For most schools, the source of their financial problems were the drastic cuts in public and private funding to higher education during the final three decades of the twentieth century. By the late 1990s, some experts began to use dramatic metaphors to describe the situation, including the sinking of the Titanic:
All in all, our actions [in higher education] are akin to a boat hitting an iceberg and the captain announcing that his highest priority, as the boat sinks, is saving the crew. The next priority is avoiding any inconvenience by continuing all activities—the midnight buffet, the bingo game, the shuffleboard tournament. The third priority is repairing the boat. And the fourth and final one, should time permit, is saving the passengers.
—Arthur Levine,
president of Teachers College
at Columbia University
Dr. Levine’s metaphor implied that while American higher education sank, college presidents mainly wanted to save the crew—the faculty and staff. Presidents also continued all university auxiliary activities, including big-time intercollegiate athletics and the accompanying party scene; moreover, these officials not only failed to repair their schools but showed little concern for the soon-to-be-drowned passengers/students.
Dr. Levine defined the iceberg as the sharply reduced funding and public support for American colleges and universities. He argued that through much of the twentieth century, higher education had been a “growth industry,” generously supported by all levels of government and the public, but during the 1980s higher education became a “mature industry,” with major expansion no longer possible. The economic prosperity of the late 1990s did not alter this situation; however, universities ignored this reality, instead squandering their resources in a cutthroat competition for research prestige, money, and undergraduate enrollment. And when students matriculated, schools gave them fun “activities” instead of meaningful educations.
Some critics compared higher education to corporate America, noting that many industries had downsized in the 1990s and, in lean-and-mean modes, prepared for the twenty-first century. But not higher education: university spending had continually outpaced revenue in the final decades of the century, also rising faster than the rate of inflation and the consumer price index. Then, when the stock market shot up and university endowment funds grew with it, this new source of money barely dented the escalating costs. The balance sheets of many universities mirrored those of their big-time athletic departments: no matter how many dollars came in, expenses exceeded income, resulting in year-end scrambles to balance the books. (Some research universities did downsize some departments, but invariably they moved the savings into other divisions. Moreover, the one unit that never shrank, and indeed grew faster and fatter than all other areas of the university, and lost greater sums of money every year, was the athletic department.)
The major cost for universities was the pursuit of research prestige. A U.S. government report noted that “research expenses at public colleges [and universities] increased 157% between 1981 and 1995,” most of it for salary raises for star professors and lesser research luminaries, as well as for equipment and other amenities to help academic departments try to move upward in the national rankings. Another huge and expanding cost was “bureaucratic bloat”: from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the number of nonresearch and nonteaching administrators and staff rose by 83 percent nationally and, at many schools, by well over 100 percent.
Administrators fueled “bureaucratic bloat” by employing more assistants, secretaries, receptionists, et cetera, and by encouraging academic departments to do the same—often to relieve research professors of contact with undergraduates. In addition, administrators allocated millions of dollars for buildings and grounds, in part to attract students to their schools (see Chapter 3), and also to keep them happy while on campus. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, made a typical move by constructing a new $30 million student center, containing a state-of-the-art movie theater and food court. This school and many others also poured millions into their intercollegiate athletic facilities, but much less proportionally into undergraduate classrooms and libraries.
Increasing expenses put college presidents and their assistants on fund-raising hamster wheels, engrossed in a never-ending search for dollars, primarily from the private sector. This obstructed long-range planning and attention to systemic problems, particularly undergraduate education. A former university official explained, “These days, all levels of university leadership are expected to devote … [up] to 50 percent of their time to fund-raising.”
Traditionally, presidents and administrators of public colleges and universities gained the most amount of money for their schools from state legislatures and, to accomplish that task, they merged fund-raising with lobbying. In this endeavor, in the last decades of the twentieth century, they failed to avoid the iceberg that Arthur Levine described, and watched while state appropriations to their institutions plummeted.
States now typically supply much less than half the funding [for their public colleges and universities] and, in 1995, state funding had dropped to 11 percent of the budget of the University of California … . A joke that circulates among [public] university presidents goes like this, “We’ve gone from being state-supported to state-assisted to state-located.”
—Nancy J. Brucker, higher education consultant
Historically, public universities lived up to their names—the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and all other State U’s were founded and supported by the people of their states, and, up to the 1970s, legislatures funded a large percentage of the financial needs of state schools, usually 75 percent or more. Then, taxpayer disenchantment with all government operations, especially universities, as well as difficult economic times, slashed state contributions to higher education across the country, down to the twenty-percentile-or-lower range in many regions.
