David Kaiser on the Future of Higher Ed
A couple of weeks ago, I linked to the first two entries in historian David Kaiser’s three-part series on the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. The third part is now available. In it, David steps back to consider higher education more broadly. We’re not done debating the role that race plays in college admissions, but there are other problems facing our higher education system that are just as worrisome. As David points out, economic inequality, sky-high tuition fees, student debt, and grade inflation all raise questions about the value and purpose of college right now.
We drill into our young people that a four-year degree is a prerequisite for success, stability, and happiness. But as David notes, universal college education is neither a realistic nor necessarily a desirable goal. The expansion of higher ed over the last half-century has resulted, in his estimation, in worse and more expensive education for students, while it’s enabled universities to inflate their own prestige and gobble up resources that contribute little to their ostensible core mission. The end of race-based affirmative action may go some way to establishing a meritocracy, wherein the brightest and hardest-working students gain admission to the best (or at least most selective) schools. But it won’t, in his analysis, justify the extraordinary costs—in time, money, and stress—that students and society at large are asked to bear. We want to tell students that they’ll be successful in school and in life according to their merits; perhaps it’s time we start telling universities the same thing.
The following is an excerpt from David’s excellent post, but I urge everyone to read it in its entirety.
This post is free and available to the public. To get early access to episodes of The Glenn Show, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, comments, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
The biggest reason for the higher cost of higher education is a small increase in faculty per student and a massive increase in the size of the administration, which now outnumbers the faculty on many campuses. Admissions offices, development offices, and public relations offices have grown enormously, and entirely new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies have grown up as well. Most of these new bureaucrats—such as all but one of Harvard’s approximately ten vice presidents, who average at least $350,000 a year in salary—contribute nothing directly to the education of students. In the 1940s and early 1950s James Bryant Conant of Harvard was one of many college presidents who used his office to shape the undergraduate curriculum, but top administrators no longer play that role. Indeed, relatively few institutions—such as the St. Johns colleges in Annapolis and Santa Fe and other schools with a great books curriculum—market themselves based upon a distinctive curriculum. By and large, our universities—including the new for-profit ones that do more and more of their teaching online—are marketing a credential, not an education, and the elite institutions are marketing an entrée into the upper reaches of our economy, the financial and tech firms that recruit most of their new hires from a select group. And the main job of college presidents today is not education, but fundraising—that is, trying to ensure that university endowments receive their share of the greatly increased wealth that today’s economy allows their graduates to create and retain.
Our universities, in my opinion, have become somewhat parasitic institutions that have used their prestige and their critical role in young peoples’ lives to siphon off far more of the nation’s resources than they deserve. Other industries playing a similar role are the health insurance industry, which makes US medical care about twice as expensive as care in other advanced nations, and our burgeoning legal gambling industry. Because administrators run universities themselves, most of them are very unlikely to undertake necessary reforms—least of all those of top institutions that are still deluged with applications. Perhaps however a few small liberal arts colleges—many of whom are threatened with extinction—or state universities with budget crises might try drastically reducing their administrative staff and even their faculty, which might allow them to offer a better product at a much reduced price. If this worked it would put a great deal of pressure on other institutions to follow suit. It will be interesting to follow the impact of laws in Florida and other states aimed at eliminating DEI bureaucracies in public institutions, which so far remain unclear. Universities and colleges would also benefit enormously from returning to more traditional humanities curriculums focusing on the great works of western civilization, but as I have often pointed out in other posts, they have strayed so far from them that it is hard to see how that might take place—or where they would find the faculty who could make that shift. As it is, most of them are dominated by social justice ideology, which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed based on their race, gender, and sexual orientation, and teaches that one's reality is a function of those categories. As we saw in the last post, Ketanji Brown Jackson in particular is one of many thousands who have picked up that ideology and are applying it in their work.
The great expansion of higher education during my adult lifetime has provided a worse and far more expensive education to a much larger proportion of our young people. I wonder whether that also means that we should revise our goal of giving everyone a college education—a goal which we have never come close to reaching anyway. Apprenticeship programs and purely vocational education could train many of our professions at least as well, including some that rely on brainpower, not muscle power. I firmly believe that unusual intellectual ability is distributed pretty randomly among our whole population, regardless of race or gender, and that our educational system should specifically try to identify those people and give them an opportunity fully to develop their talents. I don’t think that is happening today.
[…]
I suggest that Kaiser make a comparison between US, UK, and Canada waiting times for numerous medical services such as MRIs and CT scans. How do you quantify the cost of these delays in medical outcomes versus price? Otherwise, I found his analysis convincing. Count me suspicious of a big government advocate.
We examined income and education credentials and drew the wrong conclusions. Yes, people with college degrees made more money. That's because in most businesses there are only a few positions that require a college degree. In a business with 1,000 employees, there will typically be about 20 positions requiring a degree. Obvious exceptions exist, such as law firms, medical and engineering offices.
We need to create more companies that make a profit in order to justify more positions needing college degrees. That is the right conclusion.