Colleges Are Wed to the Status Quo. Ideals that were once a grounding have become an anchor.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | August 14, 2024 | Clark Ross

[karpov]

In a recent Boston Globe column, correspondent Kara Miller wrote that our colleges and universities now “embrac[e] the status quo,” preventing them from responding to new challenges. Her article draws heavily on a 2023 book by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Both Miller and Rosenberg write of the difficulty of fostering meaningful change in our colleges and universities. Private businesses in the United States demonstrating such inflexibility would quickly endanger their viability and existence.

In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education is risking exactly that irrelevance. In prior years, the status quo filtered down from elite universities and helped “ground” post-secondary education with some positive moorings. Today is different. American post-secondary education confronts a bevy of challenges that threaten its stability. Adherence to the status quo has become an “anchor” preventing meaningful change.

Let’s review briefly a few of these challenges: financial, demographic, ideological, pedagogical, and political.

Labor-intensive in their financial model, higher-ed institutions are confronting financial challenges. Rising costs, for everything from health-care insurance to student services, threaten financial stability. This challenge is occurring just as families, particularly middle-income ones, are less able to respond to higher tuition and fees. Just look at the scores of small private schools that have failed in recent years, in all sections of the country. Possible remedies, such as shortened semesters and larger classes with smaller discussion sections, are promptly vetoed, with little study or discussion, by faculty groups.

[Bernard]

The schools have become addicted to the money. Turn off the federal student loans, and deeply tax any endowment fund that does not turn itself over every 3 to 5 years.

Of course, that would require adult supervision in Washington, DC.

[econjack]

Some of the most effective teachers are not the most effective researchers; the converse is also true.

I've taught econ at both public and private universities. At two Big 10 universities I taught at, it is grant money that matters to the institution. Teaching was much more valued at a relatively small (~ 4000 students) university.

One real problem is the metric used for evaluating faculty and effect teaching...there is none. Student evaluations are a joke, since most students think the easiest teacher it the best one.

Perhaps the best measure I've seen was used at my undergraduate college. Every student had to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in their major field, even if you were not going to grad school. You had to score in the 70th percentile, or higher, or you got an "attendance certificate" instead of a degree. As a student, I had no idea how good my undergrad education was until I visited The Ohio State university book store and saw their Ph.D. micro econ theory book was the same one we were using in our advance micro theory course. Out of 23 econ majors, the worst score was the 90th percentile and 18 of us went to grad school.

Today's teachers would fight this metric to the death, since they have an agenda and it's not quality teaching of their subject area.

[SauronOfMordor]

What’s also needed is to have minimum GRE requirements for faculty, without regard to what that does to “diversity” metrics.

And for high school teachers, they need to take the same standardized tests that the seniors are expected to take, and immediately fire any who do not score “proficient”, and put on probation all who do not score “Advanced”.

https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/naep/ward-naep-achievement-levels.pdf

[John Milner]

If you look which communities are doing best economically you see many are the seat of colleges or universities. That and the seats of government employment.

While working class communities continue to struggle or even fail...

It’s obvious that government policies propping up traditional education are disproportionately favoring those communities. Student loans for all and meaningless classes and degrees cost the general populous.

[TexasKamaAina]

A challenge not mentioned is the decline in perceived and actual value of a degree leading to reduced enrollment.