Following Up on the Cost of Higher Education

“Support-Staff Jobs Double in 20 Years, Outpacing Enrollement,” The Chronicle of Higher Education

Last week, I wrote that an unacknowledged change in the mission of American colleges and universities has contributed to the skyrocketing cost of higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education for April 24, 2009 addresses a related subject–the growth of the absolute and relative size of support staff at academic institutions over the last 20 years. Richard K. Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, notes that this “shift means that core academic operations, teaching, and research are now a smaller piece of the pie.” Vedder’s findings are consistent with my argument about the increasing numbers of resources allocated to student surveillance on campuses across this country.

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The Cost of American Higher Education, Part III: The Price of Student Surveillance

the last in a three-part essay on the causes of escalating cost in American higher education

I’d like to start the third portion of this essay with another confession. I have a lifelong passion for math. I was that high school kid who did algebra problems for fun on Friday nights. For a long time, I believed that everything in the universe, including human frailties, could be translated into the elegant precision of mathematics. I’m a sadder but wiser woman these days.

As a corollary confession, I note that calculating the cost to American higher education for twenty-five years of commercial college rankings and the national 21 drinking age is an operational impossibility. The mathematical modeling tools exist, and I still play with them. It’s the data that’s the deal breaker: the data are insanely non-commensurate and inaccessibly proprietary.

So, be forewarned, if you’re expecting snazzy number crunching to support this argument, you won’t find it here, or anywhere with adequate reliability. This discussion is, perforce, anecdotal and speculative. On the plus side, recognizing my disapproval of the US News college ranking schemes and the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 (NMDAA) doesn’t require an algorithm.

A POPULATION EXPLOSION

The size of the average American waistline is not the only figure to have increased dramatically in the past two and one-half decades. Around the country, campus directories have also been getting fatter, and the biggest gain is not among the faculty. The ranks of administrators, particularly midlevel administrators, have expanded to the point that professional staff can approach or equal the number of academic appointments.

Some newer midlevel administrative jobs have nothing to do with jockeying for position in the rankings or keeping students sober. As examples, the e-mail administrators and the electronic-resources librarians are occupational adaptations to changing technologies. On the other hand, a plethora of new positions in admissions, student activities and residence life include responsibilities related to the rankings or the drinking age. Additionally, there are established midlevel jobs like the campus police, for addressing alcohol-related offenses. If we accept the claims of Amethyst Initiative and the self-reports of colleges and universities, the majority of these offenses are linked to NMDAA.

Midlevel administrative positions keyed to the rankings and the drinking age involve high levels of student contact. This particular kind of contact differs from the educating and mentoring done by faculty. The administrative positions are, at base, intended for student monitoring, or, if you will, student surveillance. I refer to them, collectively, as watcher work. (By this term, I mean a practice less benign than the ‘watchers’ of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or The Highlander.)

(Before continuing, I want to emphasize the importance of distinguishing the occupants of watcher jobs, who are often genuinely kind and caring individuals, from the institutional structuring of student surveillance.)

Together, the various academic watchers cover the gamut of social interventions. Admissions counselors are primary interveners, protecting the campus from the entrance of unsavory elements. Residence life and student activities are secondary intervention positions, geared to maintaining prosocial behaviors among the student body. Finally, as tertiary interveners, campus police and security respond to antisocial infractions, most of which are by and against the undergraduate population.

Watcher work provides only a modest livelihood. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reprinted the 2009 survey of median salaries compiled by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR). At the low end of the spectrum were the primary interveners, the admission counselors making $34,000/year. The secondary interveners fare slightly better, with residence hall managers earning just under $30,000 plus room and board or $37,000 without room and board. Student activities officers also do better than the admissions counselors, with median incomes in the low forties. In the tertiary category, security guards make a mere $27,000, while campus police officers will earn an additional ten thousand dollars this year.

