In the first two parts of this series, I addressed some of the ideas regarding higher education that are being promoted by various candidates for president of the United States. In Part 1, I examined the wisdom and folly of eliminating tuition at public colleges and universities. In Part 2, I raised the inconvenient question of what problem the solution of free tuition is intended to solve – and what unintended consequences might result from such a policy. Now, in Part 3, I want to consider yet another factor that explains why there is such divergence of opinions regarding higher education on the part of our presidential candidates.

“Is the Purpose of College to Get a Good Job or to Have a Great Life?”

I don’t mean that question facetiously. Many people would ask why one should have to choose between these two highly desirable outcomes – or they would say that having a great life must, of necessity, also mean having a good job.

But although the presidential candidates haven’t spent time debating the merits of good job versus great life, it is clear that some of the candidates are focusing heavily on the role that higher education plays in creating graduates who can qualify for well-paying jobs, thereby creating a stronger national economy.

However well meaning this focus may be, it fundamentally redefines the historic purpose of higher education, the roots of which are in the liberal arts. To be sure, the Morrill Act (1862) created colleges of agriculture and engineering. Moreover, the 20^th century saw an explosion in the number of academic majors directly linked to specific professions and areas of employment. The great majority of today’s college graduates promptly enter the job market. Isn’t it reasonable, therefore, to think that a college education should be focused primarily – even exclusively – on preparing today’s students to be successful in their chosen area of employment?

And yet almost all nonprofit public and private colleges and universities still reserve a significant fraction of the credits required to graduate for courses in the liberal arts and sciences – and even today, students majoring in the liberal arts typically form the largest single block of students on campus. There are private colleges that only offer majors in the liberal arts.

Are they wrong? Some of our presidential candidates clearly think so. One referred to liberal arts colleges as “indoctrination camps” (“Punch Lines Versus Polish on Iowa Trail,” The New York Times, Jan. 1, 2016). The same candidate had previously advocated for training more welders, rather than creating more philosophers (“Sorry, Marco Rubio. Philosophy Majors Actually Make Way More Than Welders,” The Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2015). Yet in fairness, it is important to note that this perspective is not restricted to one political party. President Obama once famously said:

“But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” (Inside Higher Ed, Jan. 31, 2014).

So if the public is subsidizing higher education, does it have the right to direct its support preferentially to the creation of skilled workers needed by American business and industry, and ignore the interests of students who wish to study some esoteric subject? And if we adopt the policy of free tuition at public universities, does that give the public even more right to define and describe the curriculum at those universities?

It is interesting to turn the clock back a century, and to consider the perspective of the only American president who had previously served as a university president: Woodrow Wilson. At a time when less than five percent of adult Americans had a college degree, and when elitism and racial bigotry reigned, Wilson said the following:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

In other words, he was advocating for a small group of liberally educated leaders and thinkers, and a much larger group of laborers and people in the trades – a world that would consist of a few bosses (almost all of whom would be white males), and a great many workers.

Is this the world to which we want to return? Didn’t we shed the elitist image of higher education with the passage of the G.I. Bill after WW-II – a bill that demonstrated, once and for all, the ability of working class people to obtain a college degree, if just given the chance?

There is a real danger that we could see education at public colleges and universities transformed into training programs for specific jobs in specific industries: workers prepared for the present, but not for a future where entire industries disappear within the lifetime of a given worker. What, then, would those displaced workers do with skills that American industry no longer needs? In short, has the purpose of higher education now been reduced to credentialing for a specific purpose, rather than being focused on breadth and depth of knowledge, and the creation of skills that can be transported when society’s needs change? Do we, as a country, care only that young people obtain jobs, and not at all that they have a life where they can participate meaningfully as leaders in their communities, and as people who appreciate the scope of human understanding?

Let’s consider a second quote from Woodrow Wilson, speaking to his students at Princeton:

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

Wilson spoke these words more than a century ago. To be sure, he was speaking to the privileged elite – the handful of young men (Princeton did not accept women students until 1969) who had the opportunity to receive a college education. But surely we do not want to return to an America where the sons and daughters of the One Percent receive a full and complete education at a pricey private college, while the sons and daughters of the 99 Percent can aspire only to be trained for a particular job or trade at a public institution. And this is the hidden danger behind free tuition at public colleges and universities – that over time the politicians who will control the purse strings will reshape the curriculum at these institutions to favor “practical” education at the expense of the opportunity students now have to think and learn and explore the collected wisdom of humankind – and in the process to become well-rounded individuals who will still secure good jobs but who will also have great lives.

Free tuition at public universities? It sounds too good to be true – and it is. If America wants to create greater opportunities for more young people to have the chance to pursue their dreams to the best of their abilities, and without regard to the circumstances of their birth, improving K-12 education and expanding the Pell Grant program would be far more effective, and no more expensive, than making public higher education tuition-free.

