What Ails American Higher Education, and Some Suggested Cures

A Guest Blog – by John Broesamle

For years, critics have been sounding alarms over the state of American colleges and universities. We hear, in particular, that they are too “woke” and far too expensive. Yet, indisputably, we have the finest system of higher education in the world. Of the world’s top ten universities, by one credible accounting, seven are American. And the premium of a college degree over a high school diploma keeps mounting, now to a projected lifetime bonus of $1.2 million.

Prior to World War II, American universities were considered second-tier at best. Even the most prestigious were unselective. In 1940, for instance, Harvard accepted 85 percent of applicants. The rise to world preeminence followed the war. America’s top private universities comprised half of the picture. The other half involved the emergence of great public universities and entire public university systems, led by the University of California (UC). In California and elsewhere, mid-range systems also developed (the California State Universities, or Cal States), along with a network of junior colleges (now called community colleges). American universities became a magnet for foreign applicants. Competition soared, to the point that the Ivies now admit only 4-6 percent. Competition to get in is so fierce that prep schools score admission of a student to an elite university like a hole in one.

The postwar surge in higher education has given rise to the false notion that every young person ought to graduate from college with a B.A. or a B.S., and, better yet, take an advanced degree. Were that to occur, the country would have plenty of engineers and lawyers but a yawning deficit of plumbers and welders. About six in ten high school graduates do immediately enroll in college. Many of these attend community colleges, which serve a multitude of purposes – from preparing students for a four-year university, to providing two-year degrees and certificates, to training in specific job skills such as auto mechanics or air conditioning repair. A student who completes general education (aka distribution) requirements as part of any of these community college programs will garner critical thinking skills well beyond those that come with a high school diploma. This is a good thing for the student and for society at large. Community colleges are a student’s best overall bargain in higher education. Tuition and fees average $3,700 per year, varying widely from state to state. The best deal is offered by California, at just $1,300. California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960, contains a strong bias toward students matriculating at a local community college, then transferring to a UC or Cal State. 

At the other end of the academic hierarchy are the indisputably elite schools, mostly founded before the twentieth century. Elitism and a sense of hierarchy are so strong among these institutions that they compare with English royalty. Unlike the business world, the coinage of the realm in academia is not money, it is prestige – an alluring institutional brand name, plenty of star faculty. Families paying for children to attend one of the elites might easily think otherwise about the money, though. Such schools are conspicuously expensive for students who, if they lack financial aid, pay full freight. Take, for instance, Yale: $62,000 a year in tuition and fees, $81,000 including room and board.

At top institutions, research is immensely more prestigious and career-advancing than teaching. The new president-designate of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, has remarked that “what ultimately makes a great university is the excellence of its scholars. Recruiting, nurturing, and supporting outstanding scholarship is the foundation on which everything else is built.” Not a word here about teaching. Indeed, at some institutions “excessively” good teaching is considered bad form – too much time devoted to undergraduates, too little to writing that next book. The truth is that for faculty in research universities, even the finest teaching will not achieve the prestige of discovering new knowledge. The relative prestige of teaching should be raised and rewarded if we want more of it. This includes granting tenure and recognition for outstanding teaching per se. Truly great teaching is a rarity that ought to be prized.

One of the cardinal threats to good teaching today is the threat to free speech and open inquiry. Cal State Northridge, where I taught for three decades, contemplated as far back as the 1990s establishing a code of “fair” speech that would constrain faculty from expressing reservations about feminism in the classroom. (This was part of a national speech-restriction campaign by a feminist fringe.) Though I was one of the campus’s more prominent male feminists, I fought the idea tooth and nail, and it was eventually defeated. The term “political correctness” was then in vogue, now being superseded by “woke.” It is no secret that today, as a broad generality, academia has a leftward tilt. In response to so-called wokeness, politicians in various states have attacked the tenure system that protects faculty free speech. Florida governor Ron DeSantis got the state legislature to adopt something he called the “Stop the WOKE Act” that regulates what professors can teach about race and gender on pain of termination. In short, the extreme left and the extreme right have both put free speech under siege. 

For “woke,” I prefer to substitute the term “hypersensitive.” In order to coddle hypersensitive students, colleges have adopted everything from “trigger warnings” to infringing on what ought to be considered the right of faculty to teach what and how they see fit. In reality, catering to hypersensitive students means that the default setting for what is taught devolves to the tolerance level of the most sensitive students in the class (or throughout the university). This is absurd and threatens to destroy education in the social sciences and humanities, given their emphasis – in distinct contrast to such fields as mathematics or the physical sciences – on social controversy. In my own freshman-sophomore introductory course on U.S. history since the Civil War, I would tell the students on the first day that “this class will challenge your values. If you emerge from the class holding your original attitudes, that’s fine. If they change, that’s fine too. But if the class fails to cause you to reflect, then I have failed.” That is all that students are entitled to. Just like faculty, they should feel at liberty to air their own views. Students who cannot handle challenging, even shocking, ideas, points of view, or facts should be invited to transfer to another institution that better reflects their comfort level.

Since faculty tenure is under threat in various states, it is worth reminding ourselves what tenure is actually about. The tenure system in American universities emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. Before that time, faculty could be fired for any reason, including that their ideas upset college donors, trustees, or presidents. The purpose of tenure is to protect freedom of thought and expression – in the classroom, in research, in published work, and even when unpopular. (Think of the troublesome University of Padua professor Galileo and his heretical theory that the earth revolves around the sun.) Tenured faculty can be fired only under extreme circumstances. The idea is that this openness to perspectives of all sorts benefits the advancement of knowledge and therefore society at large. Yet faculty tenure is actually in decline today, for two reasons. One is that it has come under siege by politicians. The other is that rapidly diminishing numbers of college teachers even qualify for it.

