Academia: Change it, or lose it

Higher education is under attack, and the leadership of academia is misreading the danger it faces. College administrators’ incessant claims extolling the virtues of higher education evoke Queen Marie Antoinette’s reply to starving peasants during the French Revolution: “Why don’t they eat cake?”  

Parents without college degrees, who will bear any hardships for the future wellbeing of their children, are becoming angry. They now realize that their children’s future will probably not be better than their own in the current knowledge-driven economy. As always, there are politicians ready to tap into the anger and subject the university elite to mob justice.

The attack on universities has already begun in Florida and Texas. The University of West Virginia, the Mountain State’s flagship university, is undergoing a massive restructuring that includes layoffs of tenured faculty. Many other red states are lining up to do the same. And parents in blue states are equally unhappy with the cost of college education. Abating the growing storm of anger and other challenges facing higher education requires paradigm shifts on several fronts.

In the 1980s, a pernicious tuition model started taking hold in academia. As the usage of this tuition model grew, so did the rate of tuition increases and student debt. The model is based on the premise that people believe they are getting a better value if the product costs more.

A portion of artificially high tuition is then returned to students as “financial aid,” used as an enticement to enroll them. The enticement for any particular student is tailored based on information about their application for student aid. Without this “financial aid” — that is, if our universities were to abandon this tuition model — the nation’s listed aggregate college tuition would decrease by more than 50 percent.

The model’s current opacity defeats the transparency of the internet in calculating the cost of attendance. The model delivers a double whammy to first-generation college students, many of whom do not even apply after seeing the listed tuition without realizing that the actual cost to them might be far less.

Some who are enticed to attend do not realize that the financial aid is not guaranteed for the duration of their college attendance, and that it often does not increase with each year’s increase in tuition. Financial difficulties force some students to drop out after acquiring loans they cannot repay with low-paying jobs.

Universities should not become inequality incubators, but this is what they currently are. It is time to ditch this model altogether, decrease listed tuition, make the cost of attendance transparent and fixed for four years, and give financial aid only from endowment revenues.

A distracting false narrative has been driving our universities for decades — namely, that teaching and research are somehow incompatible. The correct question to ask is, who are the beneficiaries of the inherent synergy between teaching and research? This unasked question dictates the cost and quality of education, the two issues animating the anger in our citizens that the politicians are exploiting. 

Graduate courses are taught by scholars in small classes, often using notes on their research. In contrast, the first two years of the undergraduate classes are taught in classes that number several hundred, often by temporary teachers and graduate students.

Is the difference in the quality of education for graduate and undergraduate students a consequence of costs, or of university values? Is the high tuition that undergraduates pay subsidizing graduate education?  

Doctoral students are the most expensive to educate, because they are engaged in a one-on-one academic apprenticeship. In contrast, each undergraduate adds only marginal cost to a system that educates them by the thousands. What’s more, undergraduates — especially first-generation college students — drop out at their highest rate after freshman year. This means that universities lose something close to three years of tuition revenue for each student who quits.

We need a critical evaluation of why undergraduates should not also be beneficiaries of the synergy between research and teaching.

Meanwhile, universities need more objective measures of teaching costs. They already have a robust accounting tool to accurately estimate the cost of research projects funded by the federal government. Expenditures on complex research projects involving faculty, staff, and students can be accurately calculated. By treating courses as if they were research projects, universities can calculate the costs of teaching any given course. A database of course-cost per student can be created for any university’s entire course offering. The database can then be used to make objective decisions about teaching costs, tradeoffs and benefits.

College administrators are already familiar with the “enrollment cliff,” which refers to a perceptible drop in the number of high school graduates beginning in 2025, out of which a smaller percentage will apply to colleges than in the past. In the context of that cliff, recruiting and retaining a greater number of first-generation college students is in all universities’ self-interest. This would address the brewing political storm of anger against the universities. Incidentally, it would also mitigate damage from the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action, as greater percentage of underrepresented groups are first-generation college students.

In a democracy, populism inevitably prevails over elitism. Universities can either make changes out of enlightened self-interest, or else unpredictable changes will be forced upon them by politicians riding the popular anger of those left out of the current knowledge-driven economy.

Madhukar Vable is professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University.