Thank you both for this! I'm 34 and still pretty much an idealist, so at the moment I believe in staying in academia and "leading the fight". The challenges in higher ed are different here in the third world but many of the consequences are similar: a huge drain of talent and a watering down of the curriculum to fit the decaying interest of a generation of students who for the most part no longer believe college education to be the great advantage their parents taught them.
Ouch, Alejandro -- it sounds hard to stay idealistic in that environment. What do you teach? And where? I'm wondering if faculty are better compensated in other countries, though my sense is that the UK and France have many of the same problems.
"I think the real conundrum is that neither conservatives nor progressives believe in higher education as an institution anymore." Boom.
To put a finer point on it, if I may, many conservatives do not believe in higher education as a road to self-exploration; the subset who are into the Great Books-like tradition are, but often with a predetermined set of outcomes (e.g., worship of free-market economics, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan). On the whole, the conservative mindset is bent on dismantling public higher education just as it has gutted public K-12 education. Whatever good is preserved, is for a select few.
On the "progressive" side, there doesn't seem to be any agreement on what the point of higher education is; most anything that smacks of being "higher" in any way, is hierarchical and therefore guilty of every kind of -ism and banished. Many (most?) on this side don't believe in higher education as the institution it once was, because that was bad. They believe in defending it, but that defense can have a detectable self-serving component to it: save it because it's my paycheck and my haven.
I had exactly the kind of education the writers had, in an honors program at a public urban university. I think it still happens, and can happen, in myriad places. But my biggest concern is that the Great Shakeout has now begun in higher ed (Google "St. Cloud State" for the latest) and the good faculty who make higher education worthy of the name will be sloughed off by the hundreds and thousands.
Yes, the self-serving defense of higher ed (or of certain programs) is unfortunate. This is most painful when it creates a Hunger Games effect among faculty. We were asked to eliminate an unspecific number of majors in order to prevent the admin from using "blunt instruments." The willingness of faculty to vote colleagues' programs off the island, even in the absence of any clear rationale for how those programmatic cuts (without actual staff cuts) would help the budget shortfall, still haunts me. It was the final straw for me. And I think that was the strategy -- to create as unattractive a work environment as possible, so some folks would voluntarily leave (see Milton in Office Space). As a result, that institution has never been forced to issue a devastating press release like the one about St Cloud.
I remain idealistic in the sense that I believe a humanities education has lifelong benefits that aren't always predictable, but that do translate into more mobility if paired with applied skills, such as those that internships or on the job training provide. But I can't really make a case for those benefits in an environment when college costs as much as a home. All I can really say is that the current narrowing of programs and the feedback loops that influence student demand are not objective truths about higher ed, even if they are unavoidable market realities in the present climate. What's needed for a healthier model is enough shared belief in institutions to make college affordable again.
What a brilliant conversation. Thank you for giving me so much to think about this morning. Almost 7 years ago, I returned to higher ed after 10 years away, only to find that everything has changed. I’m not on tenure track, thankfully, and now I have a son attending the same university where I teach. His perspective has been such a valuable lens on the young people that I teach and the institution where I work. I’ve jotted six pages of notes in response to your conversation so rather than subject them to you here I will probably be writing a post on this soon. meanwhile, so glad to find Liz’s Substack and I look forward to learning more from her.
Can't wait to see your post, Julie! Six pages of notes -- wow...
I have come to accept that investing in a humanities degree makes little sense financially if significant debt is involved. But there is a domino effect when the cost continues to rise. The higher the financial risk, the more everyone wants a sure financial return. If college were more affordable, I think more career pathways and lifeways would open up. I'm still stubbornly trying to make the humanities my life's work.
It's interesting. Even though architecture has a practical (veering toward vocational) side, I've always been more drawn to the humanities aspects of it. As for affordability, some of our strongest undergrad students are transfers after two years at community college. And still they work many hours a week to be able to afford college -- and this is a state university. The transfer of wealth upwards over the past few decades has really f***ed higher ed funding. I can't believe people fell for Reagan and Bush's tax schemes -- which saddled states (many w/ constitutions requiring balanced budgets) with paying for everything, all without raising taxes. "Read my lips," indeed.
I completely understand the new(ish) model of transferring credits from community college to a school with more brand recognition. The only thing an employer sees is the degree granting institution.
However, this illustrates what is fundamentally broken about the system. As a faculty leader, I participated in more than one overhaul of the core curriculum. There was a lot of thought put into a developmental sequence from first year to fourth year. And as director of the first-year seminar, I tried to map that curriculum intentionally onto other gen ed requirements that students would take in their second and third years. But all of that is moot when someone transfers credits in from other institutions that don't have the same outcomes or level of rigor. And we ended up assessing students for accreditation purposes at the junior and senior level, drawing conclusions about the efficacy of our curriculum, when they'd satisfied half of it elsewhere. That makes a mockery of assessment.
If my friend and colleague Jason is reading this, I want him to know I mean no disrespect to community colleges, where there are many fine and dedicated teachers (I taught at two community colleges and was impressed by my students). However, as a department chair I also reviewed many proposals for preapproved credit for courses that would satisfy our major requirements, and these were typically online courses or summer courses that had less than half the required reading and formal writing of one of our regular offerings. Not to mention the courses that students take for college credit in high school.
I recognize that there are necessary compromises, but as a professor I also cared deeply about the integrity of our programs. There was nothing "core" about a curriculum that could be satisfied almost entirely with transfer credits. And you can't easily meet the learning outcomes that you have painstakingly designed with your colleagues if students jump in midway through the sequence.
The ironies only deepen when we think about how everything is geared toward industry. Would companies onboard someone who had received a hodgepodge of training elsewhere? Would the military accept a recruit who had completed someone else's boot camp? How amenable are law schools or medical schools to transfer credits -- i.e., can you do half of your med school at Acme State U and then trade up to Harvard, so you graduate as a Harvard MD? The transactional nature of all of this, and the obvious sacrifice of quality for the sake of credentialing students rather than educating them is very difficult to stomach. Yet I realize that this is another byproduct of outrageous cost. There can be no rationale for tightening these policies while students are paying what they are now.
