Are we seeing the impending implosion of public higher education?

Public education depends on state revenues as a major source of funding. Most states, and certainly Washington state, are experiencing tremendously reduced revenues from various taxes because these are largely based on personal income and personal spending. Washington has no income tax but its other taxes that go to support the general fund are impacted by the general state of the economy. The University of Washington has already taken several budget cuts and now faces yet more, and more radical cuts at that.

The state is rapidly losing its ability to fund higher education and with that we are witnessing extreme cost cutting measures along with raising tuition rates for students. The university has to respond to the crisis as best it can, one hopes without sacrificing quality. But how they go about it is critical.

The responses we choose to make today depend critically on what we believe about the future. If we believe that this recession condition with its severe joblessness is temporary, if relatively long-lived, and that one day we will get back to the prior growth-oriented economy, then we will take actions that are meant to relieve short-term stress. On the other hand, if we believe (as I think we should) that the real contraction in the economy is going to continue for a very long time until some bottom equilibrium is reached, then we should choose quite different responses.

My argument for why we should believe that the real (not the financial Ponzi scheme) economy is in for very long-term contraction is based on the contraction of net energy that is already underway. The energy return on energy invested (extracting and processing) in fossil fuels has already declined to a point where the net energy available to the economy to do real work is diminishing. It takes energy to do real work and it takes real work to produce real assets (as well as truly useful services). Less energy available means less work gets done and a slower rate of asset production means that the money and financial assets are less and less tied to the real economy. There is a declining base in real assets so asset-backed financial instruments are becoming increasingly worthless even while the dollar denominated value seems to be increasing.

Fossil fuels supply 80-90% of the OECD economy and something like 40% of the still (but not for long) growing Chindia economies. Alternative, renewable, energy sources supply a miniscule percentage of energy for industrial countries. The scale of difference is so great that one cannot form any logical argument for the later to replace the former in any time soon enough to avoid some major contraction. See some of my prior posts in the Biophysical Economics category for much more background on this conundrum. The end result is that we are guaranteed to be in what will amount to a permanent economic contraction for many generations to come. Short of some miracle in energy production, like cold fusion, there is simply no evidence that we can become so efficient in our use of energy to compensate sufficiently for this decline in availability without major pains.

Public universities are likely to experience exceptional pain due to their being stuck with funding models based on political considerations. But I suspect there is another factor that will cause public higher education severe pain. And that is the seeming inability of education institutions to actually anticipate the coming changes and plan in advance for proactive responses rather than mere reactive ones as we have been seeing. Educators and education administrators are among the most conservative people in the world when it comes to changing their own organizations. This was actually a positive attribute in days gone by. Universities are supposed to be pillars of society. They are supposed to be stable. But the problem comes from being an institution embedded in a social milieu where radical and unprecedented change is taking place.

For the first time in human history we face a completely new kind of problem. From mankind's origins to very recently we have always enjoyed increasing energy accessibility and flows. From the domestication of fire to the present exploitation of extremely high powered fossil fuels, we have always been on the up-side of energy growth. And that is what enabled the growth of all world economies on average. But now the world is turning 180 on us. We have depleted a fixed finite resource to the point where it is so expensive to extract that we just can't support growth any more. Growth is over.

Moreover, we are going into decline. We are going to experience a wholly different world than we have grown used to. And, naturally, a majority of people, even educators, will not want to believe it nor reflect on the implications without something truly dramatic happening.

The educators and administrators I have interacted with, for the most part, still seem to believe that this economic situtation will eventually turn around and we will get back to "normal" one day. Thus the response will be to offload some number of staff and junior faculty. They will turn to hiring temporary lecturers to fill out more classes and cross their fingers that quality will not degrade. They will strive to maintain degree and sports programs that are interesting but not necessarily contributing to a society that is experiencing economic contraction. I say this even as a champion of liberal studies. But some of the programs I refer to are so-called professional degrees that are fundamentally based on assumptions of business as usual. Interestingly some of these same programs have recently started using the term "sustainable" in their rhetoric as if that will be enough to convince others that they are doing something to address what amounts to a nebulous sense that something is different in our world. They just don't yet understand how enormously different it is.

I suspect that public higher education institutions, for the most part, will choose to react with typical "fixes" to adjust their shrinking budgets under the belief that things will get better one day. We just need to hold on. The problem is that those responses will not adapt the institutions for permanent decline scenarios. What is required is planning for complete restructuring of the delivery of higher education (this may apply to K-12 as well). That plan will have to be managed carefully as the economy continues to contract.

But it is essential to society that we find a way to keep higher education alive and reasonably well. Our university institutions are the minds of society. If they fail to adapt to the impending decline properly they will implode and public education will be decimated. I would expect that there will be other forms of education that will arise Phoenix-like from the ashes. But there will be huge losses of knowledge and real assets in the meantime. Wish us luck.

 

Comments

[Robin Datta]

As well put "the money and financial assets are less and less tied to the real economy" - something the economists are yet to get. Alas, poor Yorick! economist I knew him, Horatio George, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. But I believe most members of your choir do not tire of your preachings.

"Short of some miracle in energy production, like cold fusion" - let's also not disregard the Singularity.

The "inability of education institutions to actually anticipate the coming changes and plan in advance for proactive responses rather than mere reactive ones" makes them akin to dinosaurs. Should we look to find any small furry mammals scampering about in the undergrowth?

The more lumbering the behemoths the more they "believe that this economic situtation will eventually turn around and we will get back to "normal" one day". The more they have been in a certain milieu, the more they are adapted to it: when change seems too difficult, they will resort to denial (Egyptian water sports - deep in de Nile).

