From 2014 to 2024, the University of Nebraska Office of the President’s yearly expenses increased by about 110%, adjusted for inflation. Over the same time period the budget at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NU’s flagship campus, decreased by 0.3%.

University system officials say those increases were driven by the centralization of IT services, procurement and the management of campus facilities, cost-saving measures that began in 2018.

Pulling those multi-campus costs under one roof saved the university system millions of dollars and is generally considered a success, said Chris Kabourek, chief financial officer and interim NU president.

But not everyone is onboard with an increasing amount of money and power moving from the campuses to NU’s system-wide headquarters.

More decisions that impact the university’s research and teaching are being made in Varner Hall, where there is no formal faculty representation, said Julia Schleck, vice chair of the English department and member of UNL’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. That worries some professors, she said.

“So the fact that it comes with increased spending, at a moment when we are cutting academic programs that we used to offer to Nebraska students, is particularly concerning,” Schleck said.

It’s clear that this push for consolidation at NU is just beginning.

Fewer teenage Nebraskans, forecasted continued declining enrollment and an ambitious goal to get back into the Association of American Universities are spurring NU leaders to look for more services to centralize, Kabourek said. The goal: Free up money to invest in academics.

As Varner Hall’s spending grows and individual campus administration shrinks, leaders are considering an existential question: Should there be one University of Nebraska?

“Just looking at the data, we have to be very candid with ourselves. The status quo is not working,” Kabourek said. “Our academic rankings are not where we want them to be. Our research rankings are not where they want us to be.”

In the past three years, the university’s central administration – which oversees campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, an ag-tech college in Curtis and the NU Medical Center – has spent $27 million more than the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

The Board of Regents recently approved cuts to UNK’s Theatre, Geography, and Recreation programs due to declining enrollment. Over the past decade, UNK’s budget has shrunk by about 14%.

Lincoln’s campus saw a slim decrease over the same period. Omaha and the Medical Center both grew, by 8% and 9% respectively. No individual campus experienced budget changes anywhere near the President’s Office, which doubled its expenditures.

This same budgetary trend is happening across the U.S. higher education map.

“There is generally a push to, instead of each university taking things on, have it be done centrally, especially with some of the smaller institutions down in enrollment,” said Robert Kelchen, higher education finance researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

But when universities shift services to the center, those changes hollow out employment opportunities in rural areas and lower capacity at those campuses, Kelchen said.

The Office of the President’s spending leapt from about $91 million to $155 million, adjusted for inflation, when IT services and facilities management were centralized in 2018. Spending has steadily grown since.

While university officials attribute that growth mainly to the added services, those aren’t the only line items driving the budget higher.

Spending on system administration – salaries for the university leadership including the president and legal team – also more than doubled. Recently, NU hired more attorneys and consolidated internal auditors from individual campuses into Varner Hall, Kabourek said.

“The idea is it’s a lot cheaper to have, I think we’re up to 12, attorneys functioning at one versus every campus having eight to 10,” Kabourek said.

A category called “general administration” has also grown by 85% in the past decade. This includes funds allocated by the Legislature, money then budgeted for specific programs and passed along to campuses, Kabourek said.

Presidential salaries, rising across the country, have also contributed to the system administration’s expenses.

“Some of it is, when I first started, we paid a president $200,000,” Kabourek said. “And now we’re paying the president a million dollars.”

Varner Hall has also gained a handful of smaller programs, including the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, which are budgeted by the President’s Office but operate across the campuses. Together, these programs made up about $25 million of budget growth.

The number of full-time system administrators in Varner Hall actually fell by around 20% during President Ted Carter’s tenure, Kabourek said, as leaders didn’t fill unfilled positions.

But with the additional services now under NU’s central umbrella, the workforce has ballooned. In 2014, there were 200 budgeted employees on the central administration payroll. In the most recent year: 506.

“Administrators tend to breed more administrators,” said Anna Sillers, data analyst for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “Policy changes lead to more administration, data requirements lead to more administration.”

While centralizing operations has saved the university millions of dollars, the changes have left some faculty worried that top-down decision making will hinder their work.

There are non-voting student regents from each campus on the Board, but no faculty regents. While administrators at the campuses do often work directly with the Board, Schleck said, there are no regular meetings between any faculty body and Varner Hall to advise decisions being made there.

“It’s resulted in some recent, incredibly problematic decisions that have at least inconvenienced and at worst significantly endangered some of the research mission of some of the faculty,” Schleck said.

The IT department, now a part of Varner Hall, made necessary changes in the university’s web security system. The programs allowed for greater internal surveillance, Schleck said, which endangers confidentiality agreements for research conducted with human subjects.

In order to secure federal funding for studies, Schleck said, confidentiality standards must be upheld. Researchers now aren’t sure if they’re able to provide that confidentiality because there aren’t policies protecting that data.

“We realized it very late … but (the professor’s union) caught and questioned it and spent the year drawing up all of the potential impacts on faculty and students,” Schleck said. “But of course, this is all post implementation of the policy.”

University leadership and IT had to make timely decisions that impact faculty members, Kabourek said, to ensure the university is secure from cyber attacks.

Varner Hall’s IT team consulted with the UNL Faculty Senate before the policy went into effect, said Melissa Lee, chief communications officer.

“There may be some who disagree with the policy that devices on the University’s network should follow University standards,” Lee said. “But disagreeing with a policy is not the same as not having the opportunity to provide input.”

While there is room for improvement with faculty representation in Varner Hall, Kabourek said, faculty have the chance to give input on any changes at public board meetings.

“There’s a pretty significant communication gap. On our side, we don’t know what’s going on with Varner Hall,” Schleck said. “Decisions come down from on high. Sometimes they’re fine. Sometimes they’re really problematic for us.”

Despite the cuts to academic programs at UNK, university officials said they’ve generally tried to cut back-office functions over academics.

But now that the university has picked off lower hanging fruit, additional cuts might impact academics, Kabourek said. Incoming president Dr. Jeffrey Gold has already been working to identify duplicate programs across the campuses, Kabourek said. It will be an “all hands on deck” effort.

The university’s overarching goal is to be the first institution readmitted to the Association of American Universities after UNL was removed in 2011, in part because the AAU places less importance on agriculture research. Every other Big Ten school is part of the AAU.

UNL and UNMC are considered separate institutions for research reporting purposes, another hindrance to their rankings, Kelchen said. It’ll be a challenge to get back into the AAU even without budget cuts.

The university appears poised to clear one hurdle.

The National Science Foundation will allow UNL, UNMC and the Buffett Early Childhood Institute to start reporting research together, Kabourek said – but with the requirement that it’s part of a broader strategy to unify the university’s structure.

The university, he said, has already made that commitment to unification.

Part of Gold’s charge as the incoming president is to implement a plan for return to the AAU, Kabourek said. It’ll take significant investments.

“To get to where we want to go, we have to have all 50,000 of our students or 15,000 faculty rowing in the same direction,” Kabourek said. “Because we’re competing with Michigan and Ohio State and Minnesota, and it’s going to take all of us working together to get there.”

To be competitive with those schools, a rebrand may be in the future for some campuses. Research has shown the red block “N” symbol used by UNL is Nebraska’s most recognized across the country, Kabourek said.

