These are trying times for higher education, and for more than temporary partisan reasons. Future demographic trends will exacerbate declining enrollment numbers. Facing budgetary shortfalls, colleges must cancel burdensome academic and athletic programs. Growing numbers of institutions will fail altogether, inflicting economic tragedy on the local communities that rely on them. There are no painless choices here; there will be losers in this readjustment process. But two new books present impending crises, new technology, and shifting consumer demand as opportunities for innovative reform.
Their provocative titles notwithstanding, Richard K. Vedder’s Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education and Kathleen deLaski’s Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter both articulate largely optimistic visions for higher education’s long-overdue course correction. Neither work will appeal deeply to readers who revere America’s traditional liberal arts undergraduate curriculum. Yet thoughtful and generous reading of both suggests creative and perhaps necessary means to harmonize new realities with an ancient heritage.
Russell Kirk once professed certainty that “if all schools, colleges, and universities were abolished tomorrow,” the young would nevertheless “find lucrative employment, and means would exist, or be developed, of training them for … work.” According to Kirk, the college exists not for vocational training per se, but for “liberal education,” which “defends order against disorder” by “cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination.” If pursued in this spirit, such education conduces to “order in the republic.” But much as lab-produced substitutes are an ineffectual mockery of real food, liberal education’s ancillary blessings cannot be reductively pursued as ends in themselves.
Even two generations ago, few Americans concurred with Kirk’s noble ideal. Today, six decades after Clark Kerr coined the term “modern multiversity” for their often conflicting array of interests, research universities are less coherent than ever. Kerr famously quipped at a meeting of Cal Berkeley’s faculty in 1957 that the major administrative challenges to the university were to “provide parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.” For the typical large “R1,” this may be as complete a mission statement as possible. It is certainly the most honest. Even at many putative liberal arts colleges, the increasingly vocational focus of undergraduate education contributes to this confusion as both cause and effect. The three most common reasons given for college attendance in a recent New America survey—all with response rates above ninety percent—were “improve employment opportunities,” “make more money,” and “get a good job.” This is the consensus understanding of higher education’s purpose. But it may have been so for longer than we imagine.
Clayton Sedwick Cooper wrote Why Go To College? in 1912, spawning a subgenre now large enough to fill a library by itself. Cooper recounts the scene at an Ivy League graduation of a couple whose “homely” clothes, “deeply lined” faces, and “hard, calloused hands” identified them as farmers, watching with pride as their son led in the senior class. He imagined them “dedicating their lives to the task of giving [this] boy the advantages … they must have felt would separate him forever from their humble life.” Such scenes are a commonplace of American life. Attend any college’s commencement exercises; the families cheering loudest when their student’s name is read will be the spiritual descendants of those Yankee agrarians. Kirk’s noble admonition notwithstanding, America’s colleges have always served partly as entryways to its professional class. That is an essential function in a socially diverse, egalitarian republic. At any rate, people understand it as such—and in a democratic society, the people will have their way. Liberal education and vocational training must coexist somehow.
Consumer-driven schemes for vocational training may not be incompatible with a liberal education intended to cultivate moral imaginations.
Richard Vedder, emeritus professor of economic history at Ohio University, has long been among higher education’s foremost conservative critics. He is not, though, a wanton agent of chaos. Let Colleges Fail is less a celebratory paean to higher education’s imminent disintegration than a call for its renewal. Vedder does consider the possible value of “creative destruction” in higher education, noting that publicly subsidized colleges and universities “lack strong incentives to improve outcomes,” reduce overheads and prices. “Though we may mourn the loss of [individual] schools,” he writes, “we should accept and even rejoice in more closing in the years ahead as resources shift away from” failing institutions toward “educationally stronger ones.” In this vein, the book retreads some familiar ground on higher education’s excesses, abuses, and inefficiencies, though often with characteristically insightful data analysis.
Vedder suggests many reforms, ranging in scale and consequence from minor and benign to the most sweepingly ambitious. “Reform efforts must … reduce market ignorance in higher education,” he writes. Other merchants, such as “big-box stores,” do not advertise one price, then charge each customer unique and undisclosed discounted prices—why should colleges be permitted to do so? Such commonsense proposals would meet little popular resistance, at least in principle. More controversial, perhaps, would be his scheme for voucher-style tuition aid, “converting subsidies given to schools to payments made to students’ directly.” Then there are Vedder’s most original suggestions, such as halving tuition costs by moving the academic year to three fifteen-week semesters, eliminating summer vacation, and condensing the bachelor’s degree into three years. In this plan, faculty base pay is increased, but large lecture sections are tripled in size, the number of tenured instructors is reduced, and faculty pay is moved to a sliding scale pegged to student enrollment in their courses. Pray for the poor dean who is tasked with presenting this plan at the next faculty meeting!
