One of my passions is higher education. Despite being rather opinionated, I tend to find that I enjoy debate and argumentation even if I don’t agree with my interlocuters, with but one exception. As I discuss with people, I tend to find that it is not disagreement over specific policies that frustrate me, but a misunderstanding of the system itself. We can disagree once we understand how things work, and I’ll be happy as a clam—but it’s when arguments rest on faulty premises that I (for reasons I don’t fully understand) become suddenly grumpy.
As such, here is my five-point manifesto of “things-you-should-know-about-higher-ed-as-you-debate-it.”
1. What Students Want
When polled, university faculty know what students want: a rich, liberal-arts education; an introduction to the life of the mind; an initiation into the ways of the intellect; the grand tradition of college as a rite-of-passage; experience with the joys of college life, friends, relationships, and independence, and on and on the list goes.
But what’s nice is that if you ask university students what they want, they aren’t coy: it’s better job prospects.
This mismatch is a fundamental tension at the heart of many of our debates over college.
I love the life of the mind. I grew up during college—in large part because of the independence required. I am open to the liberal arts. And yet, I am concerned that faculty are too quick to ignore the implicit transaction of a college degree: you pay us and work hard, and we open the door to better careers. We have an obligation to give students what they want—at least insofar as we want them to keep coming to college. Perhaps this new generation of students—who are questioning college at higher rates than ever—aren’t lazy, but rational. Maybe they realize that college won’t give them the better life path that they’ve been hoping for.
I would hope that most faculty would have no problem with this: our goal is bigger than rather than distinct from mere job training. When I hear faculty complain about college being “more than mere VoTech,” I am always reminded of the kid who proudly boasts that he lives “the higher law” as he breaks some rather obvious norm or commandment. In fact, the higher law is higher: We should prepare our students to be excellent in the boardroom, the laboratory, the classroom, or the medical office, and that should include practical skills as well as harder-to-measure dispositions, character traits, and general knowledge. We can do both. In fact, we have obligations to do both.
I fear that when faculty say “not VoTech!” they don’t mean “aim higher!” but rather “I don’t enjoy teaching the practical stuff.” It’s not slight to suggest that faculty are concerned about their own interests before those of their students: that’s just the way the incentives shake out. My goal is for them to be aware of how they may do this, and teaching their passion (rather than that of their students) might be one of the easiest trips down the slippery slope.
I’m reminded of a university president who was asked what the hardest part of the job was. He furrowed his brow, looked at his shoes, and became introspective. His questioner asked if it was too hard a question. The president responded, “no, I just needed to weigh whether it was worth getting in trouble. It is. The hardest part of being a university president is the faculty.”
There are good, often great people at every university. The vast majority of people are not there for selfish reasons, but for students—to help them grow, to give them better life options, and to assist them in walking their path. But to the extent that students are questioning college, it seems prudent to ask whether faculty should question the extent to which we have fallen into the habit of teaching what is fun rather than teaching what is most important for the student’s future.
I am lucky enough to work as faculty at a university, and I can think of no job so plumb, no occupation so cush. And yet, for all my luck, I feel a profound obligation to give my students something meaningful in return: employable skills and meaningful knowledge. My university is not my patron, responsible for funding my esoteric art. Rather, I am providing something of value for another—a customer, who has paid dearly for something with the expectation of a meaningful return.
I have an obligation to deliver. And so do colleges generally.
2. The Purpose of College
Let me ask a question. Let’s see what you come up with. “The primary role of college is to _______.” How would you fill in the blank?
We’ll come back to this in a moment. First, a short digression.
In my former life, I was a K-12 public educator. We always wanted to do more for students. We would lobby for art and music, nurses and afterschool programs, more social services supports and better clubs. At one point, I was discussing with some teacher friends the new proposal to put doctors’ offices in every school. Everyone nodded their head that it was a great idea, with two exceptions—me, and a friend.
He spoke up: “let schools be schools.”
Similarly, in an education class I now teach, I asked students to list on the board their favorite educational reform. “Imagine the world is your oyster, that you have the magic Staples easy-button, and you can use it on education. What one policy change do you make?” My students eagerly rushed to the whiteboards to answer: “Social emotional training for all teachers!” “Higher salary!” “Sensory rooms in all schools!”
They had dozens of ideas. Then I asked them to erase any that included the word “more,” (or, by extension, would require more cost, resources, or time). When they’d erased those, from dozens we only had one or two left. (Including, “get rid of testing.”)
I work at what must be—in my opinion—the best college in America. We’re a large university, but we focus on a very careful, few things: teaching and mentoring students. No sports. No funding drives. Research, but only as it pertains to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
It’s fantastic. I highly recommend it to anyone.
But the secret of doing less is not one that many universities take to naturally. As Michael Porter says,
The essence of strategy is in choosing what not to do.
American contemporary colleges struggle from the same kind of focus on ‘more.’ In fact, I’d argue that even my own university needs to go further.
