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Lee Gardner’s piece in The Chronicle this week about “The Great Contraction” among colleges isn’t bad, but it gets two basic questions wrong.
The first is the rhetorical slide from “higher education” to “the university.” Colleges and universities are not the same thing. Community colleges are even more specific. Conflating a research-and-football institution with a teaching institution risks misunderstanding both. In this case, the enrollment contraction has been most pronounced by far among community colleges, but nearly every example given is from universities. The evidence doesn’t fit the story. In my sector, where the cuts are largest, we don’t worry about alumni who lettered in a sport. That’s not a thing. But to know that, you’d have to talk to someone at a community college.
Which brings me to the second and more important mistake. The article conflates student austerity with institutional austerity, again to the benefit of neither.
It’s both true and understandable that students are concerned about getting well-paying jobs. That’s the effect of austerity in one domain. But to assume that colleges can then balance their budgets by focusing more narrowly on vocational programs assumes that vocational programs are cheaper to run, and that they’ve been resisted purely on grounds of academic snobbery.
Nope. By and large, they cost more. When college budgets are squeezed, it’s hard to prioritize programs on which colleges lose money, even if those programs’ graduates do well. That’s part of the “gift exchange” economic logic of an eleemosynary institution. We don’t capture the full value of what we produce. That’s by design. It’s a feature, not a bug. Applying for-profit logic to a gift exchange business model will introduce serious distortions.
Compare an Intro to Psychology class to an Intro to Automotive Tech class. (We teach both.) The psychology class is typically taught to sections of 30 to 35 and can be taught online or in a general purpose classroom. There’s no specialized equipment required, and the professor can work alone. For an automotive tech class, you need a smaller cluster of students in each section. You need cars, and bays, and lifts, and all sorts of high-cost equipment. You need lab assistants or technicians to maintain all of that equipment. You need someone to keep inventory of all the parts and tools. You have to cover the cost of environmental compliance in dealing with waste oil. You have higher insurance costs, facility costs and staffing costs.
Both programs are worthwhile, and students benefit from both. But when budgets are tight, there’s simply no getting around the fact that psychology more than covers its costs, and automotive doesn’t. If you want to see community colleges move more in the direction of programs like automotive, step one would be a massive, sustained, open-ended increase in their operating funding.
(sound of crickets chirping)
I don’t mean to pick on automotive. Allied health programs are similar. There, the limitations on class size are dictated both by accreditation and by clinical sites. A psychology class of 12 is considered alarmingly small; a clinical section of 12 is too big. But the nursing professor makes as much as the psychology professor. The arithmetic is simple.
None of this is to deny the obvious value of allied health and automotive programs. They’re crucial to the community, students love them and they’re eminently employable. I’m proud of our programs and defend them enthusiastically. But we lose money on them. Student austerity and institutional austerity, in this case, are opposed.
If we want to offer more and better vocational training for students, we’ll need the resources to pay for it. It’s just that simple. The challenge we’re facing isn’t elitist faculty, chummy alumni or an unthinking adherence to tradition. It’s money. To the extent that colleges are left to fend for themselves financially, they’ll make the internal choices they have to make to survive. If we as a society want them to make different choices, we have to make those different choices possible. And that starts with understanding the question.