[Molly Radke]

Alas. As I've argued with my friends SO often, my first quarter's tuition at the UW, back in the dark ages, was $87. Then a pound of hamburger cost roughly $.39 - sometimes a touch cheaper if there was a good sale. Now a pound of hamburger is around 2 bucks a pound. Tuition is....haven't checked the exact numbers recently, but last I looked it was 13 or 14 hundred dollars. It's probably more these days. But since way back then, the "cost of living" - a pound of hamburger - has gone up about five times in cost, but tuition? Oh about 14 or 15, or god only knows how many times. And we old farts want the young folks to keep on paying into social security - to keep on working at GOOD, high paying jobs - but we refuse to pay taxes at a rate that makes higher education and entrance to those high paying jobs possible. Nope, we expect the young people to just go into debt to pay for their higher education, and then to pay into social security to keep us. Yup. Hooray to us - who used up the resources and lived beyond our means - and are leaving them a bankrupt planet. I'm not into Invisible Friends, but god help us all. Now more than EVER we need education.....and the interest-willingness-ability - to live in a rational, fact-based world. Not likely. And I haven't EVEN mentioned professorial salaries. The people who should be among the highest paid in our society....aren't.

[Sam]

George,
Appreciate the post on higher education. It really is a mess right now, especially in Washington state. But I didn't hear any solutions from you about how educational institutions should be adapting.

Good thing other bright folk in this state have you beat. The neo-libertarian commenters who frequent the Seattle Times website often say whenever the subject of the UW comes up that the state should just eliminate the physical campus (with the exception of some libraries and labs for science students), along with liberal studies programs (because they're worthless and result in useless degrees) and just make university virtual for social science and mathematics students. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

There seem to be myriad reasons why eliminating a physical campus would be a bad idea, not least of which is the fact that a virtual campus requires energy to power the internet infrastructure over which students learn, and as a result, may be less sustainable in 75 years than a physical campus. But as much as I don't particularly like that idea, perhaps it's a temporary solution to help cut the costs of the physical campus, if some costs must be cut. Doing virtual classes is extremely problematic in a lot of ways, and in no way do I advocate it as a good solution--I just think it may be less bad than eliminating entire liberal studies programs.

These same commentators also say that they don't see what the problem is, because they, like Molly, went to the UW for $87 a quarter and they could work in the university library or in a local cafe to pay that off. If only those greedy administrators/union employees/researchers with multi-million dollar budgets would stop sucking away the tuition money, and if professors would teach more than just 3 hours a week, students would pay lower tuition and be able to pay for at least most of their education through part-time jobs. But I would hope most of those who read this blog see those rationales as what they truely are--scapegoats. Higher ed's funding problems are not mostly due to staff (although some problems may exist with compensation), but due to a lack of state support. Since higher ed is the largest discretionary spending item in the state, it's likely to get the axe and has repeatedly been cut hard in previous years. Because the benefits of higher ed spending are not completely internalized in the state, but go elsewhere, it's seen as something less worthwhile to invest in. We do need to spend more money on higher ed if we want a better system.

Although she is hardly perfect, I do want to offer a defense of the new interim president, Phyllis Wise. As a graduate of one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore, she has long been a champion of the liberal studies and is accomplished in her field. (Full disclosure: I am currently a senior at Swarthmore). Admittedly, I am guessing that she, like 99% of other university administrators have little understanding of the energy problems facing higher education, and so I don't think she will do much on the sustainability front. But I do hope that she offers some resistance to the growing chorus of commentators suggesting that students need to get STEM degrees, because that's the only field where good-paying jobs will be available. I think in that sense, she will work to preserve many valuable aspects of the UW curriculum, whether it is the 76 languages taught, the strong programs in English and creative writing, the wonderful exposure and opportunities international affairs undergraduates receive, or one of the best computer science departments in the country. It's hardly enough, because cuts will continue to come, and they will probably be targeted at the humanities, but hopefully it can stave off some of the pain.

[Robin Datta]

A brief discussion of some problems of education:
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

[Phil Henshaw]

Two of the other less discussed factors that seem at the center of the problem are 1)when unearned income accumulates by %'s and earned income linearly, the natural imbalance between them grows relentlessly 2) trying to keep #1 going forces us to consume depleting resources ever faster, to "sustain the economy", doing so using ever more complex solutions. That combination makes our society both physically and ethically incomprehensible.

Add to that the amount of time and effort students need to put into their increased roles as consumers of it all, there's no way that the "the message of our culture" can't be compromised in the process. Our world would naturally look nonsensical to any reasonable clear headed kid seeing it for the first time.

I don't think it makes for an appealing course of study to be given a profoundly self-defeating world too complex to understand anyway.

[George Mobus]

Robin,

Should we look to find any small furry mammals scampering about in the undergrowth?

Good point. I think that an educational institution focusing on systems science and permaculture will prove to be those little furry mammals! I'm still thinking about finding funding to start such a school. Got a couple of million bucks to contribute????

George

[George Mobus]

Hi Molly,

if you read my response to Robin Data you'll see what I think is the future of sustainable and appropriate education (also looking back at my posts on What should we fight to save? you can see what I think is of value for a future society). Also: A dream of education for the future.

I've almost given up on our current institutions! I want to start anew and do it right!

George

[George Mobus]

Hi Sam,

You may be interested to know that I have been in contact with members of the presidential search committee regarding the need for someone who is aware of the energy economy situation. Also Phylis came to campus and I raised this issue. Did she get it? Don't know, but we'll see!

George

[George Mobus]

Well said Phil.