PERFECT STORM: HOW AN IMMINENT CRISIS IN HIGHER EDUCATION CAN STRENGTHEN LIBERAL EDUCATION
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In memory of Stephen Weiss
Adapted from a lecture given at Boston College on April 5th 2011. I am indebted to Henry Braun of the Education School and Erik Owens of the Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life.
I flunked Retirement 101. What followed turned out to be a great learning experience.
So great that I feared my new employer, the Teagle Foundation, would find out how much I was learning and start charging me tuition.
Much of what I learned involved thinking in new ways about what I had been doing for years as a teacher and scholar. When I retired from the National Humanities Center and began a new career at a foundation devoted to strengthening liberal education, I found I had to ask some hard questions about ideas and practices I had always taken for granted.
Some of what I learned came in the form of “ Aha!” moments. For example, in a luncheon meeting with a group of exceptionally talented summer interns, undergraduates from a wide range of top flight universities, I realized their success in college was not simply the result of brain power combined with good instruction. They were self- starters, who had thought hard about what they wanted from their education and then took the initiative, by seeking out programs and courses of special interest to them, introduced themselves to faculty and staff members. They had “knocked on a hundred doors.” The results were evident in their engagement, learning and commitment.
“Aha!,” I thought, “if that makes such a difference for undergraduates, is there an analogy for faculty members and academic officers? What would it mean at those levels really to think and work equally hard about making liberal education really work?”
Those questions keep getting more intense. American higher education seem to be sailing into a perfect storm, composed of at least three converging circumstances. The forecast is not a sunny one, but a closer look at this imminent perfect storm gives reason to believe that liberal education can come through these difficulties stronger than before, provided that those who care about it take the initiative, and do so promptly.
The Imminent Perfect Storm
It is hard to forget Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm (Norton, 1997 ) or Wolfgang Petersen’s 2000 film with the same title. If you had been living in New England in autumn 1991, it would be no less difficult to forget the “Halloween nor’easter” itself.
Adapted from a lecture given at Boston College on April 5th 2011. I am indebted to Henry Braun of the Education School and Erik Owens of the Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life.
I flunked Retirement 101. What followed turned out to be a great learning experience.
So great that I feared my new employer, the Teagle Foundation, would find out how much I was learning and start charging me tuition.
Much of what I learned involved thinking in new ways about what I had been doing for years as a teacher and scholar. When I retired from the National Humanities Center and began a new career at a foundation devoted to strengthening liberal education, I found I had to ask some hard questions about ideas and practices I had always taken for granted.
Some of what I learned came in the form of “ Aha!” moments. For example, in a luncheon meeting with a group of exceptionally talented summer interns, undergraduates from a wide range of top flight universities, I realized their success in college was not simply the result of brain power combined with good instruction. They were self- starters, who had thought hard about what they wanted from their education and then took the initiative, by seeking out programs and courses of special interest to them, introduced themselves to faculty and staff members. They had “knocked on a hundred doors.” The results were evident in their engagement, learning and commitment.
“Aha!,” I thought, “if that makes such a difference for undergraduates, is there an analogy for faculty members and academic officers? What would it mean at those levels really to think and work equally hard about making liberal education really work?”
Those questions keep getting more intense. American higher education seem to be sailing into a perfect storm, composed of at least three converging circumstances. The forecast is not a sunny one, but a closer look at this imminent perfect storm gives reason to believe that liberal education can come through these difficulties stronger than before, provided that those who care about it take the initiative, and do so promptly.
The Imminent Perfect Storm
It is hard to forget Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm (Norton, 1997 ) or Wolfgang Petersen’s 2000 film with the same title. If you had been living in New England in autumn 1991, it would be no less difficult to forget the “Halloween nor’easter” itself.
NOAA has a whole section of its web site devoted to this storm (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/perfect.htm .), with details such as, “ NOAA buoy 44011 located at 41.1 degrees N, 66.6 degrees W reported maximum sustained winds of 49 kt with gusts to 65 kt and a significant wave height of 39 feet .” The most gripping part on the story, however, is the sinking of the fishing ship Andrea Gail, which set out from Gloucester just before the storm and never returned. The ship is presumed to have sunk sometime after midnight on October 28th 1991.
