Are Colleges and Universities Going to Implode?

Probably

Administrators around here are frantic. The mood of faculty is black; morale is as low as I have ever seen it. The problem is that my university campus is not at all unique. I hear this from many colleagues around the country. In fact, around the world! And I think what I am seeing up close here is really just a microcosm of the whole world.

What is going on? Demand for higher education is as high as it has ever been. Students and parents are apparently quite willing to go deep into debt to get that baccalaureate or master's degree, more so than at any time in history. You would think that education administration would be thrilled. But the reality is that this demand is just a part of the same franticness that is pervasive throughout societies in essentially every society. We are all scrambling to make ends meet and there is no obvious answer as to how.

For public universities the basic problem is the decline in support from state legislatures over the past several decades, and particularly since the great recession in 2009. State legislatures have slashed budgets and still ramped up their demands for “accountability.” Many of the states have acquiesced to allow public universities to raise tuitions to put more burden on the students (who in turn have just borrowed more to pay for it). But there is a real limit to how much tuition at public schools can cover the real costs of running a modern university, especially a flagship research university. Fundamentally universities have been in an arms race, competing for federal research dollars that do not actually cover overhead, competing for students by offering apartment-like dorms and spectacular sports complexes, and competing for mind-share in national magazines that purport to rank them by various quality standards. All the while the actual costs of providing these so-called services have gone through the roof. Universities are on a hopeless treadmill and the irony is that the regents and top administrators insist on doing more spending thinking they are going to somehow keep things going until the environment gets better. Someday.

And increasingly, professional administrators, playing the role of business executives, have seen their futures as being tied to the great American fallacy called growth. They are absolutely, and pathetically, invested in the neoclassical economic vision of growth as the only viable solution to malaise. They are making the job of predicting doom incredibly easy.

Our top dog, the president of the university, has recently resigned to take a job elsewhere. Likely he will get a boost in wages to do so, or maybe he just wants to get out of Dodge before the SHTF. Ironically, those of us on the ground are scratching our heads wondering what he did while here that would make him all that attractive. But that is another story. There have been a spate of high profile moving-ons and wanting to spend more time with families going on of late. If I had to guess (and that is all I can do, based on the peculiar patterns of behaviors I witness!) I would say that the administrators at the “top” have realized that the whole house of cards they've helped build is about to come crashing down and they want to get out before they get the credit (blame) for what is coming.

When Things Aren't Going Well...

Double down on the problem. Do more of what you've been doing to solve it. For example, if the problem is poor quality outcomes from K-12 schools, institute standardized testing for all students in the system for math to raise the number of students who can fill all of those high-tech jobs we are producing so America can compete in the world economy. Then when the test scores indicate that students are heading south on math skills double down. Increase the testing and the stakes. Threaten teachers with dismissal if the scores don't improve. Whatever you do don't consider that maybe the problem is in the standardized testing approach and the belief that all students need those math skills in the first place. Never look at your own assumptions and beliefs as possibly at the root of the problem.

We haven't yet instituted standardized testing in higher education but I expect it to happen one day. For us the solution to the chaos of lousy administration is hire more administrators. Professional administrators will never do a self-examination that would reveal that the fundamental problem with what is happening in our universities starts with their assumptions and beliefs about their role in the whole business. Oh, and if things are getting worse then increase your enrollments — grow more to solve the problems created by growth.

And problems there are.

Growth in any organization is problematic. It has to be carefully planned and managed. Just opening the front door and putting out a welcome sign is hardly enough. The new start-up world is full of the corpses of companies that imploded not because of bad products but because their rapid growth led to serious mistakes in follow-through and mismanagement. Now I will grant that our administrators realized they would need more teachers and staff to handle the increased number of classes, so they did authorize searches for more bodies. But the problem is that that isn't really the same thing as planning for growth and carefully executing the plan. That is just throwing more money at the problem without real insight as to how to make it work well. In my department alone we have added something like eight to ten (hard to keep track!) new faculty, many of whom are lecturers, gave them teaching assignments and shoved them in front of students. There was absolutely no thought given to how these faculty would be acculturated. And as a result we have had some serious mishaps.

Growth in nature serves a purpose. Your body grows until it reaches an appropriate size for autonomous living. Then it stops. The neoclassical economic model has convinced everyone that growth is good no matter what. And so that is the default model that everyone mindlessly follows. Amazingly many administrators come from technical backgrounds where they have encountered the concept of compound interest or exponential growth and many have learned that exponential growth in a finite space is a logical inconsistency. Somehow they never translate that fact to growth of organizations. And so into it they plunge.