Excellent points. I wonder if you're lamenting the loss of coherence in your carefully designed curriculum, as well as (in most cases, not all) quality. We may have it a bit easier, since grad school is (or used to be, until quite recently, but that's a whole other post) required for eventual licensure. Which gives us more time to shape young architects. But you're absolutely right, we are constantly obsessing over our curriculum. It's particularly challenging for grad school admissions, when people apply from all different undergrads that also have different curricula and quality levels. Since I don't exactly have a dog in this fight, I tend to go with the flow of diversity being a strength. But you make a great point about med school and the military, vis the transactional nature of credentialing. Architecture school has long struggling against the lure of vocational training, so maybe I'm jaded or too used to this tension.
With much respect for both of you; I'm much more optimistic; this feels a lot like hand-wringing over "what's the world coming to these days!," I think it's not nearly as bad a picture as you paint it: as Chesney would say just "a little messed up but we're all alright."
I'm at least your generation academically, perhaps a bit older. Landed my first TT job at a giant midwestern school in the late 1990s, attended a large state school as and undergraduate (U Montana; U Oregon) and graduate student (UNC), now Full in Sociology at a well-respected southern private school. I see two tensions here. First, from a student experience perspective, I think little has changed in the mix of rigor, intellectual opportunity or overt focus on getting a job since the 70s and 80s and arguably the opportunities for intellectual and artistic engagement are richer than many of us see (b) the historical portrait you paint is rooted in the very selective experience of students like us who went on to get PhDs - something only 2% of the population does -- and then the even smaller set who go on to use that PhD as professors . That's multiple layers of selectivity that colors the way we see the college experience that is likely not representative of the experience of most students. (in fairness; I'd argue none of us old farts have any good day-to-day insights into the social lives of students, with perhaps the exception of faculty living in student houses).
On the first point - that students have ample opportunity for rigorous intellectual experiences -- take a moment to listen to the things our students do outside our own narrow classes (which we see too closely and recognize too well all that we are leaving out). I have students who are engaged across the liberal arts -- my last term (teaching one historical theory course and a second specialized data analytics course) I had a brilliant student leading a new Fashion club, another organizing a new modern dance troupe, others deeply engaged in mock-trial/legal competitions. I have students who are developing new AI tools for helping hearing impaired, students who combined their passion for sport with my analytic class to create a tool for predicting how passing patterns in basketball favor one team over another. It seems they are all involved in either club or formal sport. The class was diverse and the people interesting (though we are seeing the loss of male students more each semester; my theory class was 80% female).
The writing of the worst students was terrible and coaxing a good paper in the end was like pulling teeth and I know she didn't love it (a literal response from that student: "... I actually didn't hate the class like I thought I would..."). But the writing of the *best* students? Outstanding; arguably better than mine (certainly better than mine in the time frame and other-class pressure they had ). These students clearly read widely and care deeply; and they are learning to think well. They seek out challenging classes because they want to be challenged and find them. Most of them will go on to probably do work that is significantly less intellectual than a PhD; they will go into finance; medicine, law & business. That's great. A handful will seek out deeper intellectual engagement as PhDs, but that will be (and should be) rare. My classes at a large midwestern university were different in quantity more than quality - I had more disinterested students and the mean engagement was lower; but there were always a handful that cared and wanted more.
And that's the second point. Our experiences were selective. I was just down the road from Liz at U Oregon in the late 80s, early 90s. Students were focused on majors that got them jobs -- education, business, pre-professional. Most were more interested in the party than the class and in trying to get the degree and get out (echoes of the Indigo girls? "..Got my paper and I was free"). I took a different tack (and I imagine most who go on to our line of work were similar) majored in a "useless" degree that my dormmates thought was nuts (Philosophy). But when I found faculty that had rigorous courses, I took everything they offered, read the recommended reading, some of those faculty became important mentors to me and helped me find academics as a career. I discovered the magic of wandering the stacks of the library and university bookstores.
Students who want that type of education can still find it; they have always been able to find it and I have no qualms recommending college. Where they go is (and I think always has been) less important than what they do while they are there. Universities still have good bookstores; the library stacks are still open (though easy electronic journal access has limited the wandering). I'm reasonably sure more than a few are staying up all night puffing a little smoke and arguing over ideas. The soundtrack and fashion have changed; but that's the cover not the text.
The key is that the things about the university that truly bother us -- the rise of adjuncts; the political pushes from left and right; fights between faculty and unionizing graduate students, burnout, etc.-- all of which are deep challenges that need addressed, are pretty irrelevant to most undergraduates. They have such a myopic (in a good way!) view of what the university is for and how it works, I think most of it largely passes over them.
I'm an eternal optimist on these things, admittedly, and not naive about the problems that exist. But students (who want it) getting a good education? I think that's the least of our problems.
Thanks so much for this nuanced note, Jim! I agree with much of what you say. This is perhaps your most essential point: "Students who want that type of education can still find it; they have always been able to find it and I have no qualms recommending college." However, I cannot agree that there has been little cultural change in how institutions are run since our undergraduate days, how resources are allocated, or how the core mission is implemented.
I'll take just a few points, not wishing to fulminate too much. But how can it not impact the student experience if more than 70% of college instructors are non-tenure track or if their tenured professors are burned out? Sure, many non-TT faculty are excellent teachers, they can only maintain excellence so long while being overworked and underpaid. This is not to mention the problem of externalities. Penn State (my local institution) depends on an army of faculty who are paid $35-42K for grinding students through first-year requirements with a 6-7 course teaching load. That's less than I was paid as a visiting assistant professor in 2005. The wage inequity between those faculty and those on the TT is demonstrably unfair, but the bottom line depends on it. Maybe some students are oblivious to it the way consumers don't think about how their coffee is sourced, but I think we can expect better of our institutions.