Vedder’s timeliest proposals are for the restructuring of research universities. Private companies that grow unwieldy, he writes, “are constantly spinning off operations that do not fit well with their core activities—shouldn’t universities do the same?” Do teaching hospitals, vocational schools, advanced research labs, and professional football teams still belong under the same institutional umbrella? Could inefficient, high-cost dormitories and dining halls be replaced with private boarding houses or similar free-market arrangements? Can independent laboratories not turn research grants into knowledge as well or better without campus bureaucracy? Wherever possible, Vedder urges institutions to shed distracting encumbrances to their core purpose of educating students.
Kathleen deLaski’s book, though, suggests that even this foundational mission may undergo revolutionary transformation in the near future. Who Needs College Anymore? explores the possibilities for education at the dawn of what she terms the “skills-first age,” in which the bachelor’s degree will no longer serve as the primary signifier of employability. Her book is a surprisingly engaging tour of the present state and likely direction of “the alternative credentials market.” Central to deLaski’s narrative is the “micro-credential,” a trendy catch-all term for industry-certified short-term training programs. Many, such as intensive “bootcamps” to learn software coding languages, offer direct, non-degree paths into remunerative careers. But such credentials and the traditional campus are not exclusive models. Some institutions—the 250,000-student University of Texas system, for example—subcontract third-party providers to give students access to thousands of skills-based credential courses alongside their degree curriculum.
Two institutions that embedded “alternative credential” programs within their curriculum at their inception offer particularly illustrative models. Chartered in 1997, Western Governors University pioneered “competency-based” curricula, in which students “move through [self-guided] online course material” without any real-time instruction, then take assessments “to demonstrate mastery.” Chartered in 1912, Northeastern University in Boston was an even earlier pioneer. From the beginning, its undergraduate curriculum has required completion of a months-long off-campus work experience placement. Students are prepared for professional work environments with a mandatory general education course covering resume curation, interview etiquette, and the like. In both examples, once-uniquely innovative ideas are now commonplace in higher education. All major accreditors permit credit-bearing off-campus apprenticeships and competency-based curricula. In the same way, deLaski believes, “as less expensive alternate pathways become clearer and surer,” traditional bachelor’s degrees “will seem impractical for a new majority of learners.” But she asks, “Why does the degree have to be the only product colleges sell?” Campuses offer many advantages that could help savvy institutions adjust to a changing education landscape. deLaski suggests various means for higher-education institutions to offer non-degree credentials within, alongside, or as alternatives to their existing programs. In short, “the degree may be in trouble, but colleges can survive.”
In a democratic society, the people will have their way. Liberal education and vocational training must coexist somehow.
This would be cold comfort to Russell Kirk. But consumer-driven schemes for vocational training may not be incompatible with a liberal education intended, as Kirk wrote, to cultivate “the person’s intellect and [moral] imagination, for the person’s own sake.” A few institutions already offer suggestive examples for combining the two. Affectionately known as “Hard Work U,” Missouri’s College of the Ozarks’ work-study model enables every student to gain in-house job skills and graduate debt-free. Its robust general education curriculum includes required two-part course sequences in Christian Worldview, American history and civics, and Western Civilization. Another intriguing example is LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas—a private, religious, four-year vocational college. Typical major programs include various branches of engineering, computer science, nursing, and business. But since 2015, LeTourneau’s Honors College has offered an excellent slate of liberal arts courses. Roughly five percent of students complete the full nineteen-credit concentration, but a greater number take a few honors courses as electives.
These are rare and modest examples. But if technological change and consumer demand augur seismic change for higher education, they may hold out hope to those who cherish the old liberal education. Market forces, legislatures, or both may, as Vedder recommends, require large public universities to reorganize, shedding non-core functions and renewing their focus on undergraduate education. We should hope so. Selective liberal arts colleges may continue more or less unchanged. But what of non-elite smaller institutions lacking the mysterious appeal of “prestige” or the security of large endowments? Imagine a struggling four-year, private institution with low admissions standards, reliant on athletics and vocational majors to drive recruitment. In a world of readily accessible, rapidly adaptive short-term credential programs, why enroll in a four-year vocational degree whose curriculum is updated rarely and belatedly? Such programs may appear increasingly cumbersome and costly, chiefly benefiting their tenured faculty. Suppose this college abandoned the bachelor’s degree and replaced its numerous putatively pre-professional and vocational major programs with a single liberal arts associates degree. Imagine a three-year program, the first two years devoted primarily to a “great books” curriculum alongside some foundational vocational training and summer internship options. In year three, the focus shifts primarily to job-specific training gained through the latest micro-credential courses, perhaps taken online or through intensive “bootcamps” off-campus. Students would receive guidance from a corps of counselors with up-to-date training in the “alternate credentials market”—a much expanded role for the “drop-in” career centers presently an afterthought on many campuses. In less time and with lower cost than the current bachelor’s degree, graduates of such a college might attain a “skills-based, job-ready” resume while also forming their minds and imaginations in a college-level liberal arts core curriculum.
This may be a fanciful hope. But if Kathleen deLaski is correct, new technology and probable consumer demands will permit such ambitious reimagination of college education very soon. How many administrators have the vision and courage to try such things? Richard Vedder suggests they may have no choice.
