Get Real

49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education

William G. Tierney

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438481296
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Higher education always seems to be in crisis. Governments, foundations, professional associations, and the occasional scornful professor all tend to lament one or another problem plaguing America's colleges and universities. The more apocalyptic claims state that the United States is a "nation at risk, " that our students' minds have been closed, or that radical faculty have run amok and are brainwashing our youth. In Get Real, William G. Tierney, a leading scholar of higher education, cuts through this noise, drawing on his experience and expertise to provide a thought-provoking overview of the many challenges confronting higher education and how to deal with them. In forty-nine short, engaging essays, he aims not to stoke the flames of controversy or promote a particular stance but to provoke creative, forward-looking public discussion about what higher education could and should look like in the twenty-first century. Tierney clearly distills and offers his take on critical issues—from diversity and free speech to the rise of for-profit colleges and student debt—but the goal is always to give readers the background and tools to form their own opinions. Written in a conversational tone and laced with personal anecdotes, Get Real is informed by scholarly literature without being weighed down by it and includes suggestions for further reading.

CHAPTER 1

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

The Benefits of a Postsecondary Education

From 1837 to 1842, Horace Mann, then-secretary of education for Massachusetts, gave a series of five lectures for common school conventions that were held throughout the state. Three years later, these lectures were published within a single volume, and in his fifth lecture, Mann made two significant points that had a critical impact on the US conscience. First, he argued for the importance of education, making the following claims: “In a land of liberty … there must be internal restraints; the reason, conscience, benevolence, and reverence for all that is sacred, must supply the place of force and fear; and, for this purpose, the very instincts of self-preservation admonish us to perfect our system of education, and to carry it on far more generally and vigorously than we have ever yet done.”1 Second, he stressed that, because of education’s significance, schools should be public and open to everyone: “For this purpose, we must study the principles of education more profoundly; we must make ourselves acquainted with the art, or processes, by which those principles can be applied in practice; and, by establishing proper agencies and institutions, we must cause a knowledge both of the science and the art to be diffused throughout the entire mass of the people.”2 At that time, education was neither widespread nor public. Most young people developed basic literacy due to efforts by their churches, private tutors, or family members. Approximately 90 percent of the country lived in rural areas, where children were compelled to balance informal education with work in family farms and businesses.3 Moreover, the United States was an economic backwater that boasted no more than ninety municipalities with more than twenty-five hundred people in 1830.4 The majority of young people who were privileged to enjoy a formal education were predominantly white and male, hailing from an elite, urban area of New England. Mann reckoned that if the United States was to succeed, then the fledging nation needed to expand educational opportunities to its citizens. Educational reformers like Mann, such as Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Henry Barnard of Connecticut, advocated for school taxes and a formalized, public school system along the Eastern seaboard. By 1850, public schools were widespread in New England, even though opportunity for formal education remained limited to students in southeastern and midwestern states and territories. Over the next fifty years, public education in the United States extended into more rural areas, and from 1910 to 1940, a high school movement pushed the expectations of universal education beyond grammar school. When a new state was admitted into the Union, it had to have a provision for schooling. Areas that quickly embraced high school education saw their investment rewarded in the form of greater wealth, less social stratification, and a more diversified economy that was less dependent on manufacturing.5

Until the middle of the twentieth century, higher education, however, remained the preserve of a chosen few—largely white, middle- and upper-class men. Well-to-do individuals did not seek a vocation because their life’s work was laid out for them. Large universities trained the elite for positions of authority in society. Small religious colleges came and went with rapidity in the nineteenth century, all with the same goal: to inculcate religious doctrine in the local population. By the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, however, the utility of a college education became more apparent. Congress created land-grant public colleges during the Civil War where tuition was nonexistent. Teacher-training schools were created. Women became participants in some institutions and attended single-sex institutions, and separate universities were created for African Americans.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States recognized the economic importance of a college degree to the individual and society, and its predominance took hold. Indeed, ever since Horace Mann spoke about the critical role of education in United States’ progress, the country has agreed about the significance of education and extended it.

