What does the midterm election foretell for higher education? It foretells the closing off of a dream of escape from the financial realities of contemporary higher education. The higher-ed establishment has been feasting on that dream since February 2009, when President Obama announced his plan to make the United States the nation with the highest percentage of college graduates in the world—by 2020! To accomplish that, we would have to more than double the number of college students in the United States, and steeply ramp up the graduation rate. And the very attempt would require billions of dollars in new “investment” in higher education.
Meanwhile, the American public has been expressing more and more disenchantment with the higher-education status quo. My fellow Innovations blogger, Richard Vedder, never fails to irritate CHE readers when he points to the plain realities of the situation. Millions of students who finish college with undergraduate degrees in hand find themselves underemployed, unemployed, or even unemployable. Millions more don’t finish at all but still have to trudge through years and years of payments on student loans. Increasingly, Americans are exploring other options: community college, online courses pursued concurrently with full-time employment, enlistment in the armed forces, etc.
The new Republican majority in the House will almost certainly have no interest in continuing the foolishness of trying to prop up a foundering system by stuffing it with students who lack the talent, the ambition, and the interest to succeed—and who are getting wise to the reality that student loans are often a poor bargain.
Apart from the relative handful of colleges and universities that have endowments big enough to insulate them, most of our institutions of higher education meet a crucial portion of their budget via dollars that students have borrowed. If students pull back from that borrowing, the bubble bursts. The only reply that the higher-education establishment has to this prospect is that it hasn’t happened. Yet. Students are still borrowing, and still enrolling, in sufficient numbers that colleges and universities were even able to get away with substantial tuition increases this year.
Those who find comfort in that fact are welcome to it. A bubble can look like the Rock of Ages until the day it vanishes into iridescent drops of nothingness.
The governor-elect of California, Jerry Brown, is promising a restoration of that state’s glory days in higher education. He has announced a “major overhaul of many components of the postsecondary system.” He has promised a new master plan, focusing on defunding prisons, increasing support for community colleges, and keeping regulation to a minimum. Brown, who was endorsed by both the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, also seems to be moving in a direction I predicted (facetiously at the time) a year ago: offer free college education to all “whether documented or not” to attend California state universities but use online courses to deliver on the promise.
I hope and expect that Governor-elect Brown will deliver on that promise. In doing so, he may well set the pattern for the nation: a pattern whereby states can successfully maneuver out of the increasingly unsupportable burden of funding their public university systems while maintaining the pretense that they favor college for everyone.
The truth is that high-quality online courses are far more difficult for students than traditional classrooms. Students who enroll in these courses have to be tremendously self-motivated; those who aren’t quickly fall behind and the dropout rate for online courses among undergraduate students is far higher than that for courses taught in traditional classrooms. I am all in favor of making online education a standard feature of American college instruction. It has numerous advantages of scale, timing, and flexibility for students who are disciplined enough to pursue it. But that’s a relatively small cohort. The obvious alternative is to offer online college courses that are “college” in name only.
Either way, California gets bragging rights and students get an empty promise.
That’s what it looks like when a bubble bursts. California is just a little ahead in showing the nation what is going to come of President Obama’s promise of making the U.S. first in the world in percentage of college graduates. We can reach that goal, provided we are willing to define “college” down to the level of a video game. But if we are lingering over the idea of a fairly serious, intellectually-demanding exercise that takes several years of concentrated study…well, no.
9 Responses to Forecast: Iridescent Drops of Nothingness
josephofoley - November 4, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“A bubble can look like the Rock of Ages until the day it vanishes into iridescent drops of nothingness.” Thank you for this fine sentiment. It seems that you and Richard Vedder are among the first to notice the writing on the wall.
captainshowbiz - November 5, 2010 at 6:01 am
Think it can’t happen here in academia? Years ago I remember reading about a man in Ohio or Pennsylvania who worked at a steel mill that had closed. He couldn’t believe it. Every day he walked down the street and stared through the locked gate and wondered where his job went. The mill had shut down before, of course, because of strikes or slack orders, but it had never CLOSED. It had seemed like a Rock of Ages. Same with what had been a two-mile-long steel mill in Gary, Indiana, that I saw in 1991: it had been truncated, fully half of it torn down. All those jobs gone. Then there is Detroit, where I went to high school almost literally in sight of General Motors’ headquarters. It’s another former Rock of Ages. Not only are there abandoned auto plants but there are fairly new factories forty miles out in the exurbs that are abandoned: former auto company suppliers, no doubt, that are shut down. Nothing is safe: the laws of supply and demand are almost as rigid as the law of gravity. Regarding academica, I’ve been concerned for awhile about a possible burst in the higher education bubble and Mr. Wood
brought home something I hadn’t considered: we’re all living on borrowed money.
anonscribe - November 6, 2010 at 12:29 am
I mean, if you’re just pointing out “the plain realities of the situation,” then widely available facts ought to abound to support your position. You ought to have found them in your reasoned and exhaustive pursuit of justified positions. That is the sort of inquiry demanded by the NAS, right? Allegedly, you “regard the Western intellectual heritage as the indispensable foundation of American higher education.” So either you’re a lazy hypocrite, or you’re exaggerating.