“I understand people are proud of the O, or the Loper, or the shield at the Med Center,” Kabourek said. “Those have value, but we have to think about what’s best for Nebraska, best for our students and faculty. And if we’re really serious about competing, we’re gonna have to think differently.”

There was no plan to become a single entity under the “N” when the President’s Office started to centralize functions in 2018, Kabourek said. But now, as NU faces more financial headwinds, the relative success of those consolidations is inspiring leaders to consider more consolidation.

Next year’s proposed budget, up for consideration at Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting, aims to bring the system’s multi-million dollar deficit to zero with proportional budget cuts across the board and a tuition increase. The Office of the President will face its own share of cuts, Kabourek said.

“Now, if we don’t have some of the hard conversations of five versus one, we’ll be in the same place nine months from now,” Kabourek said. “It’s important to get a wide variety of opinions and make sure it’s transparent, but time is not on our side.

This post appeared on 10/11 NOW on June 19, 2024.

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The programs, which also are being tried at some private schools, would require 90 credits instead of the traditional 120 for a bachelor’s degree, and wouldn’t require summer classes or studying over breaks. In some cases, the degrees would be designed to fit industry needs.

Indiana recently enacted legislation calling for all state universities there to offer by next year at least one bachelor’s degree program that could be completed in three years, and to look into whether more could be implemented. The Utah System of Higher Education has tasked state universities with developing three-year programs under a new Bachelor of Applied Studies degree, which would still need approval by accreditation boards.

More than a dozen public and private universities are participating in a pilot collaboration called the College-in-3 Exchange, to begin considering how they could offer three-year programs. The public universities include the College of New Jersey, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, the Universities of Minnesota at Rochester and at Morris, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Utah Tech University.

Proponents of the three-year degree programs say they save students money and set them on a faster track to their working life. But detractors, including some faculty, say they shortchange students, particularly if they later change their minds on what career path they want to follow.

The Utah Board of Higher Education in March approved the new three-year degree category. Various areas of study would be tied to specific industry needs, with fewer electives required. These degrees are broader than two-year associate degrees, but narrower than a full four-year bachelor’s.

“We told the institutions to start working on them now and developing the curriculum,” Geoff Landward, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, said in an interview. “Also, we want them to find industry partners that would be willing to hire people with bachelor’s degrees of this type.”

He added: “We created a sandbox for our institutions to play in.”

Once created, individual programs would need both national accreditation and state Board of Higher Education approval.

Landward said he has taken note of criticism that the three-year programs might “cheapen” the bachelor’s degree by shortchanging students who wouldn’t receive a broad college education. But he said students could save on tuition, get a head start in the workforce and meet the needs of industries that are looking for certain skilled workers to address shortages in the state.

That includes nursing, he said, where requiring a four-year degree means taking lots of electives that have nothing to do with the career.

Utah State University’s current four-year nursing program, for example, suggests several electives along with the required anatomy, math and biology courses as prerequisites during freshman and sophomore years.

“We think if we are partnering with industry and they help us develop it, I don’t think it cheapens the degree,” Landward said. “I think it creates a very specific degree.”

Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor and founding director of the university’s Institute for Research on Higher Education, began proselytizing for the three-year college movement about a dozen years ago.

He said the idea has gotten traction recently because “we are wading in the deep waters of righteous anger” at colleges and universities because of the perception that four-year degrees are not worth their high costs.

A Pew Research Center survey released last week found only 1 in 4 American adults said it is extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree as a means to getting a good-paying job. Only 22% of the respondents said the cost is worth getting a four-year degree even if the student or their family has to take out loans.

Zemsky suggested that a shorter time span also would lead to higher college completion rates. More than a third of students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree in fall 2014 at a four-year school failed to complete their education at the same institution in six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Zemsky said 27 colleges and universities have embarked on creating three-year pilot programs and predicted 100 would be doing so in another year.

Over the past 10 years, Zemsky said, schools have been ignoring the desires of students and instead creating their curricula around the preferences of faculty — which is where most of the opposition is coming from.

Last year, at a conference of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, a bargaining unit for professors, President Kenneth Mash said the overwhelming number of college faculty nationwide “have a visceral disdain for the idea.”

In an interview with Stateline, he said three-year programs would hurt students too, creating a “two-tiered” system under which wealthy students would get a full four-year education and lower-income students a cheapened three-year degree.

“If it’s going to be a four-year degree, they should name it something that indicates it’s not a B.A.,” said Mash, who also is a political science professor at East Stroudsburg University. “We don’t know that employers will treat them the same.

“I’m on board, as most faculty are, with the notion that people want to increase their job opportunities. But that’s not all there is to a college degree,” he said. “Degrees prepare you to be a better citizen, a better parent, and on and on.”

And he said a broad education is what makes it possible for students to change jobs and careers many times during their working lives. “It’s really that baking in liberal arts … that makes it possible for people to do different things in their lifetimes.”

Indiana’s new law

Indiana enacted a law in March that requires each public institution that offers bachelor’s degrees to review all the four-year degrees with an eye toward making some of them three years. And the law requires that by July 1, 2025, each state university offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years.

Indiana state Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican who sponsored the measure, pointed out that every extra year of college costs the students, their parents and the state.

But she noted that not all degrees lend themselves to compressed curricula. “If you’ve got a kid in pharmacy [studies], they are not going to able to get through it in three years. Engineers aren’t going to be able to do it in three years. But some of the other kids will.”

Chris Lowery, Indiana’s commissioner for higher education, said the law will encourage schools to think about how to create 90-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees: “How feasible is this, would you still have the quality, would you still have the agency?”

Three-year degrees allow for choice, he added. His daughter, for example, had enough AP credits after high school to make a college degree feasible in three years, but opted to go to school for four, because she wanted to have enough time to study so that she could get “straight As” as well as to have time for extracurricular activities.

“But for a lot of students, the finances are tighter,” he acknowledged.

Credentialing requirements

At both public and private universities, the new three-year degree programs that require fewer credits would need national accreditation.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a regional credentialing agency, accredited several three-year bachelor’s degrees at two private schools, Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, last year. The degrees are in applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health and professional studies.

Sonny Ramaswamy, the commission’s president, said in an interview that the three-year programs underwent two years of evaluation before being awarded accreditation.

He said the evaluation showed that competency in many professions could be attained in three years instead of four, and that graduate schools were willing to accept three-year bachelor’s as a credential for the pursuit of higher degrees. He noted that European college degrees often are completed in three years.

“We said, ‘We will approve you, but this is a pilot,’” Ramaswamy said. The schools will provide data to show their students have earned a good education, he added.

“My intuition is that it will head in the right direction,” he said. “The public is calling for innovation.”

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization that says its mission is promoting academic freedom, excellence and accountability at colleges and universities, said “fluff” courses strengthen the case against a 120-credit hour bachelor’s degree.

“Let people get a good foundation with a strong general education core, strong skills and some electives,” Poliakoff said in an interview. “That’s what a responsible university should be doing.”

The council does an annual survey of higher education institutions and grades them A through F on what the group calls “core curricula” — the proportion of courses dedicated to mathematics, literature, composition, economics, laboratory science, American history and government, and foreign languages.

Poliakoff said the amount of debt students are accumulating over four years is “sinful” and unnecessary. Colleges and universities must meet the concerns of students and their families, he said.