The new technology (techie) jobs pay considerably better. Programmers, systems engineers and database administrators all earn more than $50,000. Even the electronic-resources librarians make more than $50,000, while e-mail administrators are being paid $63,000. If measured by median salaries, watcher work is less valued than the techie jobs.

At first glance, it’s hard to accept that the cost of higher education has increased significantly from such meager outlays. However, there are many watchers for each techie–roughly five admissions counselors to one electronic-resources librarian. In the aggregate, the budget lines for surveillance salaries and benefits are correspondingly greater.

I don’t wish to give the impression that there are armies of watchers on every campus. But, if we look at the numbers employed in college admissions, student services and residence life, then the metaphor of a military division with ten thousand recruits is not hyperbole. In support, I’ll mention several professional organizations–watchers wishing to define their occupations as professions.

The omnibus watcher organization is the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA): National Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. According to the website, NASPA serves, “the vice president and dean of student life, as well as professionals working within…residence life, student unions, student activities, counseling,…orientation, enrollment management,…retention and assessment.” It currently has more than 11,000 individual members along with 1,200 institutional members.

Another such group is the American College Personnel Association (ACPA). Like Avis in those old rental car commercials, ACPA–with 9,000 members in 1,500 institutions–is trying harder. It has launched an effort to network with other organizations. A president emeritus of ACPA will soon be the recipient of the award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature and/or Research by NASPA. Additionally, the current president of NASPA is a longstanding member of ACPA, and three ACPA former presidents gladly attended his NASPA inauguration.

The mission of a third watcher organization, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), is to provide professional development and to set voluntary standards of conduct in college admissions, student services and other midlevel administrative positions. AACRAO represents some 10,000 individuals from 2,500 colleges and universities in more than 30 countries. The percentage of AACRAO members abroad was not a number that I could find, although it would be interesting to consider.

Finally for this overview, there is The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), with 11,000 professionals “from around the world.” The organization includes secondary school guidance counselors and higher education admissions staff. NACAC aims to “advance the work of [admissions] counseling and enrollment professionals as they help all students realize their full educational potential, with particular emphasis on the transition to postsecondary education.” (I thought that helping students reach their educational potential was the domain of the faculty, but I must have been mistaken.)

As acculturated to American higher education as they have become, the tens of thousands of watchers–and their work of student surveillance–are cultural and historic anomalies. Canadian universities educate and socialize their undergraduates without all this bother and at a fraction of the cost. Much the same can be said for Europe.

However, Canadians aren’t especially concerned with college rankings, and they haven’t saddled themselves with a national 21 drinking age. The situation is more different and dynamic in Europe. For the past decade, the considerably smaller number of Continental university administrators have been implementing the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) of progressive, three-year baccalaureate degrees, rather than trying to lure high school valedictorians and curb underage drinking on campus.

A BUILDING BOOM

To my knowledge, no one has compiled figures for the recent spate of construction on the campuses of the 3,500-odd, four-year degree granting, American colleges and universities. Lacking statistical evidence, I’m going with my hunch that most recent construction falls into three categories: non-academic and prosocial spaces, secure housing (primarily for juniors and seniors otherwise inclined to move off campus) and–because teaching still has a place in higher education–science and engineering facilities. (I’m not tackling the last of the three in this essay.)

Occasionally, as at Pacific, construction for prosocial pursuits takes the general form of a campus center. More often, it is a field house or sports complex. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I don’t hear the well-trained, backward-walking campus tour guides talk about what happened to the old dorms and gyms. I suspect that wrecking balls were involved.

Within the past two months, I did happen upon a couple exceptions to wasteful campus demolition. The first time was at Pomona College, one of the five Claremont Colleges (the 5C’s to insiders). The 5C’s are located an hour east of Pasadena, along the Foothill Freeway in Southern California. I visited in February, and the snow atop the towering San Gabriel Mountains kept distracting me from the practiced speech of our tour guide. (Yes, he walked backwards.) The young man was a senior, majoring (I believe) in politics. He talked and walked fast.