The current story is that we are expanding access to boost the economic health (as measured in growth) of the local/state economy. But that is just a story. There are not enough high-paying jobs that require baccalaureate degrees that are not deeply technical (e.g. programming) to warrant opening the floodgates. No the real story is the diminishing revenues and climbing costs. One of the tell tale signs is the push by administration to boost our population of international students and especially in the graduate programs. Those students pay much higher tuition, which, it is hoped, will help pay for the differential created by still relatively low in-state tuition. Never mind that this creates some language issues that we are simply not equipped to handle. And never mind that the mission of our campus specifically was to provide access for more undergraduate degrees. When push comes to shove toss out the mission.

At one point the administration came up with a catchy slogan: “Seven in seven”, seven thousand students on campus in seven years. But that was last year. This year, new administration, new slogans - “we will grow where we can,” whatever that means.

College Administrators Never Got the Memo

In MBA programs, in management theory courses, students learn that management is based on a three-leg support. To be a good manager you need to be able to execute in all three areas. Not surprisingly these legs correspond with the hierarchical cybernetic model of management. The first leg is basic administration, which relates to operational management. Essentially this is the mundane paperwork and “turning the crank” to keep operations moving along. In academia this is, historically, what departmental chairs and college deans did for a living most of the time. Deans, also needed to spend time on the second leg, making coordination level decisions to adjust to external issues (tactical) and maintaining balance within the college among various departments (e.g. allocating resources fairly). For literally centuries the “mission” of higher education has been pretty set and stable. The teaching and degree granting activities of departments and colleges had not been very different from generation to generation. So the main management tasks were pretty much administrative in nature. There was really never a need for college administrators to learn management theory. Administration doesn't really need any theory, you just make sure everything is operating according to the established policies and procedures.

Then things changed, after WWII. Vannevar Bush, who had worked at the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, advocated the establishment of government funding of research for a wide variety of scientific endeavors. That recommendation led to the establishment of agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). The idea was to award grants for doing research to university professors to accelerate the discovery of new knowledge, and, particularly, new technology. That is when things started changing in terms of missions for universities [see Cuban, Larry (1999). How Scholars Trumped Teachers, Teachers College Press, New York]. No longer would they be solely pursuing curriculum and teaching. Now they would enter competitions for funds and prestige. Like many drugs, government money has become addictive.

The modern research university's mission is in constant flux. The big problem is that the flux is perplexing. In fact I would have to say that the universities no longer really know who or what they are. On top of the research dominating component, there has been a race to produce PhDs and expansion of the student populations due to society deciding (actually capitalism) that a baccalaureate is the new norm and so universities have to provide seats for nearly everyone. The mission has gotten extremely complex and there is really no higher level perspective to provide guidance to universities as to what they should set as priorities. They have literally become all things to all people. And that is a formula for failure.

Which brings me to the final leg of the management platform. Leadership is the ability to visualize the future, to visualize how missions might need to change in response to changes in the environment, and provide that vision to the troops who will implement it. Leaders have to see clearly and motivate their “followers” to organize and operationalize that vision. Leaders are the strategic managers in an organization. If you aren't a natural leader, you need management theory to inform you about what your job is. No one wrote a memo to college administrators (who were already becoming professionalized). Most of them just assumed they would keep doing what they had been doing but in the new environment. They are called “administrators” for a reason.

It turns out that every manager at every level in a hierarchical organization needs to be capable of all three legs to one degree or another depending on their level. At the department level managers are more concerned with daily operations but they also need to think in terms of coordination issues (say making class assignments or working with other departments on interdisciplinary courses). And they need to have some capacity to invoke strategic thinking with respect to issues like changes in demand for their degree programs that might affect faculty resources. At the organizational coordination level, i.e. deans and provosts, the emphasis is clearly on tactical and logistical concerns across multiple programs. However, they need to have more capability to think strategically about the future and the overall changes in the environment that will impact the programs they coordinate. University presidents are much less concerned with coordination (let alone operations) and are all about strategic thinking. I have yet to observe a university president that seems to actually understand what strategic thinking entails, though, of course, they all know the word!