Peter Wood is the President of the National Association of Scholars? Sounds authoritative until you check the website. They were “founded in 1987, soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus.”
Oh, I see. A bunch of elitist xenophobes scared by all them illegals. I actually care about the humanities and about free inquiry. Please don’t try hijacking those things in pursuit of a hollow, paranoid agenda.
Wood and Vedder are, unfortunately, popular scam artists trying to capitalize on some people’s fear and lack of understanding. Please don’t listen to their trash.
Let me help with your misrepresented “millions” of unemployed college graduates: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
There are, indeed, “millions” of college graduates unemployed. Of course, Wood made this sound like an atrocity. But, exactly 2.1 million out of 46.1 million of college grads are out of work right now, which is an unemployment rate of 4.7%, almost half that of those with “some college” and over half that of those with no college.
The charge of “underemployment”? Well, those with bachelor’s earn an average of 1K/ week, compared to 700/week for those with associate’s and 626/week for those with a high school diploma. The average debt of a college graduate is 21K, which translates to roughly 200/month in loan payments on the standard plan. That’s an income gain, after loans, of 1K/month on average. Not bad for four years. Even if you factor in income losses during those four years (which is tricky because of the high unemployment rate for high school grads under 23), you’d manage to pay off your school debt and make up for income losses within fifteen years. Between 37 and retirement would all be gains. Plus, this is all for those who receive no advanced degrees.
I do agree with one thing you said though: Online education with no standards doesn’t help our students. Of course, I’ll kindly disassociate myself from your xenophobic invocation of “free college education to all “whether documented or not.”
If the NAS is the future of humanistic study, count me out.
anonscribe - November 6, 2010 at 12:56 am
Wow. I just clicked through the links provided. What misleading tripe. Here’s the language of Brown’s higher ed proposal:
“The introduction of online learning and the use of new technologies should be explored to the fullest, as well as “extended University” programs. Technology can increase educational productivity, expand access to higher learning, and reduce costs.”
Online learning should be explored to the fullest? Spoooooky.
Brown’s full comment about undocumented students: “And Brown, noting his differences with Whitman on immigration issues, called for every student who’s qualified, “whether they’re documented or not,” to be able to attend California state universities, saying that would be “one of the first bills I sign” as governor once he deals with the state budget.”
So, he doesn’t want to exclude well-qualified students from public education because of documentation status? I mean, rational people can disagree about this, but the way Wood quotes it, he makes it sound like Brown wants to let every undocumented immigrant in CA into public higher ed. So misleading.
I mean if Brown had actually said he wanted to “offer free college education to all “whether documented or not” to attend California state universities but use online courses to deliver on the promise.” – that’d be scary. Except that he didn’t say anything remotely like that.
Peter Wood: You should be ashamed of yourself. Is this what passes as fair and civil argumentation for someone committed to the “Western intellectual heritage”? Unbelievable. The Chronicle should pull Peter Wood from its staff and give itself a spanking.
aleprete2 - November 6, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Ouch! Peter just got taken to school–or should I say college.
That was a serious case of whoop-ass anonscribe unleashed on you Pete. Maybe next time you could make a little more effort at incorporating a few facts to suport your position before you go spouting off–oh, I forgot you write a blog–never mind.
prof_truthteller - November 8, 2010 at 11:23 am
@captainshowbiz got to the heart of it, and not only is higher ed the next bubble to burst and turn us all into contingent wage slave labor, but it is because of our loss of blue collar industry both in jobs as well as that sector’s representation in our national economy, that we have high unemployment and high failure rate in schools from K-12-college. Young people who were not “college material” could lead decent lives, get married and have children, be active in the community as citizens and taxpayers, and live out their modest lives as they chose of their own free will BECAUSE they could get a decent job. When the factory closes, they all want to go to college becuase there is nowhere else to go. We live in “knowledge economy” but ha ha guess what that knowledge can also be OUTSOURCED as in the popular sitcom.
lotsoquestions - November 10, 2010 at 7:56 am
I found myself asking the same types of questions as Professor Truthteller is asking here as I watched TV the other evening and saw commercial after commercial for profit-making “colleges” and “universities”. Many of these commercials extolled the professional opportunities that successful students would have after they completed their programs. They could work as Medical Officer Managers, assistants to Physical Therapists and medical receptionists at veterinarians offices. What I was struck by was the fact that when I was growing up I knew quite a few individuals who had jobs like these — none of whom ever went to a “college” to get a certificate to enable them to do these jobs. I think maybe they took a few courses in the business track in high school. They got more or less the same job at the same wage without paying for additional education or taking out loans. That’s what confuses me about these for-profit institutions. Aren’t they basically just raising the credential required for the same job at the same wage that people used to be able to get without the credential? how is that helping anyone — except the administrators at the for profits?
herman_c - April 26, 2011 at 6:39 am
Of course this has little impact on the Hauser case. The main allegations of data fabrication come from the Cognition article and evidence that he bullied his students into accepting falsely coded results. The data was missing for this Science paper and Hauser was lucky enough to guess right and was able to “replicate” the results. This does not change the other allegations, which are bad.
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