Ernest L. Boyer

The late Ernest Boyer was a hugely influential voice in higher education policy during the latter part of the 20th century. He was the chancellor of the giant State University of New York (SUNY) system, before becoming the U.S. commissioner of education (a position that later was changed to “secretary”); he ended his career as the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer was very comfortable taking on the higher education establishment and calling out its weaknesses as he perceived them. For example, he believed that American higher education began to lose its way after WW-II, when the National Science Foundation was established (1950) and the National Institutes of Health were greatly expanded, making federal research dollars available, in increasingly larger amounts, to campus-based researchers. Boyer was visibly concerned that the growing emphasis on university-based research was coming at the expense of the historic emphasis on high-quality undergraduate education.

In 1994, Boyer published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Creating the New American College.” He opened the article with these words:

“How can American higher education successfully contribute to national renewal? Is it possible for the work of the academy to relate more effectively to our most pressing social, economic, and civic problems?”

Later in his article Boyer said the following:

“I’m concerned that in recent years, higher education’s historic commitment to service seems to have diminished. I’m troubled that many now view the campus as a place where professors get tenured and students get credentialed… And what I find most disturbing is the growing feeling in this country that higher education is a private benefit, not a public good” [emphasis in the original].

Boyer makes it abundantly clear that the designation of research (“publish or perish”) as the primary mission of today’s universities is very much a modern phenomenon, and one that takes the American university far away from its origins. He points out that, while in the colonial era the first colleges were founded by various religious denominations for the purpose of training clergymen and educating pious gentlemen (there were no women’s colleges at that time), purely secular institutions became the norm after Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1740 – and their purpose was broader and more inclusive than the mission of the original church-related colleges.

Franklin stated the purpose (or mission) of the University of Pennsylvania “as consisting in an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends, and Family” [spelling, capitalization and italics in the original].

“Service to society” as a mission was embraced by the public universities as they were established in the closing years of the 18th century and in the first few decades of the 19th century – and service was also very clearly the purpose behind the founding of the land-grant universities (beginning in 1862, following passage of the Morrill Act).

Even when graduate education and research began at major universities in the latter part of the 19th century, service to society remained their primary mission. Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of The Johns Hopkins University (1876), the first university in America to be established using the German research university model, had this to say in his inaugural address:

“[Universities should] make for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospitals, less fraud in business, less folly in politics.”

The presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Stanford offered similar comments at various times over the following three decades. My point is: Service to society was the stated purpose of even the most prestigious American universities well into the 20th century – and in his paper, Boyer points out that this theme of service was, in large part, the basis for the G.I. Bill and the Peace Corps, mid-20th century initiatives.

Boyer challenged the higher education community to restore service to society as its primary value, when he said:

“Violence, unemployment, poverty, poor housing, and pollution often occur at the very doorsteps of some of our most distinguished colleges and universities. How can the nation’s campuses stay disengaged?”

He called on the faculty:

To “apply knowledge to real-life problems [and] use that experience to revise their theories.”

He said:

That “institutions must become less imitative and more creative.”

He suggested:

That “the goal of such colleges would be to bring knowledge into intimate relationships with the small, daily problems of real people and real neighborhoods.”

Boyer’s paper, coming as it did from one of the great leaders in higher education, was widely praised and celebrated – but it was ultimately all but ignored. Sadly, very little has changed in higher education in the 21 years since the paper’s publication. And the irony is that Boyer’s call for action, for the reinstitution of service to society as the primary mission of higher education institutions, is at least as relevant today as it was in Boyer’s day.

Roger Williams University responded to Boyer’s call by engaging in a campus-wide, yearlong review of its core values, core purpose and overarching university goal. Our new core purpose, or mission, is just eight words long: To strengthen society through engaged teaching and learning. Coincidentally, our new overarching university goal is also just eight words: To build the university the world needs now.

Taken together, it is our stated purpose to give each one of our students the opportunity for at least one meaningful experiential education project – often a semester-long project-based learning experience. This approach will ensure that students learn how to apply theoretical knowledge learned in the classroom to practical, community-based (and community-identified) problems.

Project-based learning will ensure that, in addition to acquiring experience in their discipline, students will obtain experience in working with students from different disciplines; in perfecting their negotiation and collaboration skills; in working with clients; in meeting deadlines; in oral and written communication; in analysis and synthesis – the very skills that employers say are too often missing in today’s college graduates.

But the value of this approach is not limited to the student. The organization that identified the project on which the students are working also benefits, by receiving the value that a team of intelligent, eager and competent students (under the guidance of one or more professors) brings to the problem at hand. In one Roger Williams University project, now completed, the work of the student team allowed the community to receive a federal grant of more than $800,000, and made the students’ plan a reality.

Students on these projects are clearly moved and motivated by the gratitude they receive from the organizations with which they work – and many of our students commit to doing more community-based work once they graduate. To the extent they do, they will continue to strengthen society throughout their lives.

Roger Williams University thinks of itself as epitomizing The New American College. We hope that Ernie Boyer would have approved.