The Purpose of Higher Education: Different Models

There is no consensus about the purpose of higher education, and these different goals make for a confusing and often frustrating public dialog. People with different mental models talk past each other in fruitless arguments, and internally inconsistent individuals fail to see the fault lines in their own opinions. In this post, I'd like to bring into relief these different operating normative models for the purpose of higher education.

The Exchange Model

In the exchange model, students exchange money for subject-specific knowledge and skills. They pay money for services rendered. In this model, students are looked at as autonomous, rational adults, and instructors as professionals performing a skilled service (teaching). While the relationship between instructor and student should be professional and civil, emotions and relationships are quite beside the point. The key is the exchange of substantive course content.

The Certification Model

In the certification model, the instructor's and the institution's duty is to the public (and particularly for state-funded institutions, to the government). The goal is to ensure that students who have received the certification of a credit hour/grade/G.P.A./degree actually earned it and possess some stock of knowledge as a result.

The Incubator Model

In the incubator model, college students are seen as fragile, still-developing adolescents, and the role of the institution is to successfully cultivate that development to move the fragile student to a more robust place, ready to enter the "real world." In this model, subject-matter content is only one element of a young person's development, and perhaps not the most important one. In the incubator model, the practices and norms of the institution are intentionally, avowedly different from the practices and norms of "the real world." The goal is to create a safe, hyper-nurturing environment in which healthy development can occur. Somebody following this model might emphasize, for instance, a strong mentoring relationship with students, or be very careful to avoid "triggering" language in the classroom. There might be a major emphasis on student life outside of academics.

The Simulation Model

The simulation model says that the college experience should be a dress-rehearsal for a student's work life. Much like the incubator model, this is a holistic model that sees content-specific knowledge as only one (and perhaps not the most important) element of a young person's education. However, unlike the incubator model that expressly creates an alternative reality, the simulation model wants to create a simulacrum of reality, with the teacher taking the roll of the "boss," coursework taking the role of work assignments, and fellow students taking the role of coworkers. The idea in this model is to inculcate the norms and practices of professional life to facilitate the student's transition into the workplace.

There are of course other models of higher education's purpose as well, including the "alumni satisfaction model," and the "promote the administrator's reputation and resume" model and the "money generation model" and the "resorts for rich kids" model, but these aren't generally very likely to receive much vocal support in the cold light of day.

The thing to note is that these models will often lead to very different policy prescriptions. How should teachers grade students? How much time should teachers spend trying to mentor students outside of class? How should teachers respond to failure? How merciful should the institution be? How should the institution handle controversial speech? Different normative models are likely to yield different answers to these and other questions. As long as education policy leaders embody these different models, they are likely to continue talking past each other in the quest to improve the state of higher education in the U.S. And individuals are likely to find themselves exasperated by particular teaching and policy quandaries if they fail to delineate between these different mental models in their own thinking.