Michael D. Smith's False Prophecy for Higher Education

Photo by Jean-Baptiste D. on Unsplash

I was driving back from Maryland to Pennsylvania on Black Friday when I tuned in to Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics podcast. Typically I don’t associate my mood or the setting with podcasts the way I do with music. But that changed as I listened to Levitt and his guest, Michael D. Smith.

Smith is the author of The Abundant University, a smart-sounding book about how to save higher ed that turns out to be alarming upon close reading. I think I will always associate the stretch of I-83 from Baltimore to Harrisburg with this book, because the warmth I carried with me at the beginning of that drive quickly turned to anger. 

From MIT Press

Some might say that my emotional investment in the topic clouds my judgment, makes me less objective. But our bodies always shape our meditations. Feeling often is understanding. On that day, there was no way I could uncouple my recent reunions with two friends from what I was hearing. 

The short version of Smith’s argument is that digital education represents a revolution in higher ed, even a “new golden age,” comparable to the shift from CDs to mp3s in the music industry or the replacement of cable TV with streaming video. He believes that this abundance of access will solve abiding problems of scarcity in American universities. But education is ineluctably different from consuming entertainment. And as far as I can tell, Smith’s remedy — in which MasterClass and Southern New Hampshire University bring virtual education to the masses — elevates a few celebrity educators while pushing even more PhDs into contingency and squalor. 

I’ll return to these problems presently. But first I must explain how my mood affected my comprehension that day.

I began the week in a vulnerable place. My 12-year marriage was ending, and it was the first Thanksgiving in thirteen years that I’d be observing as a single person. We had a nesting arrangement for the holiday, so I made plans to meet my undergraduate advisor for a hike earlier in the week and accepted a high school friend’s invitation to join his family in Maryland on Thanksgiving Day. 

Reuniting with a teacher is like embracing a parent after a long absence. In some ways it’s more powerful than that, because blood is no guarantee of kinship but the bonds between a teacher and apprentice run to the bone. In current parlance, our favorite teachers become part of our chosen families.

It had been 26 years since I’d last seen Stephen Woolsey, the professor who introduced me to Willa Cather in an American Literature survey at a little college in eastern Tennessee. He left that college soon after I did and finished his career at a similar school in western New York. We had been emailing for two years since I’d moved to Pennsylvania, resolving to meet halfway between our homes to catch up, and that week it finally came true. 

In the years since our last farewell, I had completed my graduate degrees, earned tenure, and then surrendered it. Stephen had left an unhappy workplace for a more nurturing one, which carried him to a conventional retirement. I had cycled from single person to married man, father of three, and back to bachelorhood, not a hair remaining on my shaved pate. Stephen had raised a daughter with his wife Linda (also one of my beloved professors) and now spent his days volunteering, hiking, and honing his photography. 

We picked up where we left off, walking miles of trail in Elk State Forest while recalling our time together and marveling at how the profession had changed. Stephen recalled a dean naming him in a faculty meeting, comparing his teaching method to hammering gold, which turned out not to be a compliment, since the point was that the college needed more “blacksmiths.” 

In fact, Stephen illustrates Michael Smith’s point that unlike other professionals, professors haven’t grown more productive over time. Professors are like violinists. Just as string quartets require the same amount of time to practice and perform live that they always have, so the professor who hammers gold continues to produce at the same rate as his forebears did. Accordingly, the cost of education steadily rises relative to industries where prices fall as productivity grows. Access to professorial expertise is one of the scarcities Smith believes higher ed must redress. But his definition of abundance means fewer artisans, more blacksmiths. 

It’s hard to imagine seeking Stephen out after twenty-plus years if all he’d done was pound me into a crowbar. Doesn’t each of us approach our education as an expression of our very lives? And don’t we all deserve teachers who shape us with craft and care rather than blunt instruments? 

It had been nearly as long since I’d seen my high school classmate Josh. It was a popular name back then, even in our rural town. There were so many Joshes that we went by our first names and last initials. I was Josh D. He was Josh P. And we both ended up getting PhDs. 

