Continued Misunderstanding of the Function of Higher Education

In my free time my favorite thing to do run. I think I was drawn to research for many of the same reasons that I love running. You need to be somewhat crazy, you have to put in long hours of work for only small personal victories, only people who do the same thing as you, in order to excel you have to good at a number of seeming unrelated activities, and finally at the professional ranks you have to answer to people who have little understanding of the inner workings. Earlier this week I went to the Boston Marathon to watch my wife run (a PR in 3:17:23). As a spectator of the marathon, even though I was only watching people run 26.2 miles in 2 to 5 hours, I was actually watching the culmination of hours, months and even years of hard work and preparation. At the professional level, the men and women race winners were each awarded $100,000 for 2 hours of effort and similar to other professional sports, many mistakenly believe that they are only compensated for their time in the limelight. In run training, you have to combine hours of volume training, hours of race pace training, hours of speed work, hours of strength and form training as well as cross training, active recovery, proper diet and sleep. So instead of $50,000 an hour, if we only count the days elapsed so far this year, the athletes likely only made $76 an hour.

In my other field, in the past week, two examples of people with little understanding of higher education made a similar mistake in only paying attention to the limelight and forgetting everything else behind the scenes. In Iowa, a legislator introduced a bill that would have the professor with the lowest ratings in teaching fired while in North Carolina an education bill would mandate 4-4 teaching for all faculty. While the bill in Iowa died in committee the idea behind it shows almost no understanding of the role of faculty. Just as the two hours on the marathon course are just a sliver of what makes a marathoner, the three hours per week in one particular course are just a sliver of what makes a professor a professor. I value the importance teaching and have worked hard to gather feedback from my students throughout my career teaching but I am sympathetic to professors who struggle in the classroom. However while student evaluations are one of the only ways that teaching ability is assessed, this article discusses some issues with student evaluations and suggests that they may not be the best way (check out the comments as well).

In North Carolina, Senate Bill 593—“Improve Professor Quality/UNC System” would “ensure that students attending UNC system schools actually have professors, rather than student assistants, teaching their classes.” The bill asks professors at the research institutions of North Carolina to teach 4 courses a semester and ignores the fact that if tenured faculty are not teaching courses, its likely adjunct professors. Again while 12 hours in the classroom per week may not seem like much, its just the tip of the iceberg with lecture preparation, grading, and meeting with students. But this focus on teaching at Research I institutions ignores the fact that professors at these institutions are supposed to be creating knowledge in order to pass on that knowledge in the classroom. In my six years at research focused universities (Iowa, York and Toronto) I have met very few professors that were openly hostile towards teaching with most enjoying teaching (in the broader sense, including time outside the classroom). However, almost all of the professors that I know teaching 1-2 courses a semester have almost no time as it is. Few take time off, few sleep regular hours and few have hobbies outside teaching. Asking them to teach 4 courses but place the majority of their evaluation on their research will lead to research professors in North Carolina to leave in droves with no one looking to take their place (despite the huge oversupply of candidates).

If anything I think these two bills suggest that higher education needs to do a better job of communicating its role in society. College is not just a place for job training, so in order to avoid further commodification of higher education we need to not only communicate the importance of our research, but our teaching and engagement.

Edit: 4/27/15 One day after I write this, this article is published on the future of the American Research University. This passage echo's my sentiments above:

"Those of us leading or working in research universities, especially public ones, face the urgent imperative to articulate and give full-throated explanations of the extent to which university research not only brings economic and social betterment (through new medicines, policies, products, jobs, etc.) but also is crucial to the educational mission. It drives discoveries that can be commercialized to enrich innovators and their backers, and it ensures that those innovations will be deployed to sustain the vitality of our economy, our society, and our human values. Research is also a good in itself across the full set of disciplines and fields that constitute university life; it is an aptitude and skill that students, both undergraduate and graduate, learn in college that can be of lifelong value; and it is a force that generates new knowledge — and new modes of teaching and learning."

The "real reason" college tuition costs so much

In higher education, there many be no other refrain spoken more often than the costs of tuition raising at a pace that far exceeds inflation (or any other good and service). Two articles in the New York Times in the past few months have attempted to explain why tuition is so high and has increased so much. The earlier published article appears to be a couple page ad for a forthcoming book about the future of education and the author's assumption that it will be revolutionized by on-line education. Of the many problems in higher education he identifies, the one discussed at present is the profile and rankings arms race that he sees national and regional research institutions chasing. The article can be summarized by a quote from Mr. Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, the case study of little brother universities trying to punch above their weight by raising their costs so they can spend that money on the "wrong" things:

"College is like vodka, he liked to explain. Vodka is by definition a flavorless beverage. It all tastes the same. But people will spend $30 for a bottle of Absolut because of the brand. A Timex watch costs $20, a Rolex $10,000. They both tell the same time."

With this metaphor and case study in George Washington University, the author describes the amenities arms race taking place at universities across the US. Under the assumption that more (or higher priced) means better, the author suggests that the price of tuition is increasing because it can. Without the higher price, universities lose out on the lazy rivers and luxurious apartment-style dorms that all of the other universities are investing in. So in this author's view, the high and increasing price of tuition is due to the misguided, endless search and battle for supremacy in research prestige, branding and self-aggrandizement.

