Higher Education at a Crossroads

There are metaphors—watershed, crossroads, hinge moment—that recur in historical narratives and that refer to those pivot points when society’s trajectory shifts, when critical decisions alter history’s course, and when historical processes produce a new paradigm or reality.

These defining moments signify catalytic or directional shifts in cultural economic, political, and social conditions with long-lasting consequences. These are the hinges at which history swings, or the points of transition when a new landscape emerges, reshaping life in fundamental ways.

These metaphors speak to a fundamental truth: that there are critical moments that lead to a transformational change or the opening of a new chapter.

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In U.S. history, one of those hinge moments took place in 1819. That year witnessed the Panic of 1819, the nation’s first experience with the boom-and-bust cycles of modern capitalism; the violent conquest of Florida; the first U.S. claim to the Pacific Northwest; two pivotal Supreme Court decisions (Dartmouth v. Woodward and McCullough v. Maryland) that established the sanctity of contracts and federal supremacy. That year also saw a surge in religious denominationalism starting with the establishment of the Unitarianism, and the eruption of the Missouri Crisis that made it clear that American expansion would ignite recurrent crises over slavery.

1819 was the pivotal moment when the age of the founders ended and a new era arose as a market revolution transformed the American economy, with consequences that would alter every facet of society, from politics and law to religion and family life.

1848 was another watershed year. A year of political revolution all across Europe, 1848 saw three new political philosophies articulated: Social Darwinism, first voiced in Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, modern liberalism, articulated in John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economic, and Marx and Engels’s fiery The Communist Manifesto.

There was a series of technological breakthroughs, including the Bessemer process for producing steel, the tumbler lock, and the first oil well. There was also the abolition of slavery in the French and Danish empires, leaving New World slavery confined to a handful of regions, including Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. South. In U.S. history, there was the first women’s rights convention, the conquest of the northern half of Mexico, and the discovery of gold in California.

At stake in 1848 was which groups would benefit from the scientific and technological revolutions that were poised to generate enormous amounts of wealth.

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Right now, there is a widespread believe that we are currently at one of history’s hinge points or critical moments, as Pax Americana ends, mass migration transforms the demographics of Western societies, climate change’s consequences become inescapable, and novel breakthrough technologies—from artificial intelligence, carbon-free electricity, CRISPR gene editing, data analytics, drones, natural language processing, quantum computing, and advanced robotics— revolutionize everything from healthcare and manufacturing to warfare.

Likewise, for American higher education, we are at one of those swing moments when we stand at a crossroads. Will we allow a college education to become more stratified, transactional and vocational, or will we push back and create a model that is more developmental and transformational?

As if the fallout from the December Congressional testimony by the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Penn wasn’t bad enough, other recent news sheds a worrisome light on the state of American higher education.

• Despite a $10 billion endowment, the University of Chicago faces a financial squeeze. It’s running a $239 million deficit and is carrying a nearly $6 billion debt load.
• In response to allegations of data manipulation in studies involving four top scientists at the Harvard affiliated Dana-Farber Institute, six studies will be retracted and 31 others corrected.
• More ;name-brand universities plan to make budget and program cuts and lay off employees. The latest announcements, coming from Penn State, the Universities of Arizona, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont, follow earlier cuts at Miami of Ohio, the University of West Virginia, University of Mass at Lowell, and several University of Kansas and Wisconsin campuses.

American higher education may be the envy of the world, but it faces a host of challenges:

• A demographic challenge, as the number of high school graduates declines.
• An affordability challenge, as costs outstrips families’ ability to pay.
• A completion challenge, with a noncompletion rate approaching 40 percent.
• A learning challenge, with time spent studying and reading and writing assignments falling substantially while grades have risen.
• A business model challenge, as expenses outstrip revenue.
• An equity challenge, as the neediest students attend the colleges with the fewest resources and the lowest graduation rates.
• A return-on-investment challenge, as many graduates flail and flounder for years after graduation before falling into a job that may or may not require a college degree.
• A political challenge, as a significant share of the public has lost faith in college’s value.

One statistic, reported by EAB, the consulting firm, sums up the problem: of every 100 students who enroll in college, 22 have dropped out after 6 years; another 12 are still enrolled, 28 are underemployed and just 35 work in a job that requires a bachelor’s degree.