California stands as a useful example. In December 1846, Olive M. Isbell opened the first English-language school in California on the Santa Clara Mission grounds.6 The first public school followed in 1848. The first private college opened in 1851, and a women’s college was founded one year later. Although the state ranked eleventh in population in the early twentieth century, it had the largest enrollment in public education of any state. By the 1930s, 24 percent of California’s college-age population matriculated to higher education, a figure well above the national average of 12 percent. California enacted what the rest of the country imagined: a belief in the importance of education and the will to provide it to as many people as possible.7

The value of a college degree has historically swung between two purposes: vocational training that leads to employment or a transformative experience that enables individuals to gain an understanding of the social fabric that binds humanity together. Some have argued that a degree must enable both purposes, whereas others lobby for one goal to the exclusion of the other.8 What is no longer in doubt, however, is the significance of a degree for many careers.

I shall not suggest here that everyone needs to go to college. About two-thirds of California’s working-age adults, for example, need to have some training beyond high school if the state wants to meet its workforce needs. A community college, where one earns a certificate or two-year associate’s degree in a specific vocational area intended to fill a workforce need, will suffice for many students. By 2030, for example, policymakers and stakeholders of higher education (such as those at the Public Policy Institute of California) estimate approximately 30 percent will do just fine with an associate’s degree or simply a postsecondary certificate in a particular field of study. This estimation still leaves around one-third of the state’s high school graduates who can find employment with a high school degree, which I shall discuss in a later chapter.9

Unfortunately, the United States now lags behind other industrialized countries with regard to college participation and attainment. According to 2016 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data, the United States ranked third worldwide in the percentage of the population aged fifty-five to sixty-four years that had completed higher education, but tenth among adults aged twenty-five to thirty-four years.10 The nation is falling behind in the global race for human capital development, and it places the country at risk. The Lumina Foundation and Gates Foundations, among others, have called for the United States to regain its competitiveness and to once again be the number one nation in the world in terms of college access and attainment.11 Why?

For one, wage earners will earn more if they hold a bachelor’s degree. Sure, Bill Gates ditched Harvard, and Peter Thiel awarded $100,000 checks to twenty “uniquely talented” teenage dropouts who eschewed college to conceive and develop a “radical innovation that [would] benefit society.”12 Richard Vedder, a conservative economist, likes to point out that there are too many Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers with bachelor’s degrees in Washington, DC.13 In Los Angeles, we also have an awful lot of waiters who hold postsecondary degrees in theater arts and want to be actors. These anecdotes have less to do with the need for more college-educated citizens and more to do with the value and real-world application of various degrees. If I’m trained to be a pianist and end up driving for Uber, it does not negate the fact that the country needs more nurses. Learning to be a pianist also provides auxiliary skills and benefits. If I’m a trained historian who currently waits tables, it does not mean that we have enough individuals trained in STEM fields or that I will never land a job in music. All sorts of people make strategic choices so that they might pursue their dreams while they are young. Other individuals make decisions to work in fields that are less financially lucrative but fulfill important societal needs. Interestingly, several of Peter Thiel’s fellows raised significant venture capital for budget hotels in India and topical energy sprays, yet none of them produced the radical innovation that an avoidance of college would purportedly inspire, leading one entrepreneur to caustically remark, “Peter Thiel promised flying cars; we got caffeine spray instead.”14

Bill Gates and Peter Thiel notwithstanding, the Public Policy Institute of California, among many other groups, has pointed out that unemployment rates are much lower among college graduates, and wages are substantially higher.15 A college graduate earns roughly a million dollars more than a high school graduate over the course of a lifetime.16 Degree holders also are more likely to vote, volunteer, give to charity, engage in civic activities, and send their children to college.17 A college education makes good economic and civic sense.

We need more people participating in higher education not only because they will earn higher wages but also because the economy and our democracy need a better-educated workforce. In California, we need about one million more people participating in higher education if we are to have people fill the jobs that will be available in 2025. Indeed, we need them not just to participate but also to complete their degree, and in timely fashion.18 We also need more individuals participating in the democratic public sphere.

Deficits in higher education participation and college degree attainment are most stark among a state’s racial and ethnic minorities. African American and Latinx students remain the most at-risk for dropping out of high school, not transitioning to college, and not completing a postsecondary degree. This deficit has little to do with individuals and more to do with structural inadequacies that our country has yet to fix. The implications of this concern are significant: these populations will be left out of the high wage economy, which in turn will exacerbate inequities, reduce state revenues, and inhibit economic productivity.