This is not to mention the problems of access that continue to widen privilege gaps. This piece in the NY Times also illustrates how college admissions has changed dramatically since our time. This is not an environment in which first-gen students like us with minimal family support can afford the most rigorous education. I don't know how the demographics at your institution look now, compared to what they were in the 80s and 90s, but I'd be curious? I suspect that your university is less class diverse than it once was, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Finally, your point about university bookstores made me chuckle. My former employer closed its brick and mortar bookstore about ten years ago and replaced it with a retail space for merch. This created all manner of headaches for ensuring that students had required texts for classes, but it also meant that there was no place on campus, other than the library, for students to explore beyond their required reading. Even the library was culling its stacks -- relying more on interlibrary loan and meeting students at clear points of need. Could a student still seek and find the unending conversation there? Assuredly yes. But to claim that nothing has fundamentally changed about the environment would be sadly incorrect.
I am, however, heartened to know that there are people like you still bringing passion and purpose to the classroom. May it continue to be so.
Fair; I'm sure there's some trickle down and it's ultimately and empirical question that I don't have the data to answer for the general case.
But from my own experience as an undergraduate, most of my first year courses at UM/UO were taught by graduate students and adjuncts back in 1989. It was the same at UNC and OSU when I was graduate student / new faculty - the majority of classroom hours (sans perhaps the giant 200+ intro lecture that was taught by TT faculty, tho the real work was in the sections) were done by the army of graduate students who were put in the classroom their second year. So I don't think it's a qualitative change in the menu at most universities -- full fledged, TT track teaching hasn't been the dominate offering at most universities for most of our lifetimes.
AAUP says that the shift from 1987 to 2021 was from 39% to 24% in full time TT positions (link at bottom, won't let me embed). Glass half full or half empty? That's a drop of ~38%, but it was only just over a third to start with! I'd imagine that variable costs and enrollment numbers has shifted the balance of students/post-docs vs. adjuncts, but that data's even harder to find.
Admissions is a different kettle of fish. When I went to UM my first year it was open admissions for all Montana graduates; I literally walked in the front door on opening day without having applied and they had to take me because I graduated in state (because turned out I couldn't afford the university I was accepted into and Charlie wouldn't hire me back at the fire crew if I didn't go to college that fall!). I imagine that's impossible today and costs are pushing out the bottom end of the 1st gen spectrum (but to be fair that's not a problem about what kids learn when they are here).
On admissions, Duke is an admittedly odd case that I wouldn't pretend to generalize from - we are fully need-blind with a hard wall between the admissions side and the financial aid side. The number of students needing financial aid has increased steadily - due to both increases in costs and broader admissions -- but our overall population has trended somewhat less affluent over the years (which has put tremendous strain on the financial aid system, actually), but according to a recent exhibit at the library looks like about 10% of students are first generation.
Sad about the bookstore; that sucks. Maybe I'll make a library crawl one of my new assignments to help prime the pump...
Fair points. We had different undergraduate experiences. I only had one adjunct instructor that I know of at my private college -- everyone else was fully tenured and fully invested in the life of the college beyond the classroom. I think the shift in ratio is felt more keenly in these smaller residential environments.
We had a sweet deal with the Forest Service. That's how I paid off all my debts almost immediately (in addition to Pell Grants). But it's another example of how federal support has dropped while the sticker price has risen. I haven't checked, but I'd be shocked if that student requisition program still existed. So we enjoyed a true rarity: affordable tuition with generous federal aid and even more generous federally-subsidized summer employment! Perhaps that has also skewed my perspective on what should be possible. My first-gen students in Iowa had nothing remotely comparable to that kind of support.
Good to hear that Duke is doing what it can to keep the door open to students like us. Grinnell College has a similar system. So there are some points of light, and I appreciate the reminders.
“the very selective experience of students like us who went on to get PhDs - something only 2% of the population does -- and then the even smaller set who go on to use that PhD as professors” This is very true! I had to go through a big mindset shift when I started my own laboratory, realizing that the people I was training weren’t ME—they were themselves, with different motivations and backgrounds. It sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get it!
Not everyone's perspective on higher education and students is equivalent. My son did his M.S. at your well-respected Southern private school, and there's multiple layers of selectivity in place there that would color your perspective of the student experience vs. what it's like elsewhere in 2024.
This is also true of the entire college experience. For example, college bookstores are a shadow of what they once were across the nation. If you've got one that has as wide a range of books (not just texts) as it did 30 years ago, thank your lucky stars. Everyone else's bookstores got outsourced and bought out and pithed. My own students at the University of Georgia are looking for those folks who are supposed to be staying up all night puffing and arguing, but that's not campus culture anymore, and they end up in my office and we talk for hours.
I think students often get a good education these days. The overproduction of Ph.D.s for the past 55 years should have ensured that. What they don't get is a *transformative* education in most cases, because that's scary to everyone from their parents to the CEOs who run our institutions to pleasure their boards.
It's a good question, and one worthy of proper study. It's possible that algorithms on LinkedIn create the same echo chambers we see elsewhere, but many of my readers are international, and we've drawn some European participants to our LinkedIn roundtables for academics transitioning to industry. From what I understand anecdotally, the UK and France are both experiencing similar cultural shifts, both in what students expect from their education and in how universities are remaking themselves to satisfy that demand. Administrative bloat is a problem everywhere, and the student engagement problems post Covid seem universal. Alejandro's comment above suggests the same.
In the UK it's very similar. Underfunding, everything focused on employment and industry--as you say, fixing something, making something, providing something. Humanities subjects have been under attack for some time now and programmes close regularly. I left the UK HE system in 2017 & this direction was very clear. Everything was about 'added value' and partnerships with business/industry. Even subjects like my own - nursing - started to become the rote teaching of tasks and procedures, because that's all the employers want. Almost everything else was squeezed out of the curriculum for an increase in 'skills' learning. Shortsighted and stupid. I don't recognise the preparation for my own profession anymore.