I drifted along behind the others, absorbing the vistas and the architecture. The college is an architectural gem, as are all the Claremonts. Suddenly, the guide’s speech drew me to the front of the little group. I listened intently as he explained that one residence hall and one other building are retrofitted each year at Pomona. That commitment impresses well beyond snow on the mountains.

The second exception was during the March open house weekend at Lebanon Valley College (LVC) in Annville, Pennsylvania. Annville lies ten miles east of Hershey and its pervasive chocolate smell. The weathered corn silos across the country road aren’t mountain peaks, but something of their pastoral charm has been reproduced in the contextual campus architecture. Mercifully, the LVC admissions staff tell the student guides not to memorize scripts and never to walk backwards.

My tour guide was a senior woman, an education major. When she took the group through the science building, she excitedly explained that it was the retro-fitted gymnasium of days gone by. The redesign was masterful, and I extend kudos of the non-Mertonian kind to LVC!

The student guides at Pomona and Lebanon Valley were proud of their respective communities for committing to sustainable building. They were blase about what Russell Kitchner, adopting a phrase from the auto industry, calls the “extra-cost options” on American campuses. Among the extra-cost options aggravating Kitchner are “residential suites, dining malls…and recreational facilities mirroring those of country clubs.” He has already concluded that the campus amenities building boom aligns poorly with the mission of higher education. At issue for Kitchner, and many critics, is the question of who pays for the amenities construction.

But readers beware: the bottom line in amenities construction is a snow-capped mountain seen from a campus quad: it is an alluring distraction. The fundamental issue in the college building spree is cause, not cost. The cause, I argue, is an unacknowledged but very real change in the mission of American higher education.

AN UNACKNOWLEDGED CONSEQUENCE

Not that long ago, the dual mission of American higher education was to prepare young women and men for the civic and service roles of adulthood and to provide them with the means for securing employment. Formal mission statements still pay homage to the virtue of anticipatory socialization. At Pomona College, for example, “the curriculum is designed to train the mind broadly and deeply.” Meanwhile, students at Lebanon Valley College are “building skills that will never go out of demand: the ability to think critically and creatively and the power to communicate clearly and persuasively.”

Beneath the rhetoric of broad, deep, clear and critical reasoning, the external pressures of the rankings and the national drinking age have been building for decades. Inexorably, the de facto mission of higher education has shifted, although few have taken note. The relentless watching and scripting of current conduct has overtaken the aim of anticipatory socialization for the responsibilities of maturity.

The new higher educational mission to monitor the present at the expense of preparing for the future takes forms beyond watcher work and appealing spaces of surveillance. American undergraduates now devote, on average, more hours each week to institutionally sanctioned (and uncritical) extracurricular activities than to their coursework. Moreover, the latest trend in undergraduate survey research is to measure present levels of student engagement with their institutions. (What happened to evaluating knowledge?)

Are there unintended consequences for reinforcing the late adolescent penchant for presentism? Do an abundance of extracurriculars and elevated amounts of engagement contribute to subsequent professional competence, satisfaction over the life course, or even a modest increase in the muchly lauded virtue of deep, clear, etc. reasoning? Does monitoring achieve these ends more expediently than old fashioned learning?

In this time of economic decline, there will be curbs on the construction of campus amenities, and there will be cutbacks in watcher work. However, the practice of student surveillance will persist in yet newer permutations. It will persist as long as higher education bows to the artificial manipulations of the market (the rankings) and to the legislated moralizing of special interests (the national 21 drinking age). It will persist as long as the mission of higher education remains highjacked by outside agents of unintended change. Although absent an algorithm, rest assured that all Americans will pay a price for the continuing surveillance of our college students.

another afternoon without cheers,
dkb

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The Cost of American Higher Education, Part II: Unintended Consequences and Disinterestedness

the second in a three-part essay on the causes of escalating cost in American higher education

Not long ago, I received a group email from Margee Ensign, Dean of the School of International Studies (SIS) at the University of the Pacific. The opening line was an invitation to a summer reunion. Following her welcome were two sentences. “You will find so many changes at the university and in SIS.  Our new “green” student center is beautiful and functional, the new biology building means we are ensuring that students have the most up to date information in the fast changing field.” 

