Top of the list of problems: public perception of ROI.
Last week I went down to Galveston, Tex., to speak to members of the Texas Council of Academic Libraries. Although my report “The Library of the Future” had earned me the invitation, and I also wrote “Sustaining the College Business Model” and several other articles and reports on the financial and reputational challenges facing higher ed, I’m always reluctant to play the onstage “expert.” I mean, I’ve visited many campuses, but I’ve never worked on one. So I opened the talk with a caveat borrowed from the famous military historian John Keegan: I might be a well-known scholar of war, “but I have never been in battle,” Keegan says in The Face of Battle. “And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like.”
Battle could’ve been an apt metaphor. Even before the pandemic, colleges were struggling against a set of internal and external pressures, many familiar to readers of The Edge.
Among the internal factors: decades not knowing the detailed costs of institutional operations, in part because they were difficult to track, but also because doing so would have meant making hard decisions. (“I don’t know,” a college trustee once told me, “and I don’t want to know.”) “Zombie” academic programs, underenrolled and distant from the mission, often accumulated.
Also internally, colleges expanded administrative ranks, but with uncertain effects on student success. Leaders often had too short a tenure to pull off a real transformation. Raising money to put up a building became a common way to signal achievement, but two-thirds of its lifetime cost would accrue after opening. Construction on many campuses outpaced enrollment, and deferred maintenance stands as a billion-dollar problem in many large university systems.
Among the external pressures: a demographic slide in student numbers. Populations of low-income and first-generation students who tend to need more resources and support. Rising college costs and stagnant family incomes. Confusion over college and career pathways despite an intense focus on college as the primary track to a “good job” (see the growing number of organizations offering questionable and incomplete data to label certain majors as job-market “winners,” like business, or “losers,” like philosophy).
Those converging challenges predated the pandemic. My article on the “college deathwatch” industry appeared about a month and a half before Covid-19 shut everything down. Now we are (still) waiting to see how the pandemic affected those trends. Did federal relief funds give colleges enough of an opportunity to reorganize, or just take off some of the pressure — temporarily?
Fortunately, many solutions are in colleges’ power to pursue. More leaders are assessing the costs of their various programs and centers. Many institutions are paring back their majors and departments, after, we can only hope, not just hasty perceptions but a careful consideration of the enrollment, revenue, and potential of those programs. The prospect of partnerships abounds — between or among institutions, or between colleges and their surrounding communities — but such models still seem underused.
But most of all, I told the audience of heads-up librarians, higher ed needs to tackle the return-on-investment equation, which drives doubts about college from the public, policy makers, and employers. As many of us know, about 40 percent of students who enroll in college do not graduate within six years, a figure stratified by types of institutions and student populations. Among graduates, some 40 percent are underemployed, which can mean more training (and more money) to break into a solid career.
For decades — not just since the Great Recession — students have viewed college as career preparation, and ranked that purpose more highly than those in the realm of learning and ideas. Yet polls by Gallup and other organizations show a longstanding disappointment with the preparation of graduates for the world of work. In The Chronicle’s recent report on employer perspectives about college, many noted a gap between what they needed and the skills graduates brought to the workplace. A surprising number of employers said that they had started considering applicants without college degrees, seeing the requirement as an artificial and unnecessary choke point in finding talent.
College degrees will probably remain important to landing good jobs. But some employers are chipping away at a narrative colleges have trumpeted — and relied on — for years.
This is not an admonition to colleges to hew to a narrow definition of career readiness, or to shutter programs in philosophy or art history in favor of business or welding. Instead, help students see how philosophy is legitimate preparation for business, or how art history leads not just to museums or galleries, but to all kinds of roles in the world.
I’m exploring those final points now in a lengthy project with someone who has actually spent decades in the trenches. I hope to offer more thoughts here in The Edge when the time comes.
