The Failure of Higher Education

I spent almost two decades teaching at a lower-tier, regional state university and left when it became clear the school had given up any pretense of treating students as "university" students. The emphasis was on drawing numbers into classes, into the school, and any education that might happen was a secondary byproduct, and not actually always welcome. My school wasn't the only one with this "who cares why we were created, we've got our own interests to worry about" approach. In fact, my experience since is that this is the attitude of most higher ed institutions. They just differ on the "interests."

My school's interests were in keeping numbers high enough to avoid losing appropriation funding. Since few cared about the actual substance of our diplomas, both students and officials could write quality education off in favor of processing students into dollars. Many lesser-tier schools, two- and four-year, operate on the same principles. Bigger, better schools have "research" and/or "prestige" and/or whatever else (proselytizing, for example) as their interests, and educating people to be productive participants in our democracy and economy are, again, just as much secondary byproducts as they were/are for my old school. They kid themselves that their research is more valuable than student learning and that researchers automatically translate their work well into good teaching, just like we used to tell ourselves that our school at least was better than not getting any college at all.

You might expect that, over time, institutions created primarily to educate but which make education a secondary byproduct might experience some disjunction with the society they are supposed to be serving. And guess what? The latest report of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education points out how college is less and less affordable, to the point that the US is now 7th in younger adults in higher ed in the world, raising a generation that will be less educated than its parents. Many who want college are priced out, others amass gigantic loans equivalent to a luxury SUV or a small home. The colleges themselves are favoring middle income students with aid and support rather than lower income ones.

Lower state and federal student aid and higher ed appropriations account for the problems. Why have they dropped? One reason tuition is one area you can hike without it being a dreaded "tax increase" (and legislators not only don't do the actual raising, they can bitch about it , too, a great double at election time). But a major reason (and one this report doesn't apparently discuss) is simply that legislatures, voters, students themselves don't value higher ed enough to make the hard decisions to keep funding at old levels. Why not? Did you not read the first couple of paragraphs?

A good friend of mine, a potentate in higher ed now, told me once the problem in higher ed funding was that the public just didn't understand what higher education did. My response was, with all the people who've had at least a year of it now, the public knows exactly what higher ed did. Why pay as much or more for a set of institutions that is conspicuously self-serving and unconcerned about its true social mission? If the public benefit of higher ed is truly "misunderstood," why not dump more and more off on people to pay for on their own?

Yes, there's bitterness here, about the games and corruption, the hypocrisy and self-important flatulence, but prove me wrong, why don't they? I'm still a strong believer in what higher ed was supposed to do and be (and does manage sometimes, some places). But it's not just a matter of us "waking up" and realizing how badly we pay for it. Higher ed has a lot of "waking up" to do, too, and, until it does, things will not improve for any of us.