It struck me as wrong to be expected, willy-nilly, to applaud this construction. Did Pacific really need two new buildings? Couldn’t the old ones have been retro-fitted? After all, sustainability is as much about making do by modifying what we have as it is about tearing down and starting from the green drawing board–or CAD software.

Admittedly, mine is not the majority opinion. The majority view is generally a variant of “making do means you’re barely getting by.” Correction: it used to mean you were barely getting by, until six months ago. Public opinion on spending has been shifting now that 3.6 million Americans are out of work and all of us are drowning in debt, personal and national. In this scary new world, constructing a campus center does not confer automatic bragging rights.

How, then, are we to interpret the dean’s email? If we were to relapse into Seven Deadly Sins moralizing, we would argue that she is acting out an administrative propensity for greed. A secular, social version of this argument could reference the American addiction to conspicuous consumption, against which institutional economist Thorstein Veblen railed a hundred and ten years ago.

However, we have dispensed with moralizing, and conspicuous consumption is a description, not an explanation of why Pacific and other higher educational institutions are competing to put up the most conspicuous monuments to affluence. Still wondering about the new green student center, I decided to hunt for clues in the dean’s second sentence, “You will find so many changes at the university….”

Change is a familiar theme at SIS. After all, study abroad depends upon adapting to change, and SIS Professor Emeritus Bruce LaBrack has created a stunning (and free) online resource for cross-cultural adventuring. I clicked on his What’s Up with Culture, scrolled through half a dozen exercises and selected “Sources of US-American Culture.” There, I learned, not for the first time, that the quintessentially American virtue of The New is part our legacy as a nation of immigrants. And, US-Americans do, indeed, make a virtue of newness and change–at least until we reach middle age, when it all becomes too much bother.

We are less virtuous about admitting that change does not always work out as planned. The late sociologist Robert K. Merton (who, interestingly, changed his name from Meyer R. Schkolnick) referred to these frequently unplanned outcomes as “the unintended consequences of social action.” The start of the period, in which American higher education costs outpaced median US family income by a threefold percentage increase, witnessed two social changes. Both have resulted in unintended and deleterious consequences.

Certainly, no one anticipated that these changes would become driving forces in higher education costs. The first began as an annual feature in a weekly news magazine; the second resulted from the collective behavior of concerned citizens. In the past year, higher education administrators have spoken out against both developments. The American public has responded with dismissal or disapproval. What the message from higher education is and why it has failed to mobilize the public are crucial issues for grappling with the rising cost of higher education.

A WEIRD THING HAPPENED

For the fifty years from the presidency of “Give ‘Em Hell” Harry Truman until the election of “Change We Need” Barack Obama, Americans bought weekly issues of US News & World Report at corner news stands and in supermarkets. Sinking in the current economic downturn, the magazine recently changed to a monthly format. But, regardless of the frequency of publication, US News is probably most famous for its special edition, “America’s Best Colleges”, launched in 1983 and appearing annually since 1985. For the publishers, the special edition and its spin-off college guide are sure money-makers, with a built-in resistance to recession.

From the outset “the rankings” have rankled. Criticisms range from blanket opposition to debates over replicability of the research findings. In 1995, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, took the audacious step of declining to participate in the peer survey of institutional reputations, the most subjective portion of the US News rankings. (Because the objective measures can be derived from data supplied by The Department of Education, refusal to complete the peer survey stands as the definitive gesture of resistance to the rankings.)

Reed’s resistance was followed two years later by Alma College and Stanford University, but then the trend stalled and number of resisters stood at three schools for some time. However, since 2004, opposition to the rankings has snowballed into an avalanche of academic pushback. In that year, the presidents of fifteen liberal arts colleges–including tony Colgate and socially conscious Earlham–publicly voiced opposition to the rankings.

