The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colloquy

While college costs seem to get the most attention these days, demographic trends pose an even more fundamental threat to college access in the coming decade. The number of students graduating from the nation's high schools is projected to peak at almost 3.2 million in 2009, a 10.4-percent increase over 2002, and demand for slots at public institutions is growing accordingly. As a result, even B-average students are having trouble getting into public four-year colleges in some states. Have states adequately prepared for this boom? How can public colleges accommodate the new students, especially when state financial support for higher education is shrinking? Read more ...

In a recent piece for CTHEORY, "The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class," I argue that lack of access is a manufactured crisis, a result of decisions made by neo-liberal elites that mass U.S. intellectual labor is too expensive to cultivate and hire, in a global marketplace. Here's a snippet of the piece:

Inexpensive global communication networks, combined with a younger, talented and low-cost global workforce will reduce the demand for native U.S. intellectual labor. . . The sheer plethora of young and talented workers (the Philippines alone produces 380,000 college graduates each year) in East Asia, willing to work for a fifth to a tenth of U.S. wages, may well render U.S. intellectual labor not economically viable, on the global stage, over this emergent present and well into the future. By the end of 2003, more than half of the Fortune 500 have shipped a significant fraction of their intellectual labor jobs offshore.

Concurrently, another trend may well be defining the future of U.S. intellectual labor. As U.S. states suffer from revenue shortfalls, and burgeoning college and university enrollments, large tuition increases are often bundled with escalations in class size, reduced course availability, and shrinking financial and infrastructural resources. Combined with the concurrent neo-liberal political redefinition of higher education as a private rather than a public good, "sticker shock" one-year increases may well signify that elites are no longer willing to subsidize American public higher education, once they have gained global access, via digital communication networks, to cheap and competent intellectual labor. This essay explores the links between these two defining moments of early twenty-first Century America, with an eye on the possibility that affordable public higher education, and its attendant importance as a vehicle of social mobility, may soon be thought of as an artifact of the Twentieth Century. If so, we are witnessing the digital death rattle of the American middle class, and an escalating and intensive restratification of the American class system.

That's my take on these issues. The article is at http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=402

Have states prepared? That depends on who the "states" are--the legislatures or the university administrations? Legislatures respond to the demands of the moment and seldom sustain funding during periods of austerity even though the demographic projections for imminent needs are clear. Public institutions are particularly pinched because the states' budgets are committed to medicare (and often K-12) by formula and lean economic times lead to greater pressures on the penal system. Higher education is one of the few discretionary items in the budget and it gets cut.

At the same time, legislators expect there to be seats available for the sons and daughters of their constituents. Universities respond by expanding the number of large sections of basic education courses and the adjunct faculty to teach them.

The universities' alternatives (having already sustained cuts from the legislatures) are to further cut costs (difficult in budgets that are principally devoted to personnel), raise funds (this seldom addresses specific enrollment and general education needs), increase grant funding (ditto), and raise tuition (though many do not have the authority to set their own tuition) and fees (the frequent alternative--that's why the word 'tuition' is increasingly meaningless).

Legislatures could help by reducing regulation and allowing for reasonable tuition increases. They are more likely to do the latter because higher education is increasingly being seen as a private rather than a public good (though it remains both).

We now have a budgetary chasm between the top private universities and the top publics, with salary differentials for full professors of 25-40%. The general public, however, looks at faculty salaries and believes that 'those guys are doing pretty well'. Senior faculty who are international authorities in their fields and researchers who are combating ravaging diseases are making 6-figure salaries. Zounds. Of course, the garden variety partners in large law firms make four times that and are often lampreys on the economy rather than forgers of it.

None of this is rocket science, guys.

Dion Dennis is correct in noting that the looming shortage of seats in public higher education is a manufactured crisis. But the global economic analysis that follows loses sight of the political provenance and purpose of manufacturing such a crisis. This is not a neoliberal plot, but the calculated strategy of post-Reagan conservatism, under the watchful eye of which one rolls back oublic entitlements by defunding them, then holds the line by threatening the middle class with higher taxes as the price of restoring those entitlements.