Josh P. completed his degrees at Boston University and Cornell, both in Physics. He did a postdoc at Los Alamos and has held a variety of adjunct faculty positions, but his full-time role is Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I don’t pretend to understand much about his work, which often seems Matrix-like, but we both came of age in Montana and we represent the past success and enduring promise of public education. In fact, I don’t think Josh and I would still be friends if it had not been for the transformative teachers we had and the constant encouragement from our peer group to embrace our intellectual ambitions. 

Our teachers included many characters who flouted the metrics now used for academic assessment. Mr. Nermeier, who taught Algebra with nerdy humor, was also our tennis coach (Josh and I both played tennis because it was the fastest way to earn a letter, so we could order a leather-sleeved jacket). Ms. More, who convinced me I could be a professional writer, kept us laughing with her rapier wit. Mr. Bara taught AP Chemistry, AP Biology, and Geometry. He also sported a handlebar mustache, rode a Harley Wide Glide to school, and played bass guitar. When we drifted off task, he walked into his supply closet, shut the door, and screamed his exasperation into the darkness. Then he walked back out deadpanned. It never failed — we snapped back to business immediately. 

You grow close to people who share these experiences. The effect is familial. I kept in touch with Josh P. over the years, sometimes sending him drafts of essays, other times exchanging photos of our children. And so joining Josh and his family for Thanksgiving felt like coming home. 

I was basking in the glow of these two friendships and the memories of my education that they revived when the Freakonomics episode began. And this was why my gratitude curdled as I listened.

Smith argues the American university system is compromised by three scarcities: access, instruction, and credentials. Institutions leverage market power by controlling “access to the scarce seats in the classroom, access to the scarce faculty experts, and access to the valuable credentials that help you get good high paying jobs.” He’s not wrong. Scott Galloway, of NYU, compares the behavior of elite institutions to drug cartels.

Joyce Carol Oates’s popular creative writing course at Princeton illustrates the problem. Oates is one of the major writers of our time and has built a reputation as an excellent teacher. So the waitlist for her “Advanced Fiction” course, which she offers every fall and caps at 10 students, is long. And before you can even get in line for the course, you have to make it past the admissions gatekeepers to get into Princeton, which admits just 4.4% of applicants.

But Oates’s course represents a false scarcity. Princeton lists 27 faculty for its creative writing program. If you can’t get into “Advanced Fiction” with Oates, you can sign up for Idra Novey’s section of the same course. And even if you’ve never heard of Novey, you’d be in excellent hands. In fact, you might be in better hands, because celebrity is no measure of teaching effectiveness. A famous writer might offer inferior mentorship if they felt less compelled to give detailed feedback or write a personalized letter of recommendation. 

Follow that logic a little further, and you could say the same of Princeton, compared to the much less selective SUNY Stony Brook, which admits about half of its applicants.¹ The market logic says that if you get easier access to classroom seats and faculty at Stony Brook, then the credential is somehow diminished (the Princeton degree is thus scarcer). But there are plenty of heavy hitters among the Stony Brook faculty, including Billy Collins (U.S. Poet Laureate), Paul Harding (Pulitzer winner), and Patricia Marx (New Yorker staff writer). A faculty that includes 5 Guggenheims is pretty solid, by my lights. Unless you think Marx loses her mystique by stating in her faculty bio that she “can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.” 

Smith suggests that even if subscribers to MasterClass don’t get the same quality of education from Joyce Carol Oates that her Princeton students do, digital learning expands access to “top” professors or artists and thereby destabilizes the conventional models for higher education. Just so, Southern New Hampshire University embodies the “abundant university” by offering its online degrees to “hundreds of thousands of students worldwide.”

But if one reason why higher education is broken is its widening class divide, then the mass distribution of educational content does nothing to solve this problem. In fact, it promises only to widen it. According to Stanford’s Raj Chetty, children born into the top 1% wealth bracket are 77 times more likely to attend an elite institution than children born into the bottom economic bracket. This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with privilege, as Smith admits to Levitt: 

So my wife and I live in the city of Pittsburgh and we pay to send our kids to elite high schools. We were sitting down with the college admissions counselor in a one on one meeting and we were going through one of our kid’s list of schools, and he had a reach school on his list. And the guidance counselor looks at it and he goes, ‘Oh, I know the head of admissions at this school. I’ll make sure that they pull your child’s application.’ And walking out of that, you realize, my guess is the kids who go to the local public school don’t have that connection to get their applications pulled.