Last year witnessed another important development. The Annapolis Group, a confederation of presidents of liberal arts colleges, spent two days in closed session discussing the US News practice. Although The Group has not called for a rankings boycott, as of this writing, 61 college presidents have agreed not to complete the peer survey and not to refer to the magazine in their institutional publicity. They made this pledge by signing a document called The Presidents’ Letter.

The Presidents’ Letter is an odd document. Preceding the actual pledge, it lists six reasons to reject the US News rankings. The reasons follow one after another in a sentence of Proustian proportions. Embedded in fourth place is the discrete phrase, “…encourage wasteful spending and gamesmanship in institutions’ [sic] pursuing improved rankings….” There is no elaboration on the direct and indirect costs of college ranking to institutions of higher education.

The Presidents’ Letter was crafted by Lloyd Thacker, founder and executive director of The Education Conservancy, a non-profit organization, based, like Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. Since its 2004 inception, The Education Conservancy has sought to shut down commercial college rankings in general and the US News practice in particular. It operates with private donations and grants from prestigious sources like The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation.

Thacker has never held a position as a college president or on a university faculty. Before founding The Education Conservancy, he spent close to three decades in college admissions and college counseling. His background may account for his recent popularity as a speaker on the circuit of The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). It does not explain how a man with this resume came to gain the attention, not to mention garner the support of sixty-odd college presidents in a campaign against one mass market periodical. In the world of senior administrators of higher education, this outcome is not just unexpected; it’s so rare as to be flat out weird.

THEN ANOTHER WEIRD THING HAPPENED

Not long after The Presidents’ Letter, another weird missive appeared. This one was called The Amethyst Initiative, and it, too, involved a group of college presidents, now joined by university presidents and chancellors, taking a public stand against a practice outside their narrow purview. Once again, The Annapolis Group spearheaded the assault.

A month after Thacker’s appearance, The Group invited John McCardell, President Emeritus of prestigious Middlebury College and the founder of Choose Responsibility, to speak at their June 2008 meeting. McCardell talked in advance with former colleagues. He delivered his message. Many Group members affirmed their concern for the unintended consequences of the 21 drinking age and set out to contact their peers at other institutions. From this beginning came The Amethyst Initiative, a project to “rethink the drinking age,” operating under McCardell’s non-profit, Choose Responsibility.

In the two years since its inception, Choose Responsibility has received major funding from the Robertson Foundation. Additional funds come from the Achelis Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation and private donations. Choose Responsibility accepts no money from the alcohol beverage industry or its affiliates.

The Amethyst Initiative calls upon the American public and our Congressional leaders to reopen the discussion on the national drinking age. It is deliberately not a policy recommendation, although signatories share the position that the status quo is a dangerous failure. They argue that it creates a hidden subculture of underage drinkers, promotes binge drinking and erodes respect for the law. Proponents of reevaluation also note that alcohol is a cofactor in most criminal offenses on American campuses.

The origin of this legal and public health crisis was, in sociologist Robert Merton’s terms, an unintended consequence. Specifically, it was the unintended consequence of a mother’s grief over the death of her teenage daughter, the victim of a drunken hit-and-run driver in suburban Sacramento County in 1980. The mother, Candace Lightner, turned her grief into prosocial action by founding Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Lightner worked tirelessly at grassroots organizing. She talked to anyone who would listen, from professional health organizations to national television audiences. She testified before Congress.

Lightner and the organization that she founded met with a modicum of success: Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 (United States Code, Title 23, Section 158) (NMDAA). Under this amendment to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, all states became required to legislate and enforce the age of 21 for purchasing and possessing alcoholic beverages in public. The penalty for non-complying states was an annual ten percent decrease in their federal highway apportionments.

Like the US News rankings, NMDAA was not without its opponents, and in this case, the opposition included a Constitutional challenge. In a 1987 decision (South Dakota v. Dole, 483 US 203), the US Supreme Court ruled that under Article 1 and the Twenty-first Amendment, Congress has the authority to “encourage” states to comply with a 21 drinking age. For the next twenty years, there was no serious challenge to the national 21 drinking age.