My own university, University of Texas at Austin, arguably the best-funded public campus, has its own challenges, according to the student comments that I reviewed:

• The campus is very siloed.
• Overly complicated graduation requirements make it difficult to graduate in 4 years.
• Grading is very uneven even within course sections.
• Despite grade inflation, high DFW weed-out classes persist.
• Several of the most popular majors are capped and gated—barring entry for talented undergrads who didn’t get a strong high school education or who start off slowly.
• A deep disconnect exists between students and faculty.
• Course availability is a serious problem.
• Its demographics bear scant resemblance to the state’s demography.
• Undergraduate life is dominated by a heavy drinking culture.
• The university serves transfer students poorly; they face problems with course registration, credit loss, and access to research and internship opportunities.
• Student life is segregated ethnically.
• Many clubs and organizations refuse to accept everyone who applies.

Despite the challenges from inside and outside, higher ed could be the best solution to this society’s most pressing problems: to fix inequalities of income, wealth, opportunity, and political and ideological polarization. In addition, college graduates are happier and healthier than those who don’t get a degree. They’re more likely to marry and remain married. Over a lifetime, on average, they earn over a million dollars more than those without a degree.

But today’s colleges have a very leaky pipeline and reproduce and reinforce inequality.

I worry that our colleges and universities aren’t succeeding at their core mission: to produce graduates who are culturally literate, who are conversant with social science methods and theories, and who are familiar with the frontiers of science.

I have no doubt that we can do a much better job of producing college graduates who are career-ready, and who are well prepared to navigate the complexities of adulthood. But to do so will require a relationship-rich education, firmly grounded in the humanities

The broad access institutions that educate most undergraduates must address the high drop-out rate, the mismatch between what students learn in college and the skills required in the job market, inequalities in access and outcomes, uneven teaching quality, and misguided faculty incentives. These campuses must also better prepare graduates for adulthood.

Success will require us to:

• rethink our curriculum, especially our gen ed courses and majors.
• reimagine the professorial role and how we teach and assess student learning.
• offer an education that is relationship-rich and that is offer more outcomes-focused and more developmental.

Our gen ed courses are supposed to ensure that every student acquires the rudiments of a liberal education. But the classes we offer—discipline-based introductory courses—are repetitive of high school and do little to ensure that students acquire the broad sweep of knowledge that they should.

To put this baldly, a single course in geology doesn’t ensure scientific literacy, nor does a single course in political science or sociology result in social science literacy. Nor does a U.S. history survey course that is repetitious of what students took in 5th, 8th and 11th grades do much to guarantee civic, cultural or historical literacy.

So, what is to be done?

1. At the gen ed level, we need broader courses that do a better job of cultivating an appreciation of the arts, historical thinking, social science literacy and familiarity with the frontiers of science.
2. We need to better align our majors with the jobs that graduates will eventually get. One way to do that is to link arts, humanities, and social science programs with high demand preprofessional programs in business, computing science, data science, engineering, environmental science, health care, law and technology.
3. We should supplement our lecture and discussion classes with other kinds of learning experiences, including field-based experiences, maker spaces, mentored research, practicums, service learning and studio courses.
4. We need to offer learning experiences that involve more active and experiential learning along with more formative and authentic and project-based assessments.
5. We need to embed career identification and preparation across the undergraduate experience and ensure that students acquire the skills that today’s job market requires, such as project management skills and data and statistical skills.
6. We need to nurture a professoriate that regard themselves as learning architects and mentors who are well prepared to teach more broadly than most do today and who are staunchly committed to bringing students to academic and post-graduation success.
7. Most important of all, we need to provide an education that is more developmental and transformational, an education that does a better job of preparing students for the complexities of adulthood but also engages them deeply in the life of the mind and introduces them to the rich world of arts and culture.

Ask yourself: Are we doing enough to teach essential life skills, like financial literacy, or interpersonal skills like emotional intelligence, coping or conflict resolution? To me, the answer is obviously “no.”

Are we doing an especially effective job in terms of career preparation and guidance?& Or are too few students getting practical experiences through internships, co-ops and job shadowing opportunities? The question answers itself.