“A 90-credit baccalaureate degree is a pretty good way to tighten up the bolts,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Stateline on May 30, 2024.

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American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s (ACTA) was formed in 1995 as a 501(c)3 organization with a mission of raising public awareness about the current state of higher education. ACTA does extensive surveys of thousands of colleges to determine climate, finance and policy issues of the day.

The group says it is “the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States” in supporting liberal arts education and high academic standards, as well as protecting the free exchange of ideas on campuses.

On its website, ACTA boasts it has a network of supporters and educators, including more than 23,000 trustees nationwide coupled with 1,200 college and university system presidents.

ACTA President Michael B. Poliakoff, Vice President of Trustee and Government Affairs Armand Alacbay, and Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom Steven McGuire offered insights on topics ranging from the new UNC School of Civil Life and Leadership (SCiLL) to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as institutional neutrality and how ACTA aids boards governing universities to navigate the pressing issues facing them.

“I am euphoric about this development,” said Poliakoff about the formation of SCiLL, noting other states with similar programs such as Tennessee and Texas.

“These are initiatives to focus on something that has been missing in higher education, which is a keen focus on the nature of American citizenship. That’s unique,” Poliakoff said. “What I particularly like about SCiLL is its explicit commitment to intellectual diversity, which is the lifeblood of higher education and one of the most valuable aspects of the American experience.”

McGuire called SCiLL “an excellent contribution to the future of the university” and said he was looking forward to how it will “contribute to building an even stronger culture of freedom of expression and intellectual diversity on the campus.”

McGuire noted surveys have revealed college students often self-censor while others exhibit intolerance toward differing ideas, sometimes resorting to unacceptable actions to stifle speech they don’t like. He added that a program like SCiLL will provide the skills in history, government and civic discourse “that can only be good for the University of North Carolina as well as for the state and for the country.”

When asked if programs like SCiLL might be of help if introduced prior to college entry at the K-12 level, Poliakoff remarked that “Higher education trains teachers.”

“And if teachers are not imbued with a belief and commitment to the value of free discourse, then they will carry that over into their own classrooms. I believe it will be one of SCiLL’s contributions to offer professional development for teachers.”

Poliakoff added that professional development was a part of the programs similar to SCiLL happening in Tennessee and Arizona, which he said is “vital.”

“One thing that I think we need to keep in mind is that all of these new institutes, schools, centers, whatever we’re calling them, start with a basic assumption that there is something very special and very important about American ideals and the promise of American life,” said Poliakoff. “We are unfortunately in an age when the very word patriotism is, in many circles in higher education, considered something that’s off limits.”

Alacbay said he thinks SCiLL is “part of a longer trend” that ACTA has been seeing in other states.

“This is the beginning of a movement,” said Alacbay. “I think that SCiLL just reflects another inflection point where you see that movement gathering even more momentum.”

ACTA held a retreat for the UNC System’s board of trustees in late 2022. Poliakoff characterized the trustees as “extraordinary” and “highly receptive” to the idea of a program like SCiLL. He went on to say that criticism of SCiLL was confusing to him.

“Why do they think that devoting a relatively small amount of the curriculum to understanding the foundation of America — its pivotal moments, its founding documents — is something that should be shunned as hostile or out of place in the university?” Poliakoff asked. “Or indeed an intrusion on academic freedom?

“To the contrary, within the REACH Act is plenty of room for the creativity of all the people who would teach it. So that really is a symptom of an institution that doesn’t understand the urgency of the civic disempowerment that takes place when college students don’t understand the American story.”

The REACH Act was a bill filed during the 2023-24 long session of the North Carolina General Assembly. The bill would have required students to earn at least three credit hours in American history or American government in order to graduate from a UNC System school.

Coursework would have included various founding documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the North Carolina Constitution and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

The REACH Act never made it to final passage, stalling out in the Senate Rules and Government Operations Committee.

The topic DEI drew a lengthy opinion from McGuire.

“I’d say a couple of things; first, I don’t think there should be objections to universities being places that are welcoming to everybody,” said McGuire. “So, you see this word diversity and yeah — people from all diverse backgrounds, perspectives, traditions — they should all be welcome on a university campus and especially on American public university campuses, they should be open to all Americans.”

McGuire offered the same thoughts on inclusion but said the trouble begins in how those words are interpreted.

“The one in the middle, equity, I think is arguably more difficult because it’s a concept that is purposely distinguished from equality,” said McGuire. “And I think there’s a lot of people who would argue that the treatment of various individuals on American campuses, like in many areas of life, should be one based on equality.”

McGuire also questioned what DEI really means, wondering what it means to be included or to be diverse.

“Does it mean you need to be free of ever hearing an argument or an idea that you find harmful or even offensive in order to feel included?” asked McGuire. “Or can you feel like you belong in a community that’s devoted to exploring ideas, and there will be people who may have different ideas than you that that you don’t like, or that maybe you even find deeply offensive, and it’s still clear that you’re welcome to be a member of that community. The sort of common interpretation by many who advanced the DEI on our campuses is the former.”

McGuire pointed to problematic issues with DEI practices on campuses such as mandatory diversity statements used in hiring, which surveys have shown faculty see as a way to screen out applicants holding differing views.

Referring to a survey of faculty conducted a few years ago showing 50% of faculty nationally regard the use of diversity statements as “ideological litmus tests,” McGuire noted that when the responses were broken down by those identifying as liberal and conservative faculty, 90% of the conservative faculty agreed the statements were ideological litmus tests.

“So that’s a large chunk of people in the Academy who feel like these are being used to screen faculty, you know, to only let in people who hold certain views,” said McGuire.

Another example given by McQuire was the lack of challenging of perspectives or even a lack of perspective diversity.

“For instance, I believe there were 34 student groups at Harvard who issued a statement immediately after Oct. 7, essentially blaming Israel for being attacked by Hamas,” McGuire said. “The fact that they were able to pull that together and put something like that out so quickly, to me, suggests that they are routinely accustomed to not seeing opposition to these ideas on their campuses, and I think that’s a real problem.”

The UNC System has been cited as having an extensive DEI office infrastructure and related staff costing millions of dollars each year. In an August 2022 report published by the James G. Martin Center, UNC Chapel Hill had the largest number of staff with 36 and was spending nearly $3.4 million alone just on DEI administrator salaries.

At its upcoming May 6 meeting, the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) may take a look at the DEI office costs with the possibility of ending DEI policies as well as DEI offices and redistributing those funds to other areas.

The idea of dismantling the DEI operations within the UNC System was first brought up at UNC Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting on March 27. During that meeting, Trustee Jim Blaine said DEI is “an elephant in the room” and that either the UNC BOG or the General Assembly will “follow Florida’s path” of dismantling DEI bureaucracies on college campuses.

The BOG’s possible action on DEI also follows an April 17 meeting by the UNC BOG Committee on Governance during which the body unanimously voted to repeal its diversity, equity and inclusion policies for the entire UNC System.

The North Carolina General Assembly may take up the topic of DEI during its current short session. When asked what advice ACTA might have for lawmakers attempting to tackle the issue, Alacbay said there were many layers to what DEI really means and needing to weed out and keep legitimate areas like those dealing with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance.

