With a badly needed four-day break for Thanksgiving, I was finally able to catch my breath long enough to start chipping away at the book pile on the living room table. (Not to be confused with the book pile next to the nightstand, or the one below the table, or the one on the coffee table, or …) Sustainable. Resilient. Free., by my fellow Inside Higher Ed blogger John Warner, made the cut.
SRF is in one of my favorite genres: it’s short, specific and just this side of polemical. It’s whatever the nonfiction equivalent of a novella is. It’s a series of smaller arguments packed inside one big argument. And the big argument is well worth the time and cost of this small book.
Warner argues that we should think of public higher education as infrastructure, rather than as a consumer good. If we did that, many of the pathologies afflicting the sector would be much more manageable.
I like the metaphor a lot.
Infrastructure benefits even the people who don’t use it. The interstate highway system makes it possible to deliver goods to my local supermarket from parts near and far, even using roads I’ve never driven. Public schools that my kids don’t attend prepare other people to be engineers who design products I use, doctors who keep me and my family healthy, and entrepreneurs who come up with a series of next big things.
That’s not to say that all infrastructure is perfect, or even good. Projects can become boondoggles, and corruption has been known to occur. New roads meant to clear up traffic can induce new demand that actually winds up making traffic worse. Granting both of those, though, making every road a toll road would wreak havoc on the larger economy and society.
We’ve made higher education a toll road to good jobs, and the toll goes up every year.
Contrary to the popular narrative, though, that’s not primarily because of lazy rivers or other forms of ostentatious display. (Warner is particularly good on this.) It’s largely because of public disinvestment in higher education. Since the Reagan administration, states have shifted the funding burden from their own operating budgets to tuition and fees. And although Warner sacrifices this point to brevity, the larger political economy has shifted away from jobs that pay a middle-class salary without a college degree. The combined effect has been to create what Warner calls a “slippage problem” (183), in which a series of individually rational small choices add up over time to terrible and irrational outcomes at the macro level. Prospective students feel blackmailed into paying what it takes to get degrees, for fear of being locked out of jobs with decent salaries. (Tressie McMillan Cottom refers to this as “negative social insurance” -- rather than buying their way into good jobs, they’re trying to buy their way out of the abyss.) Meanwhile, colleges increase tuition while practicing internal austerity -- witness adjunctification -- to try to manage the squeeze from increasing costs with decreasing real subsidies. Even worse, given a competitive environment for enrollment, administrators have to put on a public happy face while managing austerity internally.
The contradiction between a public-serving mission and the need to imitate for-profit businesses (in drawing revenue from students like customers) came to a head in the pandemic. We’ve seen colleges and universities take undue risks with students’ and employees’ health for fear of having to shut down if their enrollments drop. What makes that dilemma difficult is that the downside risk, for many colleges, is real. If a college closes, even tenure won’t save jobs.
In the context of his larger advocacy for a shift from “operations-driven” to “mission-driven” decisions, Warner makes a series of smaller arguments with varying degrees of success. For instance, the alternative to tenure that he sketches briefly strikes me as a quagmire of lawsuits waiting to happen, and it still doesn’t address actual variability in enrollment. Protecting some folks from risk doesn’t make risk go away; it simply moves it elsewhere. As long as budgets are enrollment-driven, enrollment declines will lead to cuts. In other words, before discussing new forms of job security, we need to specify a new source of budget security. Doing it backward would just accelerate the decline.
But that’s peripheral to his larger point. Bad policy decisions made 40 years ago have led, bit by inevitable bit, to the crisis we’re in now. If we want public higher education to survive in a meaningful way, we have to reconceive it as more than just transactional job training. It’s education. It relies on a gift economy more than a transactional one. Like infrastructure, it underlies and supports all manner of private goods, though it, itself, is not one.
Quibbles aside, Warner’s brief volume gets the big questions right, and does it in an accessible, clear and pointed way. It deserves much more attention than it will probably get. A sustainable, resilient and free system of public higher education would benefit everybody, not only those who attend, and we once understood that. Warner’s book helps us understand it again.
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