Higher Education is facing two unpleasant truths: A university education has become a commodity. And students are no longer buying what universities are selling. Megan McArdle writes:
A pandemic is an essentializing force; it strips away the frosting of rhetoric and habit and forces us to confront bare realities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in higher education, which over the past few decades has been one of two sectors that have just kept increasing their prices, the share of national income and, of course, the share of our attention they claim.
To a large extent, students have become customers. And professors should acknowledge their own role in getting us to that point, because the commodification of higher education is a direct byproduct of the transformation of college into the entrance examination for America’s middle class, something the professoriate has cheered on.
Markets are terrific, and we need them, but we also need institutions that are buffered from them. When those buffers break down, as they have in America’s colleges, dysfunction ensues. University business-think has meant bureaucratic overgrowth and an obsession with useless “metrics” — assessing faculty using student evaluations rather than student learning, goosing “selectivity” by soliciting applications in order to reject them.
And now COVID has broken the model. "Suddenly, the lectures and the homework were the only part schools could still deliver. Yet somehow, few students seem reassured that they’re getting most of what they were paying tuition for."
None of the other stuff students paid for was available -- "residential amenities, sports teams, networking opportunities, career coaching, dating service and so forth." The end result will be that tuition fees will have to go down -- and there will be far fewer professors walking the halls of academe.
In so many ways, the world has changed. Higher Education won't be the same.
Image: The Irish Times
4 comments:
I totally disagree with McArdle's assertion that "the professoriate" had cheered on the "commodification of higher education." That may be true of college administrators who make huge salaries for running higher education as a business, but the underpaid professoriate is as committed as ever to delivering the best education they can.
"[R]esidential amenities, sports teams, networking opportunities, career coaching, dating service and so forth" are frills and not the reason most people pursue higher education. A college degree carries the same worth whether the college provides those frills or not.
Delivering higher education while keeping people safe in a pandemic costs money. Reworking in-class instruction to create good online learning requires training and computer infrastructure. In-class physical distancing may require renting additional space or teaching additional classes. There is no reason students should expect a drop in fees due to the pandemic.
It's beyond laughable for a Republican like McArdle to bemoan dysfunction in US colleges after years of supporting the government funding cuts that took away the buffers and forced colleges to respond to the markets. If students are no longer buying what colleges are selling, it's because the colleges have raised prices beyond what the market will bear. In the end, this becomes an excellent argument for funding higher education like we do K-12 education.
Cap
I haven't been on a campus in more than a decade but I have heard absolute horror stories about what is going on. A family I've known for 30 years put two daughters and one son through university. He was head of medical staff at a medium-size Vancouver hospital.
In our time tuitions were modest. The state did the heavy lifting. That meant that my summer job earnings (factory work $$$$) plus student loans and grants pretty much covered the costs. At law school I worked year round at CBC (the faculty looked the other way).
Today that's all changed. My friends got their children through undergrad but it was costly. Their son decided he wanted a law degree. The tuition was astronomical. I never would have been able to afford it. Over the intervening decades, the legal profession has become overrun with graduates at the same time that demand for legal services has declined. Big law firms have broken up, some through consolidation, others simply dissolved. Now their son has a law degree but can't find a firm to give him articles. That's one expensive piece of paper.
Even in the 70s we bemoaned how law schools were becoming trade schools. The focus became unduly weighted in favour of commercial law - tax law, company law, etc. - while the more philosophic aspects - jurisprudence, the law of equity, etc. - the backbone of the Common Law system going back centuries fell into decline and, in some cases, disappeared from the curriculum.
I agree that this is a time to fund higher education as we have funded K-12 education, Cap. But K-12 education has been underfunded for decades. All of this leads to a downward spiral -- and the spread of ignorance.
For decades now, Mound, higher education has focused on producing technocrats. The goal of higher education used to be to see the whole of existence. That goal has been abandoned. The focus has been on concentrating on the pieces of existence. The result is that graduates can no longer put the pieces together.
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