Whither Higher Education?

Improving educational quality in higher education requires (1) a great deal of time and energy on the part of faculty devoted to teaching and (2) a similar amount of time and energy on the part of students to learning. Some faculty might be willing to put in more hours for teaching, and some students might be willing to put in more time for learning.

Some might, but most won't. Here's why.

Higher education knowledge workers come in four flavors: tenured faculty, non-tenured faculty, adjuncts, and grad students. For non-tenured faculty, what reward is there for them to spend time away from the thing that will get them tenure, i.e., research and publication? Should they just wait until they get tenure, and then they can focus on teaching? Perhaps. But the problem here is that lots of institutions only pay lip service to high-quality teaching. This reality manifests itself in large intro classes (Econ 101, Biology 101) being taught by graduate students, i.e., by knowledge workers who cost the institution nothing. In fact, this flavor of knowledge worker -- the lowly grad student -- more often than not makes money for the institution, as grad students are only partially compensated for their teaching work and end up paying the institution to teach its large intro classes. The institutions recognize that their best and brightest knowledge workers -- the tenured flavor -- are those that attract and retain grant money from private and public funding sources. Further, nearly half of all faculty are adjuncts these days. Adjuncts simply are not paid to put in the long hard hours to give high-quality teaching and learning experiences. So they won't do it, nor should they be expected to do it without appropriate training, support, and financial compensation. Universities employ adjuncts because they are cheaper and easier to hire and fire. But, due to the reliance on cheap (adjunct) and free (grad student) labor, teaching and learning suffer.

Sure, there are some great and committed adjuncts out there -- I was once one of them! And there are equally great and committed grad students out there, too. But you can't expect to improve educational quality when you won't put your money where your mouth is.

As for students, certainly some want to go to college to learn. But most want to go to college so they can leave. John Merrow, et al's work in Declining by Degrees suggests the vast majority of students in higher ed are there to do whatever necessary to graduate with a degree that will allow them to get a job. In the end, students in these institutions are doing time. Like prisoners, they can't wait to get out. And when they do get out, they will finally be able to do what they have longed to do for most of their lives: engage in the acquisition of material goods.

Even for students who go to college to learn, what would motivate them to spend more time and energy on a course that is not in their major? In the minds of students who intend to graduate with a degree in business or chemistry, Greek architecture and the works of Shakespeare have nothing to do with them.

And understandably so, especially if they have been told their entire lives that going to college and getting a degree was the only way to achieve happiness and fulfillment in this country, that going to college was the whole point of their K-12 experience, and that not going to college would be a failure on their parts. No one ever talked about going to college to learn, as if learning could ever be a goal in itself.

No, college is an investment that has to pay off, and so it has to be worth it.

Worth what?

For me, it had to be worth $30,000. (I'm still paying off my student loans nearly 20 years after having graduated, and I'm still wondering whether it was worth it or not.) For today's students, it has to be worth a lot more than this. $30,000 is a drop in the bucket for a lot of students these days. They leave college saddled with astronomical debt, so it sure as hell better be worth it. After all, if it turns out that it's not worth it, how are they going to pay off their loans? Therefore, out of necessity these days, college has to be about job training and job placement and getting a degree so you can earn an income if for no other reason than to pay for it after you've been through it. So the "worth" of college is not realized until after you're done. If you get a good job and can pay your loans, then it was worth it. But if you don't get a good job and can't pay your loans . . .

For today's students, most of them came from a factory model of education in K-12 where they received carrot and stick treatment in Skinnerian systems that shaped behavior and were not terribly concerned with learning. As NCLB takes an ever greater hold, K-12 is more about superficial, illusory learning rather than substantive learning. According to a story in The NY Times on 3/26/06, a survey by the Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music, and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. "Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center. The phenomenon of dumbed-down curricula coupled with an extraordinarily powerful, all-pervasive, 24/7 barrage of consumer culture coupled with pre-adolescent and adolescent anxieties about self-worth and self-image and you have the perfect recipe for the students we see in higher ed today.