How interesting, June, that a path like nursing would have been narrowed. Are you saying that humanities elements were stripped from it, or other more nuanced forms of learning?
One of my dreams has always been to teach humanities at a medical school, but I realize that many of those programs are also cash-strapped and driven by corporate imperatives. It seems that there is always a cycle where the business mindset takes over and then there's a cultural backlash demanding more humanity in health care. This was the subject of my dissertation, how the deep distrust of scientific physicians in the 19th century was transformed -- partly by heroic cures like vaccines, but also by storytellers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made a persuasive case for science in popular forms.
Yes, the humanities have really been stripped away, as irrelevant would you believe. Some of us fought long and hard to get 'medical' humanities into the curriculum so it's galling to see it disappear in favour of task performance. One of the things we fought so hard for when nursing became a degree entry profession, was that this gave us an opportunity to diversify the curriculum and take advantage of being taught in universities by utilising input from other faculties. But we were a minority. Nursing wanted the status of degree preparation but not the broadened education that it should require. It's an interesting period really, preparation going into universities in the nineties, but mostly at Diploma level, with some unis going straight for Degree level (suffering allegations of elitism), and it didn't become mandatory for degree level education until the early 20teens. Ever since then there has been a constant battle against those who blame all the ills of the NHS on nurses who don't care enough because they 'do degrees' and 'it's not necessary for nursing'. When the regulator was adamant about keeping entry at degree level then employers started to develop lower level roles with skills based preparation. It avoids the cost of university fees and they can be paid less. It's a short-termism nightmare. Nursing must be the only safety critical profession where everyone (including quite a lot of nurses) think that better education is a bad thing. Bit of a rant, sorry.
Whew, this was tough to read and think about, which means I see these pressures, too, and am sad for what my kids will get (private dorm bedrooms and bathrooms?) and not get (browsable bookstores).
I agree with James Moody that undergrads (including me) were also focused on career prep in the 80s, but it felt like my private northwestern university prioritized my growth as a person; the job search was my business. Now that that’s inverted, I think most people will sacrifice the vague “whole person” agenda for the clear and practical vocational one. When universities give up the intellectual vision, it’s a rare and privileged student (supported by parents) who will keep it.
On the other hand, I feel we’re also talking with some nostalgia about Kantian disinterest and therefore the aesthetics of a certain kind of education. But “disinterest” in the Kantian tradition has always been “interested” (a class privilege).
I am sad and nostalgic about changes in higher education, and also suspicious of my nostalgia.
Damn, Tara, now you're making me think that I'm being all Jim Burden about higher ed! Exactly right to question nostalgia. I own some of that in my anecdote about my undergraduate school, which was an oasis and a bit of a bubble in that way. But most of us who attended that little college in the 90s felt that it delivered on nearly everything the residential liberal arts experience promised. It's one reason I was initially quite happy at my private employer in Iowa. I'd like my kids to have that kind of experience, but I have to realize, as Jim Moody also points out, that they aren't me and will probably be looking for something different than I was. So I think the first job as a parent is to listen carefully to what my kids say they want and then to support the hell out of them. If they want my thoughts, I'll have thoughts to offer. But I'll try to check my inner Polonius! (
Haha! I think if my kids stumble into a high-quality culture of project-based learning, that will be the best thing in today’s HE scene. PBL gets praise and publicity and awards, aligning student optimism (for solving real problems) with learning and achievement. Done well, it teaches them to work with others. There will be books they haven’t read and art they haven’t seen, but if they leave college confident in their abilities and ideals, they’ll have motivation to keep learning.
I do think the drop in pleasure-reading is a concern, and colleges need to assign real books that delight.
I'm not opposed to any learning model that prioritizes discovery. Ownership is key to education that has any chance of sticking.
Even so, I balk a little at this: "There will be books they haven’t read and art they haven’t seen, but if they leave college confident in their abilities and ideals, they’ll have motivation to keep learning." I don't know -- a lot of my motivation to keep filling gaps in my learning came from the invitation I got from professors in those distributional core courses. I'd never have read Dante otherwise, and I wonder what a project-based approach to Paradise Lost might be? Or whether that would be rather beside the point of most literature? My students grew to love archival research because of some assignments I gave them, but first they had to have read books deeply enough to care about investigating them.
There are also questions about citizenship. Many of my views about the liberal arts only make sense as extensions of the rationale for quality public education. Before 1850, say, the liberal arts were the price of admission to positions of privilege and influence. The average citizen didn't read the classics. The more we make the case for practical outcomes as the reason for college, the more we cede the argument about a shared culture as part of citizenship. But I also know that there is almost no consensus about what "culture" means, or what a shared culture might be, and in this regard I think George Packer is right that there are at least four different Americas with pretty irreconcilable ideologies. So citizenship is contested space, not a collaboration.
I'm surprised that tenured professors have it tough. I got a friend who taught three times a week, had summers free, took long sabbaticals both at home and in Europe, enjoyed lifetime security, a high salary, tremendous prestige, gold plated healthcare, and retired at 54. Something tells me they didn't have a hard time filling his vacancy : )
Your friend's experience was a rarity. I'm not sure where he taught or in what discipline, but chances are good that his position wasn't replaced at all. If it was, odds are that he was replaced by a lecturer. In any event, this post is less about tenured faculty than it is about the conditions our kids will encounter in college.
Thank you both for this! I'm 34 and still pretty much an idealist, so at the moment I believe in staying in academia and "leading the fight". The challenges in higher ed are different here in the third world but many of the consequences are similar: a huge drain of talent and a watering down of the curriculum to fit the decaying interest of a generation of students who for the most part no longer believe college education to be the great advantage their parents taught them.
