The Big Picture Ahead

What does 2010 have in store for higher education? Well, we can expect strange, troubling, and radical things to happen, as they did this year. Unfortunately, we can’t predict those.

I do want to describe some overall trends. They are worth looking into if you, like me, are watching for positive developments that deserve support and bad ones that ought to be derailed. I’m looking at both national and North Carolina-based trends. Here are my top ten:

1) The recession will not only continue, but will have an even greater impact. With the exception of California, higher education mostly dodged the bullet over the past 18 months. It may not seem that way in the ivory tower, as Harvard stops its expansion into Alston and UNC-Charlotte slows down its plans for a football team. But consider: The country as a whole is experiencing 10 percent unemployment; has any school experienced a 10 percent cut in actual jobs?  Surely not any public ones. The first round of cuts included many already-vacant positions. In addition, public universities had a cushion of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. More federal funds may come in, softening the blow again, but state tax revenues are sliding, so the problems are going to become severe.

2) The federal government will throw its money around. President Obama has already made it clear that he wants to get more students into college and to raise graduation rates. That means more money for schools, especially community colleges.

And we will continue to see “stimulus” projects such as UNC-Chapel Hill’s $17.5 million  “Solar Fuels and Next Generation Photovoltaics Energy Frontiers Research Center” grant, which will expand the still-new Solar Energy Research Center on campus. UNC-Wilmington received $15 million to build a new marine biotechnology facility as part of its Center for Marine Science. Are these centers worth the funds? And what costs are built in that will be required to keep them going?

3) The federal government will also throw its weight around. It’s too soon to tell who will bear the brunt. Will the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission keep trying to force Belmont Abbey to provide contraceptives to its staff, even though doing so violates the Catholic principles that Belmont Abbey exemplifies?  What will be the effect of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s probe into whether some schools favor men over women in order to keep the proportion of women on campus from topping 60 per cent? Will the Department of Education force accrediting agencies to create a uniform definition of the length of a course and the number of its credit hours? Will the Department of Education pressure accrediting agencies to achieve the new administration’s political agenda?

4) Accreditation will flare up as an issue. A small group of organizations have life-and-death power over schools through their role as accreditors. These agencies are the gatekeepers for federal grants and loans. Unfortunately, the most important (“regional”) accreditors represent existing schools. They have an incentive to stifle innovation and they can easily keep new schools from getting off the ground.

I constantly look for ways around this federal government/accreditor nexus. In one recent incident, the new law school of the University of California at Irvine, which is not yet accredited, instantly became the most exclusive law school in the country. How? Using private money, the law school covered the entire tuition costs for the first-year class—leading to an inrush of applications from outstanding students. Can other schools use a similar tactic to get started?

Meanwhile, the federal government continues to tussle with accreditors. (Sometimes it’s hard to know which side to root for.) Most recently, the Department of Education’s Inspector General questioned whether one regional accrediting agency, the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges, should even be allowed to continue its accreditation. The NCASC had accredited American InterContinental University despite concerns about its “assignment of credit hours.”

5) The Obama administration wants to make students even more dependent on the federal government. The president wants Congress to abolish subsidized private college loans and replace them with a direct-loan program. Political pundits can guess better than I whether he will succeed, but it probably depends on the lobbying talents of Sallie Mae and other purveyors of subsidized loans—and perhaps also the public reaction to the health care legislation. My guess is that the private-loan lobbyists will prevail and the direct-loan program will be delayed.

6) Education schools will be in the spotlight. One good thing the administration has done is to shine the light of publicity on teacher education. Although his October 22 speech was full of caveats and sprinkled with inappropriate praise, education secretary Arne Duncan made no bones about the fact that most education schools are not teaching teachers effectively. His chief concerns differ from the Pope Center’s, but we agree on this: There is a critical link between the flaws of our K-12 system and the fact that many K-12 teachers are unprepared to impart knowledge. Duncan endorsed new techniques for measuring education-school effectiveness by linking students’ progress to their teachers and finding out where those teachers were prepared. The University of North Carolina is experimenting with such an assessment and, amazingly, Louisiana has adopted it.

7) Tenure will weaken. This trend is not new, but it may accelerate due to a 2006 Supreme Court decision that courts have begun to apply to state schools.  The case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, wasn’t about academia at all. It dealt with a district attorney who disagreed with a decision by his department and was fired. The Court said that because in making his public statement he acted in his capacity as an employee, his superiors had the right to dismiss him. This decision has since been applied to several dismissals of faculty members who expressed their views in the course of their jobs. Meanwhile, tenure-track positions are disappearing by attrition. The AAUP estimates that 68 percent of all faculty are non-tenure-track. And in December, Mississippi’s College Board initially approved a policy change that would make it easier to fire tenured employees.

8) Pressure to increase racial and ethnic diversity among students and faculty will continue. To achieve this diversity in the student body, schools are using more “holistic admissions,” in which traditional SAT scores and grade-point averages are given less attention, in favor of essays and life experiences. Some schools, such as Wake Forest, allow students to omit SAT and ACT scores entirely. Another approach is to replace or supplement race-based affirmative action with affirmative action on the basis of socio-economic status. As for faculty, the push for racial and ethnic diversity is not abating. At Virginia Tech, a proposal is afoot to make activities that promote diversity part of the evaluation for faculty tenure and promotion.

9) For-profits will grow—and change. If Congress increases Pell grants substantially, as appears likely, much of that money will go to proprietary colleges or “for-profits.” These schools take pride in the fact that they teach an “underserved” population of working adults, often low-income. That also means that they reap enormous sums in Pell grants and subsidized loans. Right now, for-profits keep their tuition generally below that charged by nonprofits—but they could undoubtedly sell their education for less. In fact, one company, Straighterline, is attempting to do so. By offering a student all the online education he or she can handle in a month for $99 a month, Straighterline is pushing the edge of the envelope in reducing costs. If it succeeds (which is far from certain—there’s the accreditation hurdle) it will shake up education as we know it.

10) Skepticism about the value of a college education is on the rise. This theme—“the overselling of higher education”—is one that the Pope Center has sounded for a long time. George Leef wrote a paper with that title in 2006. The message no longer falls on deaf ears. Thanks in part to the entrance of Charles Murray into the debate, there is increasing doubt that college education is worth its cost. “Are Too Many Students Going to College?” was the title of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it turned out to be one of the most popular articles of the year.  Figures showing that college graduates earn substantially more than high school graduates do exist, but the phenomenal returns of the past have declined as costs have gone up and the number of graduates has increased. In my view, that is building a bubble that could burst any time.