Higher Ed and the Cost of Hollow Reputations

Higher education is in bad shape. There are many and interlocking problems, but none is bigger than the overwhelming obsession with institutional reputation. The single-minded quest for reputation has driven up tuition and eviscerated the institution's potential to promote social mobility. Instead, ever-increasing tuition and ever-rising academic standards for admission have turned colleges into inequality factories, taking the socioeconomic hierarchy of the country's high school graduates and spitting out an even more ossified version of it after graduation.

My diagnosis rests on a controversial idea that the reason college degrees are valuable to employers is because they serve as a convenient "signal" or "heuristic" for judging a person's overall competence, not because employers value the educational content reflected in the degree. Economists debate this idea as the difference between the "signalling" function of education and the "human capital" function of education. While this (as far as I know) is still an active debate in labor economics, I personally find the signalling explanation much more convincing.

If you accept the premise that the wage premium from a college degree is primarily the result of signalling, then it makes sense why the institutions are so obsessed with reputation. For the vast majority of their "customers" (i.e., their students), the product they are purchasing is not education but reputation. There are a plethora of perverse trends in higher education that can be traced to this goal replacement of educational outcomes for institutional reputation.

Critique 1: Most students don't care very much about their education, and it shows.

I'm sure this will make k-12 teachers roll their eyes very hard. Of course, the vast majority of students who have ever had to go to school haven't really wanted to be there. I can't really make the case that college is special in this regard, TODAY. But, it used to be possible to earn a middle-class living without going to college. Now, it is much, much, much more difficult. We are getting that message across to teens fairly well: you'd better go to college if you want to earn a decent salary and have benefits. The downside of this is that many of the students in college today wouldn't have bothered going 30 years ago, and don't have much intrinsic appetite for learning-for-learning's sake. They are there to get their piece of paper and get out and get a job, and to have as much fun with as little work as possible in the meantime.

We have told students their whole lives that they should go to college to get a job. We shouldn't be very surprised when that's precisely how they think about their college experience.

Critique 2: It is shocking how easy it is to graduate college with a decent GPA without learning very much at all.

I suppose I could have lumped this under critique 1 just as easily. Because students see the product they're buying at college as the degree, not the education, the institution has responded in kind by making it easy to get the degree without getting an education. While measuring educational outcomes is extraordinarily difficult (see No Child Left Behind), at least one major study of higher education has indicated that a sizable chunk of undergraduates don't learn anything in college.


Critique 3: Colleges maintain their reputations while producing lame educational outcomes by doing things that promote inequality and even further worsen educational outcomes.

What goes into a college's reputation? I would venture that it's some combination of size, money, physical amenities, national prominence of its sports teams, selectivity of students, and (the only one that they actually like to talk about) the research output of the faculty.

Notice that most of these have at best a tangential relationship to the quality of instruction and education on the campus. In fact, the pursuit of some of these goals is in precise opposition to the pursuit of educational quality.

Critique 3a: the pursuit of size is bad for education

The need to grow the student body while controlling costs means that students are in large lecture classes that are proven to be basically pointless as educational endeavors. Large size means students get little individual attention, and it means teachers do not have time to grade meaningful assignments that promote deep learning. Assessments have to be able to be graded quickly and have to be few in number.

Critique 3b: The emphasis on research as the criterion for promotion and tenure means nobody knows how or cares to learn
how to teach well