How about civic engagement and social responsibility? Are we doing enough to encourage civic engagement through community service projects and courses that address complex, controversial social and ethical issues and that help students learn to cope with sharp disagreements in values? I don’t think so.

We could also do more to infuse arts and cultural education across the curriculum, ensure that our students develop global perspectives and a better understanding of international affairs, and involve more undergraduates in mentored research and in creative pursuits and innovation initiatives.

Over the course of my career, I have had a chance to be involved in or observe the kinds of “boutique” projects that needed to be scaled. These included:

• An integrated approach to the arts and humanities portion of the gen ed curriculum at the University of Houston, in which students completed a 12-credit-hour team-taught block that combined U.S. history, rhetoric and composition, technology, and art history. All reading and writing assignments were integrated and the students contributed to a class website.
• A middle school to medical school pathway at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley that included courses in the literature of pain and illness, representations of the body, the history of medicine and public health, health economics, health informatics, and the sociology of health.
• Adventures in the Arts, in which undergraduates at CUNY’s Hunter College visited art, natural history and history museums and attended dance, opera, symphony and theater performances, followed by a dedicated seminar and opportunities to meet with artists, composers and playwrights, integrating extracurricular activities into commuter students’ experience.
• An interdisciplinary course on childhood for teachers through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History that combined anthropology, art, biology, history, law, psychology, and sociology of childhood with a focus on children’s physical, affective, and psychological development and well-being.
• A practicum on museum administration, curation, and exhibit design and development that involved a partnership between CUNY and the New-York Historical Society.
• Development by students of educational websites for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
• Creation of interactive courseware in U.S. history, with a team of UT Austin undergraduates and graduate students that included a comprehensive textbook, extensive primary sources, advanced simulations, interactives, embedded assessments, gamification, and a host of active learning activities, involving data visualization, textual, song and film analysis.

Boutique courses, no matter how innovative, plant seeds in a swamp and are no more impactful than attempts to boil the ocean. But, if scaled, they can serve as the foundation for more consequential innovations.

Administrators need to encourage the kinds of faculty-driven experimentation and innovation that we have seen at institutions as diverse as:

• Austin Community College, with its Great Questions firs-year curriculum that combines great and contemporary readings with academic success skills training.
• Guttman College, with its Ethnography of Work course, which helps students identify a career path and understand workplace dynamics and expectations.
• Hiram College, with its gen ed curriculum organized around timeless debates and pressing contemporary challenges.
• Purdue, with its Cornerstone great books and big ideas certificate program, that encourages the institution’s many STEM majors to explore urgent issues involving ethics and equity in technology.

Good ideas abound. Our challenge is to implement and scale these models for emulation.

I have no more idea than you about what higher education will look like five or ten years from now. But I fear that it will become even more stratified than it is today. Without pushback, I worry that gen ed classes will shift to high school, that campuses will offer more asynchronous online classes without much substantive student-faculty interaction, that AI will provide much of the assistance and advising undergraduates need, and that program cutbacks in the humanities will become more widespread.

But there’s another path to the future that we need to push, a path that seeks to revive two ideas that are more important than ever. One is the Jesuit concept of cura personalis, a commitment to educating and caring for the whole person. That’s an education that stresses the well-rounded development across every vector: not just cognitive, but cultural, social, physical and ethical.

Then, there’s the German idea of Bildung, of an education that goes beyond practical skills, academic achievement and workforce preparation, and encompasses holistic personal development, cultural and intellectual growth, moral awareness, and a commitment to social betterment. This concept emphasizes identity formation, character development, emotional and ethical growth, and development of a capacity for self-reflection.

Achieving these goals will require campuses to think outside many of the boxes that currently define higher ed.

In addition to radically rethinking general education, we might supplement department-based majors with more coherent, integrated career-aligned degree pathways or with interdisciplinary majors organized around a societal problem (like social justice or sustainability).

We might infuse experiential learning and career identification and preparation across the curriculum. We might make active inquiry, experiential learning, undergraduate research and civic engagement essential elements in an undergraduate education.

Our faculty need to be incentivized to become more outcomes-focused and take a more active role as mentors.

We face a choice. Faculty, accreditors, and foundations can allow a college education to become more transactional and vocational, or they can push back, and make it more developmental and transformative. The future is up to us.