The US has been a leader in higher education since the Massachusetts legislature founded Harvard College in 1636, six years after the Puritans landed and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The US built the world’s first mass university system with the creation of land-grant universities via the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. They mixed the world’s two most successful models of higher education — the German research university and the Oxbridge residential college — into a uniquely powerful synthesis in the 1890s.
The 20th century has seen the US invent the high-tech research park, the multiversity, the commuter college and, cynics might add, the university as a hedge fund.
Illustration: Louise Ting
In many respects, the US remains the global pacemaker today. US universities occupy 19 of the top 30 slots in this year’s Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the world’s universities. The US has by far the largest concentration of Nobel Prize winners. Nine of the top 10 richest universities are in the US (the odd one out is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia).
Harvard University’s top ranking on that list, with an endowment of more than US$50 billion, did not prevent Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel (and a voluble critic of academic leftism), from writing a check for US$300 million.
Yet behind this glittering facade of Nobel Prizes and gargantuan gifts, the US university system is beginning to molder. The problem is not just a few glitches here and there. That is to be expected in a giant system. It is that vital elements in a healthy academic system are failing at the same time.
Prices continue to rise. A year at Cornell University now costs nearly US$90,000. Administrative bloat is rampant. Yale University now has the equivalent of one administrator for every undergraduate student. Federal student debt has reached US$1.6 trillion, 60 percent more than credit card debt.
Enrollment has fallen by 1.4 million since the COVID-19 pandemic began, with no end in sight with the waning of the pandemic. A majority of Americans now consider a college degree a questionable investment.
Life within many universities no longer resembles the bucolic ideal that Americans of a certain age remember. A tiny tenured elite sits on top of a mass of toiling temporary workers who move from one short-term assignment to the next and frequently end up unemployed — the world’s most highly educated lumpenproletariat.
The biggest US strike last year was conducted by 48,000 workers at the University of California, the state’s third-largest employer. The representation of these workers by the United Auto Workers union is symbolic as well as noteworthy. The US university sector increasingly looks like the country’s auto industry in the 1970s, just before it was taken apart by the Japanese — hampered by a giant bureaucracy, contemptuous of many of its workers and congenitally inward-looking.
How can the US prevent one of its most successful industries going the way of once-dominant General Motors?
Answers to this question tend to fall into two categories — the complacent and the disruptive. The complacent argue that the US needs more generous public subsidies. US President Joe Biden wants the federal government to forgive billions of dollars in student debt in a one-off bonanza while also tweaking the rules for student financing to make the system more generous.
However, quite apart from the likelihood that this proposal will not survive a review by the conservative US Supreme Court, it does nothing to address — and will probably exacerbate — the underlying problem of cost inflation.
The disruptive say that the US needs to reinvent higher education in the light of new technology. Former Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who is most famous for his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, cowrote another intriguing book, The Innovator’s University, about how the university was the latest example of an industry that was about to be revolutionized by a disruptive technology that could shrink prices and revolutionize access.
Yet the revolution has still not come. Education is a quintessentially human process that ideally centers on the same thing as it did in Socrates’ day — the spark of inspiration leaping from one mind to another. Technology can help, but it can never replace the human touch.
The best way to reform US higher education is to take the four principles that have shaped the university sector from the very beginning and bring them back into a healthy balance.
The US has taken the first two principles — democratization and marketization — too far. They need to be reined in.
It has also faltered in its support for the third and fourth principles — meritocracy and freedom of speech. It needs to redouble its support for the third and demonstrate that the fourth is nonnegotiable.
The democratic principle has triumphed: More Americans than ever before have attended university, but this triumph has exacted a heavy cost not only in college debt, but in the neglect of noncollege paths to success.
In Germany, practical-minded children have a clear road to success through technical colleges and apprenticeships. In the US, they are increasingly left with nowhere to go.
LEAVING MANY BEHIND
Thirty-nine million Americans drop out of college without finishing their degree, leaving them in the worst of both worlds — student debt without a sheepskin — and suggesting that college-for-all is an inherently foolish idea.
Defenders of the current university-focused system point out that US universities contain all manner of vocational schools under their capacious roof, but is it sensible to put vocational education in a realm in which many practical-minded students fear to tread and professors are chosen for their publication record rather than their teaching ability?
Democratization might have been an excuse for bundling up lots of different educational functions that might be better off delivered through diverse and dedicated institutions, as in Germany. It is time at least to experiment with a new model.
The traditional counterpoise to democratization was marketization, which was supposed to help pay the bills while keeping the “ivy towers” rooted in the ground.
Marketization has certainly paid big dividends. The US model of linking schools to local tech firms, pioneered by Stanford University, is envied and imitated across the world, but it has also generated waste — schools compete to build expensive sports complexes or hire star professors (who are always on sabbatical) to attract “customers” and boost their rankings.
US universities have also imported some of the worst qualities of mature companies: exorbitant CEO pay, a bloated middle management, a habit of treating nontenured faculty as precarious workers rather than candidates for membership of a learned society and, to the chagrin of conservatives who naively imagined that marketization might tame the tenured radicals who dominate the faculties, all the expensive paraphernalia of the woke corporation.
The number of administrators has grown with a speed that would astonish even General Motors’ middle managers of the 1970s. Stanford University’s army of managerial and professional staff leapt from 8,984 in 2019 to 11,336 in 2021.