Ouch, Alejandro -- it sounds hard to stay idealistic in that environment. What do you teach? And where? I'm wondering if faculty are better compensated in other countries, though my sense is that the UK and France have many of the same problems.
"I think the real conundrum is that neither conservatives nor progressives believe in higher education as an institution anymore." Boom.
To put a finer point on it, if I may, many conservatives do not believe in higher education as a road to self-exploration; the subset who are into the Great Books-like tradition are, but often with a predetermined set of outcomes (e.g., worship of free-market economics, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan). On the whole, the conservative mindset is bent on dismantling public higher education just as it has gutted public K-12 education. Whatever good is preserved, is for a select few.
On the "progressive" side, there doesn't seem to be any agreement on what the point of higher education is; most anything that smacks of being "higher" in any way, is hierarchical and therefore guilty of every kind of -ism and banished. Many (most?) on this side don't believe in higher education as the institution it once was, because that was bad. They believe in defending it, but that defense can have a detectable self-serving component to it: save it because it's my paycheck and my haven.
I had exactly the kind of education the writers had, in an honors program at a public urban university. I think it still happens, and can happen, in myriad places. But my biggest concern is that the Great Shakeout has now begun in higher ed (Google "St. Cloud State" for the latest) and the good faculty who make higher education worthy of the name will be sloughed off by the hundreds and thousands.
Here's a link to the St Cloud State story for the curious.
https://www.startribune.com/st-cloud-state-to-eliminate-nearly-100-programs-57-faculty-in-latest-cuts/600364121/
Yes, the self-serving defense of higher ed (or of certain programs) is unfortunate. This is most painful when it creates a Hunger Games effect among faculty. We were asked to eliminate an unspecific number of majors in order to prevent the admin from using "blunt instruments." The willingness of faculty to vote colleagues' programs off the island, even in the absence of any clear rationale for how those programmatic cuts (without actual staff cuts) would help the budget shortfall, still haunts me. It was the final straw for me. And I think that was the strategy -- to create as unattractive a work environment as possible, so some folks would voluntarily leave (see Milton in Office Space). As a result, that institution has never been forced to issue a devastating press release like the one about St Cloud.
I remain idealistic in the sense that I believe a humanities education has lifelong benefits that aren't always predictable, but that do translate into more mobility if paired with applied skills, such as those that internships or on the job training provide. But I can't really make a case for those benefits in an environment when college costs as much as a home. All I can really say is that the current narrowing of programs and the feedback loops that influence student demand are not objective truths about higher ed, even if they are unavoidable market realities in the present climate. What's needed for a healthier model is enough shared belief in institutions to make college affordable again.
What a brilliant conversation. Thank you for giving me so much to think about this morning. Almost 7 years ago, I returned to higher ed after 10 years away, only to find that everything has changed. I’m not on tenure track, thankfully, and now I have a son attending the same university where I teach. His perspective has been such a valuable lens on the young people that I teach and the institution where I work. I’ve jotted six pages of notes in response to your conversation so rather than subject them to you here I will probably be writing a post on this soon. meanwhile, so glad to find Liz’s Substack and I look forward to learning more from her.
Can't wait to see your post, Julie! Six pages of notes -- wow...
I have come to accept that investing in a humanities degree makes little sense financially if significant debt is involved. But there is a domino effect when the cost continues to rise. The higher the financial risk, the more everyone wants a sure financial return. If college were more affordable, I think more career pathways and lifeways would open up. I'm still stubbornly trying to make the humanities my life's work.
It's interesting. Even though architecture has a practical (veering toward vocational) side, I've always been more drawn to the humanities aspects of it. As for affordability, some of our strongest undergrad students are transfers after two years at community college. And still they work many hours a week to be able to afford college -- and this is a state university. The transfer of wealth upwards over the past few decades has really f***ed higher ed funding. I can't believe people fell for Reagan and Bush's tax schemes -- which saddled states (many w/ constitutions requiring balanced budgets) with paying for everything, all without raising taxes. "Read my lips," indeed.
I completely understand the new(ish) model of transferring credits from community college to a school with more brand recognition. The only thing an employer sees is the degree granting institution.
However, this illustrates what is fundamentally broken about the system. As a faculty leader, I participated in more than one overhaul of the core curriculum. There was a lot of thought put into a developmental sequence from first year to fourth year. And as director of the first-year seminar, I tried to map that curriculum intentionally onto other gen ed requirements that students would take in their second and third years. But all of that is moot when someone transfers credits in from other institutions that don't have the same outcomes or level of rigor. And we ended up assessing students for accreditation purposes at the junior and senior level, drawing conclusions about the efficacy of our curriculum, when they'd satisfied half of it elsewhere. That makes a mockery of assessment.
If my friend and colleague Jason is reading this, I want him to know I mean no disrespect to community colleges, where there are many fine and dedicated teachers (I taught at two community colleges and was impressed by my students). However, as a department chair I also reviewed many proposals for preapproved credit for courses that would satisfy our major requirements, and these were typically online courses or summer courses that had less than half the required reading and formal writing of one of our regular offerings. Not to mention the courses that students take for college credit in high school.
I recognize that there are necessary compromises, but as a professor I also cared deeply about the integrity of our programs. There was nothing "core" about a curriculum that could be satisfied almost entirely with transfer credits. And you can't easily meet the learning outcomes that you have painstakingly designed with your colleagues if students jump in midway through the sequence.
The ironies only deepen when we think about how everything is geared toward industry. Would companies onboard someone who had received a hodgepodge of training elsewhere? Would the military accept a recruit who had completed someone else's boot camp? How amenable are law schools or medical schools to transfer credits -- i.e., can you do half of your med school at Acme State U and then trade up to Harvard, so you graduate as a Harvard MD? The transactional nature of all of this, and the obvious sacrifice of quality for the sake of credentialing students rather than educating them is very difficult to stomach. Yet I realize that this is another byproduct of outrageous cost. There can be no rationale for tightening these policies while students are paying what they are now.
