With endowments down and budgets shrinking, American colleges and universities are looking for a game changer—a reason to say, “No, we’ve got to spend more than ever!” Last year, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) tried to give them that with a report entitled “Leadership for Challenging Times.”
Although AASCU has not put the full report online, you can read the breathless press release informing us that the decline in college completion “threatens U.S. global competitiveness” and the report’s executive summary.
The big idea behind this is that AASCU institutions face an important task: “to help sustain the nation’s vitality and competitiveness in a global, multicultural and rapidly changing society.” Sounds pretty serious, but the report fails to back up its assertions. Colleges and universities should not leap at its recommendations without a sober assessment of their costs and benefits.
Almost as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise, “Leadership” begins with the plea that America must start graduating more people from college because “Other nations are overtaking the U.S. in educating younger members of their populations to meet global challenges….” Furthermore, other nations including China and India are “investing heavily” in their higher education systems.
Don’t those international comparisons prove that we need to stop shortchanging our colleges and universities? Shouldn’t legislators loosen up the purse-strings?
There are some gigantic problems with the “we’ve got to keep up” argument. For one thing, the international comparisons are not as unfavorable to the U.S. as the report indicates.
Late in 2008, Clifford Adelman, a highly-respected education researcher, shredded the “falling behind” idea in an article entitled “The Propaganda of International Comparisons.” Adelman colorfully wrote that higher ed establishment groups cite scary international comparisons “to engage in a national orgy of self-flagellation” but that the facts don’t support the frenzy.
“Our 6-year graduation rate for students who started full-time in a 4-year college and who graduated from any institution (not just the first institution attended) is roughly 64 percent which, compared with other OECD countries who report the same way, is pretty good,” Adelman writes. He published that well before “Leadership” was published. Can’t let an inconvenient truth get in the way of some good flagellation.
Another embarrassment for the “falling behind” argument is that at least one of the big countries we’re supposed to be frightened of (China) has apparently gone overboard with its “investment” in higher education. According to this story great numbers of unemployed young Chinese college graduates now live in slums, desperate for work. This Asia Times article makes the same point: China has a glut of college graduates.
So, in fact, does the United States. As I have often pointed out, many young Americans with college degrees are working in jobs such as theater usher that call for no academic preparation. Thus, the paper’s argument that we’ll face global economic problems unless we graduate more people from college is awfully weak.
“Leadership” doesn’t just want to see more Americans in college, but it also argues that increasing globalization means that schools should make curricular changes. Specifically, they should (here I quote from the paper):
- Affirm the centrality of global competence in an institutional mission and strategic plan.
- Cultivate an understanding and appreciation of differences in culture and religious observation as a part of undergraduate education.
- Emphasize and develop the relationship between international and domestic diversity.
- Create more opportunities for students to experience other cultures in the local community.
- Focus on developing heightened competence in language and culture.
All of that reflects the well-known enthusiasm among education professionals for diversity and multiculturalism, but does increasing globalization really necessitate those commitments?
There is a crucial but hidden assumption in the report: because global trade and contacts are increasing, large numbers of American students need to learn foreign languages, study foreign cultures, immerse themselves in “diversity,” and acquire (quoting again) “a more pronounced sense of global identity.” (I have no idea what that last phrase means, but it’s sure to sound pleasing to educators.) Nowhere in the report is there any evidence that this assumption is true.
True, the volume of international trade keeps increasing and products made in foreign lands are more available than ever before—but that does not mean that a wide swath of the American workforce needs to speak foreign languages and understand different cultures. A few, perhaps, but the vast majority of Americans will never have any need for “global competence.” And those who do will undoubtedly receive specialized training; employers will demand more than fuzzy memories of a course taken in college.
Besides that, as an old friend of mine who was an executive at one of our most international of companies, 3M, reminded me when we discussed this recently, “English is the international language of business.”
I am not saying that it is worthless to study Chinese or Japanese or Portuguese, or to learn about the customs of Bolivians or Sri Lankans or Tunisians. Anyone who wants to do so can, and would probably learn far more at less cost by going to a library or searching the internet than by taking college courses. My point is that there is no reason why colleges must create and push new language, culture and “diversity” courses on students. They’ll accomplish very little at considerable cost.
As a final riposte to the idea that success in the globalized world depends on people having a “sense of global identity,” consider the Japanese. Japanese firms have been wizards at international business for more than 50 years, but their universities don’t belabor the obvious point that cultures around the world are different. And the Japanese don’t Celebrate Diversity. They tend to regard non-Japanese as inferiors—but never let such feelings get in the way of making profitable deals.
We don’t need to make “global competence” the next higher education fad.
Well, what can colleges and universities do to help businesses run more efficiently and compete better, locally, nationally, and internationally?
Another study put out by a different higher ed group, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, provides some insights. The AAC&U report, “Raising the Bar: Employers’ Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn” (available on the AAC&U site finds that high percentages of the employers surveyed believe that our colleges and universities are not doing a good job in such fundamental areas as communication (written and oral) and analytical reasoning skills.
So instead of adding a variety of courses on global diversity, why not concentrate on doing a better job of teaching things that will make everyone more useful?