A Pincer Movement in Higher Education

If wishes were horses... - image by Fibonnacci BlueRecently, in short succession I came accross two exposes on higher education in the United States: "The Long-Haul Degree," Patricia Cohen's April article for the New York Times about the hopeless economics of humanities PhDs, and then "College Dropout Factories," by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly for the Washington Monthly on the colleges with the worst graduation rates in the country.  In both cases students suffer from an information disparity before they embark on their education.  For very different reasons, many PhD candidates and low-income, high risk undergraduates are worth more to their institutions than the educations they are receiving.  These PhDs, earned in subjects that only allow for jobs in academia, take an average of over 9 year to obtain, yet afterwards finding any gainful employment proves elusive.  Meanwhile, the worst colleges in the country graduate less than fifteen percent of the students who enroll and treat incoming students as disposable assets that are easily replaced by fresh meat.  It is quite a system that fails to serve both the best and the most common equally- not quite the sort of equality we should aspire to.

I generally like to focus on policy's with concrete consequences and it's sort of abstract exactly what it means for a society to have less people pursuing incredibly arcane educations.  Does society suffer when it no longer supports obtaining comprehensive knowledge of something with no obvious application?  I hope we don't have to find out.  Universities that squeeze PhD students from both directions by prolonging their degree by forcing them to teach to support themselves and then cutting tenure track teaching positions because so many classes are taught by PhD students should spend some time trying to find another method of paying for doctoral programs.  Perhaps a necessary adjustment is under way and soon the widely understood fact that a PhD almost gaurantees of a life of penury will cure the glut of doctoral candidates.  I don't think that marginally increasing the job prospects of humanities PhDs rates among the highest of all societal priorities, but it is proof of the health of the whole.  Subsistence farming doesn't support a lot of people doing abstract, pure research- but we have built wealth enough to encourage these pursuits without stressing their viability.  That's a wonderful thing, and the world certainly would be poorer without that hard won knowledge.  So I hope they find a way to make a life of the mind viable again, because it is a sad testement to our dysfunction that working hard enough that you actually expand the pool of human knowledge isn't enough to gaurantee a livelyhood.

The problem of schools that are dropout factories has a larger effected population and a simpler solution: hold secondary schools that take federal money- which is to say all of them- to account when they are grossly failing their students.  Most schools in this country are only responsible to U.S. News and Weekly World Reports inane "ranking," which is arbitrary in its accounting even for the elite schools.  For the non-competitive schools that service the most disadvantaged students the ranking provides no insight whatsoever.  Our country has recently suffered a financial crisis in part due to incredibly flawed private ratings agencies and a similar bubble seems to be developing in our university system.  Many schools now use their financial aid as a recruitment tool by applying complex algorithyms and formulas to obtain the class that will rate the best in USN&WWR's ranking- even if it comes at the expense of need based aid.  Until we start with first principles about what exactly we are trying to achieve with all of the money we invest in higher education, we will fund a system that often fails to serve the best interests of the students. 

It has been pointed out that the percentage of the population with college degrees has been relatively constant since the 70s, which suggest that this is a natural level for college attainment.  However, today more that three in four students attempt college and yet we fail to graduate much more than we ever have.  I do not pretend to know exactly how many students really should get college degrees, but when most people try then I would expect most to succeed.  Getting a bachelors degree is an important life accomplishment, but not an exotic one.  For PhD aspirants or those who just want to access to a middle class that seems to require a college degree, we have failed too many, but it does feel like at least we have begun to acknowledge that we have a problem.  For alcholics and those drunk on the hubris of the "best university system in the world", that's the first step.