Although we frequently focus on the economic benefits of higher education, we cannot dismiss the social benefits of a college degree. Mann saw public schools as the great equalizer that enabled the poor to move into the working and middle class, but he also thought education was a way to civilize the uneducated. Mann’s language would likely be attacked today for suggesting that too many students are not civilized, a term that has often been associated with racial and class-based values systems. Still, education should not just be about learning vocational skills. We want students to be participants, not passive bystanders, in this experiment called democracy. To be participants, we want students to learn how to engage with the critical issues of the day. I do not really care if students come to diametrically opposite conclusions to mine, as long as they come to their conclusions based on concrete evidence, and they are able to ask intelligent questions. I’ll discuss that in a later essay, but I raise the point here because I do not want us to reduce education to merely a vocational task. The danger to democracy is not that people disagree with one another but that they have no opinion or voice in their own futures. If our colleges and universities are not fostering a sense of engagement in the democratic public sphere, then we are failing at what we are supposed to be doing.

In a celebrated essay entitled “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin spoke eloquently about the purpose of education a half century ago:

The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.19

Let’s recognize, however, that these twin purposes are no easy tasks. As I discuss in chapter 3, simply completing college in a timely manner sometimes seems beyond students’ abilities. And what students learn (or do not learn) in college is under enormous scrutiny. Yet, it seems facetious to ignore the individual and societal benefits of a degree. Jobs increasingly call for advanced skills, or the know-how to learn new ones. A mature democracy—paraphrasing and updating Horace Mann—requires an educated electorate.

At the moment, however, we face a crisis on multiple levels. In 2020, we had a pandemic race through society and change higher education in unexpected and immediate ways. All of a sudden, everyone was teaching online. Unexpected costs ranged in the hundreds of millions of dollars for some universities and state systems. Colleges that already were struggling to meet their enrollment goals faced closure. At the same time, state tax revenues for the 2021 fiscal year were estimated to drop by more than 25 percent.20 A general panic set in where the only certainty was the uncertainty of the future. I tend to think we are in for a rough few years, but doomsayers need a sense of history. Yes, this pandemic is different from other crises we have faced, but I write this book with the understanding that higher education is always in a state of change—sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes planned, and at other times unplanned. What we really need is a collective understanding of where we want to go as an industry, and then we can develop the plans to get us there.

Washington, DC, provides little guidance on how to improve educational outcomes and recently has done little to suggest that postsecondary degrees are important. Academic leaders have become more caretakers than visionaries. Faculty understandably concentrate on their own economic concerns, and they provide little guidance on how to enable universities to flourish again. It’s easy to think an optimal strategy is to keep your head down and stay out of trouble. A crisis, however, is a terrible thing to waste. It’s precisely because we are in crisis that we have the opportunity to create changes that tie our visionary past to a creative future. My purpose here will be to outline the various issues that confront us and to suggest where I stand, but more importantly, to help readers think through where they stand on these often thorny and confusing issues. I am assuming if we can discuss and come to an agreement as to what we believe, then we can come together about how to put those beliefs into concrete actions and policies. Too often, however, we are not clear on what we believe.

The Worth of Universities to Society

One of the curiosities of US higher education is the value placed on research, even though so few faculty actually do research. Here’s how it works. Faculty are first socialized to do research as graduate students. As of the 2016 to 2017 academic year, the United States had 4,360 degree-granting institutions of higher education, yet only 311 offer doctoral degrees that lead to faculty positions.21 Only a handful of those universities actually send a significant portion of their graduates to tenure-line positions in academia; one research study found that only one-quarter of doctoral degree–granting universities produce more than 75 percent of all tenure-track faculty.22 The same holds true across disciplines. Everyone who has earned a doctorate degree has gone through the dram...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
• 2 Canaries in the Academic Coal Mine
• 3 The Kids Are Alright—No, They’re Not
• 4 Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings, and the Contours of Diversity
• 5 Students as Customers
• 6 Tear Down That Wall: From High School to College
• 7 Jobs, Jobs, Not Jobs
• 8 The Cost of Free Speech
• 9 Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• 10 Paying for College
• 11 Noses In, Fingers Out: Rethinking Shared Governance
• 12 Lessons Learned
• Notes
• Further Reading
• About the Author
• Index
• Back Cover