Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Does the University Have a Future?

From The New Republic:
Three key American enterprises have seen costs rise much faster than inflation over the past generation, and all three are enterprises in which America leads the world: housing, health care, and higher education. Houses have grown bigger and better, as anyone who has looked at contemporary bathrooms and kitchens knows. Doctors do things they could not imagine a generation ago. Costs may have risen faster than quality, but there is no doubt that quality has risen, and risen substantially.

Higher education is similar--on the cost side. Benefit is another story. There is little reason to believe that undergrads and graduate students are better educated today than a generation ago. More likely the opposite. Teaching loads of senior professors have declined; probably teaching quality has declined with it. The culture of research universities has grown ever more contemptuous of students, especially undergraduates, who are seen as an interruption of one's real work rather than the reason for the enterprise. Which means that, year by year, students and their parents pay more for less. That isn't a sustainable business plan.


I wonder if the underlying point here is not whether the modern research university is an aberration anyway. Operating mostly on looking at universities for the last 30 years, and reading about them in the preceding 100 (see, eg, Henry Adams' autobiography) it would seem to me that the modern university in the US is largely an unexpected side effect of the massive government research support that followed WWII.

Certainly that seems to have a lot to do with the rise of the highly paid "celebrity" professor who doesn't actually teach or even publish scholarly work any longer (Stan Fish and Cornell West, call your offices.)

In the mean time, though, I can download whole MIT technical courses into my iPod, and access a virtual library of Alexandria from my living room.

3 comments:

Barry Dauphin said...

I do wonder (sometimes) if I have been swimming in the ocean and climbed on board the Titanic. Having been in private practice a long time, I recently accepted a tenure track position in a psychology department. Now we are responsible for both undergraduate and graduate education, so research is important as well as teaching, but my university (University of Detroit Mercy) is far far removed from being a research Mecca (a play on words for a Jesuit University). I wonder about the viability of many university situations. I say this not because of my specific situation, but how the landscape is changing. Since so much content is and will increasingly become available via the internet, the university must offer enough more than that to cut it. It will have to involve the importance of interacting with other students and with "live" faculty members. It will have to be because of more personalized education. We have fairly small class sizes here. But some unviersities have hundreds of students in introductory psychology. That is a whole lot of tuition money for a very impersonal expereince. If the educational expereince is going to be impersonal, then you may as well do it cheaply. It will become better and less expensive to get content on the web and simply hire a Ph.D. to provide you individualized (or small group)tutoring. You will learn more, have a better experience and it would cost less. If this analysis is correct (who knows?), then that is exactly what will happen.

There is a need to do "high powered" research, and some of the advances in medicine are connected to research taking place in universities. Also some of the technological developments of the last 30 years are connected to research at the bigger universities. But I suspect that the educational innovations will have to be on a smaller scale not bigger.

Morgan said...

It seems to me that universities are an expensive (and slow) way to learn. And that degrees are an expensive (and inaccurate) way to say to someone "here's what I know".

Do we really need the big, beautiful, buildings and lovely green spaces in order to learn, to get fired up about what we're learning, or to be around people from whom we can learn a great deal?

I think we're ripe for a shift in the way we obtain education and communicate the fact that we have certain skills. Maybe universities will become research centers, serving an educational role only to the extent that they are visitied by people who want to obtain research skills through something like apprenticeship.

Charlie Martin said...

Knuck, that article, at least, is available for free registration.