“The ideas of diversity and inclusion are in the abstract … are things I think most people agree on,” Alacbay said. “The problem is getting at what happens in practice in these offices. And what that is is enforcing ideological orthodoxy which is completely anathema to the mission of an institution of higher education.

“I think that legislators should empower the institutional governing boards to make the hard decisions; they have the closer campus knowledge and will be able to navigate some of those definitional questions more nimbly than something that is done by statute.”

This post appeared in The North State Journal on May 3, 2024.

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Speakers came from a diverse set of departments, spanning the humanities, sciences, law, music, informatics, education and public health. While several urged lenience for Carrie Docherty, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, as some faculty believed she was merely carrying out directives from those above her, few spoke in defense of Whitten. Faculty ultimately voted no confidence in Docherty, though it was a smaller margin than the motions against Whitten and Shrivastav.

Multiple speakers alluded to budget cuts and an overall dissatisfaction with administrative decisions. 

Maria Bucur, a history professor, read a statement on behalf of faculty who felt they were in too vulnerable of a position to speak publicly. The statement lamented a pattern of committees being created to provide faculty and staff input, only to have their recommendations ignored. It also criticized an overall lack of communication and transparency from the administration. 

Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, a law professor on the Faculty Board of Review who helped write the opinion that IU had violated policy in suspending Abdulkader Sinno, said the administration does not listen to faculty opinions — a sentiment shared by multiple other speakers. 

He also said that the administration’s attempt to provide a “confidential dossier” on Sinno during the board’s review process was unlike any proceeding he’s seen in his life. The dossier contained bias incidents reported by students and alumni against Sinno, as well as emails and letters illustrating conflicts between Sinno and some faculty members and administrators since 2022, according to the FBR opinion document. 

“I can tell you as a lawyer that that violates his due process rights, and I can just tell you as a human being – that offended me that they thought that somehow we would go along and use information when he was not given the information and a chance to respond,” he said. 

A few faculty voices provided potential explanations for faculty abstentions and “no” votes. 

Richard Shiffrin, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said during the meeting that the administration deserved a chance to learn from mistakes they may have made. He said administrators should be judged in the context of the challenges they face and mentioned Whitten’s status as the first female president. The comment was rebuked later in the meeting by Stephanie Sanders, chair of the Department of Gender Studies, who called the statement sexist because it implied women should be graded on a curve. 

Bob Eno, a retired professor from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, said he planned to abstain from the votes. While he believed the university had committed egregious violations of shared governance between faculty and administration, he said some of the statements included in the case for no confidence were unfair and even untrue.   

In interviews with the IDS, other faculty present at the meeting expressed disappointment in Whitten’s statement and the quick affirmation and support the Board of Trustees expressed following the vote. 

In a statement, Whitten emphasized the challenges faced by higher education and pledged to weigh faculty guidance when making decisions. Her full statement can be read here.  

Provost Shrivastav also addressed the no confidence vote in a column on April 17. Shrivastav acknowledged many of the specific concerns of faculty, including a “culture of unwitting competition” that makes those in the humanities feel like priorities are shifting to STEM fields, efforts to “combine operations” across schools, departments and campuses and decisions related to “geopolitical conflicts or campus procedures.” 

“And so, to deepen confidence and shared understanding, to ensure a united path to a brighter future, we must do a better job of listening to each other and coming together collaboratively,” he wrote. 

Michael Hamburger, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said Whitten’s statement didn’t show much engagement with the issues brought up by the vote.  

“Definitely there have been sudden, unexpected and very destructive decisions made on the part of the central administration about budgeting, finance and priorities,” he said. 

But Hamburger said the way it’s been handled — which he described as “haphazard” and with limited communication — makes it worse. This harms departments’ ability to make long-term plans and contributes to a climate of distrust, he said. 

One good decision from the provost was mandating increased salaries for graduate workers, Hamburger said. But departments were left to find the money within their own budgets instead of receiving increased funding from higher ups, he said.  

Hamburger, who has been at IU for 38 years, said the tensions between administration and faculty have created a dark cloud over campus. 

“There are many times where faculty have been unhappy or disgruntled, but I have never seen this kind of pervasive unhappiness with the way this university is being administered,” he said. 

Shane Green, an anthropology professor at the meeting, said he thought Whitten’s statement was upsetting in light of no confidence votes from multiple sectors of campus.  

“It seems a little disingenuous to pretend that we’re all just a big happy family,” he said. 

He said the issue was more than just Whitten’s administration, pointing toward a deeper, structural change in the role of public education. While public education was designed to produce educated, informed citizens with knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines, he said, they now appear to focus on producing a certain type of person with more specialized skills. Declining appropriations from state legislatures and reduced enrollments while colleges provide an increasing number of amenities create a precarious financial environment, he said, which a raise in tuition rates have accompanied.  

For example, Green referenced that his undergraduate tuition at UNC Chapel Hill in 1989 was around $500 per semester, or $1,265 in 2024 dollars. UNC Chapel Hill’s current in-state tuition is $7,020 per year.  

The financial constraints on public education have accompanied a shift to a less faculty-centric university, contributing to a belief among faculty that shared governance is in jeopardy. More recent theories of higher education, supported by organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, outline a university model where trustees take a more active role in reviewing and directing the work of administrators and faculty.  

“We’ve become employees,” Green said. “We’re supposed to shut up and do our jobs.” 

In “Governance for a New Era,” a report released by ACTA in 2014, a group of trustees and administrators wrote that “trustees must regularly assess the cost/value proposition of academic and nonacademic programs in setting their goals” and encouraged a balanced approach to academic freedom, which the report said is being expanded by the American Association of University Professors, at the detriment of faculty “accountability and responsibility.” 

Green said the vote of no confidence represents the opinion of most faculty, even though only 948 of the 3,276 total voting eligible faculty attended the meeting.  

“If there was a lot of opposition for it, why didn’t they show up?” he said. 

Jack Bielasiak, a political science professor who’s been at the university for fifty years, implied when he spoke at the meeting that many faculty didn’t show up for fear of retribution.  

“Look around you. There is no junior faculty that I can spot among the 800 — because they are scared,” he said at the meeting. 

It was a concern echoed by other speakers, who claimed they had heard from many faculty who also had no confidence in the administration but didn’t want to show up for the vote.  

“And I fear for this university that I’ve devoted my life to,” Bielasiak said. “I fear that it will disintegrate to something that is invisible and incomprehensible.”

This post appeared in the Indiana State Student on April 21, 2024.

The post Behind the vote: why faculty lost confidence in Whitten’s administration appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Economists and policymakers are swift to underscore the decline in government funding for higher education in recent decades. 

“The federal government and states have disinvested in higher education. This was particularly acute after the Great Recession. Understandably, they didn’t have enough money and they were looking for places to cut,” said Catherine Brown, senior policy director at the National College Attainment Network. 

However, unlike healthcare and K-12 education, funding for higher education failed to rebound significantly post-recession. 

As a consequence of the cuts, Kimberly Dancy, associate director of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), explained, the financial burden has shifted onto students and families. This trend, Brown noted, has precipitated an “explosion” in student debt.

The pullback in funding, Brown cautioned, is shortsighted.

 “If you really want your state to be set up to compete with your neighbors and be a magnet for students from other states, having a very high-quality public system of colleges and universities is usually beneficial,” she said. “It’s really important to keep pace with the investments and that those investments keep the cost of tuition down for students.”

