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Higher Education Commentary II

Written by Ron Willett

Wednesday, 18 July 2007

Higher Education II:  Reform and Black Swans In the prior segment on higher education (Higher Education I) we suggested why our institutions of higher education – which have collectively now slipped to 12th place in the world, with another half dozen countries nipping at our heels – have been able to escape the general criticism by society that prevails for U.S. K-12 education. The second piece in this series reviews briefly the various critiques commissioned to assess U.S. higher education over the last quarter century, tries to summarize the most recent recommendations, and speculates about some higher education “black swans” (the impact of the highly improbable but also possible, from the book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, now hitting the top of the best seller charts). Largely unheralded we have recently witnessed a negative black swan – the crash and pending closing of Ohio's Antioch College because of massive governance malfeasance. Also in the hopper, further escalation of tuition, producing shifts in the footers of higher education, and -- a positive black swan – the cooperation of some number of our institutions in rejecting the challenged and dubious U.S. News and World Report college rankings and proposing competent alternative if not fully collaborative and forthcoming information systems. The Paper Trail The decline-stimulated critiques of American higher education have a barely discernible date of origin in the late 1980s, but the writer’s personal experience suggests the seeds were planted in the 1970s or even earlier.  The reversal of rectitude was recognized by a few in the decade of the 1980s, but they were voices in the wilderness. Presidential commissions on higher education – the most likely vehicle for recommendations that might carry clout – go all the way back to President Truman.  They received little public attention, and even little attention from Congress for the next four decades.  The G. H. W. Bush Presidential Commission on Higher Education, circa 1989-90, found virtually no audience, but not because of bland findings.  For one of its concluding findings was that "...American colleges and universities are riddled with dry rot.”  None of its findings, from some of our best and brightest including a number of Nobel Prize winners, was ever published by NSF and the report was quietly buried, inferentially because both the academic bureaucracy and the Bush White House wanted that result. In a 1990 Cato Institute paper by Charles Sykes virtually all of the present higher education challenges and miscues were called out.  Sykes’ report, and his prior and subsequent books were promptly branded as screeds, without merit. Numerous papers and articles on the challenges to and within our university system appeared in the decade of the 1990s, but it was 1998 before another report to the President and Congress issued.  Its mission and findings were also prescient:  “Straight Talk About College Costs and Prices,” Report of the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education.  Its findings found the circular files of virtually all of our institutions, and deaf ears in Congress. Starting in 2001, the diagnostic reports started to multiply:  2001, “Quality, Affordability, and Access:  Americans Speak on Higher Education,” (Educational Testing service); 2002, “Greater Expectations:  A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College,” (National Panel Report, Association of American Colleges and Universities); 2003, “Betraying the College Dream:  How Disconnected K-12 and Postsecondary Education Systems Undermine Student Aspirations,” (Final Policy Report from Stanford University’s Bridge Project); 2005, “Cracks in the Education Pipeline:  A Business Leader’s Guide to Higher Education Reform,” (Committee for Economic Development); 2005, publication of Declining by Degrees:  Higher Education at Risk, edited by Hersh and Merrow, (also appeared as a NPR TV series); 2006, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education:  A Blueprint for American Research Universities,” (The Boyer Commission, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching). Lastly, in 2006-2007, the report issued from the commission appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Education – the Miller commission – “A Test of Leadership:  Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.”  This commission, which fought an uphill battle to keep many of its preliminary findings in the final report because of the objections and intransigence of members representing the higher education establishment, might have written its findings without the study – they mirrored collectively the prior two decades of critique. With all of the intellectual power of this cumulative record of critique, including the assessments of some of the best inside our universities, the expectation might be a collaborative and innovative effort on the part of our institutions to address the issues and American needs.  In the vernacular of the educational profession, they graded out to a “F” for action.  Part of the explanation may reside in concepts noted in the Higher Education I post.  Another part may be the stultifying effects of the bureaucratic disease that has permeated American higher education and the motivation and performance of its leadership.  Still another part has been the abject failure of our Federal government to provide a platform for collaborative attack of the issues by bringing academic leaders to a common table. A brief postscript to this segment, many of the trends in higher education could be seen in the writer’s experience as early as the 1970s.  