We are entering a new public attitude toward higher education and it ain't good. It is change. But we aren't sure what the change is going to look like. So we have to analyze what is happening in and outside of the ivory towers to understand the direction we have to go. This isn't the first time. Higher education has taken a turn as the economy and industry needs changed in the U.S. In the beginning, the main job of professors was to teach.
Universities first started mainly as teacher colleges and some prestigious colleges were to educate the rich, white and privileged. That changed after WWII when we realized after the birth of the nuclear bomb that we needed technology and a lot of it. With technology we needed a trained workforce from blue to white collar that not only would build and manage technology but create innovative products. From the transistor radio to the iPad. The main job of professors flipped to research and science, math, engineering and technology became king. We even designed our intelligence tests to measure students' probability of becoming a physicists. Like all kids want to be a physicist!
Now the economy of the U.S. is changing. Higher education has been able to raise costs easily as federal aid and government backed loans increased as the cost of an education increased. More and more students have entered college than ever before. And, standards have been interpreted to have slipped. And there seems to be an anti-intellectual movement in the U.S. And college loan debt has exceeded credit card debt in the U.S. So now everyone is questioning if everyone should go to college. This is all pointing to the perfect storm!
Legislators have pretty much had it with so many high school students going into college, their not being ready, and having to paying for them to take remedial courses that catch them up to what they should have learned in college. Faculty complain about having too many adjuncts and at the same time complaining that they have to teach more than two courses and adjuncts, at a small fraction of tenured faculty's salary, complain that they can only teach two.
Pretty much the system is not functioning well. As a result, we have boards beginning to micro-manage colleges. In Texas they have begun measuring the worth of each faculty member by people with no experience in education. We even have a hard time defining what constitutes a good teacher. Sigh.
In the next couple years, experts in education are going to have to work fast to fix higher education before local and state boards jump in and stir up the waters. However industry will hold a trump card as the U.S. goes from a consumer economy with intellectual property to sell and finance our treasured lifestyle to a ...........? economy and maybe a different lifestyle. Colleges will have to adjust to what they need.
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