Tuition and fees now constitute approximately a quarter of the revenue of public institutions. Declining public funding per student has compelled institutions to rely more heavily on tuition revenue than in previous years, noted Armand Alacbay, chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and a member of the George Mason University Board of Visitors.

Between the 1980 and 2022 school years, Dancy elucidated, student costs have surged by 136%, even after adjusting for inflation. 

“We have a situation where students and their families are really both paying a larger share of the college expenses that they are faced with and a situation where the total size of those expenses is increasing,” she explained.

With schools increasingly reliant on tuition revenue, a competitive landscape has emerged, particularly for students capable of paying full tuition, Alacbay observed. This, he contends, has catalyzed investments in infrastructure and amenities to attract such students, thereby driving up tuition costs for all. 

Phillip Levine, the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Department of Economics at Wellesley College, concurred. He emphasized that public institutions are incentivized to invest in amenities such as lavish dorms and lazy rivers to court out-of-state students who pay premium prices with minimal institutional support.

“It’s not irrational, that’s an investment. It may not work. Not all investments do, but the goal is to raise money because they need it to help support the institution. At the end of the day, the problem is the money needs to come from someplace,” he said.

The increased burden on students has led some to question the value of higher education. Despite this, Dancy said IHEP’s research has found that college is still a good long-term investment in most cases.

“Rising Above the Threshold” looked at whether institutions are producing graduates who earn as much as a high school graduate plus enough to pay for their degree. 

“We found that there are at least 2,414 institutions that enroll 18 million undergraduate students that typically have earnings that meet or exceed this minimum economic threshold, ” Dancy said. “In the vast majority of cases, higher education is providing students with economic returns on their investments that are really important.”

Private institutions, particularly non-elite liberal arts colleges, face even more pronounced dependence on tuition and fees, which constitute roughly a third of their revenue, according to Alacbay.

Levine describes these institutions as being “stuck between a rock and a hard place.” Tuition-dependent private institutions can’t charge high-income students much more than their public counterparts do, with whom they directly compete, he added. As a result, private institutions with high sticker prices end up awarding significant merit grants to a large fraction of their students to bring the price to a competitive level.

“They can charge a little bit more because they do offer things that public institutions can’t offer as much of, like small classes, prettier campuses, access to faculty. People may be willing to pay extra for those advantages, but they are probably not willing to pay $30-40,000 extra,” he explained. 

Without the cushion of higher-income students, these institutions struggle to subsidize tuition for low-income students, Levine said. They also don’t have much endowment support.

Alternatively, highly endowed private institutions use their endowment support to help pay the bills, Levine noted. 

“It’s actually the one sector of the higher education landscape where lower-income students do pay affordable prices because of the very large endowment support those institutions can provide,” he said. 

Despite the affordability of highly selective institutions for low-income students, their persistently high sticker prices are predicated on the ability of a significant proportion of students to pay full tuition, according to Nat Smitobol, an IvyWise college admissions counselor.

Many attribute the escalation in college tuition to rising institutional costs. A 2022 report from the State Higher Executive Officers Association identified higher instructional costs as a key factor driving tuition decisions. 

“The costs of providing education have increased. If you look at the total per-student expenditures across institutions, we see those also going up over the last decade well beyond the rate of inflation,” Dancy explained.

Levine highlighted the wage inflation among highly educated personnel at institutions, which outpaces other sectors, as exacerbating the cost burden. 

“In general, you face this problem that the costs of providing exactly the same services goes up over time,” he explained. 

Despite the increased cost of instruction, Alacbay explained, there has only been a marginal increase in graduation rates.

 “At public institutions, a 1% increase in instructional spending was correlated with only a tenth of a percentage point increase in graduation rates,” he said of findings from “In Cost of Excess.” 

The last numbers published by the United States Department of Education found that the average public college had a 35% four-year graduation rate for the class of 2020, while the average private nonprofit four-year college had a 44% four-year graduation rate. 

The “standard of care” that institutions offer has also increased over time, which has resulted in additional costs, David Feldman, professor of economics at William & Mary, noted in a 2017 Midwestern Higher Education Compact report. 

“It’s a one-way ratchet,” he said. “Once you discover that something’s better, you can’t go back just because it’s cheaper.

Institutions are often quick to adopt new technologies to prepare students for the labor market. 

Standard of care advancements also extend beyond the classroom, including counseling and career planning services and housing. 

“Colleges have had to increase the quality of their lifestyle amenities merely to keep pace with the quality of lifestyle amenities of their students,” he said. 

So-called “administrative bloat” has drawn scrutiny, with Alacbay cautioning against unnecessary administrative expenditures that inflate costs without commensurate improvements in education quality. 

Levine tempered this critique, advising against simplistic attributions of tuition hikes solely to administrative expansion. 

“It’s analogous to people talking about balancing the federal budget for five years by cutting fraud, waste and abuse. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but that’s not the problem,” he said. 

Feldman added that there’s a truth embedded in a lie regarding the administrative bloat argument. Although the share of an institution’s workforce that is deemed as administrative has increased over time compared to professors, it’s worth considering who is classified as being in administrative positions. 

“The IT staff is not instructional, it’s administrative. The professional staff counts as administrative. The number of IT staff that we have is certainly very different than what it was in the 1980s,” he said. “Maybe we should be a little bit more reticent about assuming an increase in the proportion of a college employee base that is not the professors is necessarily inefficient or bad.”

Experts suggest that augmenting the federal Pell Grant funding could ameliorate affordability concerns. 

When the Pell Grant launched in the 1970s, it covered three-quarters of the cost of a four-year public college. Today, it covers less than a third, Brown lamented. 

“It’s not keeping up with inflation, and that’s a huge problem for students from low-income communities,” she said. 

Doubling the grant, according to the IHEP report, could extend a minimum return on investment to students at an additional 95 institutions. President Joe Biden’s proposed 2024 budget, which includes a $820 increase in the Pell Grant, has been heralded as a step toward addressing affordability, according to Dancy. 

An increase to the grant would also help close the affordability gap, Brown added. She pointed to research the National College Attainment Network published in “The Growing Gap” which found that the average unmet financial need at four-year institutions was $2,256 for 2020-21.

Most students who receive Pell Grants, Dancy noted, are from families making less than $35,000. 

“That is an enormous amount of money for these families to try to come up with in order to just cover the remaining expenses that they owe to their institutions,” she said.

Experts caution against fixating on colleges’ list prices, urging consideration of net prices after accounting for financial aid. 

Based on a survey from the Association of American Universities, the public largely seems misinformed about who pays more for college, with 48% thinking that institutions charge the same for tuition regardless of family income. 

“I think pretty much every discussion about the sticker price is misguided. Every single news article that you see that talks about college costs $90,000 a year. That’s just not true and it’s very damaging. Despite the fact that I think college is too expensive for low-income families, it’s nowhere near $90,000 a year,” Levine stressed. 

In fact, for the 2023-24 school year, the average list price for in-state tuition at a public institution was $11,260 and $41,540 at a private nonprofit, according to a College Board report.

High list prices can scare away students, Brown noted. 

“It’s counterintuitive that students won’t have to pay it,” she said of low-income students. “They go onto the website, and they see these high numbers. And they don’t want to take on a ton of debt, and they get scared off.”