Just one microcosmic slice of the academy, our schools of business had already started a trip into space by that period, trailing in teaching and learning, and indulging in witless and meaningless so-called research that veered away from real business issues. That in turn was prompted primarily by the self-serving quest for tenure and promotion, but also reflected an arrogance about the lack of need to be relevant to real business and economics.  Many of our schools of business still haven’t changed course. Miller Commission Recommendations Below are the top lines of the Miller Commission recommendations, taken purposefully from the pre-publication (and pre-scrubbed) version of September, 2006 because of subsequent abridgement.  The full report has great detail and merits readership by every parent and prospective postsecondary student, as do most of the prior citations.  Sadly, they frequently won’t be read; measures of literacy of our population suggest that 75 percent of those who should read the material, can’t for comprehension.  If that suggests a downward spiral of American education, perhaps it’s the last early warning signal our systems will get. Top Line Recommendations were: “Every student in the nation should have the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education.”  Note this does not advocate that every student is best served by a four-year college program, or even many two-year community college programs.  A deficiency, the report does not even begin to develop some of the other postsecondary options that might creatively serve the exploding student marketplace and our postsecondary needs. “To address the escalating cost of a college education and the fiscal realities affecting government’s ability to finance higher education in the long run, we recommend that the entire student financial aid system be restructured and new incentives be put in place to improve the measurement and management of costs and institutional productivity.”  Note this is actually, even as a top line, three recommendations.  The first, concerning financial aid is prophetic given the abuses recently revealed in student loan programs.  Controlling costs is a major program in its own right, as is the question of measuring and mediating factor productivity in achieving actual learning effects.  Both are intractable superficially, and would force our institutions to deal with issues of tenure and promotion as well as brushing aside straw men disengenuously represented as assaults on academic freedom, in order to get at discipline organizational, curricular and instructional changes needed. “To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance.  We urge the creation of a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education.”  Given the present marginal degree of institution accountability to even their respective boards, in turn overwhelmingly consisting of resources both politically determined and frequently massively ignorant of higher education in general and even the realities of operations of their own institutions, this is a formidable challenge.  It would take either a new level of states' oversight and discipline, or Congressional intervention to create some national standards of performance and accountability. A subset of the above recommendation is to date the solitary item producing some voluntary initiative, and that was likely prompted not by the highest ethical considerations but because many of the institutions are being gored competitively by the U.S. News and World Report’s successful popularization of a crude collegiate ranking scheme.  That recommendation subset stated:  “We recommend the creation of a consumer-friendly information database on higher education with useful, reliable information on institutions, coupled with a search engine to enable students, parents, policy-makers and others to weigh and rank comparative institutional performance.”  Pretty much unnoticed, three separate collegiate “trade” groups have pledged to create some form of database for their customers and stakeholders.  What is less than optimal:  Multiple databases, not “a” system that would establish a single playing field; a question whether that common search engine will ever materialize – a little creativity might suggest that a universal and national joint project with Google might be the mechanism that could produce the needed result; and a high degree of improbability that even the cooperating institutions want to reveal either performance or present a database that facilitates comparative rankings.  It is arguable this is precisely where the U.S. Department of Education should be leading, and is conspicuously absent. “With too few exceptions, higher education has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing needs of a knowledge economy.”  This cuts to the most hypocritical aspects of our higher education institutions, still garnering unmerited public trust, but failing to use even their own stock in trade, knowledge and the alleged capacity to innovate, to seek self-assessment and generate new learning models to improve their own performance. “The U.S. must ensure the capacity of its universities to achieve global leadership in key strategic areas such as science, engineering, medicine and other knowledge-intensive professions.”  A litany of issues here:  Present government policies are operating to de-energize basic research by prostituting such resources; our K-12 science education is bankrupt and worsening because of K-12 bureaucratic ignorance and our educational unions; and lastly, without addressing issues of teaching versus research in higher education there are no realistic solutions to the charge. In total, the Miller Commission made 41 recommendations grouped into the six hoppers noted above.  