Looked at in historical perspective, such defunding, taken in conjunction with attacks on affirmative action, threatens to undo a time-honored effort to extend the benefits of a high-qualiy college education to virtually all who seek it. Nothing less than the Morrill Act and the Fourteenth Amendment are under attack.

What I suggest in the article is that these changes are not a "plot" but something more aligned with Weber's idea of an "elective affinity." Neo-liberal strategies to shrink the middle-class, and extend upper class privilege have an unmistakable affinity with current transnational corporate practices that actively outsource what was once U.S. intellectual labor.

The emergence of public colleges and universities from teachers colleges after WWII was meant to accomplish several goals, in the service of the state: 1. Keep returning G.I.'s out of the labor force until the post-WWII economy picked up enough steam to prevent a return to Depression-era conditions; 2. Many of these transformed colleges, and their graduates, were seen as intellectual and national security assets (for the Defense industry) during the earlier decades of the Cold War, particularly in the period between Sputnik and the moon landing; 3. This was a period where advances in technology, the defense of empire, the positive role of the state and education were seen as more or less seamless.

Technological, demographic, political and economic restructuring during the 1970s shattered these affinities. Neoliberalism was the political response, while national economies deterritorialized, via technologies that were initially developed for national defense (satellites, computers, the growth of the Internet etc.) became the means for outsourcing, first blue-collar, and now, white-collar U.S. labor.

With a transnational corporate ethos dominating many governments on the state and national level, public education, which was once seen as a "public good," is not recast as almost entirely as a "private good." (These days, this is the way most students, even in public colleges and universities, view their own educational careers. So it goes with hegemonic discourses, such as that of Becker's idea of "human capital," that it has become a taken-for-granted, quasi-common sense notion). And, if an education is seen as a "private good," well, then, why should the public pay for it? And why should corporations subsidize these institutions for the purposes of training and hiring mass intellectual labor, when well-trained East Asians will do this work at between a tenth to a third of what U.S. intellectual labor receives?

Neo-liberals sometimes goes so far as to say that the notion of "the social" or "society," as traditionally conceived, does not exist. (There's a well-known quote by Thatcher to this effect). For these folks, there's only individuals, families and local communities. They deny, in both philosophical and practical terms, the existence of macro-social realities and responsibilities (such as funding public education).

Now, there are well-framed responses to these assertions, but they are generally marginalized at this point. My main point is that these two forces, neo-liberalism and transnational corporate outsourcing, have the kind of affinity that Weber described a hundred years ago between Protestantism and Capitalism. And, if this is so, it's my contention that the access issue the original article discusses is best seen as symptomatic of the stresses between different worldviews.

Thank the lord for Dr. Peterfreund's analysis. Now we know who to hold accountable--the vast right wing conspiracy.

I also didn't know that higher education is an entitlement; that's good to know. I guess that's why George Bush has cut funding for a real entitlement, medicare. Oops, he didn't. Did someone forget to tell him to come to the conspiracy meeting?

I'll forward Dr. P's analysis to my democrat governor, who has repeatedly slashed our budget and consistently put K-12 funding above higher ed and to the republican legislature, which has given us the first increase in years.

Perhaps Dr. P will be able to meet with former president Clinton now that he's out on his book tour and thank him for continuing and expanding governmental support for welfare. Oops, he didn't do that. Sorry.

Sure hope Dr. P doesn't teach history.

I think it is a good deal more likely that Dr. P is a herterodox economist than a teacher of history; although the former frequently accomplishes the latter. To a more discerning reader, his use of the term "liberal" might have flagged Dr. P as saying something very different than what you are imputing to him. If I am correct, the reference to your Governor's political affiliation, in the context of Dr. P's remarks, is "off the wall."

