Who Uses Higher Ed?

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John Halbrooks

' Personal Canon Formation Substack is a November 2023 essay titled "Academia Will Not Love You Back". John describes how he had been assured while in graduate school in the 1990s that there would soon be a job boom, when the aging faculty who had been "hired in American academia's decades of expansion" would retire and be replaced by a new generation of assistant professors.

That didn't happen, John says, because university administrations opted for contingent (adjunct) faculty, probably in an effort to reduce cost. As he mentions, these adjunct faculty often have heavy course loads. One reason for this, at many research universities, is the imperative to "publish or perish" in the tenure track. Full-time faculty feel they are putting a lot of effort into research and writing, which isn't untrue. Many universities split off teaching (especially teaching undergrads) as a somewhat less important professorial duty and utilize grad students or contingent faculty to take that load. Some systems like the University of California created a new designation, Lecturer, and hired people who were NOT part of the tenure track to teach their undergrads. My father, who had no interest in writing books on Comparative Literature theory, happily taught all the world literature surveys at UC Davis.

I've begun listening to Eric Weinstein's Portal interviews from a few years ago. He talks to a bunch of really interesting people and I've found the conversations fascinating. Weinstein's view of the role of the academy has mostly to do with really high-end theoretical mathematics and physics. He made the point in a talk I listened to recently that for the researchers working in the rarefied atmospheres at the pinnacles of these fields, maybe only 10% of their ideas end up in publications. Weinstein claims that the most important way to capture a greater contribution from these people is to let them train "lineages" of grad students who can follow the trails they blaze and carry on their work. He also laments legislative changes over recent decades that eliminated most "blue sky" research. I suspect he may be romanticizing this situation a bit, but I'm willing to take his word for it to some extent, since I have no direct experience. I'd be cautious, however, how widely I would apply this type of model.

I've mentioned before that I think one of the big elements of confusion, when we talk about "the crisis in Higher Ed", is what part of this huge and varied thing are we imagining? Are we mostly concerned about the types of institutions Weinstein is familiar with (typified by Harvard but probably represented by about 50 universities), where the conditions he described may apply? Is the situation the same in the public research universities (R1) that grew out of most of the land-grant colleges established in each state? Should these institutions have other responsibilities in addition to research, such as educating the youth of their states? And what about other colleges and universities that don't stress research and publication quite as much? There are plenty of prestigious colleges such as Carleton, Bates, Amherst, and Williams where faculty are held to pretty high standards of ongoing scholarship, but where there's much more focus on their roles as instructors of undergrads. And then there are state systems like the one I worked in. The seven universities offer bachelors and graduate degree programs; the thirty-one community and technical colleges offer associate degrees and certificates. Although people teaching at the universities have PhDs and are expected to publish, there's really no perishing. I was one of a handful of faculty on my campus who had a book published by an academic press. Typically people got credit for a journal article or a conference paper.

John also mentions the relatively low pay faculty receive, especially relative to administrators (he forgot to mention coaches!). This was certainly my experience, despite being unionized. The proliferation of six-figure vice presidents and the excessive pay and perks lavished on presidents who seem to have nothing real to contribute were especially frustrating to me as I was living through my "Retrenchment Journey" last year. I'm aware that I made a choice to pursue a less remunerative discipline (you might be surprised to know there's a WIDE variation in faculty compensation, with business and STEM folks at the top and most Humanities people at the bottom), and that if I was interested in the big bucks I chose the wrong career. Actually, I had that career before and I'm not that interested in the big bucks.

One factor that complicates the story of Higher Ed's decline and makes it about more than just administrative incompetence or venality, is the demographic change we're seeing in America. I think it's helpful to remember that before the Second World War, college educations were available to a much smaller portion of the US population. In 1940, undergraduate enrollment was about 1.5 million. By 1949, the G.I. Bill had made college available to nearly a million more Americans. A decade later, a continuing benefit for Korean-era veterans and an expansion of the capacities and numbers of institutions pushed the number of undergrads to 3.6 million. Expansion continued and by 1969, the baby boom had helped raise the number of college students to 8 million.

As the generations changed, many children of college graduates grew up with the assumption that certainly they too would attend college. Undergraduate numbers continued to rise, to a peak of about 17.5 million in the US in 2010. But, like the elephant making its way through the anaconda, the demographic bubble caused by the baby boom began to abate. By 2020, the number of undergrads had dropped to below 16 million. This may also have been partly due to the increased expense of tuition and textbooks relative to family income: those expenses rose much faster than inflation and middle-class and working-class income remained flat or decreased with inflation. It wasn't yet the pandemic: that reduced enrollment by nearly another million in 2022.

Enrollment seems to be bouncing back after COVID, so there are still about 14.8 million undergrads in America. This is a lot, but it certainly challenges the continuous growth assumptions that a lot of Higher Ed planners seemed to have been holding. There seems to have been an expectation that a much larger proportion of the US population would go to college each year. The reality is a bit surprising. When 1.5 million affluent young people were attending colleges and universities in 1940, they made up 1.1% of a US population of 132 million. The 3.6 million in 1960 had nearly doubled college representation to 2% of the population. By the peak in 2010, 5.7% of Americans were in college. The current proportion of Americans attending college is 4.4%.

I have to admit I was a bit surprised by these percentages. I had actually thought Higher Education was much more widespread than it is. Of course, the percentages I mentioned were of the currently-enrolled in each of those years. Cumulatively, about 64% of Americans have attended some college. About 15% didn't finish a program, 10% have earned an associate's degree, and 38% a bachelor's. Another way of looking at this is that back in 1940, only about 6% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 28 were in college. By the peak in 2010, nearly 42% of 18-to-28s were in college. Currently, about 34%. That means, two-thirds of the 44 million young Americans in that age range are not going to college. What tools are they using, to make sense of their world? How many of them might benefit from learning opportunities they could access in other ways?