Thus far, our institutions have in a partial and disjointed fashion, addressed one issue.  The U.S. Department of Education, which commissioned the project, has addressed none of the issues.  Congress, which had Ohio’s deplorable John Boehner as the previous chair of an education committee, had addressed none of the issues until last week's Senate action to do an "overhaul" -- but hardly the depiction as "major."  The Senate's action, which seems to have a veto-proof majority, finally addresses the worst of the corrupted student loan issues, but is not the comprehensive rework of student aid proposed by the Miller commission.  It merely papers over with $18 billion the core inflationary problems and causes multiplying in our collegiate bureaucracies. Lastly, our general population, which stubbornly clings to the belief that they have a friend in the higher education business, may eventually but belatedly realize they don’t. Higher Education Black Swans Even while our institutions of higher education continue to bob and weave to dodge 25 years of generally pertinent critique of their policies and operations, to the detriment of our world standing, there are secular trends in motion that may create even more downstream disruption.  Their motion has been so glacial that they’ve been either misunderstood or underestimated for effect, but left to churn they can reach a “tipping point,” where the negative black swan resides. Two of these effects are linked to patterns now almost universally recognized, but seemingly at the stage where they have become major higher education degradations.  One is the alarming decline in the concept of and provision for a collegiate liberal education, as opposed to increasingly narrowed professional education, and retreat from a core of intellectual work for an undergraduate degree in favor of a Chinese menu.  The trend appears prompted by attempting to compete for students by targeting their “likes” and retreating from rigor rather than targeting our society’s educational needs.  Except for a welcome minority of our quality colleges that require such curricula, mostly our private colleges, the horse is out of the university barn and may never be returned.  Tragically, even our 9-12 educational systems have moved away from the commitment to “an education” in favor of ever more training-oriented programs.  That choice by the public system in this journal’s namesake not only reeks of the K-12 establishment’s ignorance, but appears to reflect a corrupted system decision prompted by private sector ignorance, intrusion and malfeasance. The second effect is the unrelenting pressure on tuition because the causes and cures for cost escalation have not been truly addressed.  To date the fixes aren’t fixes at all, but postponement of some ultimate denouement by proliferating financial aids to offset the cost spiral.  A real fix would require plunging into the proposals of the Miller as well as every other commission in the last decade and by making structural changes to our universities.  One of the functional “diseases” that infects our universities is termed “Baumol’s Disease.” The latter is named for economist William Baumol, now at New York University.  Its theory argues that “the labor-intensive nature of some services acts as a constraint on productivity growth in an economy (sector) that increasingly produces services.”  Our colleges and universities have dropped the faculty productivity ball for at least four or five decades, perhaps never had a real grip on it, or even a rational “play” to run. The most disruptive aspects of our universties’ lack of productivity growth – arguably zero, or even negative over the last 30 years – have been their refusal to invest in learning methods that might improve their educational productivity, and even greater misallocation of professorial resources.  The latter is reflected in the inverse relationship between the pay and prestige of faculty, and their likelihood of being accountable for contributing to learning design or teaching.  The better the faculty, the less it is employed to educate its primary marketplace. Another anomaly is the strident calls for more money for faculty salaries.  If that does not strike a discordant note given the above observations about productivity, the real faculty income track record should.  Far from being under-compensated, from 1975-2005 average faculty salaries have increased 400 to 500 percent; in real dollars (adjusted for inflation), those salaries are 33% higher in 2005 than 1975.  We don’t need higher faculty salaries; we do need specific and hard-edged accountability for greater learning productivity, with the sanction of lower faculty salaries the option. The third black swan has been noted previously but it is also so opaque to the general public that it isn’t recognized.  That is, the cumulating propensity for university leaders to be more bureaucrat than intellectual leader, resulting in university management that is risk averse and more protective of the status quo and internal politics than responsive to educational missions and needs.  This environment has also changed with a degree of gradualism that is, one, virtually unnoticed by the outsider, and two, may even be less than transparent to its principals who perceive the trade-off of “collaboration” for “management” as a positive.  