Excellent points. I wonder if you're lamenting the loss of coherence in your carefully designed curriculum, as well as (in most cases, not all) quality. We may have it a bit easier, since grad school is (or used to be, until quite recently, but that's a whole other post) required for eventual licensure. Which gives us more time to shape young architects. But you're absolutely right, we are constantly obsessing over our curriculum. It's particularly challenging for grad school admissions, when people apply from all different undergrads that also have different curricula and quality levels. Since I don't exactly have a dog in this fight, I tend to go with the flow of diversity being a strength. But you make a great point about med school and the military, vis the transactional nature of credentialing. Architecture school has long struggling against the lure of vocational training, so maybe I'm jaded or too used to this tension.
Thanks for the post!
With much respect for both of you; I'm much more optimistic; this feels a lot like hand-wringing over "what's the world coming to these days!," I think it's not nearly as bad a picture as you paint it: as Chesney would say just "a little messed up but we're all alright."
I'm at least your generation academically, perhaps a bit older. Landed my first TT job at a giant midwestern school in the late 1990s, attended a large state school as and undergraduate (U Montana; U Oregon) and graduate student (UNC), now Full in Sociology at a well-respected southern private school. I see two tensions here. First, from a student experience perspective, I think little has changed in the mix of rigor, intellectual opportunity or overt focus on getting a job since the 70s and 80s and arguably the opportunities for intellectual and artistic engagement are richer than many of us see (b) the historical portrait you paint is rooted in the very selective experience of students like us who went on to get PhDs - something only 2% of the population does -- and then the even smaller set who go on to use that PhD as professors . That's multiple layers of selectivity that colors the way we see the college experience that is likely not representative of the experience of most students. (in fairness; I'd argue none of us old farts have any good day-to-day insights into the social lives of students, with perhaps the exception of faculty living in student houses).
On the first point - that students have ample opportunity for rigorous intellectual experiences -- take a moment to listen to the things our students do outside our own narrow classes (which we see too closely and recognize too well all that we are leaving out). I have students who are engaged across the liberal arts -- my last term (teaching one historical theory course and a second specialized data analytics course) I had a brilliant student leading a new Fashion club, another organizing a new modern dance troupe, others deeply engaged in mock-trial/legal competitions. I have students who are developing new AI tools for helping hearing impaired, students who combined their passion for sport with my analytic class to create a tool for predicting how passing patterns in basketball favor one team over another. It seems they are all involved in either club or formal sport. The class was diverse and the people interesting (though we are seeing the loss of male students more each semester; my theory class was 80% female).
The writing of the worst students was terrible and coaxing a good paper in the end was like pulling teeth and I know she didn't love it (a literal response from that student: "... I actually didn't hate the class like I thought I would..."). But the writing of the *best* students? Outstanding; arguably better than mine (certainly better than mine in the time frame and other-class pressure they had ). These students clearly read widely and care deeply; and they are learning to think well. They seek out challenging classes because they want to be challenged and find them. Most of them will go on to probably do work that is significantly less intellectual than a PhD; they will go into finance; medicine, law & business. That's great. A handful will seek out deeper intellectual engagement as PhDs, but that will be (and should be) rare. My classes at a large midwestern university were different in quantity more than quality - I had more disinterested students and the mean engagement was lower; but there were always a handful that cared and wanted more.
And that's the second point. Our experiences were selective. I was just down the road from Liz at U Oregon in the late 80s, early 90s. Students were focused on majors that got them jobs -- education, business, pre-professional. Most were more interested in the party than the class and in trying to get the degree and get out (echoes of the Indigo girls? "..Got my paper and I was free"). I took a different tack (and I imagine most who go on to our line of work were similar) majored in a "useless" degree that my dormmates thought was nuts (Philosophy). But when I found faculty that had rigorous courses, I took everything they offered, read the recommended reading, some of those faculty became important mentors to me and helped me find academics as a career. I discovered the magic of wandering the stacks of the library and university bookstores.
Students who want that type of education can still find it; they have always been able to find it and I have no qualms recommending college. Where they go is (and I think always has been) less important than what they do while they are there. Universities still have good bookstores; the library stacks are still open (though easy electronic journal access has limited the wandering). I'm reasonably sure more than a few are staying up all night puffing a little smoke and arguing over ideas. The soundtrack and fashion have changed; but that's the cover not the text.
The key is that the things about the university that truly bother us -- the rise of adjuncts; the political pushes from left and right; fights between faculty and unionizing graduate students, burnout, etc.-- all of which are deep challenges that need addressed, are pretty irrelevant to most undergraduates. They have such a myopic (in a good way!) view of what the university is for and how it works, I think most of it largely passes over them.
I'm an eternal optimist on these things, admittedly, and not naive about the problems that exist. But students (who want it) getting a good education? I think that's the least of our problems.
Thanks so much for this nuanced note, Jim! I agree with much of what you say. This is perhaps your most essential point: "Students who want that type of education can still find it; they have always been able to find it and I have no qualms recommending college." However, I cannot agree that there has been little cultural change in how institutions are run since our undergraduate days, how resources are allocated, or how the core mission is implemented.
I'll take just a few points, not wishing to fulminate too much. But how can it not impact the student experience if more than 70% of college instructors are non-tenure track or if their tenured professors are burned out? Sure, many non-TT faculty are excellent teachers, they can only maintain excellence so long while being overworked and underpaid. This is not to mention the problem of externalities. Penn State (my local institution) depends on an army of faculty who are paid $35-42K for grinding students through first-year requirements with a 6-7 course teaching load. That's less than I was paid as a visiting assistant professor in 2005. The wage inequity between those faculty and those on the TT is demonstrably unfair, but the bottom line depends on it. Maybe some students are oblivious to it the way consumers don't think about how their coffee is sourced, but I think we can expect better of our institutions.