I have read all the responses, and I do not pretend that my response is anything more than anecdotal. In the 1960s (when I varied in age between a newborn baby and seven-year old child) states dramatically expanded public universities due to the large number of baby boomers moving through the system. By the time I started college in 1982, the baby boomers had gone through, and I was of the post-baby boom generation that had the privilege of living in their dormitories, eating in their dining halls, and sitting in their classrooms. When I graduated in 1986, I remember that my university, like many others, had to begin adjusting to smaller incoming freshman classes. Why? Because fewer children were born between about 1965 and 1975. From about 1990 to 1997, all colleges and universities fought over a smaller pool of high school graduates; they had to wait until the late 1990s when the "echo boom" kicked in and the baby boomers' children began to move through the system. Of course, that "boomlet" is not going to last forever, and the number of available eighteen-year olds is going to vary in size in any given year.

Thus, since the 1960s, there has been the metaphorical seven years of feast and seven years of famine. If I were an administrator, I would be reluctant to adjust my institution to the seven years of feasting; it would be far more prudent to have an institution designed to accommodate smaller classes. If there is a particularly large freshman class on the horizon, it would be foolish to add faculty and classrooms when those same professors may have to be laid off and the classrooms be vacated when, in a few years, there will be a much smaller freshman class.\

I would imagine that such is the dynamic at work today. Administrators are reluctant to adjust to larger freshman classes until they see that growth in class sizes is not cyclic but constant for the foreseeable future. Until that happens, I do not think any institution, public or private, has any incentive to accommodate larger class sizes.

You can debate whether higher education is a public good vs. private right, but when it comes right down to it, money drives the train in higher education; not sublime debates.

Patrick:

In the politics of education, as many other venues, whether money is spent, and what it is spent on is not a mere matter of "sublime debate." It is an expression of what people value, of the nature of the worldview they hold, the compromises they're willing to make, and their attitudes about the desirable (or undesirable) nature of government, and the shape of the future. I'm truly sorry that you haven't seen that the construction of "private" vs. "public" (which is always a matter of public construction) has real world consequences, in areas as diverse as domestic violence, sexual orientation, separation of church and state, and so forth. Major fiscal priorities are implicitly and/or explicitly a statement of values, given the symbolic component of politics. Whether public education is seen, writ large, as a public good or a strictly private good will have real effects on levels of funding, and on its perceived legitimacy, now and in future.

I have, for a long time now, proposed the following rather Puckish solution to the college availability problem:

Impose a federal tax on employers of $1000 per annum for every employee who has a BA, $2000 for every MA and $3000 for every PhD. I am reasonably sure the demand for college graduates would dry up and the 'space crunch' would go away.

Of course, in those few jobs where a degree actually adds value to the employee rather than status to his employer, $1000 or $2000 or $3000 would be a pittance.

Peterfreund is part of the radical left that caused this "resource shortage" in the first place. The reason there isn't room in colleges is because too much of college resources are devoted to teaching such useful subjects as

1. lesbian and gay poetry
2. the case for impeaching Bush
3. women's studies programs (the whole enchilada)
4. ethnic studies programs (also the whole enchilada)
5. the appeal of elvis
6. UFOs and the government coverup

Of course, we shouldn't forget all of the tenured faculty who are teaching this crap. Think of what is possible if we could only phase out all the womens studies and ethnic studies programs (along with a severe cut in psychology and sociology departments) and instead concentrate on increasing programs that will actually get the student a real job once they graduate. By proceeding along the path of Perterfreund and is ilk, all we are doing is bleed off valuable resources that could go towards

1. bolstering labs in computer science, engineering, and the physical sciences
2. remedial education in mathematics and science
3. increased purchase of engineering and science journal subscriptions

Write to your legistators. Call your Govenor's office. Demand that colleges stop wasting time, money and resources on the stuff Peterfreund and his kind advocate. Only then can we provide the necessary resources for the coming glut of students.

What saddens me about Nyguyen's post is its apparent incivility, a reactionary hostility to all critical ideas that is undiscriminating, a broad anti-intellectualism, and a rejection of the worth of critical thinking about culture, gender and the like. Finally, she actively reduces the entire notion of higher education to that of an instrumentalist job-training program. And, while I agree about the importance of remedial work, Ms. Nguyen should look to K-12 education, and offer up an analysis of its successes and failures, in various venues.

Personally, while I substantially differ with Peterfreund's approach, I find that Ms. Nguyen's comments are reminiscient the tone and style (and an agenda) of an acoylte of Grover Norquist.