When elite schools chase rankings by recruiting students they know they won’t admit, thereby lowering their selectivity rate and jacking their prices up to reflect their exclusivity, the class divide widens. So even if Smith and I agree on this as a core problem, not just for American universities but for our democracy, virtual education is not a reasonable solution, even if it lowers the cost of a college degree. So long as cost remains associated with value, false measurements of the credential as a status marker and use of that credential for gatekeeping in employment and other positions of influence will continue. 

Who wants a MasterClass education if it is a cheap imitation of the real thing? Smith’s kids are still going to learn the secret handshakes that get them into the club. Nobody with a degree from SNHU will be breaking those barriers. A colleague of mine who did his undergrad at St. Lawrence University (a fine liberal arts school) and his PhD at Iowa, confessed that his own graduate program would not hire him. Iowa wants faculty with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford degrees so it can compete in the scarcity game. 

So long as the Ivy League continues to set the standard and everyone keeps trying to trade up to meet it, the game will be just as rigged as it was before. Online access changes none of that.

Smith’s core metaphor for disruption in higher education comes from the entertainment industry. Just as mp3s replaced compact discs and streaming video seriously weakened the market share for cable television, so he believes American universities will be forced to offer more convenient forms of education, even if the quality is diminished. This sounds smart, but it’s a bad analogy because it conflates inanimate products with human relationships. 

My relationship with Stephen Woolsey was not like my relationship with compact discs. I studied the cover art, memorized the lyrics and liner notes, and loved my CDs to death. Part of me still misses the whish of my player sucking the disc through the slot, then the whir before the first note. But this was a passive experience. The CD played, and I listened. Sometimes I did other things while I was listening. But I never asked my CD questions, never dropped by its office unannounced, never submitted term papers to it anxiously, hoping I had not missed the mark. And not one of my CDs ever looked me in the eye and said, “Well done!,” as Stephen often did. As he still does now from time to time as a reader.

I have listened to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and “Give Me One Reason” hundreds of times via CD and mp3, and I forget all about the difference between the two mediums once I’m lost in the music. This might affect my market choice to subscribe to Spotify, for instance, rather than to keep buying CDs. But Tracy Chapman is what I’m after, and her art is relatively unchanged by the delivery mechanism. There’s no literal conversation between us. Her music always flows one way.

The same is not true of an in-person apprenticeship with Joyce Carol Oates, compared to passive consumption of her MasterClass course. One is bidirectional, reciprocal, the intimate connection that we require for deep learning. The other offers disembodied learning, no matter how glossy the production is, no matter how thrilling it might be to see a literary hero up close. This difference weakens the entertainment:education analogy irreparably. The only way Smith’s argument holds is if Oates solely offers pre-recorded classes and a cheaper medium replaces an overpriced one.

But the most damning flaw in Smith’s argument comes from his indifference to the impact of mass-produced education on PhDs themselves and on academic jobs qua jobs. For instance, the courses that SNHU offers affordably to the world are “planned centrally by subject-matter experts and then delivered digitally by a small army of adjunct professors.” 

This is the golden age that virtual education offers? 

Let’s unpack that a bit. SNHU offers courses in 8-week terms. There are 6 of these terms in a year. If you joined their army of adjuncts, you would receive $2,200 for each section you taught. Let’s say you signed up to teach 4 sections for one term. That is a heavy teaching load, but you’d only get about $4,400 per month. Multiply that by 12 months, and you might be thinking that it could be livable at just under $53K per year (depending on where you live). But then you read the fine print: “Course assignments are made by our scheduling team, with the guidance of the Associate Deans. Assignments are made on a term-by-term basis, approximately 8 weeks prior to the start of the term, with adjunct instructors allowed to teach up to 10 sections in an academic year.”

So you’d only have employment for two months at a time, and you could never make more than $22K per year. 