This brings us to the depressing story of today’s “adjunct” (aka “contingent”) faculty. Half a century ago, 80 percent of college faculty were tenured or on tenure track. Today, that has fallen to 25 percent. Seventy-five percent – 1.3 million out of 1.8 million faculty nationwide – are ineligible for tenure. These adjuncts teach over half the classes. The explanation for the predominance of untenured faculty is that they are inexpensive and expendable. Paid as little as $3,500 per course, they commonly cobble together a living by teaching numerous classes at multiple schools. (Another name for adjuncts is “freeway flyers.”) As at-will employees, contingent faculty are easily dispensed with. The glut of Ph.D.s in fields like History and English has created a labor surplus for generations now. Very smart people who subject themselves to becoming at-will employees doing piecework should make more intelligent decisions about their lives by choosing another career. This may sound anti-intellectual. The reality is that lofty aspirations to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer in a tenured position devolve to the reality of teaching writing skills or basic survey courses semester-to-semester. The sense of disillusionment runs wide and deep.

Programs conferring doctorates enhance the prestige of the departments and faculty that do the conferring, and departments understandably resist eliminating them. Yet as a matter of ethics, faculty should level with advanced degree aspirants about their job prospects. In fields where a glut of Ph.D.s has prevailed for decades, marginal programs should be eliminated. Over and above that, we should be asking which faltering disciplines in the humanities and social science are at risk of dropping below critical mass by failing to attract enough students to justify the hiring of faculty. As a historian, I would like to think that every campus should have a history department, but I do not imagine that every campus must have a specialist in, say, the history of ancient Rome. For threatened fields to survive, faculty should be teaching them somewhere, preferably in relatively strong and large departments that, as intellectual fortresses, can still protect and sustain them. 

The concept of cost keeps recurring in this post – marginal degree programs are expensive; contingent faculty are inexpensive; elite and a lot of non-elite schools have sky-high prices. Much has been written in recent years complaining about the cost of a higher education, overwhelmingly blaming the universities themselves for exorbitance. Universities are blameworthy to a degree – too many administrators paid too well, often-lavish facilities intended to help in recruiting students. Universities account for only half of the cost equation, though. If the university as the seller sets the price, the student as the buyer can accept or reject. If a student is admitted to both Stanford (tuition plus fees $56,000) and Berkeley ($15,000), and wants to avoid debt, then the student has a choice between two world-class universities of equivalent stature, one private and the other public. Comparable choices exist elsewhere: USC vs. UCLA, Duke vs. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and so on. Public universities abound in California, including UCs and the California State University system ($7,200 on average). Students need not necessarily attend their heart’s desire; they may choose to attend the best school they can get into that they can afford (taking family help, scholarships, and loans into account). A late colleague of mine, Julian Nava, started off after World War II at East Los Angeles Junior College, transferred to Pomona College, and wound up with a Ph.D. from Harvard. He spent his teaching career at Cal State Northridge. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter named him the first Mexican-American ambassador to Mexico.

Among the outside forces that have impinged on and compromised higher education over the past generation – undoubtedly jacking up costs – none has been more important than the college ranking systems run by outfits unconnected to higher education, most notoriously U.S. News & World Report. Formerly the publisher of a news magazine, this media company is now a rating service for hospitals, cars, entire states, and higher education. For decades, universities have bent themselves backward to rise in the U.S. News ratings. Fortunately, some institutions are finally having second thoughts. Over a dozen top law schools are now boycotting the rankings, and they have recently been joined by the Harvard Medical School. Colleges and universities are far too varied and complex to be “rated” this way. Since everyone in academe knows that the U.S. News rankings are a sham, every self-respecting school and program should join the boycott. Colleges and universities should define and pursue excellence on their own terms.

Finally, we return to the matter of universities as an American version of royalty. This runs against the American grain, or ought to, and yet elitism is almost certainly more pronounced in higher education today than ever before. One way of addressing this at the margin is to expand the number of universities that are considered top tier. Recently, the term “Ivy Plus” has come into vogue to gather in such institutions as Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, and Duke. Some schools have successfully strategized spectacular gains in notoriety and prestige, notably New York University. Beyond this broadening at the margin, I believe the entire academic world should get off its high horse. The pursuit of new knowledge and the teaching of existing knowledge are intrinsically noble callings. They do not need to be debased by status attributions that seem to relegate, say, a community college to a different planet than an NYU or an Ivy. Good teaching and research ought to be valued wherever they occur.

In that spirit, I will close with a story. Recently hospitalized, I encountered a nursing trainee doing the rounds with an RN. The trainee, a cheerful, engaging young woman, was redirecting her career path. She had graduated from elite UC Berkeley and Berkeley Law. She and her husband, an RN, had decided that their marriage and family life would be more rewarding and harmonious if she gave up labor law and became an RN too. Her new educational institution was Ventura (community) College. How splendid, I thought – just the way that higher education in America ought to work.

John Broesamle, a previous contributor to RINOcracy.com, is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Northridge. His books on American politics and society include Reform and Reaction in Twentieth Century American Politics, Twelve Great Clashes that Shaped Modern America: From Geronimo to George W. Bush (with Anthony Arthur), and, most recently, How American Presidents Succeed and Why They Fail: From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. In those books and others over the past 30 years, Broesamle has analyzed how American government works in practice, from the turn of the twentieth century down to today.