This is an important book by a prominent scholar of higher education in America. It is characteristically bold, honest and insightful. In order to appreciate it one must begin with an awareness of our current situation. American higher education is ridiculously expensive (and was not always so) but it offers a debased product. Expectations have been lowered and grades inflated. Students are being sold an illusion. They are not in college; they are in 'college'. Many should not be (even) there. They are unprepared, underprepared or simply not up to the task. To accommodate them (and collect their tuition) they are given what looks like and increasingly feels like an extension of high school. When one includes the various venues for higher education the bottom line is that only about half of the students who matriculate will actually graduate and of those only about half will find jobs commensurate with an actual college education. This may be mad but it is the status quo and armies of administrators and politicians are invested in its continuation.
These are not precisely Professor Vedder's words. Full disclosure: his book overlaps with mine, which came out while his was already in press. Our conclusions, however, turn out to be nearly identical, though our words and orientation are different. While I am a literature professor and former dean (for 29 years) I tend to look at things at eye level while he tends to look at things statistically and financially. For example, he will look at a university's physical plant and compare its relative disuse to that of businesses. Faculty are seldom in their offices; classrooms are minimally used for over 20 weeks of the year. How could we change this and achieve economies that could be invested in core activities?
The economist's eye is a clear one and enables him to cut through the political correctness that obscures statistical realities. For example, minority students (not including Asians) have lower graduation rates and higher indebtedness than their classmates. Giving them admission preferences is not helpful to them. (Thomas Sowell long ago suggested that financial help would be more helpful than admitting them to schools where their SAT scores are 200-300 points lower than those of their classmates.) This is the so-called 'mismatch' theory generally associated with the research of Richard Sander and Professor Vedder accepts its conclusions wholeheartedly and includes the abolition of affirmative action in its current state among a list of other recommendations (including the abolition of undergraduate colleges of education, the increase in faculty teaching loads, the end of grade inflation and speech codes and the reinstitution of a core curriculum that insures both cultural and civic literacy). One of the most fascinating passages is an analysis of research in the humanities which looks at the time and money spent on the work, the likely number of actual readers of the work and the resulting cost (per published essay). Given the excessive specialization of contemporary 'research' and its often politicized nature, the cultural cost is even greater.
He traces the bulk of our problems to the federal loan program and accepts Secretary Bennett's argument that it has materially contributed to the rise in tuition and a host of attendant problems.
He is particularly critical of our system of so-called 'accreditation' which consumes resources but tells us nothing. What does it mean, e.g., when Framingham State is accredited by the same regional agency as Harvard and MIT and all three are 'accredited institutions'?
He offers some striking ideas while recognizing the difficulty of implementing them. For example, students might take 40 courses from a multiplicity of institutions and then achieve certification of a baccalaureate degree by taking a general examination which (along with the coursework) would be underwritten by an independent agency. The result would be a numerical score and a validation of the completion of substantive coursework. This could trump the claims of 'distinguished' universities which have no core curricula and graduate students with high, unearned grades. Such a system would also encourage individual institutions to craft solid courses at reasonable prices in order to attract the students. A voucher system (which he supports) would further engender competition.
All of his recommendations are thoughtful and interesting and they would remake an educational system that is now broken. My own view is that if we could return to the structures and expectations of postwar higher education we could avoid the wholesale reinvention of our current system, but that notion faces the simple difficulty of finding living faculty to teach in it. It is a problem that Professor Vedder also touches on; the graduate students in the humanities (the core area of our problems) are unable to teach survey courses and they are certainly not interested in doing so. Their degrees and grades are as debased and inflated as those of their undergraduate students. In other words, any refashioning of our current system would have to include the significant alteration of current Ph.D. programs. The junior professoriate knows no other system than the broken one.
Professor Vedder realizes that his proposals are principally economic and that they focus upon the financial aspects of higher education more than the 'developmental'. It was once the case that students living on campus together might contribute as much as 40% of the total educational experience. That assumed, however, that they were spending significant amounts of time studying and that lower tuition did not necessitate their spending 15-20 hours a week working. A colleague of mine once suggested that dormitories should be supervised by military officers in return for room/board, etc. I had much the same experience, but they were priests, not soldiers. Now the dorms are more likely to be supervised by college of education graduates who seek to develop social justice warriors rather than intellectuals (not that the two are mutually exclusive, but the official ideology of these support staff militates against that, stressing the 'education' of the full person rather than the cultivation of intellect). One recommendation that we share is, I think, a very important one. Administrators and institutions should be evaluated based on their ability to move money (in total dollars as well as as a percentage of the total budget) from bureaucracy, athletics, et al. to the instructional budget. This is a metric that both boards of directors and publishers of evaluative magazines could understand (once parameters were set to keep the administrators from falsifying the numbers and including 'other' activities as part of 'instruction').
Bottom line: this is an interesting and engaging book that should receive our most serious attention.
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