This is not to mention the problems of access that continue to widen privilege gaps. This piece in the NY Times also illustrates how college admissions has changed dramatically since our time. This is not an environment in which first-gen students like us with minimal family support can afford the most rigorous education. I don't know how the demographics at your institution look now, compared to what they were in the 80s and 90s, but I'd be curious? I suspect that your university is less class diverse than it once was, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/college-admissions-applications.html
Finally, your point about university bookstores made me chuckle. My former employer closed its brick and mortar bookstore about ten years ago and replaced it with a retail space for merch. This created all manner of headaches for ensuring that students had required texts for classes, but it also meant that there was no place on campus, other than the library, for students to explore beyond their required reading. Even the library was culling its stacks -- relying more on interlibrary loan and meeting students at clear points of need. Could a student still seek and find the unending conversation there? Assuredly yes. But to claim that nothing has fundamentally changed about the environment would be sadly incorrect.
I am, however, heartened to know that there are people like you still bringing passion and purpose to the classroom. May it continue to be so.
Thanks Joshua!
Fair; I'm sure there's some trickle down and it's ultimately and empirical question that I don't have the data to answer for the general case.
But from my own experience as an undergraduate, most of my first year courses at UM/UO were taught by graduate students and adjuncts back in 1989. It was the same at UNC and OSU when I was graduate student / new faculty - the majority of classroom hours (sans perhaps the giant 200+ intro lecture that was taught by TT faculty, tho the real work was in the sections) were done by the army of graduate students who were put in the classroom their second year. So I don't think it's a qualitative change in the menu at most universities -- full fledged, TT track teaching hasn't been the dominate offering at most universities for most of our lifetimes.
AAUP says that the shift from 1987 to 2021 was from 39% to 24% in full time TT positions (link at bottom, won't let me embed). Glass half full or half empty? That's a drop of ~38%, but it was only just over a third to start with! I'd imagine that variable costs and enrollment numbers has shifted the balance of students/post-docs vs. adjuncts, but that data's even harder to find.
Admissions is a different kettle of fish. When I went to UM my first year it was open admissions for all Montana graduates; I literally walked in the front door on opening day without having applied and they had to take me because I graduated in state (because turned out I couldn't afford the university I was accepted into and Charlie wouldn't hire me back at the fire crew if I didn't go to college that fall!). I imagine that's impossible today and costs are pushing out the bottom end of the 1st gen spectrum (but to be fair that's not a problem about what kids learn when they are here).
On admissions, Duke is an admittedly odd case that I wouldn't pretend to generalize from - we are fully need-blind with a hard wall between the admissions side and the financial aid side. The number of students needing financial aid has increased steadily - due to both increases in costs and broader admissions -- but our overall population has trended somewhat less affluent over the years (which has put tremendous strain on the financial aid system, actually), but according to a recent exhibit at the library looks like about 10% of students are first generation.
Sad about the bookstore; that sucks. Maybe I'll make a library crawl one of my new assignments to help prime the pump...
https://www.aaup.org/article/data-snapshot-tenure-and-contingency-us-higher-education#.Zjo7J3bMKUk
https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/first/intro
Fair points. We had different undergraduate experiences. I only had one adjunct instructor that I know of at my private college -- everyone else was fully tenured and fully invested in the life of the college beyond the classroom. I think the shift in ratio is felt more keenly in these smaller residential environments.
We had a sweet deal with the Forest Service. That's how I paid off all my debts almost immediately (in addition to Pell Grants). But it's another example of how federal support has dropped while the sticker price has risen. I haven't checked, but I'd be shocked if that student requisition program still existed. So we enjoyed a true rarity: affordable tuition with generous federal aid and even more generous federally-subsidized summer employment! Perhaps that has also skewed my perspective on what should be possible. My first-gen students in Iowa had nothing remotely comparable to that kind of support.
Good to hear that Duke is doing what it can to keep the door open to students like us. Grinnell College has a similar system. So there are some points of light, and I appreciate the reminders.
“the very selective experience of students like us who went on to get PhDs - something only 2% of the population does -- and then the even smaller set who go on to use that PhD as professors” This is very true! I had to go through a big mindset shift when I started my own laboratory, realizing that the people I was training weren’t ME—they were themselves, with different motivations and backgrounds. It sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get it!
Not everyone's perspective on higher education and students is equivalent. My son did his M.S. at your well-respected Southern private school, and there's multiple layers of selectivity in place there that would color your perspective of the student experience vs. what it's like elsewhere in 2024.
This is also true of the entire college experience. For example, college bookstores are a shadow of what they once were across the nation. If you've got one that has as wide a range of books (not just texts) as it did 30 years ago, thank your lucky stars. Everyone else's bookstores got outsourced and bought out and pithed. My own students at the University of Georgia are looking for those folks who are supposed to be staying up all night puffing and arguing, but that's not campus culture anymore, and they end up in my office and we talk for hours.
I think students often get a good education these days. The overproduction of Ph.D.s for the past 55 years should have ensured that. What they don't get is a *transformative* education in most cases, because that's scary to everyone from their parents to the CEOs who run our institutions to pleasure their boards.
Is this mostly an American phenomenon? What has been happening in peer developed countries?
It's a good question, and one worthy of proper study. It's possible that algorithms on LinkedIn create the same echo chambers we see elsewhere, but many of my readers are international, and we've drawn some European participants to our LinkedIn roundtables for academics transitioning to industry. From what I understand anecdotally, the UK and France are both experiencing similar cultural shifts, both in what students expect from their education and in how universities are remaking themselves to satisfy that demand. Administrative bloat is a problem everywhere, and the student engagement problems post Covid seem universal. Alejandro's comment above suggests the same.
