Relationships such as friendship and love are far too complex to be tallied up by an accountant’s summary of positives and negatives. We wrap them up with myriad events, emotions, reactions, spoken and unspoken words, and history.
To a certain extent the history of a relationship, especially the “we go back a long way” kind, can make it difficult for us to see the shortcomings. That’s often a good thing, but it can also force us to make poor judgments.
We view institutions in much the same way we look at individuals. Only the most detached analysts see this year’s Husky or Cougar football teams purely as they are. The rest of us see them through a lens that includes Rose Bowls and snow storms, autumn afternoons and commingled pieces of the past.
This is what the Commission on the Future of Higher Education is getting at. Its draft report has just been released, and in its preamble it says that the wonderful achievements of our colleges and universities make it difficult for us to see the system’s faults.
“Our yearlong examination of the challenges facing higher education has brought us to the uneasy conclusion that the sector’s past attainments have led our nation to unwarranted complacency about its future.”
The 19-member commission was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings “to examine the critical issues of access, affordability, accountability, quality and innovation in order to determine whether our colleges and universities are adequately preparing students for the competitive 21st century work force.”
The words, “competitive” and “work force” aren’t there by accident. While our vision of colleges and universities may be softened by the scrim of history, it is steely eyed economics that has taken operational control of higher education. The purpose of higher education is no longer to develop students into better people or even better citizens; it is to develop more productive, more competitive workers.
Concern about American competitiveness, and the educational system that supports it, permeates the commission’s draft report. Where we once held a dominant position in higher education, other countries, “are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are. Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”
If you thought we were No. 1 in higher education, try a bigger number. The commission notes that, “recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicate that our nation is now ranked ninth among major industrialized countries in higher education attainment.”
Somehow, it is difficult to imagine a stadium packed with Americans chanting, “We’re number nine!” with much enthusiasm. Anything can happen, of course, and ninth place could look pretty good given the commission’s assessment of our prospects.
The truth is that we may not even deserve ninth place. The commission notes “there are also disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates. Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. Unacceptable numbers of college graduates enter the work force without the skills employers say they need.”
Overall, the commission’s draft report is what you might expect of a faltering industry. In fact, it draws a parallel to the private sector. “American higher education has become what, in the business world would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive.”
The commission goes on to describe higher education’s “lack of clear, reliable information about the cost and quality of post-secondary institutions, along with a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students.”
The most encouraging thing about the commission’s work is that at last somebody in the federal government is willing to take on this issue. The decay and enervation in our higher education system were the inevitable Newtonian resultant of the three forces that have been bearing down on it: the deterioration of the K-12 educational system that feeds it; the dysfunctional financial structure that supports it; and the asynchronous organizational structure that runs it.
The stated goal of the commission was to spark a national debate and this report, with its stark assessment of the higher education situation in our country, might accomplish just that.
While it is a big accomplishment to bring ourselves to recognize that there is a problem, in the end we cannot avoid the conclusion that the existing system is either unable or unwilling to fix it. If we want change we will have to demand it of the federal government – and accept nothing less.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.
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