Given the pricing discrepancies, Levine feels strongly that institutions should make that fact clear to lower- and middle-income families upfront. 

Smitobol noted that institutions have tools at their disposal to market to different zip codes and regions. 

“These tools allow colleges to target students from lower income brackets and send them marketing about affording their specific college,” he said.

Tools like net price calculators, which institutions are required to have on their websites, can help better inform students.

“They’re not always as visible as they could be, but it’s a really useful tool for students and families because, although it’s not perfect, it’s a pretty good way to estimate,” Brown said. “The more schools promote that tool, the more students can use it, the better.”

Although many students don’t often pay a college’s sticker price, ACTA found in its report that a rise in tuition is associated with a rise in net tuition. As long as sticker price is rising, Alacbay said, so is net tuition.

Levine emphasized that, while lower- and middle-income students often pay less than anticipated, the financial burden remains significant. 

“At four-year public institutions, a typical lower-income student with under $50,000 a year in income might face a cost of $15,000. That’s clearly unaffordable,” he stressed. He underscored that the focus should shift from the high tuition fees charged to high-income students to the formidable financial hurdle confronting lower-income students. 

Dancy highlighted the multifaceted challenge of rising college costs, encompassing both upfront expenses and general living costs. She pointed out that these financial barriers, particularly for low-income students, could result in borrowing and employment while studying, potentially deterring enrollment and affecting degree completion. 

Drawing attention to New Mexico’s Opportunity Scholarship, Dancy applauded its approach to prioritizing affordability. The program, a first-dollar initiative, permits students to utilize other forms of grant aid for additional expenses. If adopted nationwide at public institutions, the model could enable 44 additional colleges to enroll approximately 216,000 students meeting the minimum economic threshold as set out by the IHEP report.

“It’s a really promising approach, and it does a good job in terms of avoiding eligibility restrictions that are common in other free college programs and other sources of financial aid,” she said.

Defying expectations by maintaining or reducing tuition could provide institutions with a competitive advantage, Brown stressed. 

“It seems like a terrific opportunity to say, ‘We’re vastly more affordable than other schools that are the same size and offer the same education.’ I’m waiting for more schools to do it,” she said.

Prioritizing affordability could play a pivotal role in addressing the looming demographic cliff. With institutions vying for a shrinking pool of students, particularly Gen Z, who are more risk-averse to college debt, tuition decisions are likely to be influenced by changing student preferences, Alacbay explained. 

He also emphasized the fiduciary responsibility of trustees in ensuring college education remains financially accessible. 

“Institutions should be concerned about how much students borrow—not just those who graduate, but for the worst-case scenario in which students take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt and leave without a degree,” he stressed.

Brown proposed state-level intervention, advocating for caps on tuition increases to align with inflation rates. 

“Students are making decisions with their feet and that does have implications for schools. They are operating within a marketplace, and they should be responsive to it,” she said.

Despite the challenges, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. 

Higher education recently reached parity with pre-Great Recession investment levels, Brown optimistically noted. A 2023 SHEEO report found that in 2022, public higher education appropriations increased 4.9% beyond inflation. 

Alacbay added that there are some positive changes on the macro level. “The average inflation-adjusted tuition for both private and public four-year colleges has started to fall,” he said, pointing to national trends at HowCollegesSpendMoney.com.

This post appeared on Volt Magazine on April 23, 2024.

The post Navigating Higher Ed’s Rising Costs: Strategies for Affordability appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

At universities today, it’s a nearly $125,000 question — that’s how much students on campus for four years can expect to rack up in school bills, on average, according to federal data.

And here in New England, it’s a $22 billion question — that’s how much our roughly 250 colleges and universities contributed to the regional economy in 2022 alone, according to the New England Board of Higher Education.

For generations, college students have invested money — plus years of time and effort — in hopes of emerging from schools as well-rounded critical thinkers with job skills that would get them hired in a flash. And for many decades, a college degree seemed as safe a bet as you could find for a bright future. But now campuses (and college presidents) are in the crosshairs of ideological fights, overall student debt stands at a near-record $1.72 trillion, and new graduates fear AI will snatch away jobs before the ink is even dry on their diplomas.

To find what New Englanders think right now, the Globe Magazine partnered with Emerson College Polling, a nonpartisan, nationally-ranked polling center based in Boston, to survey 6,000 adults across all six states in this region. In February, we cast a wide net for respondents, including adults of any age and education status; those currently in school and people long graduated; those working or unemployed, homemaking, or retired.

For many, their reply to the question was a resounding Yes. In New England, our survey revealed, folks who show notable support for the idea that a college degree is worth the expense includes students who are working full time (71 percent agree), current students who aren’t working (64 percent), Hispanic/Latino people (58 percent), Asian people (56 percent), Democrats (56 percent), people with advanced degrees (55 percent), and 18- to 24-year-olds (51 percent). Even respondents who didn’t finish high school are pro-college (53 percent).

However, when you look at answers for all 6,000 New England adults combined, opinions are split nearly down the middle. While 46 percent agree that a four-year college degree is worth the expense, 44 percent disagree and 10 percent neither agree nor disagree. Groups with particularly high levels of disagreement include vocational and technical school grads (63 percent disagree), people with an associate’s degree (51 percent), and Republicans (51 percent).

There are doubts about college in our region, to be sure, but higher education here doesn’t have the thoroughly chilly reception it has earned nationally. A March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey of 1,019 US adults found that 56 percent said a college degree isn’t worth the cost. More than 60 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds in that survey had also lost faith in the value of a degree — a notable difference from ours, which shows young New Englanders still supporting it.

At the state level, our survey found Connecticut residents have the highest support for college, at 49 percent, followed by Rhode Island, at 48 percent. Opinions are mixed in Massachusetts and Vermont. And in New Hampshire and Maine, the largest share of respondents who weighed in say college isn’t worth it.

As for how most New Englanders define “worth it,” respondents overwhelmingly drew a direct line between college and career. Forty percent of respondents said the main reason to attend college was to get a good job (followed by “to make more money,” at 24 percent). This was the top reported answer for every state, age, education level, race/ethnicity, and political leaning.

Equally striking, our survey revealed that 56 percent of New England adults believe that a college degree is essential for landing a good job. While this shows an overwhelming belief in the promise of college, that support suggests a sharp drop from 13 years ago, when a Gallup-Lumina survey found that 69 percent of respondents nationwide said a degree is essential.

Other Gallup surveys found the portion of US adults ages 18 to 29 saying a college degree is “very important” plunged from 74 percent in 2013 to 41 percent in 2019.

“A college education is worth it, no question,” says Lawrence Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, an accrediting agency for colleges and universities in the region and beyond. He points to the long-term earning power of a degree, known as the college wage premium, compared with not having one. “With the return on investment, over a lifetime of work, how do those rates progress? That premium [with a degree] almost doubles.”

But studies show that historic economic advantage has been eroding for recent graduates as loans and other debts have skyrocketed. And amid these higher-than-ever stakes of making the wrong choice, the cost-benefit analysis undertaken by prospective students and their families has gotten far more complicated.

