We often hear that Higher Education is in crisis. Two things are happening: (A) Higher Education is suffering within from a growing number of problems, and (B) it is under attack from without.
The complaints:
● Higher education has become prohibitively expensive, especially at the high prestige, private institutions such as the Ivy League. This forces many students into huge indebtedness, from which they need years to extricate themselves.
● Students are not taught job-relevant skills. Many of them, upon graduating and hitting the job market, have difficulty landing well-paying jobs.
● Nor is employment in higher education as enviable as it was in the past: Pay and tenure (= job security) are under assault: By now, half of all faculty appointments are non-tenure track. These employees are largely required to have a PhD and their first-year annual salary ranges from $55K to $75K, depending on the state, the institution and the field.
● As a result, college is no longer viewed as a universally desirable path to success. Particularly, “Joe college” is a vanishing breed. Men are especially giving up on college. 58% of all new college entrants are women, only 42% are men.
The Grudge Theory:
The biggest challenge facing higher education is the attack upon it from outside. This attack is fed by resentment. I call this the “grudge theory.” It was best formulated by the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit (2020).
This rising anti-college sentiment is part of America’s current right-wing populist revolution. It views academia as a corrupt elite, and questions the necessity of a college degree for a lucrative job and a fulfilling life.
Hatred of the academic and technocratic elite is the response to decades of contempt for what Hillary Clinton unfortunately called the “deplorables.” The recipients of this disrespect are largely lower-class and working-class white males, people without a college experience. A good description of this subculture is J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). The 2024 Republican presidential victory was revenge for decades of disrespect by the technocratic elite - “down with universities!”
One central driving force behind the meritocractic tyranny is our credential system: Success is far too dependent on credentials. The baccalaureate diploma is often a must for a good job, and before that, other credentials often required for admission to a prestigious program include SATs, high GPAs and stellar letters of recommendation.
The “grudge theory” is becoming increasingly mainstream. Sociology professor Arlie Hochschild recently published her book Stolen Pride, documenting the phenomenon in Appalachia. Aide Acosta’s article “The Real Cost of the anti-college Narrative in the US” addresses the same subject.
But I am not sure that the “grudge theory” explains the current anti-college narrative:
For one thing, anti-intellectualism is as old as America and apple pie (See for example Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter, 1963). Before Hillary Clinton’s label of “deplorables,” Americans used words such as “white trash” to refer to that same population. That insult did not produce a mass rebellion against disrespect, a victorious anti-intellectual movement, and widespread revolutionary anger.
Solutions:
The Republican solution is to tear down the inequitable elitist university system. My reaction is to fix it, not destroy it.
The list of the benefits provided by colleges to American society is long (See Aide Acosta).
I personally experienced higher education during its Golden Age, first as a student, then as faculty.
For faculty members, the academic market place was great. As a new PhD, one could expect half a dozen attractive tenure-track job offers. Once you got tenure, you enjoyed life-time job security combined with academic freedom. Remember that tenure exists to protect the academic freedom of employees whose job includes expounding on controversial and at times unpopular subject matter.
For students, college was the major avenue of upward mobility, especially for minorities. There was a wide choice of institutions available, ranging from relatively affordable public colleges to high-end prestigious schools known around the world.
Many of these benefits remain:
The income gap remains very real: In 2023, the median annual income of high school graduates was $36K, that of college graduates was $60K. High school graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as college graduates.
But college is not just about income: College graduates also enjoy better health and longer life expectancy. They are more likely to play leadership roles, and to have more interesting jobs.
Ten of the top twelve universities in the world are American, and thirty-eight of the top one hundred (See Shanghai Ranking). America continues to enjoy a significant brain drain coming in from countries such as India., whereby many countries’ best minds come to the US to study and often to move here permanently. For example, notice where many of your medical providers come from.
So isn’t it worthwhile to preserve and perpetuate this success story, rather than to destroy it? Two thirds of Americans do not have a college degree. Why not increase this, instead of reducing it? The World War Two G.I Bill helped thousands of veterans to go to college and to have a better life. The value of higher education was clear then, as it should be today, especially to men.
To be sure, solutions should be specific. One can recommend, vaguely, that “college should be more conducive to a well-paying job,” or that “we must restore the dignity of work,” or that “elitism is wrong, as it glorifies the prestige of absurdly expensive and mostly private universities.”
But Sandel and others offer more helpful and concrete remedies:
● Admissions: After having weeded out 30% of the applications for not reaching a minimum bar for ability, place all the remaining applications into a lottery to select those who are admitted.
● Admissions: Apply a sort of “affirmative action” based not on ethnicity, but on income.
● Admissions: Maximize scholarships to those needing them the most.
● Spend more on technical and vocational training. This has existed for a long time in European countries such as Germany and Switzerland. Those who opt for it are by no means second-class citizens, either in terms of income or status.
● Spend less on sports, fancy athletic facilities and other non-academic items.
● Provide a wage subsidy to those with low-paying jobs. This would provide a livable salary while also retaining the dignity of work.
● Tax wealth, consumption of luxury items and speculation more, and payroll less. Currently, less and less wealth is the result of investments in the real economy, and more and more in financial dealings that yield huge profits but produce nothing - shareholders capitalism (Sandel).
● Revolutionize the curriculum: Reduce the separation between science and the humanities (see Barthsch). This separation is preventing mankind from solving the world’s problems. True understanding requires both spheres of knowledge and an integration of the two. To be sure, this argument is not new. The British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow made it in 1959 (The Two Cultures)
Also, for over a century, every bona fide college has required all students to fulfill a general education requirement in addition to their major. The point of the near-universal G.E. requirement has been sort of to heed C.P. Snow. The G.E. requirement wants all students to be grounded in the basics of both the humanities AND science. You cannot be a college graduate and still be illiterate OR innumerate. A complete human being must meet a minimum threshold in both cultures. Interestingly, many students complain about the G.E. requirement. That is because they are already wedded to one of the two cultures, and they feel that taking any sample of the other culture is a waste of their time.
Whatever changes universities make in their curriculum in the future, the recommendation is for more inter-disciplinary courses and departments.
● The credentials problem: The entire process - from high school through college and employment - is too dependent on credentials. Admissions to college are determined by GPA, SAT scores and letters of recommendation. Getting the desired job is determined by the applicant’s major, recommendations and the prestige of their university.
Some of the onus is on the employers: A job applicant’s major is not necessarily the key to their employability. Where does it say that a philosophy major cannot become a great business executive? My current dentist (an excellent one), majored in sociology (plus dental school, of course). When Intel hires, they interview primarily applicants with high-tech degrees such as computer science. However, depending on their need, might they not do well to interview more alternative applicants, including some who majored in mathematics, anthropology, psychology or human relations?
As to the applicant’s alma mater, it has been my experience that the quality of instruction is not better in elite universities than in low-prestige schools such as state colleges or junior colleges.
● Mitigate the tracking system in secondary school, whereby students are tracked into college prep and non-college prep programs.
leave comment here