Admittedly, the states have varied widely in interpreting and enforcing NMDAA. A few states outlaw all consumption for persons under 21, regardless of whether the venue is public or private. Many states have provisions allowing private consumption in the immediate presence of parents or spouses over the age of 21. Some exempt higher educational curricula that include tasting, but not drinking–which reminds this blogger of Cornell’s famous “wines” course. All fifty states make exceptions for religious rites, including the Christian Eucharist.

Enforcement, the second part of the NMDAA amendment to the Federal-Aid Highway Act, also varies by jurisdiction. For example, in 2004, the same year that the presidents of Colgate College, et al, declined to participate in the US News peer survey, a Washington, DC, court ruled that prosecutors cannot file criminal charges against persons accused of underage drinking. Police may issue civil citations, but these are, at best, only weak deterrents (think: parking ticket for open container). The consequences, unintended or otherwise, of refusing to enforce a federal statute include encouraging other scofflaw behaviors. This situation should concern more than a handful of highly placed academic administrators, but it doesn’t seem to be drawing much response from the public at large.

As of this writing, 134 presidents and chancellors of higher educational institutions have signed the Amethyst Initiative. A dozen signatories have published their reasons on the website. Typical of their concerns are the comments by Lawrence Schall, President of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.

“I see the effects of [alcohol] abuse every day, in automobile accidents, in sexual behavior, in acts of vandalism and assault, in academic performance. I know I don’t have the answers, but I also know that the status quo has failed. I signed… not because I think there is an easy solution out there, but because we need to be talking about solutions.”

Holding the advanced degrees of juris doctor (JD) and doctor of higher education (EdD) from University of Pennsylvania, Schall is the kind of university president who chooses his words with care, even when his remarks appear unstudied. For interpreting the meaning of very deliberate writers, close reading is essential. And, upon close reading, Schall’s quote is most interesting for what it doesn’t say.

Absent from Schall’s endorsement, and from all but one website testimonial for the Amethyst Initiative, is any mention of the economic cost of the national drinking age to American institutions of higher education. As the sole exception, the statement by William Durden, president of Dickinson College, acknowledges the outlay for alcohol-related student services.

“…[the national drinking age is] an issue that truly maters [sic] for our society and that appears now to be compromising not only the health and welfare of many college-age students, but also, contributing to the ever increasing cost of an undergraduate degree through the student life, public safety and counseling resources that are applied to it without apparent success.” (italics mine)

For a college president, Durden has an uncommon biography. Before accepting the position at Dickinson ten years ago, he presided over a division of Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc., the for-profit tutoring company with a thousand franchises worldwide. He is a man with a solid track record in business. His experience in managing to the bottom line may explain Durden’s willingness to go on the record about some (not all) of the institutional costs of underage alcohol consumption.

HARDY, BUT HARDLY ODD, HABITS

Let us assume, until the last section of this essay, that both the college rankings and the national drinking age are costing higher education considerable sums of money. Let us also assume that these expenditures have increased over the past twenty years. If this is the case, then why is the ordinary citizen faced with the labor of digging through obscure documents like The Presidents’ Letter and The Amethyst Initiative to figure out what is going on? Why are academic leaders being coy about their financial predicament? Why aren’t they joining the high financiers and auto czars in a grab for federal funds? Surely, affordable higher education is no less vital to our long-term national interests than fuel efficient Fords and the umpteenth rescue of American International Group (AIG).

Now that bailouts have become the order of the day, it is difficult to understand why top administrators in higher education are reluctant to air their financial woes in public. But, it ought to be clear by now that they are, indeed, reluctant; and their reluctance is so pronounced and so uniform that it can only be an integral part of academic culture. To appreciate the way that academic culture underscores administrative stoicism, we can revisit the work of Robert K. Merton.

