Degrees of influence
How the marketing mindset overtook higher education
WHEN GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY sought to revamp the University of Massachusetts last spring, media coverage focused on the ensuing political donnybrook. Critiquing the substance of Romney's radical reforms took a back seat to kibitzing the contest between an upstart governor and a legendary politician, William M. Bulger, whose $304,000 president's job was an item on the governor's chopping block.
Following Bulger's resignation last summer, Romney's plan dropped from sight -- and now the governor who boasted that "this is my opportunity to be bold" has declared that his proposals are no longer on the table. Even so, they deserve attention, since their market mindset exemplifies important and troubling national trends.
The management consulting firm Bain & Co., Romney's old outfit, developed the governor's proposal, and the plan betrayed its origins. It called for substantially increasing tuition and fees, starkly differentiating research-oriented and vocationally oriented campuses, and grouping smaller campuses into regional networks more responsive to local industry's needs. In an attempt to strengthen its "flagship" campus, UMass-Amherst would grow bigger and, thanks to tuition and fee hikes as well as additional state funds, it would also grow richer.
Such ideas exemplify an age when priorities in higher education are determined less by academic values than by the interests of multiple constituencies -- students, donors, corporations, politicians. In today's university, the student is a "customer" and the professor is an "entrepreneur." Each campus unit is a "profit (or loss) center," and each institution is busily promoting its "brand" and looking for its "niche market," whether in money capital or intellectual capital. "The University of California means business," says Richard C. Atkinson, that system's recently retired president, and he knows whereof he speaks.
It's important not to slip into nostalgia for a mythical republic of knowledge where the creation and transmission of knowledge was all that mattered. Dollars have always greased the wheels -- otherwise, the term "legacy" wouldn't have a meaning specific to universities. At the turn of the 20th century, the University of Chicago stripped Worcester's Clark University of its best professors by offering to double their salaries; Columbia University ran a factory-like correspondence school; and General Electric opened a corporate-sponsored laboratory at MIT.
What's troubling today, however, is the single-minded fixation on marketplace and managerial values. The winners are those with the skills valued by the market. The losers are advocates of the liberal arts, who can't prove their bottom-line value, and students from poor households, who are increasingly priced out of higher education.
Today's commercialized academia stems from myriad sources. Universities' costs have risen rapidly since the 1970s, partly because of the astronomical expense of biotech and high-tech research. Meanwhile, traditional sources of funding -- federal research support with few strings, as well as state dollars -- have been proportionately shrinking. These developments have forced universities to look elsewhere for funds. The impact is evident everywhere: in the rise of the so-called "practical arts" majors; universities' eight-figure investments in student perks; the growing dependence on deals with industry; and the belief, especially common during the go-go 1990s, that the Internet would be a gold rush for higher education as well.
A new generation of administrators, schooled in business practice, has acquired ever-greater power in the retooled universities. Those officials, veterans of government streamlining and corporate downsizing, have brought all the fashionable management and budgeting nostrums -- ideas like TQM (total quality management), revenue-center management, and emphasis on "core competencies" -- to higher education. The intention is to make universities run more like businesses, whether that means using financial aid to maximize revenues, skimping on the library and counseling center while spending money on gyms and rock-climbing walls, or hiring superstar professors to burnish a school's reputation while relying on adjuncts and other academic day laborers to shoulder the burden of teaching. Those borrowed innovations have been problematic because universities aren't like widget-making firms or the post office and organizational strategies can't be created by the logic used to assemble cars.
This lesson was lost on Mitt Romney and his consultants, in the thrall of the new managerial logic. The UMass-Amherst campus was potentially best at academic pursuits, that logic ran, and so it would be pushed to become the next Berkeley or Ann Arbor, while the rest of the system was viewed as best fit for the plebeian tasks of training. But the would-be reformers forgot that higher education is as competitive as any blood sport. Precisely because prestige is so scarce, schools high on the status ladder fiercely guard their places, and the losers in these status wars far outnumber the winners.
Almost every state is making a major investment in its flagship campus. The University of Vermont, for example, which already bests UMass-Amherst on the all-important US News & World Report rankings, is spending nearly $100 million on student amenities like an artificial skating pond. Massachusetts, busily cutting its higher education funding in the face of big budget deficits, has no realistic hope of coming home with the gold.
Meanwhile, the governor's proposal would have converted most of the UMass campuses into engines of economic development, with firms in the region having a major say in shaping school policy and the curriculum, the heart of the academic enterprise, explicitly tied to local companies' needs. In the name of promoting business, this formula slighted the liberal-education mission of public universities. It is widely recognized that higher education is a good investment, but the emphasis on parochial economic interests ignored the reality that, as Richard Florida's recent account of "The Rise of the Creative Class" demonstrates, companies in the knowledge economy are drawn to locales where the creative ethos thrives. That means intellectually vibrant campuses, not glorified training schools.
The most disturbing trend in higher education is its growing inaccessibility to poor and working-class students, and this too is directly related to the market and managerial mindset. The 1863 federal legislation that underwrote land-grant colleges like the University of Massachusetts mandated that these schools promote the liberal and practical education of "the industrial classes."
But that has proved a hollow hope. Today, fewer than half of high school graduates from families with incomes below $25,000 enroll in four-year colleges, a 2003 report from the congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance concludes, and nearly a quarter never pursue higher education of any kind. By contrast, five out of every six students whose families earn more than $75,000 enroll in a four-year institution, while a mere 4 percent never go beyond high school.
Since 1980 the racial gap has narrowed but the gap between rich and poor has stayed the same. As Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, summed up the situation in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece: "Smart poor kids go to college at the same rate as stupid rich kids."
Students from poor families are also much less likely to graduate than their well-off peers. Forty-one percent of undergraduates whose families' income is in the top quartile get their degrees within five years, reports Frank Newman in his forthcoming book, "The Academic Marketplace," but only one-seventh as many from the bottom quartile -- 6.1 percent -- graduate in the same time period. Federal scholarship and loan programs are supposed to close this gap, but with a ceiling of $4,050, the scholarships don't begin to match the escalating tuition. In short, public higher education, which has conventionally been regarded as an engine of opportunity, is generating inequality.
Low-income students are acutely sensitive to tuition increases. Because their families don't take the benefits of higher education for granted, the greater the cost of an education, the less they're willing to risk a livelihood now for uncertain future prospects. Tuition hikes in Massachusetts (where tuition is already above the national average) would raise revenue, but even if scholarships and loans were increased, thousands of students would be discouraged from applying. California's experience is instructive: This fall the state raised community college tuition from $11 to $18 per unit -- that's less than an additional $100 a semester -- and enrollment fell 100,000 below what was anticipated.
The ultimate question is this: Can the public be persuaded that universities represent something as ineffable as the common good -- more specifically, that higher education contributes to the development of knowledgeable and responsible citizens, encourages social cohesion, promotes and spreads knowledge, increases social mobility, and stimulates the economy? Can the argument convincingly be made that the university offers something of such great value that it is worth subsidizing despite bottom-line pressures?
Embedded in the idea of the university -- not the romanticized idea, but the university at its truest and best -- are values that the market does not honor: a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers; openness and not ownership of ideas; the professor as a pursuer of truth, not simply an entrepreneur; and the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisfied.
Those values don't show up in Mitt Romney's plan, and that's reason to hope that it's on the shelf for good.
David L. Kirp's latest book is "Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line" (Harvard), from which portions of this article are adapted. He teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
