaching will be viewed as the expectation and the norm.— Keisha N. Blain
As the numbers of Americans pursuing and earning a college degree continue to grow, new pressure will be placed on public officials to address the most urgent policy questions. — Earl Lewis
It is true that for far too long, corporate America has given a lot of lip service to education. More recently, however, because the tremendous shortfall of qualified employees has become so acute, employers now find it absolutely necessary to join forces with educational institutions. — Eduardo J. Padrón
Fiscal pressure from societal aging will squeeze funding, slowly reducing waste and curtailing credential inflation. — Bryan D. Caplan
Very little. — Troy Duster
We face numerous problems as educators today — but the same thing could have been said, with equal force, at many periods in the past. Higher education has come through other formidable trials of wars, witch hunts, lack of funding, and obtuse publics, and has made it through to become even stronger and more resilient. — Nannerl O. Keohane
There is very little that makes me optimistic about the next 50 years in higher education. — Richard Grusin
Today’s social movements make me very hopeful about higher education’s future. True, progressive innovation has always sprung from partnerships between stabilizing institutions and radical, creative organizing outside them. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, and Strike Debt are just a few of the social movements that have critically, seriously engaged with higher-education policy this year. If they continue to do so, all of us in higher education will owe them a significant debt in the future. — Tressie McMillan Cottom
What makes me optimistic is that the basic work product of higher education — ideas, the product of human creativity and the scholarly endeavor — may be what saves us as a species. Those ideas will come from universities. — Greg Britton
In 1940, barely one out of 10 Americans had a high-school diploma and a whole lot of people thought there was no reason to get one. We raised our expectations, put our faith in the ambition and potential of our citizens, and built the best-educated and richest society the world has ever seen. There’s no reason in the world we can’t do that again. — Margaret Spellings
