Since the late 1980s, low graduation rates at many colleges and universities and the rising costs of attendance at nearly all of them have made the leaders of our institutions increasingly vulnerable to public criticism and, most recently, to Congressional inquiries. Not surprisingly, an army of consultants and lobbyists has been mobilized either to interpret the criticism and deflect it, when possible, or to try to deal with the underlying issues.
For the most part, higher education’s advocates and apologists have pointed to external factors to explain low graduation rates and rising costs. They usually cite the inadequate academic preparation of many high-school graduates or the diminishing purchasing power of Pell Grants as the most important reasons for low completion rates. And they point to the declining share of state budgets going to public higher education and the financial burdens colleges face in keeping up with essential information and communication technologies as the underlying causes of higher prices.
Few spokesmen for higher education make the connection between the unwelcome trends they live with, and must explain to their constituencies, and their own patterns of behavior. But the connection should be made. The changes that people outside higher education, including legislators, are demanding -- better outcomes for students and lower costs -- will not occur if we in higher education, especially those who lead colleges and universities, focus only on external factors while ignoring the unintended consequences of what we do within our own system.
A prime example is the avid quest by institutions for places at the top of higher education’s prestige pyramid, a quest that becomes very public because it is linked to the pursuit of rankings in U.S. News & World Report and other publications. Space at the top of the pyramid is limited, and the current occupants -- highly selective liberal-arts colleges and research universities -- have remarkable staying power. They also usually have no interest in admitting larger numbers of applicants, even as unprecedented numbers of students from many backgrounds seek access to higher education.
The result is a paradox. We are opening up access to higher education at the base of the prestige pyramid at the very time that more institutions, hoping to strengthen their claim to be pathways to leadership in American society, are competing to rise to the top of the pyramid. With the passing of time, the institutions locked in this competition, especially public ones, may lose their ability to serve as agents of social and economic mobility. Their degrees are increasingly becoming stamps that ratify social advantage. Indeed, one unintended consequence of the rankings craze is that it generates behavior totally at odds with our rhetoric about providing educational opportunity for all students, regardless of their backgrounds.
What is the fastest and most effective way to climb to the top of the pyramid? It is to generate large pools of applicants, most of whom will not be admitted. It is to recruit students who attend academically strong high schools and who will probably stay in college and complete their degrees, not those who are likely to stop out or drop out. It is to cap enrollment and raise tuition for those students lucky enough to get in, rather than to expand enrollment and try to control costs. Why? In good part because such actions improve an institution’s retention and graduation rates, its “selectivity rank,” and other measures that move it up the prestige ladder. Campus leaders and governing boards give little thought to how the quest for better rankings may affect their institutions’ allocation of resources or commitment to educational opportunity for low-income and minority students.
Now public flagship universities and other campuses throughout the country, both public and private, are emulating the culture and values of institutions at the top -- and with unfortunate results. Instead of investing in learning environments that help students of varied backgrounds and preparation succeed, too many institutions now spend their resources aggressively recruiting students with high SAT or ACT scores and other conventional markers of achievement that correlate most strongly with socioeconomic status. In turn, at many institutions those choices skew the allocation of financial aid from students with the greatest need to those with the most offers of admission.
The numbers tell the story. An estimated 70 percent of freshmen entering a four-year college in 2003 came from families earning more than $50,000, significantly higher than the national median of $43,000. At some prestigious institutions -- both public and private -- a large proportion of the students in the entering class come from families earning more than $100,000 annually.
Another unintended and rarely acknowledged consequence of higher education’s pursuit of prestige and rankings is the accelerated devaluing of hundreds of institutions that E. Alden Dunham described in 1969 as “the colleges of the forgotten Americans.” Those are the lower-tier four-year institutions and community colleges that either do not meet the criteria to be included in the rankings or choose not to participate. They are devalued by their more-selective peers and by the news media that profit from the publication of rankings. They are all too often also devalued by students and parents who care more about brand-name degrees than they do about the actual education that the students are receiving.
Today such colleges enroll nearly three out of four undergraduates, a majority of master’s candidates, and virtually all students pursuing certificates and continuing-education units. The group also includes new types of higher-education institutions, like the country’s largest accredited private university (the University of Phoenix) and the only accredited competency-based university (Western Governors University), as well as community colleges that award baccalaureate degrees.
Precisely because they cannot rely on their history, brand name, or endowments to attract students and resources, the colleges of the forgotten Americans, whether old or new, are more willing to address the questions and concerns of higher education’s critics. They are willing, for instance, to share information about the outcomes of their instructional programs with employers and to respond positively to legislative requests for information about what drives their costs and about the value they add to their students’ lives.
Those institutions truly are the unsung heroes of higher education. They deserve much more attention from reporters who should be tired, by now, of writing the same old stories about cutthroat competition for admission and outlandish price tags at the elite institutions. And the colleges of the forgotten Americans deserve more respect from institutions involved in the ranking game to the point that their behaviors increasingly reinforce social and economic advantage and undermine higher education’s traditional arguments for autonomy and self-regulation. That is especially true of public universities that lay claim to more public support while at the same time capping enrollments or raising admission standards, or both.
Clara M. Lovett is the president of the American Association for Higher Education.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 20, Page B20