Thanks to Prof. Nguyen for putting the issue in bold relief. A more moderate casting of the question might be, "Haven't the themes of women's studies and ethnic studies programs now so permeated the humanities that those administrative units could be closed? For good or ill, the battle has been won. You now get women's studies and ethnic studies issues everywhere you turn; we don't need the separate departments or program offices anymore.

But ah, just try to close them and out come the red arm bands and the cries 'we're being dissed!' The answer to that is that major authors, major artists, branches of history other than social history, etc. have been receiving far less attention for decades; they've been dissed.

Consider this reality--many universities are closing language programs or consolidating them administratively. At the same time they're setting up support offices for the transgendered. What are the underlying assumptions here--that a support office is more important than the curriculum? That the perceived needs of a tiny but currently very fashionable minority captures the liberal/academic consciousness much more than the study of foreign languages {at a time when we're all supposedly 'globalizing'}? Look around. The support services grow; the academic programs get their budgets cut. What's with that? Don't the transgendered need to learn foreign languages? Everyone is suffering in this scenario, including the minorities.

Here's the problem--the rich privates can afford everything--traditional curricula, trendy curricula, trendy support services. The other 99% of higher education can't, but all of the aspirant schools try to have what the rich privates have. So they institute sequences in Asian-American literature in the English department (and don't fill their medieval position), add a support center for the transgendered (but stop teaching Hindi or Korean). When they try to roll back budgetarily they face student protests and demonstrations. Then they cave, so the activists' agenda becomes the university's agenda and everyone suffers. Then the administrators move on to new jobs, touting their records on diversity and innovation.

I would take Professor Nguyen's strictures far more seriously than I do if she were able to spell emeritus so that it looked like a condition of honor rather than a case of hemarrhoids. As for the ridiculous identity politics that takes my comments on a well-known conservative fiscal strategy and builds an implied curriculum based on such politics, what is one to say? While I do not sit in judgment on what my colleagues teach, my own teaching covers the expanded canon of British literature, takes account of the impact of science on literature from the seventeenth century onward, and is in no way extreme, even as it is critical. As I have seen previously in my problematization of "green" criticism, my status as a "problem" is directly proportional to my unwillingness to hew to any party line, a condition that enrages those for whom stereotyping is a precondition of political discourse.

No Peterfreund, you are wrong. Identity politics is NOT ridiculous. Indeed, it's kiling me and my lily white, and wanna-be-lily-white-like-Nguyen, ilk. We must instead kill the study of identity when it resides outside the purview of schools of traditional behavioral psychology--those bastions of TRUE objectivity, shorn of racialized, ethnicized, gendered scraps. How many times must it be reiterated here in Colloquy? THE COLOREDS ARE BURDENSOME IN COLLEGE. They and the study of them do not challenge my preconceived notions of my superiority based on my non-pigmentedness. When our colleges and universities are bursting at the seams with academically under-prepared freshmen, how can we give them the choice to take EITHER a course in Asian American Studies OR remedial math/reading? Do you see? Do you see what electives do to the development of our future grads? Black Movement literature OR Medieval studies--there's no in-between, no compromise; Hindi/Korean OR Queer theory--it comes down to one choice and one choice only. Do you see how the coloreds have RUINED higher education with their blathering about identity? Nguyen's right. Let her change her name to that of an honorary Euro-dude. God knows she has the desire. But it is a shame she'll burn in hell as a pigmented heathen none the less.

Understand this, you bleeding heart identity seekers: I AM A WHITE MAN. ANY STUDY NOT FOCUSED ON ME AND MINE IS WORTHLESS IDENTITY POLITICKING AND MUST NEEDS BE STOPPED!!

Let me see...

The left blames the right, then the right blames the left. The conservatives and the liberals engage in a war of words and ideas. Then, somebody cheapens the whole thing by playing the "race card".

Meanwhile, nothing gets solved.

We can do better.

Let's offer some serious, positive solutions to the problem that can be accepted by everyone instead of backing off into our respective ideological bunkers and lobbing bombs at the group that you blame the most for the ills of education and society.

Making room for more students in a capacity crunch