By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
America’s rise to prominence following World War II was due to a massive increase in university attendance, heavily stimulated by the GI Bill. The return of war veterans, who had experienced the Great Depression in their childhood, along with the prior inflow of foreign academics who had fled persecution, led to a surge in college and university expansions. University enrolment in 1950 was seven times the proportion of college enrolment in 1900! This in turn resulted in a solid growth in the U.S. economy, expanded suburbs, and more subsequent Nobel Prizes. –But only for two generations.
Until the end of the 1970s, the American public saw public support of higher education to be a public good that “raised all boats.” In most states, the state provided over two dollars for every one dollar a student paid in tuition to public universities. But after the early 1980 Reagan era, public attitude gradually changed to view higher education as a “private good”: you generally make more money with a degree so you are the one who benefited and you should pay for it. Today, states underwrite far less funding and students contribute more in tuition for instructional costs.
This movement toward treating students as customers is referred to as the “corporate model” of education and it has driven a decline in U.S. higher education further eroded by the “digital revolution.”
In “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk” edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, a series of specialists detail the demise of American universities. Deborah Wadsworth discusses the public shift from over three-fourths of our population valuing education in 1993 to only 18 percent providing a similar response in 2005. Focusing on cost alone, only 43 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans responded "yes" to a Business Insider poll on whether higher education was worth the cost. Our public concern for a well-educated next generation has waned.
Universities have turned to increasing programs popular with students, and ditching programs that are important for society, from foreign language to physics, based merely on student enrolments. We are seeing increases in marketing costs as well as fabricated data being submitted to the U.S. News & World Report guidebook and rankings.
Dual credit high school courses have exploded, along with AP courses to substitute for introductory college courses. Initially justified as serving the few advanced students, they are now marketed to every student. But in most cases, high school teachers lack the academic depth and high school students lack the maturity. This “credit” is even more questionable in competency-based programs awarding credit for merely taking-a-test. Meanwhile, K–12 grade inflation and incompetent teaching have placed many universities in “the remedial education business.” With more students sent to college who are not college-able, this increases their cost of serving temporary students who have little likelihood of graduating.
Meanwhile, faculty evaluation has shifted to counting publications. In response, teaching responsibilities at larger universities have shifted to teaching assistants and they also have moved from small classes to large lecture courses, leading to our Academic Depression.
Our national focus on higher education as primarily job training is a serious concern and a marker of a society in decline. But it is also vital to "have a life" after coming home from "making a living." Generally, six-out-of-ten college students change their major at least once. Universities are the major place where they make decisions about their future vocation. That has often involved becoming converted to a realm of study due to an inspiring professor in face-to-face lecture or lab. Such professors change lives, and often follow their students’ careers after they graduate. But recent surveys show that barely one-out-of-five college students now experience such a mentor-professor. And such enthusiastic mentoring does not occur online, a delivery mode proven ineffective in these recent pandemic years.
We now live in an era where U.S. higher education enrolments are in serious decline.
Several decades ago, Kansas public universities had reasonable tuition while under state “corridor funding” that remained constant as long as enrolment did not vary dramatically. But when one Kansas university chancellor convinced the other universities and Board of Regents to let each university keep its tuition, the race-to-the-bottom was on!
Heartbeat and credit card required. (And I suspect they might waive the heartbeat.)
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.