East Carolina, Appalachian State, and Elizabeth City State University. You had a nice 230-year-run, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, but I’m sorry to say, it’s over.
And yet, even with all these horrible signs, I am hopeful.
What’s beneath the Bottom?
If higher education is meant to be a ladder to prosperity, the ladder doesn’t seem to reach very far and we have left out some of the rungs. Data compiled by Harvard economist Raj Chetty shows that colleges are largely stratified by socioeconomic class in terms of the students they admit. Only a few institutions in the country achieve a high “mobility rate,” moving students from the bottom 40 percent of income to the top 40 percent.6
Much of this mobility problem is rooted in how difficult it has become to navigate college for those who do not have access to the funds to pay for it. In Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, Sara Goldrick-Rab of Temple University and the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice shows how the byzantine system of federal and institutional aid prevents students from starting degree programs or finishing them once they’ve started. In one study, half of the 3,000 students Goldrick-Rab followed who enrolled in the University of Wisconsin system left college without a degree. They didn’t leave because they were incapable of handling the academic demands, but because there were too many hurdles in the way of securing the basic resources necessary to live while also attending school.
To continue a program of austerity in order to keep institutions afloat through the current pandemic crisis strikes me as beyond futile. What is worth preserving about this system? And perhaps more importantly, what exactly is left to cut? Colleges and universities now are like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, having had multiple limbs lopped off, keeps insisting, “It’s just a flesh wound!” But as Bryan Alexander, a trend tracker on higher education and the author of Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, observed in the immediate aftermath of school closures during the spring 2020 semester, “We’re out of fat. We’re cutting sinew, muscle, bone.”
We have come to the terminus of what Christopher Newfield, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and an expert on higher education institutional finances, calls “The Great Mistake,”7 the steady commercialization and privatization of our public colleges and universities. Having embraced the ethos of the market, we have managed to reduce the value of a postsecondary education entirely to its credential, while simultaneously leaving institutions starved of the revenue necessary to do their work.
Responding to this current crisis with the remedies of the past will consign a significant portion of institutions to a final demise. Those schools that are left behind will barely resemble what we once believed them to be, and they will turn many localities where they exist into ghost towns. Consider a school like the University of Wisconsin-Stout, which enrolls nearly 10,000 students while being situated in Menomonie, a town of 16,000 people. In many places like Menomonie, the local college or university is the town’s chief employer, its cultural center, and a technology hub for the residents who surround it. To allow these institutions to die or turn into virtual shells of their former selves would be an economic disaster. Consider a Midwest that has been both ravaged by deindustrialization and stripped of its regional higher education institutions. What will be left?
If this is not enough, the total student loan debt in the United States at the time I’m writing is over $1.6 trillion. It may be noticeably larger by the time you read this sentence. The drag on prosperity that amount of debt creates is incalculable.
And yet, even with all this I am hopeful. I am hopeful because now we have little choice but to act.
CHAPTER 2
Nowhere to Go but Up
One of the reasons I am hopeful about the future of public higher education is because the threats it is facing now are not new. In fact, the reason the current crisis is so threatening is because it has been building for over thirty years. It has been a slow-motion sabotage, and the remedies are well understood.
Sadly, though, there are signs that the lessons of the past have not yet been learned. Once anyone starts asking whether or not a college education is “worth it,” the inevitable end point is to reduce education to a dollars and cents return on investment (ROI), a mere credential needed for gainful employment.
The future of higher education as it is envisioned by the school of ROI is positively dystopian. Scott Galloway, an NYU marketing professor who has become a go-to voice on the future of higher education during the pandemic, sees a horizon where higher education for most people will be an almost entirely virtual experience, one where elite (primarily private) institutions will partner with giant tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to create online universities with expanded enrollments, swallowing up market share at the expense of less elite, small private schools and nonflagship public institutions.
Galloway has reduced education to its credential and decided that this is the thing of value that should be preserved; after all, the credential is what students are “buying.” If an MIT or Stanford credential can be earned online at a lower cost than an in-person degree at UCLA (Galloway’s alma mater), he believes it will be highly unlikely that students will choose UCLA.
Galloway recognizes this as a “reduction in humanity,” but by accepting the logic of competition and credentialing, he also sees it as an inevitable development, just another business opportunity for tech companies who need to go “big-game hunting” to justify their stock prices.1
Apple has to convince its stockholders that its stock price will double in five years, otherwise its stockholders will go buy Salesforce or Zoom or some other stock. Apple doesn’t need to double revenue to double its stock price, but it needs to increase it by 60 or 80 percent. That means, in the next five years, Apple probably needs to increase its revenue base by $150 billion. To do this, you have to go big-game hunting. You can’t feed a city raising squirrels. Those big-tech companies have to turn their eyes to new prey, the list of which gets pretty short pretty fast if you look at how big these industries need to be in that weight class. Things like automobiles. They’ll be in the brains of automobiles, but they don’t want to be in the business of manufacturing automobiles because it’s a shitty, low-margin business. The rest of the list is government, defense, education, and health care. People ask if big tech wants to get into education and health care, and I say no, they have to get into education and health care. They have no choice.
This type of world isn’t just in the future, either. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is currently working with the federal government to create something called the US Digital Service Academy, which is intended to rival Stanford and MIT in terms of funneling tech workers into government work focused on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, exactly the type of competition Galloway envisions.2
Galloway sees a future where all the resources flowing toward education will be privatized. Students will be instruments to juice the stock price of our wealthiest corporations. To get an education at all will mean consigning oneself to some period of service to corporate tech overlords.
This is not me doomsaying. This plan is dictated by the logic of the market and the absolute primacy of credentialing as the purpose of postsecondary education. Galloway believes there’s literally no other choice. According to his logic, colleges and universities are destined to go the way of department stores if they do not adapt to this new reality.
But what if there is an alternative?
A Fully Embodied Education
Scott