The magic of specialization is found in the factories of Henry Ford, the sewing pins of which Adam Smith taught, or the pencils that the great Milton Friedman used as an object lesson: we become massively more efficient with each person doing a small job well than with each person doing many jobs poorly. This grand insight has transformed such things as pencils, sewing pins, and cars to make them increasingly competitive in price and quality over time.
What I am suggesting is that colleges ought to more carefully choose their strategy. I am not suggesting that every college should ditch their sports program, but many should. I am not suggesting that they should all ditch their research endeavors—but they should ask if it’s really worth student tuition (and taxpayer) dollars in terms of returns on investment.
But now let’s go back to my question from earlier: what is the primary role of college?
I would hope that most people would put something like “teach students.” If I may be didactic, however (forgive me, I am after all a professor) I’d like to suggest a superior alternative: the primary role of college is to credential student learning.
Colleges don’t sell learning. No, what colleges uniquely offer is assessment and credentialing: the ability to certify that someone knows a thing or two. In fact, learning has become infinitely cheaper over the last several decades: you can now learn nearly anything on youtube or Wikipedia or Khan Academy. The price of college is not going up because it’s getting more expensive to learn—it’s never been cheaper. The price of college is going up because we haven’t figured out how to effectively credential students, and it is on that basis that the competitive revolution of higher ed needs to take place.
If you want to see college prices come down—and students choose college at higher rates—it will require an assessment reinvention. The fact is that students feel that the college degree has lost its value. It has lost value at the same time as—and in many ways, for the same reasons as—the grade inflation scandal has continued its climb. When everyone gets As, As no longer have meaning.
Now let me note: I am not advocating for professors to grade like they are the courageous last barricade defending the hallowed halls of rigor. You probably know a professor or two who are doing this: attempting to hold the line on rigor on their own—but it’s a little like a single soldier defending the castle gates, when the enemy is already inside. While the individual effort is noble, it is ultimately wasted.
What fixes this problem is not tut-tutting those who give easy grades or cheap diplomas—it’s to tie diplomas to quantifiable skills that go deeper than just GPA. It’s to turn college transcripts from standard and bland to individualized and unique. It’s to increase the resolution at which we communicate important insights on the transcript rather than communicating the same old—and the rather meaningless—set of things like GPA and courses completed.
3. The Sheepskin Effect
Now, if I’m not careful you’ll take me for one who believes that higher education is a waste—that there is no meaningful difference between those who get a degree and those who don’t. Not so. I strongly recommend that people get a degree, even if they question the value of it all, because the numbers are still dramatic: those with degrees have better life outcomes than those without.
But it’s important to view higher education in the right way: as a complicated sifting machine that takes four years to do its job.
This is called signaling theory: college isn’t about giving students human capital skills, it’s about stamping them with a “verified graduate” brand once they’ve jumped through all the necessary hoops. Economists have talked about this a lot, and I think they’re on to something: all schools to some extent (and some schools to nearly the full extent) have a business model that is about attracting the best and brightest and then patting themselves on the back for it all. You and I both agree that Harvard student probably have a leg up in life; what might surprise you, however, is that many Harvard-accepted prospects don’t choose Harvard but go on to succeed at similar rates.
It was never about Harvard. It was about the kid.
Universities need to stop the zero-sum game of sifting, and shift toward value-added. What can we give students that could transform their lives?
Right now—and this is relevant to point 2, above—the thing we give them that is most meaningful of all is “a degree.” When students work through college but then drop out, you might think that after a year of college they get 25% of the economic returns; after two years of college, 50%, and after 75% of college, they get a 75% return. Unfortunately, this is not the case: in reality, college students gain only the slightest returns to college until they gain their degree—on the order of 3-7% of the economic gains for attending every class session, passing every course, completing every assignment, and still waiting for the diploma in the mail. And then, when the diploma arrives, the other 90+% of financial benefit comes with it. This is known as the Sheepskin effect.
I’m not saying that the sheepskin isn’t useful: it clearly makes a difference. I’m saying, rather, that we have built a very expensive, complicated sorting machine that takes four years to do its work. Separating out the machine from the teaching machine would make good sense (as I describe in #2) and finding ways to deliver more practical, employable skills to students would be good too (that’s in #1) but finding a way to sort faster is another critical task for colleges.
As a thought experiment—and with the advent of the ninety-credit degree—imagine the world of the one-year degree, or the one-month, or two week degree: no teaching, no learning, no studying, just a careful constructed set of assessments that measure what a graduate can or can’t do. Then, if the graduate isn’t capable in ways that are needful for employment, they can pay the teaching-part of the university so as to improve their chances on the credentialing-part.
College matters. You can learn a lot about someone when you make them jump through four years’ worth of hoops. The question is whether you can learn about them any faster.
4. The dual crises in American higher education
When we speak of the crisis of college in America, most people assume that it is rising costs—or, perhaps, that those rising costs are limiting access to college. While those concerns are genuine (and to be heeded!) I find that there is a far more important crisis: the completion crisis. When a student starts college, but drops out before getting to graduation, they only gain the tiny percentage of the financial benefit that I mentioned in #3 above.
But now, they are laden with debt. What’s more, they have spent time—often years—with little to show for it, and likely carry the dismay of someone who has failed.