This perfect storm was the result of converging meteorological forces, -- a strong, high pressure system of Canadian air moving over the Appalachians, and converging with warm air over the Atlantic, with further turbulence caused by hurricane Grace’s hairpin turn eastward. There had been nothing quite like this storm since the great hurricane of 1938.
At least three forces are converging right now in American higher education. They are all familiar ones – the economy, the skeptical mood of the American public, and what is sometimes called “a failed business model” A fresh look at them challenges conventional wisdom and points to an opportunity in this perfect storm for strengthening liberal education.
First, the economy. Great attention has been paid, and properly so, to the effects of the meltdown that started in 2008, and the agonizingly slow recovery that has followed. Higher education has not escaped the pain, and will surely feel more as the budget battles in Washington and in state capitals continue.
Even before 2008 college education was in an affordability crunch. The growth of family income stalled during the first decade of the new century, as the College Board has pointed out:
At least three forces are converging right now in American higher education. They are all familiar ones – the economy, the skeptical mood of the American public, and what is sometimes called “a failed business model” A fresh look at them challenges conventional wisdom and points to an opportunity in this perfect storm for strengthening liberal education.
First, the economy. Great attention has been paid, and properly so, to the effects of the meltdown that started in 2008, and the agonizingly slow recovery that has followed. Higher education has not escaped the pain, and will surely feel more as the budget battles in Washington and in state capitals continue.
Even before 2008 college education was in an affordability crunch. The growth of family income stalled during the first decade of the new century, as the College Board has pointed out:
Over the entire income distribution in the United States, average family incomes in 2009 were equal to or lower than they had been a decade earlier after adjusting for inflation. The largest declines were for the lowest income families.See http://trends.collegeboard.org/downloads/College_Pricing_2010.pdf
The same report indicates that tuition and fees at private four year colleges increased on average 3% per year over the CPI . (At public four year institutions the annual rate was 5.6% over the CPI.)
Colleges struggle hard to have financial aid keep up with these increases, just as families scrambled to help their kids pay for college. It’s getting harder and harder to make that happen.
The affordability crunch is bad enough but it should not obscure another phenomenon, one that I find even more frightening. Paul Krugman calls it the “hollowing out” of the American economy, including the computerization of all “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.”
Paul Krugman “Degrees and Dollars” the New York Times March 6th 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hollowing%20out&st=cse). Krugman was citing the work of David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane
I saw that hollowing out first hand some years ago when I inadvertently pushed the wrong floor number in an elevator a corporate headquarters I was visiting in New York City. I stepped out into a totally empty floor. When I at last found the senior executive I was looking for he explained, only half in jest, “Oh yes, that was middle management; we replaced them with computers.”
In theory the elimination and exporting of routine jobs should results in innovation and a net increase in jobs elsewhere in the U.S. economy. At this moment it is not clear that this is happening.
But computerization is not the only force eliminating positions that college graduates once held. In addition, as Krugman points out, globalization and outsourcing export jobs, and not just low wage manufacturing jobs.
One example: the pharmaceutical form GlaxoSmithKline now has 470 research and development workers in China.
Consolidation within companies and mergers and acquisitions among them also contribute to this hollowing out. “ It’s no longer true”, Krugman concludes, “that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.”
These shifts in the economy pull the rug out from under a familiar argument on which many leaders of American higher education have long relied – if you go to college you will earn much more than if you stay away.
See for example the ACT Student web site: http://www.actstudent.org/college/index.html
That argument may hold up in the long run , but as many recent graduates will attest, “it ain’t necessarily so.”
These shifts in the economy pull the rug out from under a familiar argument on which many leaders of American higher education have long relied – if you go to college you will earn much more than if you stay away.
See for example the ACT Student web site: http://www.actstudent.org/college/index.html
That argument may hold up in the long run , but as many recent graduates will attest, “it ain’t necessarily so.”
“For college educated workers over age 25, unemployment is indeed lower than for other groups. But for college graduates under age b25, unemployment over the last year has averaged 9.7 percent and shows no sign of improvement.” “The Economy Slows” editorial, The New York Times, May 2, 2011.
Casualties of the dismal job market may not be much impressed by an argument that does not match their experience and is technically fallacious.