In the second article, the real reason why tuition costs so much,  the author names two different reasons for the increasing cost of tuition, the increasing number of students attending universities (requiring more services, facilities, etc.) and the increasing number of university administrators. Surprisingly, the author vehemently denies the most commonly cited cause of raising tuition costs, decreases in state and federal funding. He states that higher education's federal budget is 10 times higher than the 1960s and state appropriates are 4 times higher than the 1960s. Almost everywhere else I looked I couldn't find data supporting the idea that funding hasn't decreased (this was a very difficult search to do given the motivations on both sides of the argument). In 1960, 2.9 million students were enrolled in colleges and universities while in 2014, 7.24 times that many were enrolled. This piece from the Chronicle does a great job summarizing state funding trends with their findings pointing to decreases in funds.

Combining the suggestions from the two articles and reanalyzing one of their points I think we find the reasons why tuition is increasing. There has been an explosion in the number of students attending college, paired with increased government oversight and an increase in the number of services that colleges provide causing an increase in the number of staff to oversee/audit those new services all while the schools receive less funding from the public (federal and state).

One thing that seems to be rarely discussed when pointing out the college tuition is skyrocketing is that college today is much different from the 1960s or some other time period that is pointed to for lower tuition costs. Technological advances has created the need for revolutionized infrastructure in order to support computer and internet abilities (that also comes along with specialized staff to make sure those services are provided safely and timely). Other support services have been created and expanded including alumni/career services and student support services that help students find employment, health services or extracurricular activities. Again, to beat an old drum, college is more than sitting in a lecture and taking a multiple choice exam (or watching a video on-line, writing in a forum and taking tests). If we envision college this way, then it also makes sense to extend it to all aspects of the college experience. Dorm rooms should be 9X7 concrete blocks, the cafeteria should serve gruel and there should be no extracurricular opportunities because all of the students' time outside of the classroom should be spent working and preparing for class.

Colleges are meant to provide for the public good and includes more than just the time students spend in the classroom. In short, the public good provided by colleges/universities include: collaborative relationships with the community, service to the community, supporting diversity, improving quality of life, providing economic benefits, training a workforce, regulating social change, transmitting culture, creating knowledge, disseminating knowledge, providing critical reflection, promoting diversity of thought, increasing problem solving abilities, promoting democratic citizenship, civic participation, and social responsibility. Practically these public goods are reflected in increased engagement by college graduates including more volunteer work and participation in elections. College graduates are also more likely to make more money thus increasing their contribution to tax revenues while also using less social services. So while we watch public funds drain away from colleges and universities, at what point does the public good become a private good?

"Lack of critical thinking in strike"

In college I avoided English classes like the plague. After my first year writing course, I only took one English course and it took place during Interim with the topic covering protest in American literature, comparing and contrasting literary authors and American singer-song writers (i.e. I listened to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and analyzed how their lyrics spoke to themes found in Steinbeck and Ellison). When approaching a critical analysis of any piece or idea you can generally take one of two tracts, a surface level and a deep level. Although not always true, the track you take is often dependent on your experience with the piece or idea. In a recent article in The Star on the strikes occurring at York University and University of Toronto, the author comments on a lack of critical thinking, but appears to come at the issue so far removed from it, that in their analysis citing a lack of critical thinking, they miss all of the deeper issues that with critical analysis would be revealed.

I've never heard of the author of this article before, Martin Regg Cohn, but he is a political commentator for the Toronto Star. Wading through the article, its hard to find his point. Under the title is a subtitle: "Labour strife has exposed fault lines in university faculties — byzantine hierarchies where part-time teachers toil in classroom sweatshops." while a caption for the included photograph says: "While a hardy band of low-paid contract lecturers bear the brunt of teaching, a coddled elite of tenured professors are among the best-paid on the planet — while teaching fewer courses than ever, and sloughing off research duties." and the article concludes: "But as other sectors adjust to upheaval — from manufacturing to media to hospitals — we should demand greater accountability and clarity from universities. It’s not just students who deserve a better deal, but part-time teachers, too. Listen to the canaries in the ivory tower." What I pull from these comments is that Mr. Cohen believes that Universities have created two classes of workers with tenure-track faculty riding high hogs with no teaching responsibilities and zero cares about research output while contract faculty perform all of the teaching. He cites a "hallowed" rule that tenure-track faculty divvy their responsibilities 40-40-20 among research, teaching and service, that some professors hadn't published or received funding in 3 years and were well compensated. Taken together I understand this piece as a diatribe against tenure-track professors, however, as the title suggests, Mr. Cohn lacks critical insight into the issues underlying the environment from which these strikes are arising.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I've written about these issues before (here and here) with the gist suggesting that we need to re-think how we evaluate and reward research output and reconsider or come to an agreement on the roles of universities/colleges, in particular research universities in society. Without the private sector respecting a PhD for the general skills it provides (similar to the general skills that a liberal arts education provides), there will continue to be a glut of PhDs who are hoping to work towards a tenure-track position, with few other options. As long as there is pressure to enroll as many PhD students as possible in order to produce as much as possible, we'll be unable to escape the cycle of enrolling more students and turning out too many PhDs. Mr. Cohn and others deride faculty for their apparent unwillingness to teach, but faculty at R1 institutions receive little to no reward for teaching (in the narrow sense of teaching in classroom). Even outside of Universities, few people talk about the best teaching institutions unless they're high school guidance councilors. Most of the time that colleges are mentioned for their prestige or impact, the reference is to their research output not how many classes their professor taught that semester or how high their ratemyprofessor.com ratings are.

We can look at these strikes on the surface and make very little contribution with our comments, tenure track professors don't teach enough, tenure track professor only work 9 months a year and are paid too much, TAs, contract faculty are only working part-time, why are they expecting full-time wages. Or we can look past these surface issues and try to understand why colleges and universities value research output from their tenure faculty, why they rely on cheap options to teach every expanding classes and why little will change without massive overhaul across the private sector, government funding and the research culture.