What Do Students Want?
Students, increasingly being referred to as "customers" in higher ed circles, want good value for their time and money. They want to get through their courses so they can get that degree, get that job, and buy that SUV they've been after. Higher ed costs are going up. Pressure from the marketplace for more advanced degrees, promotions and salaries based on degrees, market niches expressing an interest in life-long learning, and ongoing professional development needs have opened up unprecedented revenue opportunities for institutions savvy enough to recognize and serve the real needs of students/customers.

Exigencies and Double Messages
Yet higher ed administrators are still caught up in the model of education for education's sake, romantic notions of the virtues of a liberal arts degree, and demand of the professoriate, a.k.a., knowledge workers, to publish or perish. Now K-16 educators are being scrutinized by administrators and told to produce evidence that learning has actually occurred in their classrooms. At my institution, new faculty are being told to spend more time on teaching. But they are rewarded for what they publish. Administrators say, "We want you to be a better teacher," but they do little to assist them. Nor do they compensate them through pay or through release time. They simply say, "We expect you to do both, to be a great teacher and a great researcher/writer." This double message only serves to undermine efforts at improved teaching methods, as faculty clearly understand that when the rubber meets the road, they must adhere to the time-honored mantra to publish or perish. Simply put, time spent on teaching is time wasted. Yet, with the new pressure to produce demonstrable evidence of learning and the implicit (and undoubtedly soon-to-be explicit) connection between this evidence and promotion/tenure, knowledge workers are faced with perhaps the greatest challenge the profession has ever known.

Whither Academia?
While there will always be a market for students interested in a traditional, liberal arts education, the number of students in this market will shrink over the coming years to the point where it becomes a rarefied niche. The reasons for this shrinkage are quite simply these: (a) no one except the ultra-elite will be able to afford these institutions, and (b) these institutions will seem increasingly out of touch with the needs of most students as they fail to deliver what they want. As for the non-elite institutions, now is the time to begin re-engineering and transforming their core missions to serve the majority of students. They can do this by yielding to the pressure for evidence of student learning outcomes and supporting faculty to help them produce this evidence.

So how do faculty produce the evidence of greater student learning outcomes? By improving the means by which these outcomes are produced, i.e., by becoming better teachers. And how do faculty become better teachers? Drop the antique notion that good teachers are also good researchers/writers; eliminate the need for faculty to do research and publish, allowing them to focus their efforts exclusively on teaching; base rewards, tenure, and promotion solely on the quality of teaching; create a mechanism by which faculty teaching is measured through multiple means, e.g., portfolios, interviews, student mid-term and end-of-term reviews, peer review, etc.; provide a mechanism for training, supporting, and developing faculty as teachers throughout their careers at the institution; recruit and hire new faculty based on their qualifications as teachers and their commitment to developing as teachers.

What impact will this have on these institutions? In being able to show evidence of student learning by showcasing both the students themselves (through video testimonials on the institution's web site) and their work (though links on the web site to their projects), these institutions can prove to prospective students that they can meet their needs. By basing their marketing and recruiting efforts on this evidence, these institutions can expect to increase their enrollments dramatically, thereby increasing revenue.

But wait. Is the system really broken? And, if it ain't broke, does it need fixing? Perhaps all we have to do is serve our customers and give them what they are asking for -- a ticket out called a "diploma" as a way to get what they (say they) need.

But if the system is broken, it's precisely because we give them what they say they need, not what we need from them. So what do we need from them? If our way of life and our country is to have a substantive future, we have to do more than produce tax-paying consumers. Sure, tax-paying consumers serve the short-term interests of the economy. But long-term, where will the innovators come from? Where will the researchers and scientists originate? More importantly, where will the future citizens come from that have more than their own self-interests in mind, who not only know what the Constitution is but have a passion to defend it and the rights that are guaranteed within it? Such citizenship and such civic engagement come out of experiences in learning institutions that inculcate in students a deep love for critical thinking and thoughtful analysis. Allowing students to skirt this kind of engagement in learning not only short-changes them, but it also jeopardizes our future as a nation.

But in the end, we must give the customers what they want. We have to give them what they want because if we don't, someone else will. And we'll be out of business.