At least in R1 schools, teaching is considered a necessary but unpleasant chore, and one for which the majority of
teachers have received little to no training. While administrations give public lip service to quality teaching, even
going so far as to give awards for teaching, these accolades mean little when it comes to actual career advancement. So not only is it difficult to teach well when class sizes are huge, the considerable investment of time that would be required to teach well under those conditions makes absolutely no sense to the typical person teaching a class. Combined with the fact that most students don't care much if they learn or not, you get a recipe for the dog and pony show that is modern higher education. The old Soviet saying that, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" comes to mind. We pretend to teach them, and they pretend to learn. Lecture-style teaching with multiple-choice learning assessments are easy to do for everybody involved, but educationally speaking, they are a complete waste of time for the vast majority of students. At the end of the day, the students happily take their B and promptly forget anything of value they may have temporarily learned, while the professors have sacrificed only the bare minimum of time necessary to not get fired, saving maximum time for pursuing research, which the institution has told them in no uncertain terms is their actual this-is-what-we-pay-you-for job. Their happy B students give them a decent evaluation, and the teacher's complete lack of pedagogical training probably helps them continue in ignorant
bliss at just how educationally pointless their class was. You've heard about grade inflation? Well, this is it. This is why grade inflation happens. It happens because it helps everybody involved. As long as the faculty keep pumping out research and doing other reputation-enhancing activities, the fact that the institution is producing crappy educations for undergrads just won't impact its reputation very much.

Critique 3c: the pursuit of selectivity turns colleges into inequality factories and temporary resorts for rich kids

One way colleges are able to produce crappy educations while maintaining good academic reputations is by increasing their admissions standards. Typically, this would involve increasing the standards for GPA and scores on standardized tests like the SAT. This has two consequences, both of which are bad for social mobility and good for ossifying pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies. First, there is clearly a gigantic overlap between a student's socioeconomic background and their likelihood of being admitted to a selective college. Poverty and race impact educational achievement. And while the issue of racial characteristics in the college admissions process has received considerable public attention, the issue of affirmative action for class has not. Making your college more academically selective means that it will attract wealthier students and exclude lower income students, on average.

However, that's not the only way that selectivity promotes inequality. To attract this "better class" of wealthy, privileged students, colleges have been engaged in an aggressive amenities arms race. If West Plains State has a new gym, we need a new gym with a climbing wall! If South Mountain State U has an on-campus bakery, we need to give students a free personal masseuse and 10 ipads! Ok, hyperbole there for illustrative purposes. But this amenities arms race is very real, and it drives up tuition prices, cause hey, it turns out giant new dorms and academic buildings and state-of-the-art technology and gleaming new stadiums are all really really expensive!

In the race to attract the best and brightest, colleges have transformed themselves into 4-year all-inclusive resorts for 18-22 year olds. I'm extremely dubious that having that 5th racquetball court is doing much to help students understand Nietzsche, but it sure as hell is making it harder for a poor kid to afford the tuition.

Critique 3d: The only people being asked to bear the burden of institutional cost-control are the relatively powerless non-tenured adjuncts and grad students.

Instead of saying, oh, I don't know, maybe we DON'T need 10 new buildings a year, colleges have used one primary mechanism of cost control: paying teachers as little as they can possibly get away with.

University middle-management and expensive amenities and infrastructure have exploded, while the people who actually deliver what MOST people in the public believe to be the university's primary product (education) are increasingly non-tenured desperate adjuncts making very little money. Universities have adopted a corporate model for their management. Increase demand (i.e., grow large student bodies) and cut some costs. That is, cut the salaries of the people most powerless to say or do anything about it, and increase the proportion of the workforce constituted by people like that. Meanwhile, continue accepting and pumping out many times more ph.d. students than the market will support. Happily exploit 25 year olds' naievete and confused career ambitions. It's a double-whammy, really! Having a lot of grad students keeps your supply of desperate low-paid un-unionized non-tenured labor high, and it also keeps the supply of desperate newly-minted ph.d. holders high sector-wide, increasing the supply of desperate adjuncts and driving down wages!

So, to review this tour through the pedagogical wasteland that is higher education, we have students who don't care about learning, faculty who don't care about teaching, classroom conditions that are educationally difficult, and more and more low-paid adjuncts who are teaching as many classes as possible just to pay rent.

Once you understand that the primary product that colleges are selling is reputation, this all starts to make sense. Sad, frightening, stupid sense.