"And the Chicks for Free"

                        "And the Chicks for Free"

I remember my first big day in college when the generic speech by the president was delivered, a speech delivered by every school president across academia. He said, "Look to your right and your left. One of the three of you will not be here in four years." Why is that, I thought. Bad students? Bad screening? Whose fault is the failure of one-third of the students in the freshman class, students with a significant financial, personal and family commitment to their success? Half of American colleges and universities lose a quarter or more of their freshman class in the first year, according to University of Pennsylvania education professor Robert Zemsky. Forty percent of college freshmen don’t even graduate.

What is going on here?

Here is one take from the growingly confident Heather Mac Donald:

....“The priority for many college presidents is getting freshmen in the door and tuition dollars in the bank,” wrote UC Berkeley professor David Kirp in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “Nobody gets fired because students are dropping out.”

Higher education today resembles a massive Ponzi scheme. Colleges desperately recruit ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating. Before their inevitable withdrawal, those students’ tuition dollars fuel the growth of the bureaucracy, which creates the need to get an even larger pool of likely dropouts through the door to fund the latest round of administrative expansion. Administrative positions at colleges and universities grew at ten times the rate of tenured faculty positions from 1993 to 2009, according to academic consulting firm ABC Insights. By the 2013 school year, there were slightly more campus administrators nationwide than faculty; spending on the bureaucracy was equal to spending on all educational functions, including faculty. Tuition rose to cover those bureaucratic expenses, regardless of whether families could afford to pay it. Tuition at private four-year colleges grew 250 percent from 1982 to 2012, while the median family income rose about 18 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to ABC Insights. Since the 2008 recession, tuition at four-year public colleges rose 35 percent.

…….


Conservatively, half of American college students should not be in college at all; they are neither intellectually prepared for nor temperamentally inclined toward postsecondary book learning. Yet the dominant narrative in our culture today is that the only way to be successful and self-respecting is to have a college degree. This narrative reflects the experience of the nation’s elite degree holders, who are largely clueless about work that does not involve sitting at a desk and using a computer. That narrative pushes students away from practical training in a trade, while a relentless campaign from campus pitchmen pulls them into four-year colleges. Vice-chancellors of enrollment, vice presidents for enrollment management, and executive directors of university marketing try to find potential recruits and persuade them to send in that first tuition payment, or at the very least a non-refundable deposit. The enrollment bureaucracy’s mantra is “optimizing yield”—getting as many warm bodies into your dorms and classrooms, if only briefly, for every thousand recruiting dollars you spend. A vast industry of enrollment consultants assists the in-house yield optimizers, promising to “reduce melt” (i.e., reduce no-shows), provide “multi-channel marketing,” and measure “product knowledge.” Their problem is right out of Econ 101: the nationwide supply of slots in each year’s freshman class outstrips demand—except in that thin upper crust of name-brand, status-conferring institutions. Thousands of obscure colleges fight for each applicant with techniques that resemble time-share marketing: offering priority in housing and in choosing a simpatico sleep-until-noon schedule of classes, say, to students who apply for early admission."

Everything can be made a business, from government to non-profits to religion. There is no reason that education should be exempt. But there are a lot of cultural reasons why it should be muted. Education used to be an institution, a pillar in the social edifice. It didn't always have to be perfect but is it too much to ask that it be reasonably high-minded and that its students be more customers than victims?