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Can Higher Education Solve America’s Economic Crisis?

Part 4: How Many American Adults Should Have a College Education — and How (and by Whom) Is That Question Answered?

A quick history of education

The history of education is fascinating, if only because it can be seen as evidence of how the powerful have repeatedly used limiting access to education as a weapon to deny rights and opportunities to the underclass.

Let me restate that point, because it is important: Historically, the expansion and enhancement of literacy rarely resulted from a deliberate policy of benevolence but instead occurred because at various times expanded literacy proved to be in the economic interests of the ruling class. We should never assume that the default position is increased literacy; to the contrary, the default position is continued ignorance of the underclass, and it is shocking to see confirmation of that even today. (Witness current efforts in Washington and in various states to focus public higher education on job preparation, at the expense of a traditional liberal arts education. [1])

In the Middle Ages, before Gutenberg and his printing press created mass-produced books, formal education was essentially lacking in most European countries — unless you were a monk. The capacity to read and write was essential for members of the clergy because they needed to be able to read the Mass or to copy manuscripts. But since the Mass was read to the congregation, it was not necessary (and, from the standpoint of the church, not necessarily desirable) for common folk to be able to read and write themselves. They needed to know only what God wanted of them, and the monks, who could read God’s word, were there to tell them. So no good could come from universal literacy.

The printing press, the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment all worked to change the thinking about literacy. And as the Industrial Age began to replace a largely agrarian economy, workers needed to be able to read, write and add and subtract numbers, in order to provide greater utility to the merchants and factory owners for whom they worked.

During the 19th century, free public education through grade six became a common goal in the United States and in many European countries, and the resulting more literate workforce drove economies upward. In America, the idea of a universal high school education began to spread during the latter years of the 19th century and into the early years of the 20th century. But as late as 1940, only half of American adults had earned a high school diploma.  (There are still almost 25 million adult Americans today — nearly 12 percent of all Americans over the age of 25 — who never finished high school.) [2]

Currently, high school completion rates nationally stand at 84 percent. But that means 16 percent of the class of 2017 failed to complete high school, and too many of those are entering a world without the skills needed to secure a well-paying job.

During the 1950s and 1960s, as it became increasingly clear that a far brighter economic future awaited those individuals who were able to attend and complete college, parents lobbied to do away with the two-track system in high school (wherein high-achieving students were placed on the “college” track and less successful students were put on the “clerical and trades” track), and instead to create a system that would prepare all students for college. (Whether the students actually chose to attend college was entirely up to them and their parents, but the argument was that they all should be prepared to attend college.)

This was an important change because, until this point, the expansion of educational opportunities was driven by the economic needs of the state or nation. Now we began to see an argument being made on behalf of the individual: it’s not enough that we have sufficient numbers of college graduates to meet our country’s economic needs. I want my child to have that opportunity.

Who should bear the cost of education?

Thus began the tension between the twin beneficiaries of expanded numbers of college graduates: society as a whole, because more college graduates meant increased tax revenues due to higher salaries; and the individual, because the college graduate clearly benefited economically and in so many other ways, in contrast to the person with just a high school education.

This tension has been at the heart of the debate over the last half century about the funding of higher education: Is it the responsibility of society at large, or should it be primarily the responsibility of the individual, and his or her parents?

College funding obligations aside, the problem with the goal of universal college preparation was that it resulted in too many high school students with a high school diploma in one hand and a college rejection letter in the other (or a letter of acceptance that required the student to do remedial work before being able to enroll in college-level courses). That is, a high school diploma and college readiness are not the same thing. Indeed, in some states more than half of students with a high school credential are not qualified to enroll in credit-bearing courses in college.

One answer to this problem has been to increase the size and number of community colleges, where students with little money and/or a poor K-12 education can begin their post-secondary work. For example, under the California Master Plan of 1960, students in the top eighth of their high school class were guaranteed a seat at one of the campuses of the University of California; students in the top third were admitted to a campus of the California State University; and everyone else was obliged to enroll in a community college. The idea was that students who completed their associate’s degree at the community college would then be offered the chance to transfer to a branch of the University of California or the California State University, where they could complete their undergraduate degree.

The problem in California and other states was that the “open admission” standard for community colleges — where anyone can enroll, even without having completed high school in some states — placed the community colleges in the position of having to remediate the relatively poor K-12 education received by a majority of their students. The students were, in effect, repeating work they ostensibly had been taught in high school but that they obviously had never learned. Even the California State University, which admitted only the top third of the high school graduating class, found itself with enormous numbers of students who required remediation before they could enroll in college mathematics or English courses.

The odds against completing a college degree rise dramatically if a student requires remediation. Six-year graduation rates at the California State University campuses vary considerably, but several have historically been below 40 percent, a figure that is sadly typical for many state colleges in other states as well.

Graduation rates at community colleges are far worse, in large measure because the percentage of college-ready students is even lower than in the state colleges. So three-year graduation rates (for a two-year associate’s degree) often fall below 20 percent, and most never finish their degree, let alone transfer to a four-year school.

How much education is enough?

The cost of providing an opportunity for a college education to students who did not receive a quality K-12 education, or who are “late bloomers,” is enormous. And yet the reason behind creating this opportunity remains as valid today as it was when the “two-track” system was abandoned: How else are people who are born poor, who attended failing K-12 schools, who never “caught fire” in high school (or whose fire was somehow extinguished) to have the chance to improve their lives?

Access to a college education is that chance.

Americans note with disapproval those countries that force all secondary students who aspire to attend college to take a qualifying exam, the outcome of which is determinative as to whether that student will progress to a well-paying job or be relegated to the ranks of the working poor. America is the land of opportunity! We believe in second chances! Everyone should have the right to a college education if they have the intelligence and the will to succeed!

But there remains the question of the cost of providing such opportunities.

Although places such as New York City and California experimented with free public higher education, it proved too expensive to be sustained. Our collective will to create additional capacity at colleges and universities waned as the tax bills arrived. Besides, we reasoned, since almost half the students who start college today don’t finish, surely that suggests that many college students shouldn’t have been in college in the first place. In fact, the argument goes, we would be better off with fewer college students, and we could do that by raising entrance standards and excluding those who are clearly not capable (or at least not ready now) of handling a college curriculum successfully.

The fallacy of this line of reasoning is that it assumes that our current educational paradigm, at all levels of education, is as good and as equitable as it possibly could be, so anyone failing to complete a particular level of education does so because of personal inadequacy (“poor learner”), not because of inferior or inadequate instruction.

This simple dichotomy ignores the reality that students are not automatons. Many people face crises while they are seeking an education: a family emergency to which they must devote their attention; food or housing insecurity; not enough money for child care, books, transportation or tuition; discrimination because of race, national origin, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

The point is: While it is convenient to blame the unsuccessful student for failing to be successful, much of the time that lack of success stems not from inferior intellect or a willingness to work hard but from limitations entirely beyond the ability of the student to control.

Moreover, if we are already educating as many people at the college level as are capable of learning at that level, how do we explain the fact that there are many countries in the world that are educating greater proportions of their citizenry than we are? (And be careful about suggesting that their educational standards are lower than ours.)

Is our country doing enough to create successful and equitable educational pathways for students, both at the K-12 and the college levels? How do we meet the economic needs of our country with our current model? Reducing the number of students in college will do nothing to resolve the problems business and industry have in finding a sufficient number of workers with the skills and abilities these businesses require.

Do we educate to meet social needs, or is it about personal development?

In a recent article, [3] Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, makes a persuasive argument for a dramatic increase in the production of college and university graduates. Mr. Bok proposes increasing institutional capacity and doubling the number of college graduates by pouring a great many more tax dollars into public institutions. Unfortunately, in today’s anti-tax world, that suggestion will surely fall on the deafest of ears.

And really what Mr. Bok’s proposal demonstrates is the utter futility of calls for action that are not truly directed at anyone in particular, that do not include a consideration of the steps that would need to be taken to achieve the results being called for, and that come from someone — and I say this with the greatest respect for Mr. Bok — who is not in a position to deliver any of the outcomes that he wishes to see (since he is no longer the president of a university).

Mr. Bok is by no means alone in this position. The Lumina Foundation, a foundation with considerable resources, has been calling for years for a significant increase in the production of college graduates (and would appear to have the opportunity to make investments in ideas that might well advance its agenda). And early in his first term, President Obama himself called for a near-doubling of the proportion of college graduates by 2026 (but he never made a strong push to create the political will to achieve this outcome).

Regrettably, we have seen only very modest gains in the percentage of American adults with a post-secondary degree (associate’s or bachelor’s) or high-value certificate over the past decade. We must conclude that calls for action, in and of themselves, have limited value in enhancing the level of higher education attained by adult Americans. We need a more comprehensive and inclusive campaign.

With that in mind, might there be ways by which we could make education more successful for more people, thereby lowering the cost per degree received? And if there are, shouldn’t we start using them?

We will examine these questions in upcoming postings to this blog site. First, however, let’s examine how well colleges and universities are doing with our current model of higher education.

Next week: Is there a disconnect between what America needs and what colleges actually do?

[1] “Mike Lee, Mia Love: It’s time to modernize higher education,” Deseret News, Dec. 15, 2017. (Mike Lee is the junior senator from Utah; Mia Love is a congresswoman from Utah. Together, they have introduced the HERO Act—Higher Education Reform Opportunity—in the Senate and House to “open doors to new education opportunities” that do not involve four-year degrees at traditional colleges and universities, but focus instead on massive online open courses—MOOCs—and certification exams that utilize “alternative accreditation paths.”)

[2] “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015,” U.S. Census Bureau

[3] The Boston Globe, Sept. 9, 2017

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Can Higher Education Solve America’s Economic Crisis?

Part 3: The Relationship between a College Education and a Well-Paying Job; Reconciling a Liberal Arts Education with the Needs of Employers

Historically, the universities of medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the colleges of Colonial Age America, had almost nothing to do with preparing young men for the world of work. (There were almost no women in college until well into the 19th century). Rather, the universities served to introduce the next generation of society’s expected leaders to classic Greek and Roman writers and thinkers, and to sharpen their skills in grammar, logic and debate.

To be sure, some students became lawyers, doctors or theologians, but for the most part the traditional college or university education focused almost entirely on teaching people how to reason, analyze and communicate.

Things began to change after the Revolutionary War, with the establishment of the first public universities. But even these were relatively scarce until the Morrill Act of 1862 established land grant colleges that were specifically devoted to agriculture and engineering — applied fields in which the acquisition of certain skills and knowledge connected an area of study to a particular line of work.

No longer were college students limited to the sons of wealthy merchants and landowners. Some now prepared for jobs in industry (as the Industrial Age came into its own) — and some college students were women!

In 1870, Johns Hopkins University, established on the German model, introduced the idea that graduate education and research should be within the scope of what universities do. The resulting production of students at the graduate level provided the faculty needed to allow new colleges to be established, and to permit existing institutions to grow.

Even with these changes, however, most college students still majored in the liberal arts, and many colleges taught only the liberal arts (as some do to this day). Liberal arts colleges, and liberal arts faculty, continued to emphasize the non-economic purpose of higher education: to instill a love of learning, and a life of the mind, as one of society’s loftiest goals—and a goal that needed to be nurtured and protected.

However, by the beginning of the 20th century, it had occurred to business leaders that people who had attended college must be quite smart, and they began preferentially hiring college graduates. They hired them not necessarily for what they knew, but because they had demonstrated that they were bright and could learn and reason with ease. Businesses were content to train these young graduates in the specifics of what they needed to know to contribute to the business, recognizing that they learned quickly and were likely to stay with the company for their working lives.

Liberal arts faculty and liberal arts colleges looked askance at such blatant commercial use of the education they had provided to their students, but since neither the colleges nor the businesses asked anything more of the other, both were content to let matters run their course.

Increasing educational opportunity

With the passage of the GI Bill in 1944, and the work of the Truman Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy in 1946/47, the doors of colleges and universities were flung open to people from all walks of life. These new students from the working class were far more successful than many believed they would be, and higher education in America was forever changed. The percentage of adult Americans with a baccalaureate increased from 5 percent in 1945 to more than 30 percent today.

Growth in the economy allowed the ready absorption of newly minted college graduates into that economy, and growing numbers of college graduates in turn contributed to economic growth — a kind of virtuous circle, where supply and demand for college graduates stayed roughly in balance, even as the economy grew and the nation prospered.

What should be the focus of education?

But everything changed with the Great Recession that began in 2008.

Almost immediately, demand for newly minted college graduates plummeted, even as the production of graduates continued, throwing the balance between supply and demand out of equilibrium. Those few businesses that were hiring could limit their search to individuals not only with a college degree but also with relevant experience — something that the typical new college graduate did not possess.

Businesses promptly canceled their training programs for new employees because newly hired but experienced employees needed very little training. Almost overnight, new college graduates — especially in the liberal arts — found themselves with few job offers, and obliged to accept temporary or part-time jobs. The college graduate working as a coffee shop barista became the image etched in the minds of the parents of college-age young people everywhere, and they wondered aloud whether a college degree was still the ticket needed to join the middle class — or even whether a college degree was worth the price.

Conservative governors of several states openly challenged the notion that public (i.e., taxpayer-supported) institutions should engage in producing liberal arts graduates with no marketable skills (conveniently forgetting, of course, about the “soft skills” possessed by the typical liberal arts graduate, such as the ability to think, reason, synthesize, collaborate and communicate, among others). We need more STEM graduates! We need more graduates in the trades! Even President Obama questioned  the wisdom of students who elected to major in art history.

The liberal arts faculty pushed back hard. Hundreds of years of history were on their side. As I have noted, the traditional college education was never about preparing people for careers. Businesses chose to hire college graduates and then train them. Now, they were saying that businesses no longer wished (or needed) to shoulder the expenses of training, so the task of preparing students for the workplace must, by default, fall on the colleges.

In the intervening years, the job market has improved and more colleges have seen the virtue of students’ combining a liberal arts education with specific skills in one or more of the professional schools (and/or of gaining relevant experience while an undergraduate through internships or other examples of project-based learning). [1] So the tension between the wishes and expectations of the businesses and of the parents of college students on the one hand, and the liberal arts faculty on the other, has diminished — but not vanished.

Neither side has relinquished its position. We await only another recession for a resumption of hostilities.

In the meantime, here are two things to consider:

First, a powerful case can be made that the best reason for obtaining a college education today is because of the strong interrelationship among being well educated, getting a great job and living a great life. [2]

Thinking about a college education only in terms of how it prepares you for a job can cause you to undervalue the other factors in living a great life, as well as tempt you to try to “time” the market — that is, to choose a major based on the needs of the job market at the moment. The problem is that the job market is constantly changing and what is “hot” today might be ice cold tomorrow. Getting a good educational foundation on which additional education can be built as and when needed is the better strategy.

Second, lifetime earnings in different job sectors broadly overlap. Engineers generally have higher lifetime earnings that English majors, for example — but some English majors earn more than some engineers. The point is, median salary for a particular major does not tell you the range of salary for that major, nor does it predict the actual salary of any one individual. [3]

The takeaway is that college students should not abandon their commitment to an area of study that ignites their passions to make themselves into something they are not in hopes of a potentially bigger paycheck. Lifetime salaries by major are not chiseled in granite, and the future is too uncertain.

But failing to appreciate what employers are looking for in a new hire is an equally serious mistake. To repeat, the better response is to combine the strengths of professional study with the breadth that comes from the study of the liberal arts by balancing your major (primary interest) with a minor in a completely different area that extends your skill set. For example, majors in graphic design or dance may be very well served by taking a minor in marketing or management.

Graduates in professional fields tend to be hired quickly (assuming that their area is in demand when they graduate), whereas liberal arts graduates often drift from job to job for several years before getting on track. Liberal arts graduates with some defined professional skills, on the other hand, tend to get started on their careers more quickly, because those skills are attractive to employers — and their liberal arts skills allow them to be successful once hired, and to advance their careers.

Final point: The traditions of the academy should be respected, if only because their ultimate value is proven by virtue of their longevity. Only certain religions can claim a longer history than can the oldest of our universities (in marked contrast to the relatively rapid turnover of businesses and corporations, for example).

But it’s true that, as our society evolves, certain factors that support our society must evolve along with it. Higher education today plays a very different (and arguably much more important) role in supporting and strengthening our society than it did four centuries ago. And we in higher education should not be so in love with our traditions and history that we blind ourselves to the need for us to adapt to current demands and expectations of our society. Our challenge is not to reject these demands outright but to respond to them even as we honor the values and traditions that are the basis of what we do.

Next time: How many Americans should have a college degree — and how (and by whom) is that question answered?

[1] “From Liberal Arts to Making a Living,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 22, 2017

[2] Great Jobs, Great Lives. Gallup Organization, 2015

[3] “Six Myths About Choosing a Major,” The New York Times Education Supplement, Nov. 5, 2017

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Can Higher Education Solve America’s Economic Crisis?

Part 2: Massive Tax Cuts or More Educated Workers? Which Is the Better Choice for a Broken Economy?

In late December 2017, the House of Representatives and the Senate, urged on by President Trump, approved a dramatic restructuring of the tax code. The primary goal of this restructuring was to reduce the tax burden on corporations to allow them to retain more of their earnings in the expectation (or, more correctly, the hope) that with more dollars in corporate pockets, some of those dollars would be spent creating new jobs for additional workers and/or augmenting the wages of current workers.

Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, claims that the proposed tax reform is in reality a jobs bill [1] — and since everyone favors adding jobs, everyone should support the bill. (Ironically, the six largest U.S. banks collectively eliminated 8,000 jobs just before the tax bill passed, despite the fact that banks were among the industries most favored by the tax cuts.) [2]

Even though the tax bill will result in a $1.4 trillion loss in tax revenue over the coming decade, the gamble is that the growth in the number of jobs and job-related income (annual increases in GDP of 4 percent or more each year) will provide such a boost to the economy that the growth in overall tax revenue will make up for the lost $1.4 trillion. (Not factored into the expectation of large GDP increases, however, are the plans of the Federal Reserve Bank to continue to raise interest rates to prevent inflation and an overheated economy. The Fed and Congress are effectively pulling on the same economic rope — but in opposite directions.) [3]

We can analyze whether a tax cut was the best possible economic stimulus that Washington had available to it by looking at the assumptions that form the basis of the tax reform legislation:

  1. Corporations today lack the financial ability to add jobs or to pay their workers higher wages. The primary reason for the “bull” stock market of the last eight years is that corporate America has been doing very well, on the whole, and earnings have typically met or exceeded analysts’ projections — and when that happens, the price of a share of stock rises, making investors very happy, further driving up share price. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased from about 6,500 in March 2009 to over 26,000 today — quadrupling in just over eight years. Corporate America is strong, and the companies that survived the Great Recession are generally far more robust today than they were in 2008. Corporations already have all the money they need to hire more workers.

 

  1. But it’s still the case that, at 35 percent, corporate tax rates are too high, much higher than in most of the nations with which we compete, and a lower rate (21 percent) would make corporate America more competitive. While it is true that our posted corporate tax rate is high, what the corporations actually pay averages just under 19 percent. [4] Stories abound of how major corporations, especially those doing business internationally, establish headquarters in offshore tax havens where earnings can be retained without being subject to the U.S. tax code. Other strategies that push against the boundaries of the law have the cumulative effect of dramatically reducing the actual tax bill for these corporations. The point is: Using the posted tax rate as the argument, rather than the rate of tax actually paid, gives a misleading impression of the tax burden American corporations really face. A reduction in the posted rate should have been accompanied by a comprehensive reform of the various techniques and loopholes now used by corporations to avoid paying anything close to the posted tax rate.

 

  1. But what about all those new jobs that will be created? The underlying assumption of the tax bill is that a dramatic reduction in taxes will allow corporate America to hire many more employees and pay them well, but as I noted earlier this outcome is more correctly characterized as a hope than an expectation. We have been hearing for some time that corporate America cannot find skilled and experienced workers. The demand for workers exists now, but the supply of those workers is insufficient to meet that demand [5]. Giving corporations more money to hire more employees won’t work if the prospective employees don’t exist. Moreover, for corporations, their workforce represents an expense — and corporations are very cost-conscious. Every dollar not spent on salaries is a dollar that can be put into stock dividends, or used for corporate stock buybacks, a strategy that increases the price per share — both outcomes that are much appreciated by shareholders. (Increases in share price also help corporate leaders meet the provisions of their employment contracts, resulting in their being granted bigger bonuses.) Of course, in theory they could just give their workers that money, as a sign of corporate benevolence. Unfortunately, when the interests of the workers are pitted against the interests of the owners, the owners almost always win — and the migration of money from labor to capital over the past three decades has been a primary contributor to the growth America has seen in income inequality. In short, the idea that corporate tax reduction will result in higher wages or more jobs is fanciful, and not supported by any evidence.

So is there an alternative approach to enhancing the economy?

As we noted in Part 1 of this series of essays, there is a huge imbalance in the job market — and it is expected to continue and possibly worsen — between the collective skills and abilities actually possessed today by American workers, and the skills and abilities employers say they need for the jobs they currently have available. A recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce [6] showed that, of all the jobs created since the beginning of the Great Recession, fully 73 percent required at least a bachelor’s degree — twice the actual percentage of college graduates now in the workforce. Consequently, huge numbers of people are eligible only for the small number of jobs that require limited skills, and since those jobs are not abundant, employers see no need to pay generously — and that’s why the inflation-adjusted income of people in the bottom quintile of family income has actually declined in recent years.

Conversely, there is abundant demand — and often a shortage in supply — for many jobs requiring specialized skills, which is why the inflation-adjusted income of people in the top quintile of family income has increased significantly as the Great Recession has faded into memory.

The solution seems obvious: More people need more education to rebalance supply and demand between workers and employers.

A greater supply of skilled workers — workers prepared for the jobs of today and tomorrow, not the jobs of yesterday — will allow corporate America to grow their businesses, and that, in turn, will enhance the American economy even as it improves median income. Similarly, fewer people seeking low-skill jobs will put pressure on employers to increase salary levels for those positions, in order to attract and keep these workers. That outcome will also improve median income and possibly bring some of the workers who have sidelined themselves, convinced they could never find a decent job, back into the job market, an outcome that would benefit everyone.

How might that outcome be achieved?

A report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [7] offers an intriguing possibility. The report provides two models stemming from a proposed federal investment designed to improve college graduation rates. The optimistic model assumes that an increase in higher education spending to 125 percent of current levels would raise current graduation rates by about 50 percent. The pessimistic model assumes that spending might have to be at 150 percent of current levels to achieve that outcome.

The models are complex, and the report runs for 35 pages. But in sum, an investment that is less than the $1.4 trillion cost of the tax cut, spread over the next 20 years, would begin to show net positive revenues around 2042, and these numbers would become increasingly positive thereafter. By 2046, the share of the adult population with at least a bachelor’s degree would rise from 32 percent to 46 percent; unemployment rates would fall by another half percent; earnings would increase by more than 3 percent; and the gross domestic product would be 2.5 percent higher than if we did nothing at all.

Sadly, this alternative economic stimulus was never considered in Washington. The tax cut would happen immediately, while the higher education investment would require a much longer time horizon — well outside the election-cycle thinking that seems to determine almost all of Washington’s actions.

But if the American people had been given a choice for improving the American economy between a gamble that reducing the corporate tax burden might, through corporate largesse, find its way into the pockets of workers and indirectly create more jobs — or directly investing in higher education institutions to increase their capacity and create more of the workers corporate America says it needs, thereby empowering the workers themselves — I would have supported choice No. 2.

Corporations or people? A gamble or an investment? Why can’t we do a better job as a nation of making the right choice? Why won’t our political leaders even give us a choice?

Next time: The role of higher education in preparing America’s workforce.

[1] “Anti-tax advocate defends GOP cuts,” Providence Journal, November 11, 2017

[2] “Big U.S. banks slashed 8,000 more jobs before tax-cut windfall,” Providence Business News, January 18, 2018

[3] “Fed Expects Tax Cut to Give Economy ‘a Modest Lift,’” The New York Times, December 14, 2017

[4] “The Right Way to Cut Corporate Taxes,” The New York Times, November 13, 2017

[5] “In Trump Country, College Is a Leaky Lifeboat,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2017

[6] “America’s Divided Recovery: College Haves and Have-Nots” 2016

[7] “The Economic Impact of Increasing College Completion” 2017

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Can Higher Education Solve America’s Economic Crisis?

(And if It Can, Then Why Does America Still Have an Economic Crisis?)

Many of America’s most serious problems are linked to the state of its economy. Consider: income inequality has been increasing for the past three decades; too many of today’s jobs pay far less than did the jobs that disappeared during the Great Recession; most family incomes are flat or declining, leading to a sense of economic deprivation that promotes depression, family strife, and alcohol and drug abuse. The stridency and deep political divisions we have seen in recent years owe, at least in part, to the seemingly irreconcilable differences of opinion regarding the right path forward for our nation, specifically whether that path should consist of more, or fewer, hands-on programs by the federal government aimed at strengthening the economy.

The thesis underlying this collection of eight essays is that our country’s economic problems are solvable, that the malaise in which we find ourselves today need not be permanent, and that the driver of the new economy, the change agent that we need to employ, is higher education — but not higher education as we have traditionally known it. Rather, we need to think about creating public-private partnerships on a far larger scale, with institutions of higher education working with business, industry, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the one hand, and local, state, and federal governments on the other, to develop shared expectations of outcomes in which all of the partners are winners. The highly disaggregated and inequitable system of higher education practices we have today, wobbling precariously on a flimsy base of tradition and complacency, must be replaced with something far more integrated, one grounded on a solid foundation of evidence, and with a clear and realizable purpose.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin at the beginning.

Part 1: 

What Are the Factors Creating Our Economic Crisis? Analyzing Opposing Opinions and Reconciling Contradictory Conclusions

Is America still in crisis economically? Or have we now recovered from the hangover of the Great Recession?

In a world where contrary information is promptly labeled as “alternative facts” or “fake news,” it is difficult to identify a common data set on which all can agree — and, absent such an agreement, it is impossible to answer those questions, let alone to develop a consensus path forward. But at least some of the confusion can be eliminated by a careful analysis of what is being said. The old adage of the blind men describing an elephant is useful to us here.

Employment is up/workforce participation is down

Both statements are true.

In 2016, the United States added 2.2 million new jobs, and 1.4 million additional jobs were added in the first eight months of 2017.[1] The unemployment rate has fallen markedly over the last eight years, and now stands at 4.1 percent, the lowest rate of unemployment since 2001[2]. But the percentage of people of working age who are actually employed has fallen dramatically since the Great Recession, and this drop is especially acute for those with no college degree. Among men aged 25 – 54, 94.5 per cent were employed in 1980, but only 88.5 percent are employed today.[3] This is one of the lowest percentages among economically developed countries. The comparable figure in Japan today, for example, is 95.5 percent. So we have the apparent paradox of a low level of unemployment coupled with a historically low percentage of employed people.

And the problem is not just that there are many more people of employment age who are not working today, as compared to 2008. One-third of these non-working people are receiving disability payments, and an equal number are estimated to be using prescription pain medications, most of which are opioids.[4] The absence of a job detracts significantly from the quality of life for these people, and burdens society with Medicaid and welfare costs much higher than they were a decade or two ago — and the inability of prospective workers to pass drug tests keeps them unemployed[5].

Incomes are rising/incomes are stagnant

Both statements are true.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, median individual income peaked in 1973. Median family income, because women continued to join the workforce, did not peak until 1997—but since then, the percentage of women in the workforce has declined, as increasing numbers of women of working age have left the workforce to care for aging family members.[6]  In the last two years, the median family income has increased by 3.2 percent, to $59,059, but is still 2.4 percent lower than in 1999, and 1.6 percent lower than in 2007.[7]

But it is also true that median income does not capture the full story. Incomes have actually fallen for much of the workforce — notably, those toward the bottom of the income scale — even as they have risen, often dramatically, for those near the top of the scale. For example, over the past decade, and measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, median household income has fallen by $571 for families in the bottom quintile of income, and risen by $13,479 for families in the top quintile.[8] Moreover, the traditional bell curve of incomes, in which most workers were near the middle of the range, has inverted such that incomes are clustered toward the ends of the curve, with far fewer workers in the mid-range.

So some workers have seen a significant increase in earnings in recent years, even as others have waited in vain for salary increases, or have been forced to accept jobs paying significantly less than their pre-Great Recession jobs.

Whether incomes are seen as improving or not is very much an individual perspective.

The economy is barely growing/the economy continues to improve

National economic growth is measured quarterly, and is always subject to subsequent revision as more comprehensive data later become available. Thus, it is not unusual to see a particular figure announced (to widespread gloom or fanfare, depending on the number), only to see that figure adjusted upward or downward months later.

The point is, making statements about the state of the economy based on the latest quarterly number is risky and ultimately not particularly helpful. (For example, quarterly increases over the past eight quarters have ranged from 0.2 percent to 3.1 percent.[9]) On the other hand, historic data over many quarters reveal a much more useful picture of how well the economy has been doing. As measured in that way, the growth of the American economy over the past decade has been tepid at best (only five of the 52 quarters in the past 13 years grew at 4 percent or better[10]), and growth has not yet returned to levels typically seen following the end of a recession.

The takeaway is that our economy has fundamentally changed since the Great Recession of 2008, because the nature of the jobs available has changed. Low-skill, service jobs have proliferated, but they pay poorly. (For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there will be 4-million new jobs in health care over the next decade, and more than 400,000 of those jobs will be for home health aides — but the median salary of home health aides, a job requiring only a high school diploma, is just $22,600.[11]) Certain well-paying high-skill jobs will continue to be abundant — but millions of mid-level jobs in the trades and especially in manufacturing have disappeared, and are not coming back.

The economy is divided into haves and have-nots — and there are far too many of the latter for our economy to be called “robust.” Too many Americans are living at or near poverty levels, a circumstance that should not be acceptable to anyone who cares about the quality of life of the American people. For these unemployed or underemployed members of our society, the economy is still very much in crisis. Our collective challenge is to prepare workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow, rather than waiting in vain for yesterday’s jobs to return.

America needs a change in the status quo, in terms of educational attainment levels, and Americans cannot assume that our current educational models are up for the task. (If they were, we wouldn’t be still having the problem of far too many marginally employed people.) And all Americans must collectively own this responsibility, rather than idly standing by, waiting for someone else to assume it for us.

How might this task best be accomplished? Next week: Tax cuts or education stimulus?

[1] “Incomes Jump, Adding Twist To Tax Battle,” The New York Times, September 13, 2017

[2] “Yellen’s Legacy: Progress, But a Sense of a Job Unfinished,” The New York Times, November 3, 2017

[3] “Labor Shortage Gives Workers an Edge,” The New York Times, September 20, 2017

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Workers Needed, but Drug Testing Takes a Toll,” The New York Times, July 25, 2017

[6] “The Weight of Elder Care on Women,” The New York Times, December 20, 2017

[7] “Incomes Jump, Adding Twist to Tax Battle,” The New York Times, September 13, 2017

[8] Ibid.

[9] “Economy’s 3% Spurt Emboldens Tax Cut Supports (and Critics),” The New York Times, October 28, 2017

[10] Ibid.

[11] “Without changes in education, the future of work will leave more people behind,” The Hechinger Report, October 31, 2017

 

 

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Recognizing the Indigenous People of New England

Dear Roger Williams University community,

The arrival of Europeans in the New World is celebrated in the United States with Columbus Day in recognition of one of the earliest of the European explorers. But, of course, Columbus Day reflects the European perspective, and it does so at the expense of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, whose lives and cultures were forever transformed (and often lost) with the arrival of the Europeans.

During the last academic year, both the Student Senate and the Faculty Senate passed resolutions urging Roger Williams University to recognize and commemorate the fact that the land on which our campus now sits was, for untold generations before the arrival of Europeans, occupied by Native Americans. The two Senates hoped to provide some balance in how we recognize the “discovery” of America by having RWU declare an “Indigenous People’s Day,” and to so note the day on the University calendar. As president, I am accepting this recommendation, but with an important modification.

Columbus Day is not a particularly good choice for Indigenous People’s Day because it is a holiday and classes are not in session. Accordingly, at least for this year, I am declaring the balance of the week that begins with Columbus Day—that is, Tuesday, October 10th, through Friday, October 13th—to be “Indigenous People’s Week.” After all the years of ignoring them, it’s reasonable to conclude that the indigenous peoples of our state deserve more than just a single day.

It is important to note that the underlying intent goes beyond a simple notation on our academic year calendar. Rather, we anticipate and expect activities inside and outside the classroom that every year will provide our students the opportunity to develop a balanced view of the impact of European colonization of our region by ensuring that the voices of the indigenous peoples are heard. Given the presence of King Philip’s Chair within sight of the campus, it seems particularly appropriate for Roger Williams University to be taking this action – and to do so this year, when the campus discussion theme is “Talking about Race, Gender, and Power.”

Sincerely,

Donald J. Farish,

President

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Convocation 2017: Stick up for each other. Support each other.

Today is the only time I will be able to speak to you as a class until Commencement, in May of 2021, so I want to take full advantage to use my few minutes with you today to best effect.

Let me begin with an apparent paradox: a college education is a profoundly personal experience that you nevertheless undertake as a community. Each of you will be uniquely shaped by the experience, even though that experience is broadly shared.

I can illustrate this concept by using a metaphor that is appropriate for a campus with a nationally ranked sailing team. You should each think of yourselves as the captain of your own ship, undertaking a four-year voyage. You can travel as far as you wish in that time, or you can sail in circles close to your home port. You can make many ports of call, or none at all. You can be daring in your decisions, or play things safe every step of the way. You can choose to explore ideas and cultures that you may find different and mind-expanding, or you can spend all your time in the comfort of the company of those who think and act exactly as you do. But in four years, you will own your decisions. There are no “do-overs.” You get to do this once, so my advice to you today is to make the most of your experience. Don’t be one of those college graduates who almost immediately starts regretting the opportunities missed, the doors left unopened, the pathways not taken, while you were in college.

But even as each of you will have your own unique voyage, you are doing so as part of a flotilla of boats, all setting sail together. You certainly will not all sail as one, but there will be others with you at various points in your voyage. You will always be a part of the Roger Williams University class of 2021, and much of what you experience in the next four years you will share with members of your class—and some of your classmates will become lifelong friends.

The job of the faculty and staff is to assist you on your voyage, not so much by telling you where and how to sail, but by aiding you in making choices that will be in your interest, and by helping you become increasingly self-reliant, and entirely capable of responding effectively to everything from speed bumps to full-blown catastrophes—because you will inevitably see both during your lifetime.

And that leads me to the two points I want to make today:

 

  • First, however confident or insecure you may feel today, things are always easier when you are surrounded by your friends. So task number one is for us to convince you to stop seeing yourselves as 1150 individuals, and help you to realize instead that you are a community of 1150 souls, some of whom you will come to care deeply for, and some of whom will care deeply for you. Our job, then, is to create bonding experiences to facilitate the community building that will help undergird your success as students. We do this in many ways, in class and outside class, but front-loaded in your freshman year, so that you very quickly move from feeling like a person surrounded by strangers to a person surrounded by friends. So understand what we are trying to do, and go along with it. It’s really in your best interests.
  • Second—and this is the hard part—in order to make you self-reliant, and in order to prepare you to deal with the unexpected once you leave RWU, we have to confront you with ideas and concepts that you may find disquieting, or in contrast to your current world view. You can’t survive in college on a diet that is exclusively the mental equivalent of comfort food. You have to allow yourself to be challenged about what you know, and think, and believe, not with an eye to changing everything that you currently accept, but to strengthen your understanding of what you know, and think, and believe, just as you would strengthen your muscles to do better in athletics competitions.

 

Let me continue with this thought for a moment. At Roger Williams, we believe in academic freedom: the right of our faculty to introduce difficult and challenging topics and ideas into the experience they create for their students in the classroom. In addition, we believe in the virtues of the First Amendment:  no prior restraint on what is published in a free press or on what people want to present as ideas and positions that others may find uncomfortable or confronting. The idea of free speech is meaningless if it refers only to ideas with which you already agree. So we do not protect you from ideas. In fact, we very deliberately challenge you with them.

But we also honor our namesake, Roger Williams, one of the more remarkable men in the history of America, and a person about whom you will soon know more. We strongly value diversity, inclusion, equity, and civility, just as Roger Williams did in the 17th-century. To you as incoming students, and especially in light of the expressions of bigotry and intolerance we all saw on the news at Charlottesville, I underscore our on-going commitment to honor and protect ALL members of our campus community, regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, differing abilities, or economic status. These are not words we say, and then ignore. They are central to who we are as a university. This year, for example, the theme we are using to organize campus conversations is “Talking about Race, Gender, and Power.” Our Provost will provide some details when he speaks in a few minutes, but my point is that rather than avoiding difficult topics, we actively seek to engage in conversations about them, all with an eye towards preparing you for life after graduation.

But what about ideas that focus on hate and rejection, and that promote not understanding but fear? It is very difficult to be a successful student if you are forced to study in fear. Job number one is for us to make you feel as safe as we possibly can, not by protecting you from ideas, but by protecting you from physical violence, sexual assault, discrimination, intolerance, and hate. And I want you to work with me on this. Accept that an attack on any member of the class of 2021 is an attack on the entire class. Stick up for each other. Support each other. Intervene, if you see one of your class members being picked on, or belittled, or in danger of being attacked. Call your RA, or your CORE, or speak to your instructors, or contact me. Do not allow your own core values to be whittled away and diminished because you allowed bad behavior to occur when you could have intervened.

To come full circle, here you are, about to start your college career. Graduation is so far in the future that you can hardly conceive of it. After all, today those four years represent more than 20 percent of your lifetime—but you will be astonished by how quickly those years will pass—so make the most of them.

Have a great first year, class of 2021! Go Hawks!

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Forward to the Past

In the 1985 movie, Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time to change the future of his parents’ lives. In 2017, President Donald Trump seems intent on reversing certain of the actions of past presidential administrations, most notably those of President Barack Obama, to create a future in America that returns us to the past—hence, Forward to the Past.

I identified 13 threats to higher education and its values poised by Mr. Trump’s election in my essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Nov. 15, 2016.  Sadly, virtually all of them have either happened, or are in the offing.

Some of these threats have the potential to affect profoundly certain members of the Roger Williams University community. As the University’s president, it is my responsibility to declare our unwavering support of ALL of our community’s members, and I do so now with respect to three distinct threats.

Title IX

Rumblings out of the Department of Education represent cause for concern. First, the acting head of the department’s Office of Civil Rights, Candice Jackson, said that “90 percent” of campus rape cases involved alcohol and female students with subsequent regrets (a comment for which Ms. Jackson subsequently apologized, describing it as “flippant”). Then, Secretary DeVos scheduled a hearing at which those alleging to be sexual assault victims and those claiming to be wrongly accused of sexual assault each were given equal time to testify (implying that each side was somehow equivalent in numbers and therefore deserving of the same amount of attention).

Second, there are rising concerns that “preponderance of the evidence”—the most commonly used evidence standard on college campuses, and the one enshrined in the famous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter during the Obama administration— may be replaced by “clear and convincing evidence”, a higher standard that would benefit the accused.

Over the years, campus surveys have consistently shown that about 20 percent of female students claim to have been victims of sexual assault during their college years. Sexual assault is a huge issue on college campuses, but one that, until quite recently, was not given the priority and attention it deserves. Campuses are still struggling to create policies and procedures that incorporate due process standards and that fairly and impartially balance the rights and interests of the parties—but to introduce a new evidentiary standard at this point would not only require rewriting campus protocols but would also (and much more importantly) roll back the rights and protections of female students, and return us to an era we in higher education thought had been permanently relegated to the past.

Until and unless the law is changed, RWU will continue to maintain our heightened protection of female students, and we will continue to use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in sexual assault cases.

Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action began in the 1960s as a means of favoring members of underrepresented groups in hiring and college admissions decisions, and in the awarding of government contracts. At the time, the focus was almost exclusively on expanding opportunities for African-Americans.

Over the years, U.S. Courts of Appeal and Supreme Court decisions have severely narrowed the application of affirmative action such that, today, race may not be considered in hiring decisions, although it still is permitted as one of many factors that can properly be used in college admissions.

Recently, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department was seeking lawyers to pursue compliance investigations and federal lawsuits that would target affirmative action programs in college admissions. Interestingly, the report focused on a case involving Asian-Americans at Harvard. The issue was not that their admit numbers were disproportionately low, relative to the overall percentage of Asians in American society (there is actually a much higher percentage of Asian students at Harvard than there are Asians in the broader society). Rather, it was that, on purely meritocratic grounds, less able students of other races were being admitted to Harvard instead of more Asians.

If the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of the Asian students, thereby increasing their numbers at highly competitive colleges and universities across the country, most of the students who would be displaced would be white—and one wonders if white students displaced by Asians would be demanding reinstitution of affirmative action—but this time to favor white students!

The push against affirmative action comes from people who think that no race should be advantaged or disadvantaged relative to another race. Unfortunately, the myth that “all [people] are born equal” is belied by the reality of inequality of wealth and income at birth, to say nothing of continued discrimination based on race or ethnicity. Underrepresented groups are underrepresented in higher education in the first place because disproportionate numbers of them were born poor—and without the means to obtain a college education, they are likely to stay poor.

RWU will continue to consider race among the many factors we use in admissions decisions, but we are particularly focused on finding creative ways of opening our doors more widely to low-income students. Consideration of race or ethnicity may be in peril by the current administration, but at present it is still legal to advantage the poor.

Transgender and the Military

Recently, President Trump announced—first in a series of tweets and subsequently in an executive order to the Department of Defense—that he intends to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military “in any capacity.” That action would reverse a policy instituted by the Obama administration in July, 2015, permitting transgender individuals to serve in the armed forces. President Trump has now reversed his own position, stated at last year’s GOP convention, that he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ individuals.”

The speed with which society changed its position on gay rights to include, for example, same-sex marriage was enough to cause whiplash for individuals who had, in recent years, been pushing (successfully, in several states) for legislation that defined marriage as being restricted to the union of two members of opposite sex. So it may not be surprising that there are people who would very much like to revisit the recent extensions of rights to gays.

But herein lies the danger. A worst case scenario would be for gay rights to be held prisoner to the party in power. History provides a dramatic example: the repeated reversal of religious rights in Tudor England. To obtain a divorce, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic church in the 1530s, in favor of Protestantism. When Henry’s 10-year-old son, Edward VI, became king, Catholicism was banned—but when Edward VI died, at the age of 16, his half-sister Mary assumed the throne, and England became Catholic once again—but only for five years. Upon Mary’s death, Elizabeth I assumed the throne, and, during her reign, Protestantism was reinstituted as England’s official religion. Thus, for over 70 years, the people of England were forced to endure repeated flip flops in the country’s official religion, at times facing charges of heresy for failing to conform to the religion of the day—and a heresy conviction could bring prison, torture, or even a death sentence.

There is certainly no imminent danger of anyone being burned at the stake in 21st-centry America—but there is the very real danger that transgender individuals, having been encouraged by the Obama administration’s willingness to allow them to join the military to “come out” without fear of rejection, now will face discrimination and exclusion once again.

And that outcome strikes me as unfair in the most fundamental way. Our system of jurisprudence is designed to ensure that newly passed laws are applied only prospectively. That is, almost without exception, one cannot be prosecuted for an act that he or she did prior to the passage of the law. But this 180-degree pivot by the Trump administration regarding transgender individuals in the military effectively does just that: having relied on the rules established by the Obama administration, these individuals are now being told that they are no longer able to serve in the military. At present, that means that no additional transgender individuals will be allowed to enlist, but Mr. Trump’s executive order is written in such a way that some transgender people now serving can be discharged, although what isn’t clear is whether that discharge would be honorable or dishonorable.

Being discharged for the “crime” of being transgender would be the equivalent of retroactive prosecution, something our country normally does not allow.

But the harm is not limited to the capacity to serve in the military. Rather, it is the declaration by the government of the United States that transgender individuals have restrictions on certain of the rights enjoyed by all other members of our society—and that declaration will encourage testing the limits to see what additional rights might be taken from them. For example, several states have reintroduced bills to restrict the use of public restrooms to the gender of one’s birth, an action clearly directed at humiliating and discriminating against transgender individuals. And with the Department of Justice’s amicus brief in a civil case involving a gay individual’s discrimination claim, in which the Department of Justice argues that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not apply to sexual orientation, but only to gender, the rollback of rights recently extended to the LGBTQ community is clearly under way.

As would be true of any community of 4,000 or more, Roger Williams University has some number of students who identify as LGBTQ. We also have a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program (ROTC), in which some of our students participate (and receive significant financial assistance with their college costs). Finally, we have declared (as have most other institutions of higher education) that we do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation. How, then, under the current set of circumstances, are we to reconcile the presence of ROTC on the campus with the military’s now being ordered to disallow transgender individuals the right to serve? How do we accept that transgender people will be denied the opportunity available to every other student to receive financial support from the ROTC program?

To all of the members of the Roger Williams University community, let me make my position clear: I am not willing to accept discriminatory practices at our university, and if that means having a campus discussion that could lead to the termination of our ROTC program, so be it.

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A Statement on the Violence in Charlottesville

Under the guise of exercising their rights under the First Amendment, a collection of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, members of the alt-right, and anti-Semitics gathered in Charlottesville on Friday and, outfitted for violence, paraded through the campus of the University of Virginia, brandishing torches and shouting racist and homophobic slurs as they confronted counter-demonstrators. Regrettably but not surprisingly, violence ensued, resulting in three deaths and almost two dozen injuries serious enough to require hospitalization. One white supremacist drove his car into a group of counter-demonstrators, an act that Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, subsequently labeled ‘terrorism.’

I repudiate in the strongest possible terms the hate speech and violence we all witnessed on Friday in Charlottesville, and I reiterate my personal support for ALL members of the Roger Williams University community, representing a variety of races, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, gender identities, religions, and socio-economic backgrounds.

As college and university campuses, including RWU, are preparing to reopen for the coming academic year, campus presidents need to find the right words to communicate to their students, faculty, and staff. How do we balance our inherent commitment to the First Amendment with the reality that there are provocateurs whose goal it is to inflame the passions of members of the campus community and, if at all possible, to incite violence?

I think it is imperative that we separate the exercise of the freedom of speech from the initiation or instigation of violence. Violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment, and neither is incitement to riot.

And it is equally important that university presidents speak to the messaging itself. Whenever challenged, institutions of higher education must go on record to reaffirm the principles that guide us and that form our core values. So let me be clear: Racism, anti-Semitism, and all expressions of intolerance and hate are in direct opposition to RWU’s commitment to equality and inclusion, and have no place on our campus.

Finally, I ask that you join with me in keeping the families and friends of those killed or injured in Charlottesville in our hearts and thoughts.

Donald J. Farish,

President

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Is the Role of Higher Education to be Inclusive or Exclusive?

(Extended version of my essay in The Providence Journal, Aug. 10, 2017)

The United States is on a collision course with disaster. Unless we change our current model of higher education, our country will never have the educated workforce it needs to support and grow its economy.

A 2016 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that, of the 11.6 million new jobs created since the beginning of the Great Recession, 8.3 million (73 percent) required a four-year degree — powerful evidence that we are continuing the transition from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy. Yet a 2017 report from the Lumina Foundation showed that only about 32 percent of American adults have a four-year or graduate degree — a percentage that has changed little in the past decade. In the absence of a sufficient supply of college graduates, how can American business and industry grow? And if American business and industry does not grow, how can the American economy expand?

Don’t assume that the law of supply and demand will take care of this problem. That’s not the appropriate model when it comes to higher education because, overwhelmingly, individual institutions of higher education are focused more on maintaining, and if possible enhancing, their own reputation than they are on producing more graduates. In other words, their obsession with quality (often equated with ranking) eclipses society’s need for quantity — a statement supported by findings from a just-released New America survey of 1,600 American adults (“Varying Degrees”).

This obsession manifests itself in two distinct ways, both of which hurt the American economy. First, almost all four-year colleges and universities seek to admit the very best high school graduates they are able to recruit — with “best” being those with the highest GPAs and test scores, ideally from high schools with reputations for being strong academically. Because the publications that rank colleges and universities use, as one criterion, the percentage of college freshmen at a given college who are in the top 10 percent, or 25 percent, of their high school graduating class, these are the students most in demand. But if the American economy needs 70 percent of its workers with a four-year degree, which are the colleges willing to take students from the bottom half of their high school class? The answer is that these students have few college options and, for the most part, those options are unattractive. Colleges prove their worth and enhance their reputations by being exclusive — not inclusive.

Second, the emphasis on “quality” creates a grading system that ensures some number of college students must fall short of an instructor’s expectations, and falling short in enough courses causes the student to leave without graduating. The four-year graduation rate of less selective colleges is often below 20 percent — just one in five receives the degree on time, and the six-year graduation rate is commonly below 40 percent.

How can this model be changed to meet today’s societal needs? Here are three answers:

  1. Colleges and universities must dramatically increase their graduation rates. It is unconscionable that there are institutions graduating less than 20 percent of the freshmen they admitted four years earlier. These low graduation rates are a national disgrace, and the American public should demand better. As a nation, we literally cannot afford to have half of each entering class of students failing to graduate within six years (“half” being the national average graduation rate across all higher education sectors). What other business or industry could survive if half of its input never made it out the door as marketable product?

Too many institutions of higher education continue to miss the point of their mandate. A college education should not be seen as the civilian equivalent of Army Ranger School, where a majority of would-be Rangers are expected to wash out. Colleges choose who they admit — and by choosing in this way, they establish what might be seen as a quasi-contractual relationship with their students to do everything in their power to help them achieve their educational aims. Instead, too many institutions still act more as judges than as advocates; more as inquisitors than mentors; more as auditors than as teachers. And when students fall short of expectations, the conclusion is that they are poor learners, not that the institution is doing a poor job of teaching.

The response to these criticisms is, of course, predictable. “Gasp! You would have us lower our standards of quality in order to give students outcomes they neither earned nor deserve!” To which I respond: Nonsense! We can provide far more guidance and assistance to students without in any way compromising the expectations we have of what and how they learn. We can enliven in-class and out-of-class instruction to make learning far more interesting. We can move away from counting the hours a student must spend in a classroom to earn three credits, and move towards a direct assessment of the learning outcomes we have for the course. These changes are all within our reach and ability, yet for the most part we ignore them — because there is not yet sufficient pressure and expectation for us to change the standard model.

Suppose the regional accreditors (or the federal government) set an outcome standard of, say, 75 percent graduation in four years of all full-time students (those taking 15 or more credits each semester). Institutions failing to meet that standard would be placed on probation by their accreditors or lose some portion of federal funding. Does anyone seriously believe that we would not immediately see far greater attention being paid to successful student learning? Why should it take the threat of penalties to motivate colleges and universities to do a better job of graduating their students?

  1. Lower income students must be given significantly greater opportunity and support. Institutions of higher learning do a respectable job with students from the top quarter of family income, many of whom have college-educated parents, and almost all of whom are the product of quite good K-12 school systems. About 77 percent of students in this income bracket will ultimately earn a four-year degree.

However, colleges and universities have had much less success with students from the bottom quarter of family income, only 9 percent of whom will earn a four-year degree. If the United States is to see a significant increase in the percentage of adults with a four-year degree, we must work to make students from the bottom quarter of family income more successful.

Creating greater access and better educational outcomes for low-income students is not an insurmountable problem; we’re just choosing not to address it.

Many of these students did not attend high quality K-12 schools; most will be first-generation college students; they may or may not receive moral support from their families; they are generally unfamiliar with how colleges operate, and often feel out-of-place trying to navigate an unfamiliar landscape. By providing them with educational “coaches” — individuals dedicated to helping them in every facet of their lives — a few institutions have seen dramatic increases in retention and graduation. This model should be the norm, not the exception.

And we have to stop punishing people just for being poor. Low-income families tend to live in areas where the K-12 school system is often terrible; where the neighborhood is often dangerous; where families routinely confront food and housing insecurity, and move frequently, often disrupting the children’s education. Then, when the children finish high school, too often their only educational option is a community college, where funding on a per-student basis is far lower than at state colleges and universities, to say nothing of most non-profit private institutions. And we wonder why low-income students are one-eighth as likely to earn a four-year degree as are high-income students, who overwhelmingly attend colleges and universities that are far better funded on a per-student basis?

Why does our society find it in any way acceptable to provide the most financial support for those who need it least (students from the top quarter of family incomes), and to provide the least financial support for those who need it most (students from the bottom quarter of family incomes)?