After kicking around higher education for nearly a quarter of a century (having done a stint in private industry and being the observant guy I am) I have learned a few things about management in academia (for example see my post: What Do We Mean By Leadership in an Academic Institution?). On a few occasions I've been asked to take on a temporary management role to fill a hole. So I've been faced with the issues at several different levels. I think I understand the problems and I think most of them start with those who take on professional management positions really don't have a strong background in management to start with. There are no real mentors to learn from. In short I really cannot say I believe most of them have a clue as to what they are doing. That is why we are facing the problems we are, and why those problems will not actually be solved. I fully expect higher education, particularly the public institutions, to implode in the not-too-distant future.

The bricks and mortar colleges will mostly be replaced by on-line courses as if those can really provide an education. That “strategy” might be seen as saving administrators' jobs so they will push it I'm sure. But so what. Education is now a commodity anyway. You don't really need to understand subjects you just need to pass tests and get a piece of paper. You yourself are a commodity, a worker (or a consumer). You have little individual value so why waste money and time on a real education?

Of course in the slightly longer run, society itself will collapse so this is all academic (pun intended). I still hold out hope for a nucleus of eusapient beings to sequester themselves somewhere a little more safe and hunker down for the coming dark ages and bottleneck event. I still think such a group could establish an education process that would really educate children and young adults.

Speaking of the bottleneck, Bill Catton (Overshoot and Bottlenck) passed on in January. Some of you may have read my review of Bottleneck here or at the Oil Drum. When I spoke with Bill last he had decided to let it all go. He realized that our human species was incapable of understanding what is happening to us and that his efforts would not change anything. His attitude was what changed mine about trying to get people to understand anything. He went off to spend quality time with his grand kids and I think he did enjoy a more pleasant time of it. He was a true seer.

Comments

[George Mobus]

Several readers have sent me e-mails telling me the Captcha (or whatever it is called) bot-filter is not working properly and preventing them from posting comments.

If you are having difficulty and want to e-mail me your comment I will post them to the blog here. And I will let Typepad service know.

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Here is a comment from Ruben A.

John Michael Greer mentions the diminishing returns of knowledge in his post this week, honouring William Catton.

I have come to think diminishing returns is one of the great nonunderstoods, like the exponential function.

Basic literacy and numeracy makes life and work a whole lot better, but beyond that the utility drops off sharply for most people.

Now, my mother always said, "Get an education, so you have something to think about while you are digging ditches. " I like higher education, but that mental stimulus used to be met by speakers and radio shows and books, not extraordinarily expensive degrees.

The same diminishment occurs in the research programs you mentioned. There are no more discoveries of aspirin or penicillin, things that make every human life better. We are left with the hope we might help find a drug that encourages hair growth 5% of the time.

So the fact is, universities are not worth public funding.

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[Thanks]

Amazing read....sometime a few paragraphs can really make an impact.m Thank you for taking the time to share

[Reverse Engineer]

In the post industrial world to come, the College Degree is an anachronism.

Universities developed during the Growth phase that took off during the so-called "Enlightenment", with places like Oxford kicking off in the 1100s or so. They served to consolidate and centralize an accumulating body of knowledge, and train people to think in a way useful to the developing paradigm.

Universities have no place in the coming world, the knowledge they have accumulated is for the most part useless in a low per capita energy world and the economic model they are built on is demonstrably false.

It boggles my mind that people are going into deep debt to attend these dinosaur institutions, clinging to the Hopium that a Sheepskin will get them something better than a job flipping burgers at Mickey Ds.

Along with the Banks and Goobermints, the sooner the Universities collapse, the better.

RE

[D]

I suspect that implosion is guaranteed.

I was very lucky to graduate before my (UK) university was transformed from an educational establishment into a profit-making impersonation of one.

I returned to the same city some years later to work for a hi-tech start-up in the adjacent science park, and would occasionally meet ex-tutors for a few beers over lunch. They would tell me woeful tales of disasters which had unfolded since my departure: the mad scramble to create all manner of spurious new study programs; entry requirements and academic standards sacrificed to maximise student numbers - and income for the University. Quality teaching now took second place to maintaining order in classes of increasingly unruly students.

The most mobile and marketable members of staff had left for posts in industry or overseas. Those who remained were demoralised and depressed, counting the days before they were eligible to take early retirement.

At the same time, student grants had been replaced by loans, helping to keep (what was clear even then to be) a bankrupt financial system staggering along for a while longer.

The main motivation for young people going to university now seems to be the chance of three or more years of partying before being spat out into a life of debt and burger-flipping.