For the argument to be valid in a strict sense one would need to compare the earnings of college graduates with the earnings of high school classmates with comparable GPAs and SATs who chose not to enter college but to go into the military, community service, other parts of the work force, etc.
For students still in college the bleak job market puts it on the line: If a college education promised a good job but can’t deliver on the promise, why am I here? To answer that question higher education has to shift its focus, and articulate better reasons for attending college, including the long term advantages of developing the ability to think straight, solve problems, speak and write clearly and develop life-long habits of curiosity and continued learning. In a time of tempestuous change such higher level skills may be the best possible life preservers. Students today are, I believe, alert to this consideration. Many of them can also see the importance of studies that enrich f life through literature, science, history and the arts. If the job market is bad for all fields, some of them have said to me, why shouldn’t I study what I genuinely like?
Students may be more aware of these considerations than some spokespersons for higher education. That may explain why enrollments in the humanities and other liberal arts fields have, so far at least, held up surprisingly well in economically difficult times. See Cheryl Ching and W. Robert Connor “Liberal Arts I: They Keep Chugging Along” Inside Higher Ed October 1, 2010
Second, a skeptical public. Skeptical minds are now everywhere, not localized as in the old saying, “Show me; I’m from Missouri.” Today everybody is from Missouri, it seems. To be sure, the American public is not, by and large skeptical about going to college – it’s still part of the American Dream, but people today want to see results. They want to do the numbers.
Some of those numbers are tuition and fees, now exceeding $40,000 at some institutions. Sticker shock is leading some good students to assume they couldn’t possibly go to top quality institutions. They can also be frightened away by the debts students accumulate in college.
Some of those numbers are tuition and fees, now exceeding $40,000 at some institutions. Sticker shock is leading some good students to assume they couldn’t possibly go to top quality institutions. They can also be frightened away by the debts students accumulate in college.
See Tamar Lewin , “College Loans Weigh Heavily on Graduates” The New York Times April 12, 2011 p. 1. “Two- thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt.”
But another number is no less troubling: On average 55.9 percent of full time students entering an American four year college graduate within six years. If you track those who transfer it’s about 67%.
Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems pointed me to the useful web site: http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=27&year=2008&level=nation&mode=data&state=0
Drop out rates are not often perceived as a problem at highly selective colleges, where more than ninety percent of entering students typically graduate within a reasonable period of time. But even in these settings it pays to ask who are the drop-outs and why do they leave.
The commonest explanation is finances, pure and simple. Despite all efforts, financial aid is not adequate. Fix that and all will be well.
That’s part of the story. But there’s more to it than that. Listen to one college drop-out:
Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems pointed me to the useful web site: http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=27&year=2008&level=nation&mode=data&state=0
Drop out rates are not often perceived as a problem at highly selective colleges, where more than ninety percent of entering students typically graduate within a reasonable period of time. But even in these settings it pays to ask who are the drop-outs and why do they leave.
The commonest explanation is finances, pure and simple. Despite all efforts, financial aid is not adequate. Fix that and all will be well.
That’s part of the story. But there’s more to it than that. Listen to one college drop-out:
I dropped out … after the first 6 months …. So why did I drop out? … all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Care to guess who this drop-out was? It’s one of these five drop-outs:
Paul Allen, dropped our of Washington State College
Michael Dell, dropped out of the Univ. of Texas at Austin
Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard
Steve Jobs, dropped out of Reed College
Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of Harvard
Other CEOs who dropped out of college or didn’t go to college: www.davidtan.org/famous-ceos-without-college-degrees/
It is Steve Jobs, the most famous apple guy since Adam, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford. His story reminds us that financial pressures become intolerable if one doesn’t have a clear sense of what college is for.
So how well are colleges doing in responding to that question? Programs promising business success, are clear and forthright.
Paul Allen, dropped our of Washington State College
Michael Dell, dropped out of the Univ. of Texas at Austin
Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard
Steve Jobs, dropped out of Reed College
Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of Harvard
Other CEOs who dropped out of college or didn’t go to college: www.davidtan.org/famous-ceos-without-college-degrees/
It is Steve Jobs, the most famous apple guy since Adam, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford. His story reminds us that financial pressures become intolerable if one doesn’t have a clear sense of what college is for.
So how well are colleges doing in responding to that question? Programs promising business success, are clear and forthright.