The boom times of the 1990s did not reverse this trend; in addition, in 1999, an important report on this topic predicted that “state spending on higher education will probably take a turn for the worse” in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The report also suggested that public colleges and universities would continue to compensate for meager state appropriations by extracting the missing and desperately needed dollars from their only dependable source of income—their undergraduate students.
In the 1970s, when state legislatures first started cutting their funding for higher education, university administrators, searching for new revenue, decided that because tuition rates were generally low, schools could raise the price on this item and thus cover their budgetary shortfalls. As the tuition increases accelerated through the 1980s and beyond—the U.S. General Accounting Office noted that from 1980 to 1995, the tuition fees of four-year public universities jumped 234 percent—students and their families felt more than a monetary pinch; in fact, “the portion of household income needed to pay for college nearly doubled.” Adding to the average student’s financial dilemma, the Reagan and Bush administrations severely cut federal loan programs subsidizing tuition for many undergraduates: thus, while tuition costs rose, federal money shrank, forcing many students to borrow privately and to assume massive debts.
Paralleling the tuition increases at public universities were even more dramatic ones at private institutions, particularly in the Ivy League and at other prestigious private colleges. These schools noticed the success of public institutions in raising tuition, and they decided to follow and then trump them. For example, tuition at Penn went from $3,790 in 1976 to $24,230 in 1999; other Ivies and sub-Ivies had similar leaps, caused in part by increasing costs but even more by what economists term the Chivas Regal Effect—the consumerist belief that price equals quality.
In the 1980s, Ivy League administrators discovered that many Americans believed that the higher the tuition price, the better the education product, and so the Ivies began to raise tuition at an extraordinary pace. Helping them sustain these incre
ases was their selectivity in admissions, convincing many consumers that hard-to-obtain places in freshmen classes were another sign of quality undergraduate education. Often the Ivies delivered an excellent product, but, more important, they produced a “halo effect,” consumers believing that many other schools with escalating prices, including some public ones, also offered first-class undergraduate education programs.
When experts studied this phenomenon, they quickly concluded that tuition was rising faster than educational quality. In fact, as the Carnegie Foundation and others proved in the 1980s and 1990s, general undergraduate education at some private schools and at most large, public research universities was usually mediocre and sometimes wretched. However, the media buried this reality under countless stories on the difficulties of “getting into” Harvard and other Ivies, as well as the necessity of high SAT/ ACT scores for admission—the latter topic was also hyped by the ubiquitous advertising of companies selling SAT/ACT tutorial programs.
From the 1990s on, as a result of the media misfocus and the desire for a Chivas Regal education, many college-bound students and their parents ignored the actual acceptance rates of most universities. They should have read the annual guidebooks carefully: those publications punctured the selectivity myth, revealing that the vast majority of America’s colleges and universities rarely rejected applicants. U.S. News even listed the hundreds of schools who accepted over 90 percent of their applicants. That’s nine-plus out of ten students who send in application forms! One wonders what disqualified an applicant to these schools? Perhaps the lack of a pulse.
Yet, despite a market heavily weighted in favor of student buyers, tuition prices continued to rise, and the quality of undergraduate education sank.
Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Association of American Universities, an association of 58 major research universities, put it very bluntly when he charged: “For too long, universities, led by the best of them, dealt with their neglect of undergraduate education by asserting that simply being in the presence of faculty working at the frontiers of their fields was beneficial to students. That sometimes seems to mean little more than being in the same city with them.”
Compounding the neglect to which Rosenzweig refers is the unhappy truth that while students were being shortchanged in the classroom, they were shelling out more tuition dollars at the bursar’s window.
—U.S. News & World Report college issue for 1990
Ten years later, the neglect of undergraduate education has become, at many research universities, the abandonment of undergraduate education. The recent Boyer Commission report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities (funded by the Carnegie Foundation), called for a total overhaul of the current system and a major commitment by research universities to educating their undergraduates. The report also contained a large number of specific proposals—indeed, if implemented, undergraduate education at these universities would equal the product now provided by small colleges like Swarthmore. However, to achieve this result, large, public research universities would not only have to obtain and spend enormous sums of money on general undergraduate education, but also transform their internal culture. Therefore, even if the money miraculously appeared, the likelihood of these schools changing their value systems and privileging undergraduate education is extremely remote.
One writer on this topic explained that the primary value for administrators and faculty at research universities is “prestige maximization, a dedication to the goal of institutional excellence” (emphasis added), as gauged by the fame of the school’s research programs and professors: “Being at the top of the heap is the quintessential positional good” for these institutions, yet the top “is limited by its very nature to a few winners—but all can aspire.” However, “one of the by-products” for every school in this competition is the “declining state of [their] undergraduate education” programs.