[George Mobus]

@RE,

I agree that universities in their current form are going to be useless, as are most degrees. But I hold out hope that the notion of higher learning will not go away entirely. Not because my job is associated with higher ed (I am beginning to plan for retirement). We will always need some form of bastion for more abstract concepts and understanding. Perhaps only a few will ever participate (as it used to be), but there should be a light of knowledge shining somewhere. That is, unless we go extinct!

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@D,

There is a lot of lowered expectations and low achievement to be sure, but I still meet a number of students who are sincerely interested in the world and how it works. My own view is that these are the students who belong in higher education in the first place. Instead, higher ed has become the new "high school" because society has decided everyone needs to know calculus! Amazingly, year after year a new study comes out showing that college graduates who do get living-wage jobs rarely use much if any of the knowledge and skills they supposedly learned in college.

George

[BC]

Prior to WW II and the GI Bill, 1-10% of the population obtained or required a post-secondary "credential" to obtain lifetime gainful employment and increasing purchasing power from earned income after taxes and inflation.

However, since the 1970s-80s, when women entered the paid labor force en masse in unprecedented numbers as a share of the labor force and population, post-secondary "education" became effectively a low- or no-productivity, low- or no-value-added jobs program, and now a net cost to the economy and society, for primarily female "educators" and administrators of the institutions of "education".

Moreover, the sum of total gov't spending, private "education" and "health care", and household and business debt service costs are now 54% equivalent of US GDP.

Also, the cumulative imputed interest to total credit market debt outstanding and the resulting net annual financial flows now equal annual GDP growth in perpetuity.

Therefore, the net costs of "education", "health care", gov't spending, and debt service ("rentier taxes") now preclude further growth of real per capita activity of the remaining 46% of GDP, let alone acceleration of growth.

Add the net energy costs of uneconomic extraction of shale oil and the cumulative costs of oil consumption per capita, and the current system of uneconomic resource extraction, allocation, and income and wealth distribution is unsustainable and a prohibitive cost to sustaining our standard of material consumption per capita and psycho-emotional well-being for the bottom 90%+.

None of this is readily apparent, but it might be hereafter as a consequence of what appears to be the incipient shale bubble bursting and the effect of a plunge in capital and consumer goods orders, decelerating industrial production, and a rapid deceleration of profits, income, and gov't receipts as we begin 2015.

Just as we cannot now collectively afford the oil-, auto-, debt-, and subruban housing-based economic model, neither can we afford per capita the cost of the institutions that arose as beneficiaries of the unsustainable economic model, including "education", "health care" (costing 18% of GDP, $10,000 per capita, and $26,000 per household), financial services resulting in the perpetual indebtedness of the bottom 90%, and never-ending imperial wars for oil and world domination.

[George Mobus]

@BC,

I certainly agree with your conclusion insofar as the modern version of higher education is concerned. But a more sapient version of education will be needed so long as humans persist.

George

[allhomeworktutors]

Due to the decline in funds from the government and legislatures , the universities and colleges have commercialized their courses to make ends meet. This has lead to introduction of poor quality courses to increase income through increased quantity of students. The general effect is that they produce half baked graduates who are not competitive in the job market. This is not a national problem- it is global.

[eee]

BC expresses a strange animosity toward female higher ed workers, but rest assured that women entering the labor market did not cause or appreciably exacerbate the explosive growth of higher ed since WWII. (That's a bit like confusing a symptom of the disease with the cause.)

Much has been written about in the higher ed press about these processes happening in large public university systems, but it is happening at privates as well, although "each private university is unhappy in its own way."

Getting a degree did used to mean something in the job market, but basically it meant the difference between having a job where you could sit down most of the day, versus having a job where you needed to be on your feet most of the day. This is actually still the true class divide in American life, and was what my parents meant when they wanted their kids to get a "good job." (A good job could mean a secretarial job in a pleasant office, as long as you could sit down all day. A bit more pay was also a good thing, but $10K more a year and being able to sit down was better than $20K more a year and having to stand up and dig ditches.)

Of course, a college degree doesn't even guarantee that any more. But my parents, uneducated as they were, still grasped the reality of how energy expenditure really mattered in life. The money was important, but earning money + saving one's personal energy was the sweet spot.

(BTW, I really hope the call for "sapient survivors" doesn't mean that we all have to live together in a supersapient commune or something... cause that sounds awfully familiar.)