Should Colleges Operate Like Businesses?
A recent survey of Americans has suggested that they have lost faith in higher education. In fact, they believe, there is little difference between higher education and a business. Both seem to be out to generate money, and both, Americans feel, care little about people. (See link.)
On the one hand, this is not true. Faculty members could have had much more lucrative careers in other fields. By choosing to teach rather than to go into law, medicine, or business, they have already decided to earn significantly less than their similarly-educated peers. They did it out of love: love of students and love of subjects.
On the other hand, it is all too true. It reflects the success of the Reagan Revolution, and the effort to privatize all American institutions, especially those of the public sector. Since the 1980s, American policymakers have been seeking to make higher education more market-oriented. One result is the emergence of college presidents who are paid like CEOs with high salaries and exorbitant benefits. This is a result of colleges acting more like businesses.
But the real danger is not college presidents’ salaries but that colleges and universities will no longer be special places devoted to the development of students’ minds and character. And this is what Americans in the recent poll have concluded.
Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been told to rely less on public revenue and more on generating their own. As a result, colleges and universities have invested less in teaching and more in promoting investments in research and programs that generate patents and revenue.
Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been told to orient their programs around the needs of the private sector rather than society at large. As a result, many of the disciplines—such as the humanities—that once catered to student learning are being gutted—even eliminated on some campuses—to make room for revenue-generating, market-oriented vocational programs.
Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been forced to raise class sizes in order to achieve that great market goal of efficiency. Of course, it’s not efficient. Larger classes mean less personal attention to individual students, less feedback on courses, and, ultimately, less learning in a less caring environment. But they’re cheap. They’re also impersonal, and parents and students do not appreciate being treated like commodities.
Americans have discovered that they were wrong to ask colleges and universities to become more like businesses. By reducing public funding, they have created a system that violates their own values of what a place of learning should be like. They want teachers to focus on students. They want teachers to care. They want classes to be small and personal. They want higher education, in fact, to be different from the business world.
The only way to do so, however, is to fund it. Since the 1980s, we have been told that public funding is a bad system, and that the market mentality is superior. But now that colleges and universities have responded by focusing on their bottom line rather than students, Americans are questioning the results that they themselves demanded.