Things are different now than when Lisa Cornelio, a 58-year-old survey respondent from Connecticut, and her siblings went to college. “I grew up in an old New England mill town, so most folks were blue collar,” she says. “For whatever reason, my mom was able to encourage my dad to send all of us to great institutions, and he had the resources to do that.” Cornelio was also able to work jobs while attending Princeton, and didn’t need to take out loans.

Now, however, Cornelio works as a social worker and college consultant, and sees the different kinds of struggles her students go through. “It’s not even the top-tier institutions that are expensive, but community colleges, too,” she says. She asks her students a core question, one she didn’t necessarily need to ask herself in school: “You have to do a real inventory: What are you doing this for?”

Julie Reuben, a historian at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has seen the risks when students start school but don’t finish. “Going into higher education is very expensive,” she says, “and what is particularly expensive is not finishing.” Almost a third of the 2.4 million students who started college in 2017 have since left without earning a degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “These students take on loans but do not get the economic benefit of a four-year degree.”

The risks didn’t used to be this high. Adjusted for inflation, students at four-year colleges face tuition costs that have more than tripled in the past six decades. “Generationally, it was [once]much easier to get a college degree, affordable enough to work your way through,” Reuben says. “Students could go without gaining a lot of debt. That’s the reality they knew.” But today, she continues, “To graduate without significant debt, you have to come from a well-resourced family or go to a school with financial aid.”

In the Globe Magazine-Emerson College Polling survey, 52 percent of New England adults said their college degrees were not worth the loans they needed to get them, and now regret taking on that debt. A similar portion of respondents — 53 percent — support using government funds to reduce or forgive student loans, though the Republican and age 60-plus segments show strong opposition.

People such as Michael Poliakoff believe it’s not just the cost of college that is draining support: What is taught is inadequate to prepare students for many jobs. Moreover, colleges have become an “echo chamber” of ideas, he says. “It used to be a diploma from a four-year college would get you a good job,” says Poliakoff, president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “So many employers are not confident in newly hired four-year college graduates.”

The concept of free speech on campuses is hotly contested. When our survey asked respondents to choose which was the bigger problem for colleges, 52 percent reported it’s people being allowed to say harmful or misleading things, while the rest believe it’s people being prevented from saying what they want.

“Take these findings as a wake-up call,” says Poliakoff, whose organization advocates for the free exchange of ideas on campus. “College should be a place where you think the unthinkable and challenge the unchallengeable. . . . It should be an opportunity for everyone to come out with greater strength for career and citizenry.”

Lisa Cornelio, the social worker and college counselor from Connecticut, tries to remind her students that “there are a lot of options for greatness.” For some, that’s going from high school to college. “A good education can expand your mind,” she says, “bring you the confidence to go after things that, without that degree, you may hold yourself back from.”

But for others, success is ignoring the drumbeat (and peer pressure) that a four-year degree is the only path. “If you have a dream and a vision, then you can get going on it,” she says. “I think vocational schools and training can do wonders, and people end up living great lives because they’re out doing what they love every day, and it didn’t involve going to a four-year institution.”

According to the Globe Magazine-Emerson College Polling survey, New England adults seem to agree with Cornelio about options. When asked what a high schooler should do after graduation — assuming no obstacles stood in the way — 39 percent say attend a four-year college. But the next highest answer — at 23 percent — was to enter a non-college training program. (For 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed, the second choice is to enter the workforce.)

Lawrence Schall’s accreditation agency, the New England Commission of Higher Education, recently announced it would consider accreditation proposals from colleges looking to offer bachelor’s degrees in fewer than the traditional 120 credits, which could mean going for three years rather than four. The idea is to get people out of the classroom and into the job market sooner and less burdened by debt (Merrimack College and New England College have both expressed interest).

“The power of American education is in the diversity of institutions,” Schall says. “All with different admissions, price points, outcomes — the information is out there for people to find their place.” The Harvards and MITs represent only a sliver of New England institutions, he points out, adding there is a huge number of smaller colleges here where an “extraordinary education” is available at an affordable price.

“People think of college as one thing,” Schall says, “but it is nowhere near one thing.”

This article appeared on The Boston Globe on April 11, 2024.

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The origins of the turmoil lie in extreme campus reactions to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. They led to a blockbuster congressional hearing in December. In it politicians accused three college presidents of failing to curtail antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania’s then president, Elizabeth Magill, stepped down just days later. Claudine Gay, formerly Harvard’s president, resigned from her job in January amid twin furores over antisemitism on campus and plagiarism in her scholarship (which she contested).

Plenty of faculty—both at Harvard and at other elite universities—insist that hard-right Republicans and other rabble-rousers are fabricating controversies. Stirring up animosity towards pointy-headed elites can win them political advantage. But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

To understand the mess that the Ivies and other elite colleges find themselves in, first consider how they broke away from the rest in recent decades. Despite the fact that America’s elite universities have centuries of prestigious history, much of their modern wealth flows from a bull run that began in the more recent past. Back in the 1960s, only a modest gap divided the resources that America’s most and least selective colleges could throw around, according to research by Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Stanford. By the late 2000s, that had widened to an abyss.

This happened in part because of changes that enabled elite universities to enrol ever cleverer students. The collapsing cost of air fares and phone calls made sharp school-leavers gradually more eager to apply to ritzy colleges far from their homes. Smart youngsters from around the world joined them. At about the same time, the expansion of standardised testing made it easier for colleges to identify the very brightest sparks from far and wide.

These smarter, more ambitious entrants were more likely to value top-notch faculty and facilities, and were more willing to pay for them, according to Professor Hoxby’s analysis. And they went on to greater success, which meant the size of donations elite universities could squeeze from alumni began to increase.

Newfangled ways of managing endowments also boosted America’s super-elite colleges. For years top universities managed their nest eggs cautiously, says Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University. But in the 1980s the wealthiest ones began ploughing into riskier assets, including commodities and property, with considerable success. The richest universities were both more willing and more able to roll the dice; they could also reinvest a larger share of their returns.

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

For all their success, America’s best institutions are now flying into squalls. One clutch of challenges comes from abroad. American universities still dominate the top rungs of most international league tables—but their lead is becoming somewhat less secure. Every year Times Higher Education, a British magazine, asks more than 30,000 academics to name the universities they believe produce the best work in their fields. They are growing gradually less likely to name American ones, and a bit more likely to point to Chinese ones (see chart 1).

Research in disciplines such as maths, computing, engineering and physics is becoming especially competitive. Rankings produced by Leiden University in the Netherlands, which scores universities solely on the impact of the papers they produce, now place Chinese universities in pole position for all those subjects (see chart 2). “The difference from five or ten years ago is quite astonishing,” says Simon Marginson at Oxford University. The challenge is not that American output is growing weaker, he reckons, but that the quality produced by rivals is shooting up.

Competition to snag the world’s smartest students and faculty is growing more severe, too. Twenty years ago America attracted 60% of the foreigners studying in English-speaking countries; now it gets about 40%. Starting around the time of Donald Trump’s election, high-achieving Chinese—who once had eyes only for America’s finest universities—began sending additional, “back-up” applications to institutions in places such as Singapore and Britain, says Tomer Rothschild, who runs an agency that helps them.

