It is not just the economic
climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines
what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
In 2003, only two colleges
charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, room, and board. Six years
later more than two hundred colleges charged that amount. What happened between
2003 and 2009 was the start of the recession. By driving down endowments and
giving tax-starved states a reason to cut back their support for higher
education, the recession put new pressure on colleges and universities to raise
their price.
When our current period of
slow economic growth will end is anybody’s guess, but even when it does end,
colleges and universities will certainly not be rolling back their prices.
These days, it is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and
universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they
operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
If corporatization meant only
that colleges and universities were finding ways to be less wasteful, it would
be a welcome turn of events. But an altogether different process is going on,
one that has saddled us with a higher-education model that is both expensive to
run and difficult to reform as a result of its focus on status, its view of
students as customers, and its growing reliance on top-down administration.
This move toward corporatization is one that the late University of Montreal
professor Bill Readings noted sixteen years ago in his study, The
University in Ruins, but what has happened in recent years far exceeds the
alarm he sounded in the 1990s.
Rank Tyranny
The most visible sign of the
corporatization of higher education lies in the commitment that colleges and
universities have made to winning the ratings war perpetuated by the kinds of
ranking U.S. News and World Report now offers in its annual “Best
Colleges” guide. Since its relatively modest debut in 1983, the “Best Colleges”
guide has grown in influence. For any number of small colleges, getting
traction from the “Best Colleges” guide may be a dream, but for a wide range of
middle-tier and upper-tier colleges and universities, winning a good “Best
Colleges” ranking is considered so essential to success that it shapes internal
policies.
Robert Morse, who heads the
team that makes up the college and university rankings for U.S. News, says
the “Best Colleges” guide never sought to shape higher education policy, but
that claim no longer matters. Colleges and universities continue to do whatever
they can to boost their U.S. News ranking, especially when it comes
to whom they admit.
It is now a standard practice
for many schools to solicit applications from students who have done well on
their SAT tests, even though they know there is no room for most of these
students. Admissions officers don’t mind this waste of their time. The more
students a college or university gets to reject, the higher it is ranked on the
all-important U.S. News selectivity scale. Having a student body with
impressive SAT scores is great; having a student body with impressive SATs and
rejecting more applicants than a rival is better still. The closer a college or
university comes to Harvard’s nationwide low of taking just 5.9 percent of its
applicants, the happier parents are.
Instead of backfiring, the
make-it-as-hard-as-possible-to-get-in strategy has pushed more and more high
school students to go to extremes to win the attention of admissions officers.
Recent cheating scandals at New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School and
the Great Neck high schools on Long Island’s Gold Coast show how desperate even
“gifted” high school students are these days. Everyone is telling them they
need to find an edge. Middle-class families as well as the rich are as a result
spending thousands of dollars to hire private college advisers, SAT tutors, and
sports coaches for their college-age sons and daughters.
The students who succeed in
getting into our highest-ranked colleges and universities are thus far
wealthier than the population as a whole. At elite schools, 74 percent of the
student body come from the top quarter of the socioeconomic scale, while just 3
percent come from the bottom quarter. What follows from this skewed demographic
pattern is a second layer of college spending. In the eyes of college
administrators, students, especially those who are not on scholarship, have
become customers who need to feel satisfied with the campus experience bought
for them at prices that now top $50,000 per year at many elite schools.
Food courts, spa-like athletic
facilities, and elaborate performing-arts centers are increasingly common on
college and university campuses. Whether this emphasis on the amenities is much
more than a throwback to such a nineteenth-century Harvard extravagance as
having a student room come with extra space for a valet to live is open to
debate, but not open to debate is how so many colleges and universities with
four-year residential campuses have increased spending for student services
that on a percentage basis outpace their increases in academic instruction and
financial aid.
Equally telling, winning the
higher-education prestige battle no longer involves just changing the internals
of college and university life. Prestige—and with it the prospect of new cash
infusions—also comes these days from increasing educational market share. We
are currently witnessing the rise of the imperial university with campuses
around the globe, particularly and ironically in countries with authoritarian
regimes willing to invest in a brand-name university. As of 2010, thirty-eight
American schools had sixty-five branches in thirty-four countries, all with the
authority to grant degrees.
Colleges and universities that
don’t have a foreign campus worry about getting left behind. As Brown
University’s outgoing president, Ruth Simmons, complained in an interview she
did for the Brown Alumni Magazine, “Our competitors are internationalizing
at a much faster rate than we are. As a consequence, they are making themselves
more attractive on the global stage.”
Not all university officials
are as candid as Simmons, but what they are willing to give up in order to open
a foreign campus is considerable. In starting its new campus in Singapore, Yale
University has not only ignored protests by its faculty over civil rights
abuses there. It has also ignored the warnings of Human Rights Watch, which
classifies Singapore as a “textbook example of a politically repressive state.”
New York University, which has
started a campus in Abu Dhabi, where free speech is also limited, has been
equally cavalier about the toll its venture will take, but there is no doubt
about who is ignored as NYU builds its global empire. Half of NYU’s faculty,
compared to 20 percent at Columbia or Harvard, is part time, and scanty
financial aid leaves the average NYU graduate with $35,000 in debt (the average
college debt is $23,000 nationwide).
The Rise of the Administrators
Not surprisingly, those
administrators who occupy the highest ranks in our college and university bureaucracies
are those who have professionally benefited the most from corporatization.