Even U.S. News, generally an advocate for “the student consumer,” acknowledged the difficulty of emphasizing undergraduate education at large, public research institutions. The magazine’s 1999 college issue discussed such “reforms” as “making faculty teach more and research less,” but admitted that these changes “would involve big trade-offs. Research can bring a college public notice and improve its reputation, which can boost enrollment and donations, which in turn can boost academic standing and help the [school’s] bottom line.”
Moreover, the intractability of the research-equals-prestige equation is confirmed by U.S. News’s criteria for rating universities. The magazine gives “greatest weight … to [academic] reputation because a diploma from a distinguished college so clearly helps graduates get good jobs or gain admission to top graduate schools.” The magazine arrives at numerical rankings on “academic reputation” by asking presidents and other administrators of research universities to evaluate peer institutions on this item. Predictably, these voters value research prestige—not the quality of undergraduate education—most highly. For example, in the 2000 edition, on U.S. News’s five-point scale, they rate the University of Wisconsin at Madison, famous for outstanding graduate programs and also for huge lecture classes and beer-and-circus, at 4.3; and Clarkson University, lacking major research facilities but renowned for faculty attention to undergraduates, at 2.6.
A key word in U.S. News’s explanation is diploma—significantly, they use it and not education. The magazine implies that the label is of primary importance, that because it says Chivas Regal or Big-time U Baccalaureate, the Scotch whiskey is superb and the person holding the degree well educated. Clearly, this is not true. A California higher education expert commented, “I see students graduating who cannot write a business letter, balance a ledger, or use a computer to do so. I see other students graduating from the same colleges with the same degrees” who perform academic tasks at a high level and “are clearly very well prepared” for future jobs and advanced schooling (similarly, some graduates of Clarkson are better trained than some Wisconsin grads in the same fields).
For large, public research universities, labeling replaces learning, and, unfortunately, many students participate in this game by entering college with a single goal in mind—to obtain a diploma as easily as possible. One experienced teacher complained that for too many students, “It turns out that having been to college is thought to be the important” thing, not “acquiring knowledge” while there. This attitude connects to the historic disdain of collegiate and vocational students for academics and intellectual achievement but, ironically, Big-time U’s promote this point of view by trumpeting the label value of their degrees and downplaying their general education programs. According to the recent Boyer Commission Report, when Big-time U’s treat “undergraduate programs as sideshows to the main event” (research), students receive very clear signals about their marginal place within the academic parts of the institution.
“This school treats the average student [undergraduate] like shit,” said a senior at Ohio State University. “And so we blow off our classes and party on High Street. Go Bucks. I’ve had a great four years of partying and following the Bucks, but an awful four years of course work.” Whether this student offered a reason for his devotion to beer-and-circus at OSU, or a personal rationalization for the time and energy he spent on it is impossible to say. The synergy between the neglect of general undergraduate education and beer-and-circus is so profound that it is impossible to separate cause and effect. But the resulting reality dominates many campuses today.
10
STUDENT MIX AND MATCH
Students at large, public research universities respond to their schools’ emphasis on research and indifference to general undergraduate education in predictable, unpredictable, and sometimes unscrupulous ways. However, they always filter their reactions through the true center of their college lives, the subcultures to which they belong. This chapter examines the current state of the traditional subcultures—collegiate, academ
ic, vocational, and rebel—and how these shape contemporary student attitudes toward the education, or the lack of it, that they receive at Big-time U’s.
In their essay, Clark and Trow look at four student subcultures. Currently at Indiana University [April 1998], their divisions remain somewhat accurate. But I also feel students today may easily belong to one group but have lots to do with another subculture simultaneously.
Because I have to work my way through school with several part-time jobs at once, I basically identify with the vocational subculture. But I have done my fair share of partying and socializing (collegiate), and have lots of collegiate friends. I’m also a huge Hoosiers fan (collegiate). But I know many students who belong to only one subculture and to me that is the waste of a wonderful learning experience.
—A female Indiana University undergraduate
This woman’s comments, typical of the majority of student responses to a question about the Clark and Trow categories, indicated the current state of traditional undergraduate subcultures. In the last generation, the barriers separating the subcultures continuously lowered, permitting many students to live within one subculture but to incorporate elements of others into their daily lives. In addition, although some undergraduates still remained within one dominant subculture for their entire college careers, an increasing number moved from one to another. Indeed, during the 1990s, some students made dramatic four-year odysseys from mainly collegiate as freshmen, rebellious as sophomores, vocational as juniors (when full awareness of the cost of their college educations dawned on them), and even academic as seniors (finally engaged by course content, able to take small classes in their majors, and considering attending graduate school, although usually unprepared to do so).
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