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

Why has this happened? One argument is that academics’ views have not in fact changed that much; instead, Republicans have abandoned them by moving to the right. But conservatives insist that bright sparks with right-leaning views have been choosing to leave or stay out of the profession, in part because lefty colleagues have been declining to hire and promote them. This mix of bloat and groupthink helps explain why prestigious universities often find themselves at odds with the American public in battles over access and speech.

Start with access: elite colleges clung to affirmative action long after the majority of Americans had decided that it was unfair to give black, Hispanic and Native American students with slightly lower grades an advantage when deciding whom to admit. Academics who spoke against the practice—arguing, for example, that some youngsters were being catapulted onto courses they were poorly prepared for—have often been slammed as bigots by their students and peers.

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

As for speech, elite colleges have done a particularly poor job of handling a generation of youngsters who are alarmingly intolerant of views they don’t like. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (fire), an ngo, rates freedom of expression across America’s best-known campuses. Last year it placed two Ivy League outfits, Harvard and Pennsylvania, among the five worst performers; Harvard came last. More than half of students at the five colleges believe it is sometimes acceptable to stop peers attending a speech by a controversial figure. Only about 70% agree that it is “never acceptable” to use violence to stop someone talking.

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

All these problems would be better handled if universities had more effective governance. University presidents, and the deans beneath them, have too often looked intimidated by activist students and administrators, and unwilling to stand up for academics bullied for unpopular views. fire, the campaigners for academic freedom, reckon that between 2014 and mid-2023 there were at least 1,000 attempts to get academics sacked or punished for things they said (one fifth of those resulted in people losing their jobs).

Years of wishy-washiness about what speech campuses will and will not tolerate have made it more difficult for university leaders to referee the clashes that have erupted between students supportive of Palestinians and those speaking up for Israel. Presidents who have not always held firm on free expression now find themselves besieged by censors of all political stripes. College leaders who, since the start of the Gaza war, have rediscovered their commitment to vigorous debate have inevitably ended up looking partisan.

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

Where is all this going? Reports of campus antisemitism have roused lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In December a bipartisan group in Congress added new language to a draft bill that aims to boost funding for short, non-degree courses. They proposed finding the cash for this by preventing students at very rich universities from taking federal student loans. That idea was dropped in February, amid worries that it would create new obstacles for poor students, but it has since been replaced with a new proposal: that wealthy universities be required to “share risk” with the government by covering the government’s losses in the event that federal loans are not repaid. Universities have long resisted talk of such schemes.

Elite universities’ tax advantages are another possible target. For years politicians have accused them of “hoarding” huge endowments while raising prices for students and snaffling government money for research. Ten top colleges got about $33bn in federal research grants and contracts between 2018 and 2022, reckons Open the Book, an ngo. Over the same period, the endowments swelled by about $65bn. Until 2017 universities paid no tax on income from these nest-eggs; then Mr Trump hit the very richest with a recurring annual levy of 1.4%. He has implied that, if re-elected, he will take another bite.

At a minimum a Republican administration would make much sharper use of regulators, such as the civil-rights monitors employed in the federal education department. They might be encouraged to launch more investigations, for example into admissions rules or the work of dei teams. Republicans have already meddled energetically in the running of public universities, over which they have far greater control. The University of Florida announced on March 1st that it had got rid of all its dei positions in order to comply with a newish state rule. Signed into law a year ago by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, it prevents state money from being spent on such things.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

The ongoing furore over antisemitism could bring the impetus universities need to reform. But a less optimistic scenario exists, too. Seeking to escape heat over hate speech, college leaders could choose to become all the more watchful of what their students and faculty say. Tighter rules about speech on campus might deflect brickbats in the short term; but in the long term they would only degrade the quality of both teaching and research at American universities. “We are at an inflection point,” believes Professor George of Princeton. “It could go either way.”

This post appeared in The Economist on March 4, 2024.

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It’s not. And as tuition and fees rise, some students would likely benefit from a bachelor’s degree that could be completed more quickly, potentially in three years.

The New England Commission of Higher Education had been among the last of the national accrediting agencies to refuse to consider accrediting a bachelor’s degree program with fewer than 120 credits. That changed Wednesday when the commission announced that for the first time it would consider proposals for programs that allow students to earn a bachelor’s degree with fewer than 120 credits.

“The impetus is to find a way to reduce college costs and get people out into the market sooner,” commission president Lawrence Schall said.

The announcement is an important positive step that should encourage the rise of innovative programs that let students obtain a degree more quickly and cheaply. It will not be right for every school, major, or student, but colleges should think seriously about whether a shorter degree program would appeal to some of their students. As schools begin to implement these programs, the data that emerge could provide valuable insights into how to make college more efficient without compromising quality.

Some schools already offer three-year degrees, but they still require 120 credits. Students either get credits for Advanced Placement tests or early college programs or they take classes year-round. But in the last few years, a national initiative spearheaded by Robert Zemsky, a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, and Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, has gotten about 20 schools to commit to piloting a three-year bachelor’s degree with fewer than 120 credits.

The two New England schools that have expressed interest are Merrimack College in North Andover and New England College.

New England College is exploring a 100-credit degree in criminal justice. The program cuts some electives and combines general education and criminal justice classes, for example, by letting students fulfill a science requirement by taking forensic science. Lesperance said he thinks the program will attract students who are not interested in the full college experience of sports and extracurriculars but who want a credential for a job — for example, police officers who would get paid more with a college degree.

Merrimack College officials have said, in a presentation to NECHE, that they are envisioning a pilot program with a small number of students in a handful of non-licensure majors like business, health science, physics, and liberal arts. It would target lower-income, high-ability students who plan to pursue a graduate degree.

A handful of schools elsewhere — including Brigham Young University-Idaho and its affiliated Ensign College, University of Minnesota campuses in Morris and Rochester, and West Virginia-based American Public University System — have had similar programs approved under different accrediting bodies. But New England schools have been stymied until now by NECHE’s unwillingness to approve these programs.

NECHE’s new guidelines say any program must be at least 90 credits with classes in a major, general education classes, and electives. It needs to have a degree name that distinguishes it from a typical bachelor’s degree, and the school must be transparent in marketing materials that some graduate schools or employers might not consider it a bachelor’s. The school needs to assess program outcomes related to student retention, graduation rates, learning, and employment.

Offering a lower-cost, shorter degree could increase chances of student success. Over the years, college tuition and fees have steadily risen, and many graduates leave school with enormous student loan debt. Around one-quarter of first-time bachelor’s degree students and 40 percent of all undergraduate students drop out before obtaining a degree, according to the Education Data Initiative, often for financial reasons.

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit focused on improving educational quality, suggested that colleges could cut electives, revise core curriculums, and still offer a quality education. “A well designed 90-credit-hour program could get students ready for work and citizenship without the financial and opportunity costs,” Poliakoff said. “For accreditors to dig their heels in and say only a 120-hour program will be sufficient is simply ignoring reality.”

There are existing tests that measure how colleges are performing and whether students are learning, which could be used to assess how much students are learning from a shortened bachelor’s program compared to a traditional degree. As Michael Horn, an education writer and lecturer at Harvard who cofounded the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, said, “I’d much rather be certifying demonstrations of learning as opposed to focusing on is it three years or is it four years.”

It’s an attitude accreditors and schools should adopt. Ensuring students are learning well is more important than regulating how long it takes them to learn.

This article appeared in The Boston Globe on March 6, 2024.

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