Merton’s pioneering sociological studies of science led him to conclude that natural scientists operate under a particular set of professional norms. He referred to these norms by the acronym of CUDOS, for communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (later, originality and skepticism). But, astronomers and physicists are not the only academicians to adopt Mertonian CUDOS. Humanities faculty and social scientists are no less acculturated to these norms.

The virtues of CUDOS permeate faculty life, from the teaching of freshman seminars to the debates about curricular revisions. Of the four (or five) Mertonian virtues, disinterestedness is most germane to our understanding of administrative stoicism in the economic downturn. By disinterestedness, Merton meant the outward appearance of acting in a selfless way. However, academic disinterestedness goes deeper than surface gloss. It shapes the conduct of inquiry and the pedagogy of the classroom. Unlike proprietary corporate research, academic inquiries may be replicated and their conclusions may be directly contested. In the classroom, good teaching takes into account the needs of different learners, but blatant favoritism is always out of bounds.

Higher education administrators function within this culture of CUDOS. They interact with college and university faculty members who enjoy a degree of self-governance unimaginable in business. Faculy serve on committees with top administrators. They view themselves as equal (or superior) to their deans and presidents. And, at many institutions of higher education, the deans and presidents teach a course or two each year. A bit of classroom contact keeps them connected to their communities and with the academic disciplines wherein they earned their own doctoral degrees. In this climate of studied disinterest, nothing is more foreign (and more unseemly) than the obvious self-interest of bemoaning financial woes.

Of course, there is a more skeptical interpretation of academic stoicism in the face of financial difficulties. In this interpretation, advertising a series of financial setbacks is bad for the business of appeasing trustees and building endowments. (After all, it is this intellectual labor rather than the teaching of an occasional course, which occupies most of a college president’s time.)

Whether one accepts the normative interpretation or the cynical view, the appearance of stoicism persists in the pronouncements of top administrators in higher education. Personally, I have seen this stoicism in recent correspondence from my undergraduate alma mater. About the time that Dean Ensign of SIS zapped off her email, I received a thoughtfully composed letter from Donald V. DeRosa, the out-going President of the University of the Pacific. He was writing to assure alumni that “…the University is well-positioned to weather this economic turbulence.” As I was meant to do, I took comfort in his words.

still not cheering,
dkb

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The Cost of American Higher Education, Part I: Soaring Prices, Sinful Means

the first in a three-part essay on the causes of escalating cost in American higher education

Amid the holiday revelry at the end of last year, many of us avoided the bad news announced by The Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (CPPHE) on December 3, 2008. Faced this spring with the sobering reality of a continued economic downturn, avoidance is as welcome as stale fruitcake at a Seder dinner. Hence, once again, here are the CPPHE numbers for the twenty-five year period from 1982 to 2007:

Cost of US higher education: 439% Increase
Median US family income: 147% Increase

Why the percentage for the cost of a college education has increased three times more than for household income is a matter of structural alignment. But, grasping abstract social structures can be as hard as being the first to find the Afikomen. It is easier to point fingers of blame at recognizable social groups than to dig out the root conditions. Easiest of all is to wave a hand in the general direction of well known antisocial behaviors.

IMMORAL ACTS

For the last seven centuries–give or take a decade–The Seven Deadly Sins have ranked high on lists of antisocial behavior in the Western world. In the months since the CPPHE announcement, American pundits have orchestrated an outbreak of hand waving at three of the timeworn Seven. When the text is rising costs in higher education, the subtext is typically the cardinal sins of greed, sloth and lust.

In the moralistic view, the public is encouraged to look for rampant greed by administrators and sloth among faculties of indolent slackers. Lust, from the Latin luxuria, is the most common sin of American college students, who allegedly exhibit insatiable desires for garden apartments, housekeeping services and glitzy fitness centers. They also have a penchant–seldom reaching gluttony–for vegan, spa and fusion cuisine along with the ubiquitous pizza, barbeque and burgers.

The moralizing followed hard upon the heels of the CPPHE announcement. A December editorial in USA Today nicely described the moralists’ road to repentance for rising college costs.