Universities need to borrow some of the tougher techniques from the private sector, as well as softer ones such as increasing presidents’ pay. How about “downsizing” some of those middle managers, “re-engineering” some of those administrative processes and focusing on “core competences” like teaching?
They also need to prevent new administrative staff from taking over functions that should be reserved for academics, most importantly selecting students and staff, and defining the ethos of the institution.
The combination of democracy and marketization is weakening a third defining principle of a successful university — meritocracy.
Elite universities continue to favor the offspring of donors (actual or prospective) by providing preferential admissions for the children of alumni or practitioners of plutocratic sports, such as fencing or lacrosse. At the same time, they favor certain ethnic groups through policies of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Worryingly, a growing number of universities are making SAT tests, which were introduced in the 1930s in the name of meritocracy, optional while keeping legacy preferences intact.
SAT tests are a valuable way of discovering hidden talent in poorer children from nonacademic backgrounds. True, elite parents can improve their children’s SAT scores through coaching, but this problem can be addressed by providing coaching for everyone or by using SAT tests to compare people from similar economic backgrounds.
Giving more emphasis to more subjective measures such as academic grades, extracurricular activities and teachers’ reports invariably tilts the selection process in favor of richer students and favored ethnic or social groups.
New York Times journalis Jacques Steinberg’s classic study The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College paints a stomach-turning picture of admissions officers making life-changing decisions on the basis of raw prejudice and social snobbery.
Without the backup of universally administered objective tests. it will be harder to hold admissions officers to account for decisions that affect the spending of public money, as well as the shaping of the future elite’s character.
FREE SPEECH
The most dangerous threat of all is to the principle of free speech. There is an uncomfortable number of examples of students shouting down invited speakers — most recently, law school students at Stanford University shouted down a former US president Donald Trump-appointed federal judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the school’s Federalist Society chapter.
The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) estimates that there were 877 attempts from 2014 to last year to punish academics for the expression of ideas that are protected by the US constitution.
The threat to freedom of speech goes deeper than overt bullying. In On Liberty, British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that freedom of speech can only flourish if there is a diversity of opinion.
However, that diversity is squeezed out in US universities. Left-of-center academics vastly outnumber their right-of-center colleagues, and the left is shifting ever more to the left.
In one recent survey, most conservative academics told pollsters that they encounter a “hostile environment” for their beliefs while about half of left-wing and centrist academics admit that they would discriminate against Trump supporters or conservatives.
The US Department of Education’s bureaucracy is by its own lights wedded to a highly questionable notion of equality — equality of results (“equity”) rather than equality of opportunity — yet about 20 percent of academic jobs require candidates to sign Education Department-imposed statements.
In 2018, the University of California, Berkeley, weeded down a list of 894 applicants for five jobs in the life sciences to a short-list on the basis of gender and racial diversity statements alone, in a worrying example of academics ceding the selection process to the ascendant managerial class.
ECHO CHAMBERS
Universities must not only stand firm against attempts to shout down speakers, but also make sure that they do not become echo chambers in which unconventional views (which these days usually means conservative or libertarian views, but also means gender-critical feminism) are not given an airing at all.
Although a rebalancing of the fundamental principles of higher education might sound like an unrealistic demand, signs of progress are popping up on all fronts. Some powerful voices are questioning higher edugation’s monopoly over “good jobs.”
Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit founded by former McKinsey consultant Byron Auguste, who served in the administration of former US president Barack Obama, writes that the US obsession with degree certificates is creating “a paper ceiling” for people who have acquired skills by other routes, a ceiling that is particularly damaging to members of ethnic minorities.
Some leading high-tech companies have dropped the degree requirements for some positions, as has the state of Maryland. University newspapers such as the Yale Daily News are full of outraged stories about the sheer number of academic bureaucrats.
Groups of Asian-Americans, such as those who brought a Supreme Court case against Harvard University’s affirmative action program, are rallying behind meritocracy in general, and the SAT and other objective tests in particular, on the grounds that more subjective systems of assessment are excuses for anti-Asian prejudice.
The best news might be the (albeit belated) rallying behind freedom of speech.
Stanford Law School dean Jenny Martinez has produced a robust defense of the principle of free speech and insisted that all students should henceforth be obliged to attend a training session on free speech and the norms of the legal profession.
A new faculty-led organization at Harvard University has vowed to defend academic freedom. (Harvard ranks 170th out of 203 schools in FIRE’s free speech rankings.)
Cornell University has decided to make free expression — its significance, history and challenges — its featured theme for discussion in the next academic year.
“It is critical to our mission as a university to think deeply about freedom of expression and the challenges that result from assaults on it, which today come from both ends of the political spectrum,” Cornell University president Martha Pollack said.
A long period of pell-mell growth has pulled the higher education sector badly out of shape.
Let us hope the coming years of retrenchment will allow universities to rein back some of their excessive enthusiasms (for adding numbers and unleashing market forces) while at the same time reinforcing their commitment to the foundational liberal principles of meritocracy and freedom of speech.
Yale’s Latin motto is “lux et veritas.” At a time when the world is confronted with dark clouds of misinformation from foreign autocracies and click-mad social media platforms, US universities need to show that they are on the side of light and truth.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former writer at The Economist.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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