How do you define quality in higher education?
Why everyone should care about the state of academe
A little over a year ago, when I started this Substack, I envisioned a very different arc for the project. I thought that by weaning myself from the myth of a singular calling, properly grieving the transition away from academe, and turning to more affirming pursuits, such as rediscovering family roots and gardening, I might heal enough to create art again. But as Sarah Orne Jewett once counseled Willa Cather, art requires a quiet center. Marilyn Robinson indicated a similar sentiment when she confessed (at a reading I attended years ago) that she writes fiction longhand on her couch in various stages of repose, whereas she hammers out her essays at a desk while highly caffeinated.
Instead of easing comfortably into the literary life I imagined, I’ve found myself drawn increasingly back into the life I left: not as a teacher, but as a survivor who is still trying to understand what happened, what is still happening to the profession.
I care about these things because I was once a professor, but I find myself increasingly drawn back to them because I have three children. My eldest turned eleven in May, and she’ll be weighing her college options in six years, maybe sooner. I think about her when I read about the student mental health crisis. I worry about her peer group when I see plaintive missives like the one from Danial Arias-Aranda at the University of Granada describing an epidemic of apathy and disengagement among students that faculty refuse to address directly. Arias-Aranda himself doesn’t really address it in the classroom. He does what good teachers do: try to create a positive learning experience. But he feels that this is ultimately an act of deception. His final words to students are these: “[I]f you don't want to change, don't worry, we'll keep deceiving you, making you believe that you're doing very well.” Most parents know all too well that a lackluster peer group can overpower the best teaching in the world.
Even people without children ought to care about quality in higher education. The students graduating from college today will soon be performing surgery on us, handling our taxes and financial planning, even (God help us) teaching the next generation. Their preparation does not depend solely on the faculty in the Biology, Business, or Education departments — it is directly affected by the broader health of the institution. So it should matter to everyone when a whole cadre of librarians is demoted from being active scholars to belonging to a “service unit.”
The more I learn about the hollowing out of the university, the more I think this Twitter video of a dead beetle walking offers an apt metaphor, or at least a warning, of what these institutions might become. We could play a fill-in-the-blank game to identify the parasite hijacking the brain of the already-moribund university. But I think it would be more fruitful to salvage what we can of our intellectual tradition before it truly is an empty shell. I think your children deserve that as well as mine.
Take, for instance, the perennial debate about general education requirements, otherwise known as a “core,” that students see as a checklist or a series of annoying obstacles to get out of the way. Beth McMurtrie argues in a recent essay that traditional courses like surveys, which offer breadth of knowledge, need to be reimagined with the non-major in mind. Instead of being seen as an obstacle to graduation — a “lemon” in the curriculum — core requirements should be embraced as levers for better retention. Reshuffling the goals, so that disciplinary integrity takes a back seat to customer satisfaction, requires a centralized committee (the General Education Committee at Boston University) to vet courses.
The shift from breadth to more topical offerings reflects a shift from prioritizing the material itself to elevating particular skills. McMurtrie writes that Johns Hopkins University is “replacing the traditional distribution model of general ed with six foundational qualities that students must acquire, such as complex creative expression and ethical reasoning.” I’m sure that this creates a more efficient path to graduation for students and offers a more coherent narrative for the curriculum. It’s easier to highlight those qualities or skills in a job application than it would be to explain how taking an American literature survey has prepared you for work in industry. But it also means that whole swaths of human history and national heritage are relegated to electives or upper-level requirements in dwindling arts and humanities programs.
My recent post on Independence Day illustrates the point. Every example (including the songs at the end) comes from the sophomore-level American literature survey I used to teach. But several readers (all with PhDs) confessed that they’d never read the essays by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Frederick Douglass — and in some cases had never heard of those texts at all. I say this not to shame anyone, since my own blind spots are legion, but to illustrate the need for more literacy in the roots of American identity. I’d be surprised if Toby Keith could name four of the American Founders. But his ignorance doesn’t stop him from waxing righteous about what the “American way” ought to be. When colleges say that their core curriculum is an education in citizenship, building historical literacy is part of what they mean.
But there is almost no way for faculty to have honest conversations about which gen-ed model offers a superior education in the current climate because programs and sometimes individual faculty have a vested interest in how those requirements drive enrollment. As a newly-minted Ph.D., I found this turf-bound mentality disheartening. But by the end of my tenure, while serving as a department chair, I understood it all too well. Gen-ed requirements create winners and losers among departments because they drive demand, which drives staffing. And if an institution repurposes general education to bolster retention, it implicitly admits that business takes precedence over traditional disciplines.
Faculty make considerable sacrifices to acquire their disciplinary expertise — years of their life and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in forfeited wealth. They feel understandably protective of their content. They bought it with a price. And so the dynamic is not unlike the scene in Office Space where two downsizing experts admonish a gathering of terrified employees to think, “What is good for the company?” Not one employee cares about that. Everyone is wondering whether they’ll be left standing after the “right-sizing” is done. If Chris Luecke is right that companies would do well to consider what every employee’s equivalent to Milton Waddams’s “red stapler” is, then this is even more true of universities, who don’t have to speculate at all about what their faculty care about most.