Put aside for the moment the question of why [University of Washington President] Emmert makes more than twice as much as the president of the United States….Simple ways to rein in costs include requiring professors to boost teaching loads and retreating from the “amenities war,” in which colleges compete to build the fanciest athletic complexes (1 December 2008, pg: 11A).

In this editorial, rising college costs result from moral failures among the biggest institutional stakeholders. Because we no longer burn sinners at the stake, it follows that the solution for curbing costs is to control the behavior of these wayward individuals: the greedy managers, slothful educators and lusting students of higher education.

FANNING THE FLAMES

Finding fuel for the fires of the morality argument is no more difficult than scanning the front page of The Chronicle of Higher Education (6 February 2009). The banner headline by Robin Wilson reads, “Downturn Threatens the Faculty’s Role in Running Colleges.” It’s an expose of the tactics that avaricious administrators are using to wrest authority from the professoriate during the economic crisis.

Beneath this warning about the end of academic self-governance is another, penned by Jeffrey R. Young, “How Not to Lose Face on Facebook, for Professors.” This article recounts the saga of Dartmouth neophyte Reiko Ohnuma. Assistant Professor Ohnuma blundered when setting the security on her Facebook profile. She erred again by gossiping to her Facebook “friends” (and unwittingly to the entire Dartmouth community) about the value of Wikipedia for composing lectures in Buddhist studies.

Obviously, Ohnuma tripped a couple times on the step of Right Action, the fourth stage on the Buddhist eightfold path. I doubt, however, that she is guilty of sloth, as understood in the US-American context. A more plausible defense is the chronic exhaustion of the untenured.

Turning a few pages of this issue, I came upon a gem worthy of a Golden Fleece Award, if such were given to non-profit institutions. This is a rare instance when lust is not the student sin of choice. Faculty slacking, however, may have hit a new low in the account of four students of Robin Lee Mozer, English instructor at Birmingham-Southern College (page A6). The students devoted their January interim term to road tripping across five states on a quest for the South’s best barbeque–for college credit. It’s probably a good thing that Mozer, unlike Ohnuma, isn’t in a tenure track.

As amusing or depressing as they may be–reaction being in the mind of the reader–anecdotes of undergraduate antics should not be confused with hard data. There is no evidence that most US college students prioritize good barbeque, garden apartments or fitness centers. On the other hand, it is known that far too many are struggling to make tuition payments and feeling pressured into assuming unprecedented levels of undergraduate debt. To attribute the so-called amenities war to student-consumer demand is an unconscionable argument in victim blame.

Equally suspect is attributing the rising costs in higher education to antisocial behavior among university faculty and administrators. Although twice that of President Obama, the salary of University of Washington President Emmert falls significantly below the earnings (as salary, bonuses, stock options, benefits and sundry perks of the private jet variety) common among Fortune 500 CEO’s, not to mention movie stars, professional athletes, inside traders and the heads of international drug cartels. The notion of an aspiring millionaire pursuing a career in higher education administration would be as ludicrous as college credit for the South’s best barbeque, were it not being treated seriously in the press.

Similarly, faculty sloth is a fantasy of those who have neither earned doctoral degrees nor held positions in higher academe. A comprehensive study released this January by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that more than four out of five women and three out of four men currently in doctoral programs worry about the family friendliness of their career choices. Tenure track positions in research-intensive universities–the institutions granting doctoral degrees–have the worst reputation for balancing work and life. Slothful souls know not to apply at places like the hapless Ohmura’s Dartmouth College.

BEYOND THE MORALIZING

For those of us unconvinced by Seven Deadly Sins moralizing, it is time to address the root causes of the rising cost of American higher education. We need to look beyond the campus and its principal stakeholders, to the effects of two developments in the early 1980s. Preceded by a discussion of change in the US, these developments comprise the second part of this essay: “Unintended Consequences and Disinterestedness.”

not cheering just now,
dkb

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