Running a corporatized college or university is not easy. The professor who
takes time out from teaching and research to devote him- or herself to
administration for a few years increasingly is an anachronism. A new, permanent
administrative class now dominates higher education. At the top are the college
and university presidents who earn a million dollars or more a year and serve
on numerous corporate boards (Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, earned a reported $1.38 million in a single year from
her multiple directorships). Thirty-six private college and university
presidents, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, fall into the
million-dollars-a-year category, and many more are close behind.
Not surprisingly, those
administrators who occupy the highest ranks in our college and university
bureaucracies are those who have professionally benefited the most from
corporatization.
A still bigger change in how
higher education is managed lies in its growing number of administrators in its
ranks. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, the leading authority on this
subject, has pointed out, administrators have become a greater presence in
colleges and universities while faculty have been in decline. Between 1998 and
2008, private colleges increased their spending on instruction by 22 percent
while they increased their spending on administration and staff support by 36
percent.
If we go further back in time,
the rise in administrators becomes even more striking. In the last forty years
the number of full-time faculty at colleges and universities has grown by 50
percent—in line with increases in student enrollment—but in this same period
the number of administrators has risen by 85 percent and the number of staffers
required to help the administrators has jumped by a whopping 240 percent. Small
wonder, then, that so many policy decisions at colleges and universities are
made without—or despite—faculty input.
Small wonder, too, that when
colleges and universities think of economizing, their target is all too often
those who are already their most vulnerable employees—part-time faculty and
service workers. The administrators who run our leading colleges and
universities are unwilling, the record shows, to downsize themselves. In the
1970s, 67 percent of faculty were tenured or on a tenure track. Today that
figure is down to 30 percent, and for those who run higher education such a low
number is ideal. Whether they are adjuncts or teaching assistants (TAs), those
without the claim to permanent jobs cost less and are easy to get rid of in a
period of contraction. Unionization efforts by teaching assistants in graduate
programs at public universities throughout the country have rectified some of
the worst abuses in what is in essence an academic temp system. But the TA
union successes have not changed the fact that, at our largest universities, an
academic underclass is at work: the faculty having the greatest amount of
contact with individual students are those on the lowest rung of the academic
ladder.
The corporatization of higher
education has placed similar burdens on the employees who do the brunt of the
janitorial and food-service work. In the case of food-service workers, whose
median wage in 2010 was $17,176, these burdens are often made even worse
because the workers are actually hired by a contractor, whom the school then
pays. This hiring distinction is an artificial one that simply adds a
bureaucratic layer, but colleges and universities like it. Hiring through a
contractor allows them breathing room when, as is bound to happen, their
workers complain about their wages and benefits and win the support of students
and faculty. The schools can then promise to deal with the contractor while
insisting that they are caught in the middle of a crisis not of their making.
This claim of being trapped is
a fig leaf worth paying attention to, however. It reminds us that those
responsible for the corporatization of our colleges and universities are aware
that they face limits on their own power. Whether they will be able to erode
these limits further, as they seem to want, or forced to deal with a pushback
is an unanswered question. “It is easy to criticize the corporatization of
education,” social critic Thomas Frank warned in a Harper’s essay, (“The
Price of Admission,” June 2012). “But criticizing it is actually different from
halting its progress—a political step we seem unable to take.”
Beyond the GI Bill
The corporatization of higher
education began to take its present form in the early 1980s at the same time
Ronald Reagan was dominating American politics. U.S. News’s “Best
Colleges” guide came into existence then, as did the willingness of college and
universities to increase their prices at a faster rate than the cost of health
care or inflation was rising. In an age of deregulation, a built-in restraint
that had been in place for years was suddenly gone, and no effective resistance
movement by parents and politicians rose to counteract it.
Today, by contrast, critiques
of higher education abound. Columbia University literature professor Andrew
Delbanco’s book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be has won
widespread praise within the academic world for its old-fashioned defense of
liberal education and its insistence that today’s students are being betrayed
by being “relentlessly rehearsed and tested until winners are culled from the
rest.” Criticism from within colleges and universities by professors such as
Delbanco, even when accompanied by union organizing, is still limited, though,
in the actual reform it can bring about.
For starters, faculty are
going to have to take back much of the power they have surrendered over the
years to professional administrators to see real change.
In addition, the federal
government will also need to play a bigger role in higher education. The
Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which in the middle of the Civil War gave the
states federal land they could sell and use to start state universities, was
transformative. The GI Bill, which Franklin Roosevelt signed into law in the
summer of 1944 while the Second World War was still going on, opened up
educational opportunity for the nation’s military. By 1947, veterans accounted
for 49 percent of the students in American colleges and undid the Great
Depression notion that higher education was only for the rich.
Barack Obama, faced with
Republican and Tea Party opposition at every turn, has acted cautiously with
respect to higher education. At a time when, according to the Education
Department and the Consumer Protection Bureau, outstanding student loan debt is
over $1 trillion, the president has nibbled at the edges of reform, calling for
keeping down the interest rate on student loans and insisting that colleges and
universities need to make their actual costs clearer to families. But the Obama
administration’s caution should not be a guide for the future.
According to a 2011 Pew
Research Survey, 75 percent of Americans believe college is too expensive.
There has never been a better time for proposing major reform in higher
education. Allowing students to pay for their college educations by having a
small percentage of what they earn following graduation deducted from their
income tax could make a difference in reducing the burden of student debt, and
so could a loan-forgiveness system that allowed students to write off their
government loans in exchange for working at a public service job, such as high
school teaching, at subsistence wages for the same number of years they were in
college.
The only thing out of the
question when it comes to higher education is continuing to do business as
usual.
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