In the UK it's very similar. Underfunding, everything focused on employment and industry--as you say, fixing something, making something, providing something. Humanities subjects have been under attack for some time now and programmes close regularly. I left the UK HE system in 2017 & this direction was very clear. Everything was about 'added value' and partnerships with business/industry. Even subjects like my own - nursing - started to become the rote teaching of tasks and procedures, because that's all the employers want. Almost everything else was squeezed out of the curriculum for an increase in 'skills' learning. Shortsighted and stupid. I don't recognise the preparation for my own profession anymore.
How interesting, June, that a path like nursing would have been narrowed. Are you saying that humanities elements were stripped from it, or other more nuanced forms of learning?
One of my dreams has always been to teach humanities at a medical school, but I realize that many of those programs are also cash-strapped and driven by corporate imperatives. It seems that there is always a cycle where the business mindset takes over and then there's a cultural backlash demanding more humanity in health care. This was the subject of my dissertation, how the deep distrust of scientific physicians in the 19th century was transformed -- partly by heroic cures like vaccines, but also by storytellers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made a persuasive case for science in popular forms.
Yes, the humanities have really been stripped away, as irrelevant would you believe. Some of us fought long and hard to get 'medical' humanities into the curriculum so it's galling to see it disappear in favour of task performance. One of the things we fought so hard for when nursing became a degree entry profession, was that this gave us an opportunity to diversify the curriculum and take advantage of being taught in universities by utilising input from other faculties. But we were a minority. Nursing wanted the status of degree preparation but not the broadened education that it should require. It's an interesting period really, preparation going into universities in the nineties, but mostly at Diploma level, with some unis going straight for Degree level (suffering allegations of elitism), and it didn't become mandatory for degree level education until the early 20teens. Ever since then there has been a constant battle against those who blame all the ills of the NHS on nurses who don't care enough because they 'do degrees' and 'it's not necessary for nursing'. When the regulator was adamant about keeping entry at degree level then employers started to develop lower level roles with skills based preparation. It avoids the cost of university fees and they can be paid less. It's a short-termism nightmare. Nursing must be the only safety critical profession where everyone (including quite a lot of nurses) think that better education is a bad thing. Bit of a rant, sorry.
This is discouraging, June, but it's symptomatic of an era of revenue optimization and optimizing everything but the human element.
Whew, this was tough to read and think about, which means I see these pressures, too, and am sad for what my kids will get (private dorm bedrooms and bathrooms?) and not get (browsable bookstores).
I agree with James Moody that undergrads (including me) were also focused on career prep in the 80s, but it felt like my private northwestern university prioritized my growth as a person; the job search was my business. Now that that’s inverted, I think most people will sacrifice the vague “whole person” agenda for the clear and practical vocational one. When universities give up the intellectual vision, it’s a rare and privileged student (supported by parents) who will keep it.
On the other hand, I feel we’re also talking with some nostalgia about Kantian disinterest and therefore the aesthetics of a certain kind of education. But “disinterest” in the Kantian tradition has always been “interested” (a class privilege).
I am sad and nostalgic about changes in higher education, and also suspicious of my nostalgia.
Damn, Tara, now you're making me think that I'm being all Jim Burden about higher ed! Exactly right to question nostalgia. I own some of that in my anecdote about my undergraduate school, which was an oasis and a bit of a bubble in that way. But most of us who attended that little college in the 90s felt that it delivered on nearly everything the residential liberal arts experience promised. It's one reason I was initially quite happy at my private employer in Iowa. I'd like my kids to have that kind of experience, but I have to realize, as Jim Moody also points out, that they aren't me and will probably be looking for something different than I was. So I think the first job as a parent is to listen carefully to what my kids say they want and then to support the hell out of them. If they want my thoughts, I'll have thoughts to offer. But I'll try to check my inner Polonius! (
Haha! I think if my kids stumble into a high-quality culture of project-based learning, that will be the best thing in today’s HE scene. PBL gets praise and publicity and awards, aligning student optimism (for solving real problems) with learning and achievement. Done well, it teaches them to work with others. There will be books they haven’t read and art they haven’t seen, but if they leave college confident in their abilities and ideals, they’ll have motivation to keep learning.
I do think the drop in pleasure-reading is a concern, and colleges need to assign real books that delight.
I'm not opposed to any learning model that prioritizes discovery. Ownership is key to education that has any chance of sticking.
Even so, I balk a little at this: "There will be books they haven’t read and art they haven’t seen, but if they leave college confident in their abilities and ideals, they’ll have motivation to keep learning." I don't know -- a lot of my motivation to keep filling gaps in my learning came from the invitation I got from professors in those distributional core courses. I'd never have read Dante otherwise, and I wonder what a project-based approach to Paradise Lost might be? Or whether that would be rather beside the point of most literature? My students grew to love archival research because of some assignments I gave them, but first they had to have read books deeply enough to care about investigating them.
There are also questions about citizenship. Many of my views about the liberal arts only make sense as extensions of the rationale for quality public education. Before 1850, say, the liberal arts were the price of admission to positions of privilege and influence. The average citizen didn't read the classics. The more we make the case for practical outcomes as the reason for college, the more we cede the argument about a shared culture as part of citizenship. But I also know that there is almost no consensus about what "culture" means, or what a shared culture might be, and in this regard I think George Packer is right that there are at least four different Americas with pretty irreconcilable ideologies. So citizenship is contested space, not a collaboration.
I'm surprised that tenured professors have it tough. I got a friend who taught three times a week, had summers free, took long sabbaticals both at home and in Europe, enjoyed lifetime security, a high salary, tremendous prestige, gold plated healthcare, and retired at 54. Something tells me they didn't have a hard time filling his vacancy : )
Your friend's experience was a rarity. I'm not sure where he taught or in what discipline, but chances are good that his position wasn't replaced at all. If it was, odds are that he was replaced by a lecturer. In any event, this post is less about tenured faculty than it is about the conditions our kids will encounter in college.
Got it. And he was a communications prof specializing in business.