I can see how this model might lower the cost of college and increase access for many students. But there is no case whatsoever to be made for requiring a PhD for these services. No one could call adjunct teaching for SNHU anything more than a side hustle, and a crappy one at that. It’s certainly not a career. 

The problem that an economist like Smith ought to be addressing is that the system has insufficient funds to offer fair compensation across the board for the expertise required. If you are Michael D. Smith or Steve Levitt, your professorship is subsidized by adjuncts who hold an identical credential, but who work for poverty wages. The more the American university models itself after industry, the more it is forced to accept such externalities. I care about this ethical quagmire as a recovering academic, but it haunts me even more as the father of three children who will soon be seeking college degrees. 

Here’s Smith again:

Imagine a world in which ten of the country’s top history professors made their lectures and exams available online for a fee that didn’t require exclusive matriculation at a single university. Would the relatively inexpensive education you might get in that situation be “worse” than the expensive one that you’d get from just one of those professors teaching at their home university?

I’m a little flabbergasted that a decorated professor could pose such a question. If all you’re doing is sitting passively in a lecture hall at a fancy university, then obviously the content from that one course could be packaged in a host of different ways. But this would be one course out of dozens that a student would take, and no one would pay elite tuition if every class were taught this way. So it’s misleading to isolate one lecture-based seminar as representative of the whole. 

Smith’s question raises many others. Who curates this list of “top professors”? Wouldn’t such a scenario only accelerate personal branding competitions among professors that don’t necessarily serve a greater good? Wouldn’t those superstars be pocketing the majority of fees charged for their à la carte content? And how would enriching an elite class of academic influencers redress the current caste system for faculty, in which 70% of college instructors are adjuncts or lecturers?

There might come a day when the difference between free trade and fair trade applies just as much to education as it does to chocolate and coffee beans. Perhaps that day has already arrived.

Stephen Woolsey brought an ethic to teaching, not a personal brand. The art was bigger than he was, and he gave himself to it the way an artisan does. That ethic allowed him to complete a conventional career with dignity — a middle class salary, retirement at the typical age — but it also yielded hundreds of grateful students, including many like me who are now lifelong friends. The same was true of the teachers I shared with Josh P. They taught us affectionately, personally, and they bound us to one another as a result.

I inherited that ethic from my teachers. It drove my teaching for two decades and continues to shape my approach to writing, coaching, and editing. A golden age in higher education would allow more teachers like us to keep that ethic alive and to share it with students in small groups, the only environment where embodied learning can thrive. 

The world that Michael D. Smith envisions would render the Ph.D. program itself obsolete, at least at its current scale. There is no earthly reason that anyone should complete expert-level coursework, exams, and a dissertation representing original research to administer someone else’s content in a virtual course for $22,000 a year. Even a subject-matter expert would need only a fraction of the expertise now required by a conventional Ph.D. Lowering the bar for teaching credentials might lower the overall cost of a college education for students. But it would only further degrade the currency of online degrees, especially if students at Princeton continue to be taught by conventional PhDs.

The more I study Smith’s book, the more his proposal looks like a Profzi Scheme.² It’s hard to imagine the “top” professor existing without the army of graduate students and adjuncts holding the pyramid aloft. Perhaps this system will collapse of its own accord. But in the meantime, don’t your children and mine deserve to be shaped by artisans, however modest their platforms might be?

Would you willingly subject your own child to the blacksmith’s hammer and tongs?

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I’ve run out of space to dig deeper into Lewis’s book. Please join me on Friday for a private discussion thread to continue the conversation. Will education go the way of college athletics, with a few multimillion dollar professors winning the lottery and everyone else picking up table scraps? 

1. In fact, Smith’s three scarcities are not real scarcities at all for many liberal arts colleges, which would love nothing more than to boost their enrollments. Almost any aspiring college student can get admitted somewhere and find access to highly credentialed professors. Most less selective institutions also spend a great deal on support services, determined to retain and graduate as many students as possible. So the credential itself cannot be said to be scarce. Smith’s point is really about value, and it’s a condescending one. In his framing, there are many degrees that are scarcely worth holding at all.

2. I borrow this term from John Knox, by way of Jorge Cham.