There’s a simple federal fix to this: imagine how things would change if student tuition dollars were held in escrow until completion. Colleges can teach, but they only get paid when students reach success. Talk about skin in the game.
Of course, there’d be a good deal of watering down of requirements for graduation (which is why we’d need meaningful assessments instead) and colleges would probably become a little more choosy about who they accept (but only on the basis of who will succeed in college and who won’t, not on the basis of elitist student sifting), and I suspect that higher education as an industry would quickly shrink to an efficient, nimble size.
Let me be somewhat more blunt: if colleges only got paid when students got to graduation, a lot of colleges would close. And I think that would be good and moral and right. That colleges get paid when students don’t benefit strikes me as deeply immoral. In other words, we are right to be concerned about the college access crisis—but we ought to be equally concerned about the college completion crisis.
I favor entry requirements for college—not because I want schools to become elite institutions that sift the best and brightest in a zero-sum signaling game, but because I want universities to carefully assess who has the best shot at getting through, and only let those with a high probability of success to begin the endeavor. And if they can find ways to support more students, then nothing would make me happier. But if they can’t, may they have the good sense and tough-love to tell students that three years of college isn’t that different from three days in economic returns, and that a spotty academic history in high school does not portend good things in university.
My preferred entry requirements, however, are not very heavy. And why not, given what I believe about student completion? Because any broad requirement will necessarily mislabel some students as likely-to-fail who will succeed, and likely-to-succeed who will end up failing. There is no set of requirements that is sufficiently high resolution that I would trust it to keep a student from the opportunities of college; but I would insist on being frank and up-front with students about what finishing college will look like in terms of time, dedication, resources, habits, and dispositions.
5. The College Cartel
In 2018, business guru Clayton Christensen predicted that half of American universities would close over the next few decades. We have yet to see whether he will be right, but I think the facts are on his side. Bankruptcies are up, and mergers too.
To the extent, however, that Christensen’s prediction hasn’t materialized so far, I suspect that is not because he misunderstood anything about the market dynamics of higher education, but rather because he underestimated the political heft of the higher ed lobby. Not only do colleges and universities have enormous power at the local, state, and federal level in terms of raw prestige, but they are also massive employers who often function as the heart of local economies. What’s more, they sit on state boards, produce the research on which decisions are made, and effectively function as organs of the state itself in many regards.
I don’t think this is a good thing, but neither is it nefarious in intent; much of it is simply an artifact of history. And one of the most problematic aspects of the higher-ed industry is in its design.
Imagine for a moment that you go to your local grocer’s to pick up food. They greet you warmly and let you in, but then explain “I’m afraid we’ve shifted our payment model. You are still welcome to shop here, but you can only take a cart of food out if you buy a four-year subscription.”
Your eyebrow firmly cocked, you try to understand the implications.
“You’re saying that I can be here, I can put food in my basket, I can wander around, but if I want to buy anything I have to sign up for four years worth of shopping?”
“Yes, precisely,” they answer.
You leave, flustered at the idea. A four-year-subscription? How on earth would they price such a thing? Do they not see how inefficient it would be? That would increase costs, create enormous waste, and most of all, it would lock me into shopping at only one place over the four-year period!
You pull up to a competitor only to see a sign out front: “get your subscription now—the best four years of grocery shopping of your life!” You go to another and another until you realize that all the grocers have shifted to the new subscription model.
I am not an expert in the laws of anti-competitive acts, but I would hope that such a move would be immediately shot down on an economic basis: it would be disastrously inefficient, and would effectively guarantee increasing prices for the same goods. Grocers would have no incentive to keep prices low, to get you what you want, or to maintain quality; rather, they’d be hyper-incentivized to get you to sign at the dotted line. And so, you would have signing parties and door prizes and celebrations all for signing four years away to whoever had the fanciest admissions office.
I hope my analogy is obvious: a four-year subscription plan for groceries would be absurd, and legally shady; and yet, that is the default model of education that is enforced with cartel-like uniformity across the sector. I don’t mean by this the cultural and violent cartel, but the economic one: a group of organizations that band together to set prices and design systems to ensure that they reap maximum benefit from students.
Future U
The university of the future, if you accept these five points, comes into focus all on its own. A university that focuses without apology on much more than job prospects, but doesn’t apologize for teaching practical skills. A system that gets better and better at credentialing students quickly and efficiently rather than taking four years to do the job. A university that gives portable credentials rather than making them finish the full degree before getting any benefit. A university system that only wins when students do, too. A college system that works for students a la carte, instead of subscription model.
And while I am not wise enough to know the exact details of how Future U will end up looking, I think there are people who are beginning to feel out the fuzzy edges and bring them into focus.
Here’s just one, to begin to fire your imagination. I’m sure he gets some things wrong, of course, but when people ask me about the future of the university, his idea is among those that get me most excited.
Citations:
https://fortune.com/2023/11/03/gen-z-resume-work-skills-based-hiring-recruitment-research/
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/hbs-professor-half-of-us-colleges-will-be-bankrupt-in-10-to-15-years.html