In America, we lavish attention on our most talented fellow citizens—star athletes, film and television celebrities, brilliant scholars and scientists, and sometimes even college presidents—but we also insist that our celebrities not act like self-styled royalty. When members of America’s elite are aloof and ignore the public’s welfare—as many titans of Wall Street did, first ruining the economy, then paying themselves bonuses—Americans insist on retribution.
Something like this is happening in American higher education today, but not for the reasons you might think. A former president of the University of Wisconsin once observed that in an earlier era when dairy farmers dominated the state legislature, its attitude toward the world-class university down the street had been highly deferential, but as the rate of college-going increased and more graduates of UW were elected to the legislature, second-guessing of its president became common. Legislation sometimes appeared to be attempts to settle grievances from undergraduate days.
Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself.
Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.
Even President Obama, in his speech to Congress arguing for a “public option” alternative to for-profit health insurance, drew a false analogy between this choice and a student’s choice between private and public colleges—apparently oblivious to the private colleges’ nonprofit status, their superior graduation rates, and the lower average family income of their students. The President (and his speechwriters) received a first-rate education at private institutions, so one wonders how this view of private higher education found its way into the President’s speech.
College-bashing is in the air. Just a few years ago, then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings spotlighted the University of Phoenix, a for-profit, largely online college with truly dismal attrition rates, as the model alternative to the shortcomings of traditional colleges. (Her own child enrolled at an excellent private, residential liberal arts college.) The governors of several states now advocate pie-in-the-sky, three-year degree programs as the way to meet the national goal of more college graduates. (Their states’ flagship universities, meanwhile, have been unable to graduate even half their students in four years, as the book Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities [Princeton University Press, 2009] documents.)
The public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself.
And a frequent columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education recently castigated private colleges and universities as hypocrites for accepting federal funds while objecting to proposals for increased government interference. (He apparently believes that free speech is fine for journalists but not for academics.)
It’s baffling why all well-educated, successful, and prominent Americans don’t want to extend to others the opportunity for precisely the kind of education that they received, preferring instead to shunt today’s students to new, unproven models of a college education. Despite personal success in life, why don’t these prominent individuals express greater appreciation for the colleges that gave them so much?
Formula for Success
Before we rush to abandon traditional colleges and universities, let’s recall what long experience has demonstrated about the American college’s formula for fostering the success of its graduates:
