For the past 18 months, I have made numerous posts wherein I have described my reactions to seeing the gradual disintegration of both the public and private models of higher education, in a manner akin to watching a slow-motion train wreck.

Well, the rate of disintegration is increasing. The slow-motion train wreck is speeding up. Consider five categories of evidence from the news media in recent weeks:

(1) The gap between the wealthy privates and everyone else is becoming a chasm.

My claim in my blog post of Oct. 15, 2013, that, in some respects, the wealthy colleges and universities seem more like investment companies that do a little teaching on the side now seems more prophetic than ever. Two recent articles make the case.

In “How American Universities Turned into Corporations,” Time, May 22, 2014, documentary film director Andrew Rossi points out that the American model of higher education, from the time of the founding of Harvard in 1636, has depended on “constant improvement and expansion” – and that the resulting educational arms race is no longer sustainable, except for the most affluent of institutions. “As universities succumb to this cost disease, they begin to resemble businesses more than nonprofit schools charged with a public mission. The future of higher learning and, more broadly our society hangs in the balance.”

The second article, “Princeton’s Top Money Managers get 46% Pay Raise in 2013,” Bloomberg, May 20, 2014, underscores both the widening chasm between the wealthy privates and the rest of higher education, and the notion that these institutions have effectively become businesses. The top investment official at Princeton received total compensation of $3.9 million in 2013. (Princeton’s president, by comparison, earned just $979,636.) The top investment official at Harvard was paid $7.9 million, while Harvard’s president earned a “mere” $1.04 million. Whether or not one believes that any college president is worth $1 million, the fact that the chief investment officer is earning between four and seven times as much as the president provides telling testimony regarding how the institutions value the services of the institution’s leader, as compared to those overseeing investment returns. And all this time you thought the most important person on a college campus was the football coach!

(2) Many public institutions continue a downward slide.

Shortfalls in state budgets, often accompanied by enrollment declines, have put many public institutions in significant jeopardy.

The magnitude of the problems of public institutions varies enormously from state to state, but some state colleges and universities are seeing a level of difficulty beyond anything they have experienced in decades – if ever.

The University of Maine system recently approved a budget that not only required spending more than 75 percent of its emergency reserves, but also necessitated eliminating more than 150 positions – and the budget is still not entirely balanced. (The Maine system has been steadily losing enrollment for seven years.) (Bangor Daily News, May 19, 2014)

Although Gov. Jerry Brown of California is proposing an increase in state appropriations for the public universities, the state is currently spending between 35 and 40 percent less per student in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did 10 years ago – and Gov. Brown was quoted as saying “They’re going to have to have a serious conversation with the professors, the staff, of how you lower the cost structure.” (San Jose Mercury News, May 13, 2014)

Vermont’s funding of public institutions amounts to just $2,655 per full-time equivalent student, making the colleges and universities highly susceptible to enrollment declines – and at least two of the colleges have seen drops of five to 10 percent in the past four years. The result has been to cut staff. (Vermont Public Radio, May 14, 2014)

North Carolina has cut per-student funding by more than 20 percent since 2008, resulting in a 35 percent increase in tuition – yet over that same time period the flagship UNC-Chapel Hill campus has had to eliminate almost 500 positions and 16,000 course seats, and has increased class sizes. This year, Gov. Pat McCrory has proposed another $49 million cut for higher education. (Charlotte Observer, May 19, 2014)

(3) Many private institutions have again missed their enrollment targets.

The data are just starting to arrive, but institutions in many regions of the country are facing serious budgetary problems due to enrollment shortfalls.

In the Philadelphia area, many of the private colleges and universities came up short. Widener University, for example, is down almost 10 percent. Almost two dozen others are still accepting students, and many are attempting to lure students who have committed to other institutions by offering very generous aid packages. (One student with a high school GPA of less than 2.5, and a 940 on the SAT, was offered up to an 80 percent discount at several schools – a measure of the desperation felt by some institutions to increase their enrollment.) (Inside Higher Ed, May 21, 2014)

Enrollment at Iowa’s 33 private colleges is collectively down by four percent over the past four years, but a quarter of the schools face declines in excess of nine percent. (The Gazette, May 12, 2014)

(4) The reluctance to consider changes in the model is as strong as ever.

Colleges and universities continue to endorse the “high-cost/high-aid” model, despite overwhelming evidence that the model is no longer effective – and faculty on many campuses are unwilling to consider pedagogical changes.

Despite continued warnings from pundits about the coming impact of online education (“What Lies Ahead for Digital Education,” Forbes, May 7, 2014; “Why MOOCs Are More Like Health Clubs Than Hospitals,” Forbes, May 15, 2014), the great majority of universities continue to resist changing their model (“Rutgers Graduate Faculty Rejects Online Degree Compromise,” Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2014). It is that attitude that leads to predictions that up to half the colleges in the country will close in the next 15 years, despite the broad acknowledgement that, as a country, we need to educate a larger fraction of our populace at the college level.

(5) Student debt is only going to get worse.

In the face of stagnant family incomes, rising college costs, and increased interest rates on federal student loans, more graduates will be leaving college with even larger debt loads.

A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that the four in 10 households led by people who were under the age of 40 and who had student loans averaged $137,010 in total debt, whereas similar households with no student loans averaged just $73,250 in total debt. (abqjournal, May 15, 2014)

Interest rates on federal student loans for undergraduates are scheduled to jump from 3.86 percent to 4.66 percent, starting July 1, 2014 – a 21 percent rate increase. Graduate loans will increase from 5.41 percent to 6.21 percent – a 15 percent rate increase. Direct PLUS loans will increase from 6.41 percent to 7.21 percent – a 13 percent increase. (Inside Higher Ed, May 8, 2014) Higher interest rates will require higher monthly payments on a loan of the same amount, and will increase the already astronomically high level of overall student debt, even if students do not increase the amount they actually borrow – something they almost surely will do, should colleges continue to increase their tuition.

The consequence to the economy of even the current level of student debt was the subject of a recent article in The New York Times (May 14, 2014). Student debt has grown from $300 billion to $1.1 trillion in just the last decade. In the same time period, the percentage of 27- to 30-year-olds with mortgages has dropped from 30 percent to 22 percent – and much of that drop has been among people with student debt. A similar pattern has occurred with auto loans. The inevitable conclusion? Student loan debt is holding back the economy.

Each of these issues is concerning. Collectively, they are truly frightening. The slow-motion train wreck is picking up speed – and there’s very little evidence that the resulting catastrophe to our young people and to our national economy can be averted.

At the local level, however, those with the will to do so can make a difference – and Roger Williams University intends to try.

Two weeks ago, I presented a list of 10 expectations, predictions and suggestions relating to higher education that have received extensive media coverage in recent months. A week ago, in Part 2 of this topic, I selected three related topics from that list, and offered an opinion about what higher education can do to address them, and what is beyond our capabilities.

This week, I’d like to select another three items from my original list of 10 for more detailed analysis and comment. These include items number 3, 4 and 6. They are, respectively:

• Higher education is hidebound;
• Higher education is going broke; and
• Large numbers of colleges will go out of business – unless…

Well, is higher education hidebound? Are we hopelessly mired in the past, unwilling to examine, let alone adopt, new ways of thinking about teaching and learning?

As with many things, the answer to these questions is somewhere in the fuzzy middle. On the one hand, over the past 20 years, colleges and universities have accepted the need to find new ways of validating student learning beyond merely certifying that the students have received passing grades in a series of individual courses. Defining and verifying “learning outcomes” has slowly but steadily become standard operating procedure on most campuses (84 percent of colleges now have common learning goals for their students, up 10 percent over the past four years, according to survey results published in Inside Higher Ed on January 21). This is a very significant (and positive) change.

Moreover, during those same two decades, higher education has slowly embraced technology. “Blended courses” (courses with both face-to-face and online components) have become commonplace, and whole programs of study are now available entirely online.

