Virtually my entire adult life has been spent in academia—as an undergraduate student, a graduate student, and a faculty member at both public and private universities. As I approach my retirement, I feel both qualified and at liberty to address some of the problems I have observed and offer recommendations to address them. I will focus on the educational mission of state universities because that is where and why most students attend college. However, I have found that most of these issues apply equally to private universities.
Rising Costs and Declining Affordability
My greatest disappointment with higher education over my career is the relentless rise in cost and the erosion of affordability. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Pharmacy) from a state university in 1978 with literally no debt. Full-time summer work and part-time employment during the academic year covered the roughly $1,500 needed for tuition, fees, books, and supplies. With the aid of $100 each month from my grandparents, I was also able to cover my modest living expenses.
Today, a similar program costs upward of $50,000 per year sans living expenses and students routinely graduate with more than $300,000 in student loan debt—the equivalent of a mortgage with no house. Given my family’s challenged economic circumstances, college would be out of the question if I were considering it today. I worry about how many capable young people are now being denied the life-changing opportunity that was available to me, and at what loss to society.
Administrative Bloat and Misaligned Incentives
Administrative bloat is often blamed for inflated costs. Presidents and deans are now surrounded by a dizzying array of supportive administrative personnel. Many of these roles cover a relatively narrow set of responsibilities once handled by far fewer administrators or by faculty themselves. In addition to their direct costs, these mostly non-teaching personnel tend to generate a seemingly endless succession of surveys, task forces, working groups, and advisory committee requests that drain faculty time and detract from the educational mission.
In fairness, not all administrative growth is the fault of universities. Accrediting organizations impose excessive and overly prescriptive requirements that consume resources without improving educational quality. When challenged, they often blame the U.S. Department of Education, an agency for which a legitimate role in higher education continues to elude me.
Faculty salaries contribute to the problem of misaligned incentives but not in the way you might imagine. While upper administrative personnel enjoy generous salaries and even bonuses, the salaries for most teaching faculty neither incentivize nor adequately reward teaching excellence. Excepting singular events like promotion or tenure, a typical teaching faculty’s annual salary adjustment only marginally exceeds inflation, and sometimes not even that. Even in exceptional performance years, merit-based raises rarely reflect the additional effort required. This disconnect between achievement and reward encourages faculty to supplement their incomes through outside activities like consulting or entrepreneurial ventures—many of them spun out of their academic roles but few of which benefit the university or students. This drain on faculty productivity is one of academia’s dirty little secrets that is tacitly acknowledged and accepted but rarely discussed.
The Student as Customer
The growth of “student-as-customer” culture in higher education has fueled both rising costs and grade inflation. Universities increasingly compete for the tuition dollars of a dwindling supply of applicants by expanding amenities that add little or nothing to educational quality. This trend is reinforced by university presidents who often define their legacy in terms of campus expansion, especially in bricks and mortar. New programs and buildings serve as permanent monuments to their ego, regardless of their relevance to the educational mission.
A particularly pernicious consequence of viewing students as customers is the misuse of student teaching evaluations. Ostensibly, these surveys are conducted to assess teaching proficiency. They do not. Students lack the capacity to judge instructional quality, instructor knowledge, or the appropriateness of course content. Instead, evaluations are largely popularity contests. Nevertheless, administrators continue to demand them, and supervisors continue to rely on them. When an instructor’s average score falls below some arbitrary cutoff, their annual performance evaluation suffers. Young faculty quicky learn the quickest and surest way to improve their course evaluations: make the course easier and give more As. Problem solved.
Tenure, Seniority, and Accountability
Full disclosure, I have been tenured most of my academic career. I have benefited from tenure, especially in recent years when my productivity has admittedly waned. Seniority has further shielded me from layoffs. Yet I believe both tenure and seniority deserve reconsideration. Tenure should not guarantee a job for life, and seniority should not be the primary criterion for determining the order of layoffs. Is it disingenuous of me to point this out only now, at the end of my academic career? Yes, it is. But if hypocrisy were helium we would all talk higher, right?
Declining Academic Preparedness
The academic preparedness of incoming students has been in decline for decades. It is important to recognize that the ability of universities to create a quality product is limited by the raw material they are provided. Simply put, we cannot make silk-purse graduates out of sows’-ear matriculants. As many high schools have devolved into warehouses for the storage of children 14-17 years of age, the readiness of typical freshmen for college-level work has eroded dramatically. One need only look at basic math competency or compare the letters written by 17-year-old Civil War soldiers with the compositions of many college freshmen today to appreciate how far we have fallen.
How to Fix Higher Education
Any serious solution must begin with reducing costs. That requires state universities to refocus on their core educational missions and legislatures to fund them adequately. Arizona’s Constitution states that instruction at state institutions “shall be as nearly free as possible.” It is not, in part because State funding has fallen from roughly 75% of university budgets in the 1970s to about 40% today, forcing institutions to rely much more heavily on tuition, federal grants, and research contracts to fill the gap.
Universities must forego costly amenities unrelated to education and restrain the impulse to grow for the sake of growth. All prospective university presidents should be asked this interview question: What legacy do you hope to leave? If the answer does not begin with improving educational outcomes and career opportunities for graduates, keep looking.
Administrative growth must be curbed, in part by holding accrediting entities accountable to their original mission: establishing and assessing broad educational standards—not prescriptively micromanaging how those standards must be met. Doing so only increases costs while eliminating the opportunity for educational innovation. The U.S. Department of Education’s role in higher education should be fundamentally reformed or eliminated entirely.
Tenure should be restored to its intended purpose: protecting faculty who teach or conduct research in politically or socially sensitive or controversial areas. It should also provide a degree of job security to allow faculty to pursue longer-term, higher-risk projects that can yield significant breakthroughs. To discourage abuse, universities should implement periodic post-tenure reviews and be willing to withdraw tenure when warranted. Seniority should be a factor, but not the primary one when layoffs are necessary, as will be increasingly necessary as universities face declining enrollment in the coming years.
Students are not customers, nor are they peers or colleagues of faculty. Classrooms are not democracies, and education is not entertainment. If students knew what they needed to know, they would not be students. Student evaluations should be limited to areas where they can legitimately assess such as interpersonal qualities of the instructor and interest in the material. Actual teaching proficiency should be evaluated by seasoned peers, with expertise in the subject being taught.
Students must arrive on campus better prepared, particularly in math, science, writing and critical reasoning. While it is tempting to blame indolent, screen-addicted students or overindulgent parents, the responsibility rests squarely with secondary education. Middle and high schools must ensure that students who plan to attend college are ready for its demands, and they should be held accountable for doing so. At the same time, parents must uphold their end of the partnership by supporting demanding educators.
Rethinking What “Higher Education” Means
Though my parents lacked college degrees, they revered those who had them and instilled in me the expectation that I would attend college. Until recently, I firmly believed that every young person should go to college. However, I have come to the realization that not everyone needs or will benefit from a college degree. What we call “higher education” is both an inaccurate term and an ill-suited path for many. Our country needs more than just people who know things, we need people who can do things—electricians, plumbers, welders, dental technicians, HVAC specialists, and many more.
As our skilled workforce ages, we need more young people entering trades that offer strong career opportunities without the time, expense or intellectual demands of a university degree. High schools and post-secondary programs should provide robust vocational pathways, and we should encourage students who pursue them without implying their choice is somehow lesser. I do not regret my own academic journey. It was the right choice for me. But the term higher education has become too narrow and subtly pejorative, insinuating that anything outside a college or university is lower. That attitude must change.