As a parent I care about the gen-ed curriculum because I see it as a reliable measure of quality in education. How many of those “core” requirements must actually be completed at the institution? How many of them can be satisfied with transfer credit from summer classes or online coursework at institutions with demonstrably more lenient requirements? Institutions willing to bend their rules in this way and thereby offer a discount by making graduation possible a semester or two early are betraying their financial desperation and encouraging students to adopt a transactional approach to their education. That’s not the kind of peer group I’d choose for my children if they asked for my advice. But the landscape of higher education is changing so rapidly that it’s hard to predict what it will look like even five years from now.
If you think these are simple questions, try having a conversation with someone about the markers of a quality education. How do you define educational quality? How do you know it when you see it? What do you accept as evidence of quality?
I used to ask prospective students this question when they would meet with me. Overwhelmingly they saw quality as defined by personal relationships with faculty. Are my professors available to help me when I’m struggling? Do they genuinely care about my success? Most of these young people didn’t care where their professors earned their degrees, how many peer-reviewed papers they’d published, or whether they were seen as leaders in their disciplines. Personal care and attention was everything.
For other students, institutional reputation is the most salient marker of quality. It doesn’t matter what goes on behind the curtain, so long as a degree from Harvard or Yale carries a penumbra of prestige or wealth, like a Nike swoosh. Others point to the power of a university network as a marker of quality. If you make it past the gatekeepers, you’re initiated into a community of self-perpetuating privilege. This was true for Tara Westover: admission to Brigham Young connected her with a professor who handpicked her for a program at Cambridge, and her Cambridge mentor wrote the letter that opened the door to Harvard. Which isn’t to say that she wasn’t up to the challenges along the way, so much as to say that if she’d toiled away at a community college or institution with a less powerful network, she might have topped out well below her current role.
It is striking how out of step the credentialing process for professors is with these public perceptions. A PhD is no marker of networking prowess, nor is it any guarantee of emotional availability to students. Above all, a terminal degree signifies mastery of a discipline. Publication is one way to demonstrate that mastery. Teaching is another. Both are reliable markers of educational quality and professional sophistication, depending on whether one wants to study under a leading expert or an exceptional guide. But neither form of expertise is germane to what young people seem to want out of their college educations. And if this is true, the argument for a traditional gen-ed curriculum misses the point.
So instead of asking what kinds of courses ought to count for graduation, maybe universities ought to be looking at how they produce the professionals who teach those courses. A Ph.D. is not necessary for teaching entry-level job skills. It’s also true that you don’t have to write a dissertation to be capable of teaching complex creative expression or ethical reasoning. So why are people still writing dissertations? It seems that neither parents nor prospective students want that level of disciplinary mastery in their teachers, at least not in the teachers providing a core curriculum. Institutions are increasingly willing to accommodate those preferences, which could mean that the Ph.D. is losing its cachet in the very sector where it represents the highest level of expertise. Whether this is a sad commentary on the state of American colleges and universities or not depends on your own definition of quality in education.
I’m going to be sitting with this post for awhile Josh. Thank you.
An early thought as the mother of a daughter about to start her junior year - and my apologies for being off topic.
Location was incredibly important to me in helping my daughter think about school choice. I was worried about her access to reproductive healthcare not only during her undergraduate studies but if she stayed for graduate school or found a job. This was something we talked a lot about.
Now I would also be concerned about attending a school where state legislatures are seeking to restrict academic freedoms.
These are along side the weighty questions you pose for sure but also feel tangled up in ways I’m still not awake enough to be coherent about.
I perceive my graduate years, mid-80s to early 90s, as coming more or less midpoint between what I'll here call the *old* university and the current situation you describe so well. I began teaching still imagining the possibility of doing it in that old environment and ended it, very recently, in a profession I never would have been drawn to enter to begin. That's a statement loaded with possible understandings and misunderstandings, but what's important in my making it now is the profundity of the change it suggests, and how well we understand it. Smaller point before my larger: my extended, interrupted undergraduate education was at the urban, commuter, City University of New York, decades ago. Institutionally, *then*, there existed no notable, empathetic involvement in the personal needs or success of individual students. The institution did not come to the student; the student came to the institution. Students succeeded, mostly on the basis of their own resources capable of employing university resources. That is, it was pretty much like the rest of life. To the extent that we have different expectations now at the college level that we may think we fail, it's crucial to understand all the conditions for those different expectations. Larger point: if we call it "general education" or refer to a "core," the fundamental questions are general education in what, core learning in or of what and why is the university or liberal arts college necessarily the place for that to go on. I don't think there is anywhere near the necessary clarity and coherence in addressing those questions either institutionally or socially .