But politicians are seeking change at a far more aggressive rate (“U.S. Seeks Experiments on New Models of Higher Ed,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 5, 2013; “White House Science Council Recommends U.S., Accreditors Support MOOCs,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 19, 2013). Almost overnight, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) became the darlings of the “change everything” movement. They were inexpensive, dynamic, clearly the wave of the future – except they really don’t work very well for traditional-age students. Education leaders in California have backed away from them very explicitly, after a failed experiment at San Jose State University (“California University Leaders Now Skeptical on Online Solutions,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 16, 2013).

The “I-told-you-so” chorus has been in full voice ever since.

On the other hand, the notion of competency-based education, wherein college credit would be granted when a student demonstrates that she has mastered a defined set of skills and capabilities, is gaining traction as a logical outgrowth of the development of learning outcomes. Why should college credit be based on seat time, which is at best a surrogate measure of learning, when it could be based on a demonstration of actual learning?

This idea is a game-changer. To be sure, it would seem to pose a threat to those who are true believers in the inherent value of the traditional lecture. In the competency-based model, faculty would oversee the learning process, and would authenticate that learning had occurred, but would no longer be the primary source of information for the students.

However, whether or not everyone in the academy accepts it, competency-based education is almost surely coming (“Two Democrats Plan Legislation to Promote Competency-Based Ed and Rate Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, Nov. 22, 2013; “Lumina-Funded Group Seeks to Lead Conversation on Competency-Based Education,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 12, 2013).

And in my view, this is a good thing – especially for adult learners, many of whom could immediately demonstrate a variety of learning competencies, be given college credit as a consequence, and find that receiving a degree would require significantly less time than would be true under the traditional seat-time model.

There’s another benefit as well. There is a huge potential market for higher education in furthering the education of working adults. In my state of Rhode Island, there are an estimated 80,000 adults (that’s eight percent of the entire population of the state) with some college credits, but less than a baccalaureate. Many of these people would love to have the letters “B.A.” or “B.S.” after their name – but how can they find the time (not to say the money) to go back to college? Competency-based education would be ideal for many of them – and it would open up an almost entirely new market for colleges and universities at a time when the traditional market of high school graduates is shrinking.

Many colleges are finding balancing their budgets to be a growing challenge (“Ivy League Budget Deficits Prompt Harvard, Yale to Seek Cuts,” Bloomberg, Dec. 12, 2013; “Survey Suggests Colleges Aren’t Ready for New Higher-Education Landscape,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 6, 2013). A new market might be just the ticket to a balanced operating budget – and there’s nothing like a budget shortfall to engender a willingness to experiment with new educational models.

But are colleges and universities really in danger of closing if they fail to adopt a new business model? Many people inside and outside of higher education think so. One commentator likens traditional bricks-and-mortar higher education to Blockbuster, Tower Records, Circuit City and Borders – retailers that are either closed or fading rapidly (“Colleges Can Still Save Themselves. Here’s How,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 6, 2013).

Another recent article provides a series of examples of colleges that are in serious financial trouble, primarily because of declining enrollments (“Private Colleges Remain Under the Weather,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 9, 2013). The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 11, 2013) quotes a senior official at a private university as saying, “I think it’s fair to say 30 percent of these private schools won’t exist in a decade.” The same article noted that Moody’s Investors Service found that the number of private colleges and universities at which revenue was not keeping pace with inflation had tripled, to 35 percent, in just three years.

So where are we? Will higher education as we know it in this country undergo very significant change?

I think either that we change – by working to become more affordable with more clearly defined learning outcomes; by integrating technology more completely into our teaching and learning process; by opening up new markets through the use of competency-based education – or a significant number of colleges and universities, many with long and distinguished histories, will not be with us five years from now. Economic forces caused dozens of colleges to close in the years before the Civil War, and again at the beginning of the 20^th century. It can happen once more, if we are overly resistant to change.

Next week: Part 4.