  1. A new educational model is needed for working adults who require additional skills, or who want to complete their undergraduate degree. There are literally millions of American adults who have more than a high school diploma, but less than a four-year degree. Virtually all of them would be economically better off with a four-year degree, and surveys find that about 75 percent of them would very much like to have a four-year degree. But the opportunity to do so is just not available.

The traditional model for a college degree requires four years of full-time study, typically in residence. This model is all but useless for a working adult who cannot give up employment to attend college, and whose time is limited by job and family responsibilities. Not-for-profit higher education has been painfully slow to respond to this need, a fact that provided the opportunity for for-profit institutions to enter the market and develop what can most charitably be described as a “mixed” record.

America’s need for a far better-educated workforce cannot be met simply by enrolling more high school graduates. We must also develop new methodologies to serve working adults, who neither need nor want a “seat time” education (that is, one based on the input of how many hours a person spends in a lecture hall to earn a college credit). Rather, they need to earn credits based on the output of academic competencies achieved. This model is moving with glacial slowness in the world of traditional higher education; change has to happen far more quickly, in order that the educational needs of millions of adult Americans can be met, and in order that we can create the larger pool of college-educated workers that our economy so desperately needs.

Accomplishing even one of these three changes will be challenging. Achieving all three may seem impossible. Yet while there is a real sense of urgency on the part of both the American public and the American economy, it is not necessary that all of higher education responds overnight. It is enough that some institutions, public or private, decide that there are certain actions that they can take that will address these three changes. And they can do so while still protecting their ranking:

  • Programs for adults can be developed in such a way that they will not interfere with the current college ranking system, which is based on measures relating only to first-time, full-time freshmen.
  • Working to increase graduation rates will help an institution’s ranking, because graduation rate is an important criterion in the ranking process.
  • Creating access for low-income students, on the other hand, may affect an institution’s ranking (because these students generally score lower on standardized tests and on high school GPA), but these institutions will have to ask themselves whether they exist solely for the purpose of establishing a high ranking for themselves, or whether their more fundamental purpose is to meet the needs American society has of them.

As even a few institutions respond to one or more of these needs, they will demonstrate that so much of what we think of as being fundamental and ingrained in higher education is, in fact, a product of the model we are using — and that model can be changed. Indeed, it must be changed, if America’s economic strength is not to be undermined in the coming decades by an educationally ill-prepared workforce. Higher education needs to hold itself accountable in ensuring that this gloomy forecast does not actually occur. And the first step in being accountable is to adopt inclusivity — not exclusivity — as higher education’s watchword.

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A Recommendation to Jeff Bezos to Award Transformative Philanthropic Gifts to Colleges

(My essay in Inside Higher Ed, July 2017)

On June 15, The New York Times published an interview with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in which he was asked about his philanthropic interests, now that his net worth exceeds an estimated $80 billion. His philanthropic giving to date has been modest by the standards of many other multibillionaires.

Bezos responded, “If you have any ideas, just reply to this tweet …”

Within a day, Bezos had received more than 18,000 replies. No doubt the flood of tweets will continue unabated for days to come. Yet it’s very difficult to compress a good idea into the 140-character limit of a tweet.

With that in mind, I offer my own suggestion.

Dear Mr. Bezos,

You indicated to The New York Times that, when it comes to philanthropy, you are interested in making investments that are “at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.” I have a suggestion that I think would do just that. But first, let me set the table for you.

In 1992, Henry M. Rowan Jr., an industrialist living in southern New Jersey, did something literally unprecedented: he gave $100 million, virtually all of which was unrestricted, to a local public institution, Glassboro State College. He had no particular history with that institution, but it was the only four-year college near his business offices. It was, at the time, the largest gift ever given to a public institution — and Glassboro State College then had an endowment of less than $1 million. In recognition of this gift (and not, as some people have speculated, because it was a condition of the gift), Glassboro State College changed its name to Rowan University.

Rowan was rolling the dice with an enormous bet. He was betting that a gift of this size could be transformational for Glassboro State. He was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and that institution was soliciting a major gift from him. But he decided that MIT was already so rich that even $100 million would do little to effect a transformation there, and he wanted his gift to have an impact.

Rowan’s gift was paid in installments over 10 years, and I had the good fortune to be hired as president of Rowan University in 1998 to move the university “to the next level” — a concept that was not specifically defined but was assumed to mean making the university better, stronger and more recognized.

The gift was intended to be an endowment, with some of the investment earnings available for spending every year. But the sheer size of the gift allowed us to leverage it in the market for purposes of borrowing funds to improve the campus. We built engineering, science and education buildings. We renovated many of the existing buildings and improved landscaping. We constructed a town house complex to increase student housing. We acquired 600 acres of land near the campus for future expansion and the construction of a technology park.

Over a 10-year period, working with the town of Glassboro, we constructed campus-related buildings (residence halls, a hotel, a bookstore and a parking garage) on city-owned land adjacent to the campus, and to benefit the town, we orchestrated a public-private partnership to ensure the new buildings would be taxable at normal rates. Most of them included shops and restaurants on the ground floors, as a way of attracting the local populace to the area.

The campus grew in size and reputation, and shortly before I left in 2011, we built the first new medical school in New Jersey in 40 years. The work continues under my successor, with an intention of growing the student body from 8,000 in 1998 to 25,000 by 2025. (It’s more than 17,000 today.)

Rowan died two years ago, but he lived long enough to see his legacy in full bloom. His gift was every bit as transformational as he had hoped. He was a tough businessman, but when he spoke of the university that bore his name, his eyes filled with tears, and on more than one occasion he told me, “That was the best money I ever spent.”

Some cynics speculated at the outset that the university would never receive another gift, since any gift would pale in comparison to Rowan’s gift. To the contrary, philanthropists reasoned that a university that could attract a gift of $100 million must certainly be worth their much smaller investments, and over the subsequent decade, we received more than a dozen gifts of $1 million or more, with one gift of $10 million. Success breeds success — and large philanthropic investments attract other philanthropic investments.

The Rowan story is gradually becoming better known. For instance, it was featured in a Malcolm Gladwell podcast last year as an example of how philanthropists should be investing in colleges where their gifts will have meaning and impact, as opposed merely to swelling the bank vaults of well-known institutions that are already fabulously wealthy.

So, Mr. Bezos, here is my suggestion for a philanthropic investment.

  • Transform 10 colleges or universities each year for 10 years by awarding them an unrestricted endowment gift of $100 million. That’s $1 billion annually for 10 years.
  • Any public or private four-year, nonprofit institution with an endowment of less than $100 million would be eligible to apply.
  • An anonymous panel of experts whom you select would review the applications each year and select the 10 that promise to be the most transformational, affect the largest number of students and have the greatest societal impact. The specific criteria for evaluation would be yours to state, and those criteria may well change over the 10-year history of the plan.
  • As a condition of the gift, each recipient institution would be obliged to prepare an annual report, for 10 years, documenting their success (or failure) in achieving the goals they stated in their initial proposal. Those reports would be public, so that everyone could see the ways in which the colleges and universities were being transformed by virtue of winning a Bezos grant.

Mr. Bezos, this proposal, if funded, will positively impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of students every year — forever. But more important, if something like this does not happen, our country will continue to see a major shortfall of college graduates relative to our economic needs, and that shortfall will occur largely among would-be first-generation students, many of whom are members of ethnic and racial minorities.

There are many worthy philanthropic investments that you might make. But the economic future of our country depends on doubling the percentage of American adults with a four-year degree. A study last year by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce showed than 73 percent of all jobs created since the Great Recession required at least a baccalaureate, and only 36 percent of adult Americans currently have that level of education. The current system of higher education will never get us to where we need to be, but philanthropists such as you can show us the way.

Respectfully,

Donald J. Farish, president
Roger Williams University