But the trends are insidious, left to accumulate without disruption they create organizational culture change destructive to higher education. A fourth trend is frequently applauded by some in government but is as black in effect as any other negative:  That is, the galloping commercialization of academic research justified by the vision that it is the right or corporately preferred research funding, and driven by the belief that such research can translate in the short or medium run into area or regional economic development.  There is little empirical evidence that universities can or should be accountable for state economic development in that more direct form; there is conceptually a strong argument that the pattern – e.g., ignorantly being pushed by Mitch Daniels in Indiana – may actually erode academic freedom and diminish, for example, IU’s future basic research independence and capacity. The last black swan is perhaps the most potentially disruptive of the list.  It emerges from a trio of causes:  First, the effect that has “taken” for our public, the belief that every high school graduate must go to college whether that is needed or prudent; second, the escalation of traditional four-year costs pushing a mass of postsecondary students into cheaper (in both senses of the word) satellite college programs and community colleges; and the explosion of the latter programs, but without the checks and balances on the quality of instruction and curricula that prevail in the traditional academic environment.   An example, in Ohio -- where misguided policy has created a pastiche of second- and third-rate satellite campuses -- is the pseudo higher education at Wright State’s Lake Campus, where faculty quality is on the order of the mediocrity of most of Ohio’s K-12 systems, and such programs have become the "new high school," remedial work taught by unqualified instruction.  Exacerbating the latter pattern, community colleges with political clout and without competent academic leadership – the situation in Indiana’s exploding IvyTech system – are now successfully demanding their work be transferable for full credit to legitimate programs.  Indiana’s IvyTech, so-called community college system, more a business than educational institution, now has over 100K students, though it lacks competent academic administration or any effective oversight or quality assurance of instruction or curricula – the “new high school,” on steroids, but lacking even the marginal oversight provided by instructor unionization.   Left to run a course of decades, the effect of such devalued postsecondary education substituted for legitimate collegiate programs would be an even more devastating cancer of collegiate mediocrity, especially among our state universities.  This may indeed become the black swan that wicks into and completes the “dry rot” of American higher education.  The U.S. appears to be pedaling backwards educationally as fast as its now misshapen higher education legs can pump. Futures   It is hard to see a reversal of most of the trends cited above.  The increasing independence of our state universities, their increasing evolution as “corporate systems,” and the perverse blindness of our general population in judging higher education on the basis of sports performance, plus their inability to assess what is unfolding in “the academy,” are pushing U.S. higher education farther away from its needed reform trajectory.  It would seemingly take a major black swan of the positive variety to create optimism for their future.   Amazingly, Ohio recently scored a positive black swan, in the appointment of Dr. Gee, again, as president of The Ohio State University.  Dr. Gee’s belief that reform of collegiate athletics is one key to higher education reform, his performance at Vanderbilt, and his stated zero tolerance policy for student athletes may be the most favorable OSU event in a half century.  If he sticks to his principles, it will be interesting to see how long it takes before a civil war erupts with the mindless horde of Ohio OSU sports zealots possessing a vision of that university that fails to extend beyond a football stadium and a field house.  Management guru Peter Drucker may have been prescient when he predicted that our American system of higher education could self-destruct within the next three decades.  What seems crystal clear from evidence on the table, is that the U.S. will not improve its 12th place ranking in the world in this or in the next decade without a major shift in core strategies, spanning reduced academic self-righteousness, new cost and educational value-added transparency, and some new universal initiative to innovate improved learning systems.   In the name of some democratized but too simplistic vision of universal collegiate access, it may very well be choosing and solidifying mediocrity on the way to an even lower world higher education standing.  Postscript  For the reader wishing to probe on their own the depth of reform material that addresses our higher education challenges, the following two references are a major starting point:     http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html     http://www.highereducation.org/reports/reports.shtml Note:  Ron Willett is a former Indiana University business professor and administrator, and former corporate executive and CEO.  He holds BS and MBA degrees from Miami University, and a doctorate in business administration from Indiana University.  He is the creator and editor of TNBJ. (Articles are the property of their authors and may not be reprinted, copied or electronically copied for other than personal use without permission.  For permission to reprint, contact TNBJ by email to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .)

Last Updated ( Saturday, 24 April 2010 )