Tag Archives: higher education

Failing grades

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Trump is setting us back with his war on education

Source: India Today

Over the last 14 years, folks in China have welcomed me to teach fairly often. Whether they were graduate students at Tsinghua University or undergraduates at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, the students I was privileged to teach were smart and hardworking. Some even asked for extra homework, a request I never got at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, even from some outstanding students there.

That’s why a new report from Bloomberg News is alarming. Headlined “Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore,” the piece bemoans the erosion of working-class men’s status and prospects in the U.S. In that decline, a turn away from schooling is key.

“As U.S. men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too,” the piece reports. “Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years, they’re less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18 percent more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.”

The suggestion, of course, is that a college education can boost earning power, aid in social mobility and status, and lead to better health and wellbeing. All those things are backed up by data. A wealth of it shows that more schooling drives such benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, higher education also increases one’s ability to think critically and, in theory, spawns smarter political decision-making. The disproportionate support Donald J. Trump has enjoyed among the less schooled, the so-called diploma divide, suggests as much. Dumb voters vote dumbly, it seems.

But perpetuating ignorance may be why so many on the right decry higher education and why President Trump is leading a war on it. He just launched his newest volley in an executive order attempting to reshape the college accrediting process.

The order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act,” a White House official told CNN.

As the news outlet reported, the order also “directs the attorney general and the secretary of education to investigate and terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools,” the official said.

Trump’s order would shake up the arcane but pivotal world of college accreditation, a move Trump has called his “secret weapon” in his bid to remake higher education, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The order aims to use the accrediting system to combat what Trump views as discriminatory practices and “ideological overreach” on college campuses, the Journal reported. It would put a greater focus on intellectual diversity among faculty — presumably putting more conservative ideologues in the teacher’s lounge — and on student success. It also would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval.

Source: Digital Marketing Institute

As the newspaper reported, accreditors set standards that must be met to access federal financial aid. The federal government gave $120.8 billion in loans, grants and work-study funds to more than 9.9 million students in the year ended last September. To earn an accreditor’s seal of approval, higher-education institutions must prove they meet standards covering everything from their mission and admissions policies to the quality of their faculty and programming.

“Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities,” Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, told the paper. “If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you’re done.”

The effort mirrors Trump’s slash and burn approach to education. As the Journal reported, proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, currently being fought over in court, have driven universities to freeze hiring, rescind graduate student offers and pause research. The White House has targeted several Ivy League schools, including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Brown, with federal grant cuts or freezes, citing antisemitism concerns.

Trump, of course, has particularly attacked efforts to promote diversity on campus, echoing the themes of far-right extremists. Such rightists amplify a national undercurrent of dissatisfaction with schooling.

“Similar messaging has come from activists such as Charlie Kirk, who traveled to more than two dozen colleges before the 2024 election on what he called the ‘You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,’ to try to get more members of Generation Z to cast a vote for Trump,” the Bloomberg piece notes. “Almost one-third of U.S. adults said they have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in June 2024—before Trump’s latest tirades against academia. In 2020, 41 percent of young men aged 18-29 voted for Trump; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2024 election.”

Should this worry us all? Unquestionably.

Trump’s demagogic promises of restoring a 1950s culture in which a high school degree and a well-paying assembly line job guarantee the American Dream seem as fictional as his vows to cut grocery prices and scale back inflation. The sepia-toned nostalgia he trades in is nonsense in the 21st century.

That brings me back to China. In the current great power competition, the country has some key edges over the United States. Start with the population disparity: 1.4 billion compared with 342 million. Then move onto governmental systems, where one prizes stability and competence and the other lately has been erratic and unpredictable. But most of all, consider education, where China graduates nearly 4 million college students year, nearly double the U.S. tally.

For educators, of course, the last category is the most unsettling, especially since so many Chinese are drawn to science and technology. As MSNBC reported, China graduates almost twice as many STEM-oriented Ph.D.s than the U.S., an estimated 77,000 versus 40,000, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Exclude international students from that count and China outpaces the U.S. 3 to 1.

The Chinese students I taught were representative. They worked like demons and were respectful of knowledge and education, realizing that school was their ticket upward in society. And, simply put, if these edges continue, the Chinese are going to beat the pants off us.

Meanwhile, our president would take us on sorry steps backwards. Yes, globalization driven by trade liberalization from the Reagan years onward has hollowed out American manufacturing, driving lower-skilled work overseas. And, yes, this has eroded the American Dream for many, at least for those who thought assembly-line jobs were the smartest route upward.

TikTok mockery, source: Newsweek

But is the answer really a return to such low-skilled work, the sort that Chinese meme-makers are satirizing? Is the answer a remaking of education to suit the political whims of some fantasists who momentarily are in power? Is the answer not, instead, a ramping up in university education, a stepping up that would better equip the U.S. to compete globally?

The multiple tragedies now unfolding in Washington and spreading, cancer-like, across the nation’s campuses are quite a partisan matter — one in which the Democrats have ceded far too much ground. Ever since at least the Clinton Administration, Democrats have lost the working class, particularly men.

Just recall how President Bill Clinton championed higher education as a sensible response to economic change. Consider his message in his 1998 State of the Union address:

“I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight: Your children can go on to college,” Clinton said. “If you know a child from a poor family, tell her not to give up-she can go on to college. If you know a young couple struggling with bills, worried they won’t be able to send their children to college, tell them not to give up-their children can go on to college. If you know somebody who’s caught in a dead-end job and afraid he can’t afford the classes necessary to get better jobs for the rest of his life, tell him not to give up-he can go on to college. Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.”

Source: Florida Trade Academy

Of course, since then, college has grown out of reach for many — or just something they feel they can’t or don’t want to achieve. Recall that less than less than 38 percent of American adults have bachelor’s degree to higher.

And that proportion may shrink, as college costs soar and state support shrinks in many places. As the Bloomberg piece notes, sticker prices in the Ivy League are near $100,000 a year, while public in-state schools cost about $25,000 annually, according to the College Board. “These costs also disadvantage lower-income women and girls, but it’s boys and men who are more often taught (consciously or not) the value of starting to collect a paycheck as soon as possible,” the report says.

Indeed, given such costs, it may be reasonable for many to forgo pricey schooling to instead seek a trade-school salary. And many may be more suited to that than to computer science or, heaven help us, the humanities.

But where does that short-sighted approach leave American society overall? Will there really be enough jobs for the underschooled? Is it really smart for our society generally to underfund higher education?

And, longer term, what road does that approach put our politics on? Does it blaze a path to enduring demagoguery, a country in which people unequipped to think critically can repeatedly be suckered by slick salesmen who make unfulfillable promises?

Some highly competitive and smart folks China would love just such a result. For the rest of us, however, the answers will earn us a dismally failing grade.

Higher Ed aims lower these days

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Have the pols lost sight of the value of education in Nebraska?

Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Back in 2009, when I joined the journalism faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, all arrows were pointing upward for the university. Enrollments were growing, buildings were rising, and graduates were going on to healthy careers in newswriting and other things. The state legislature and good citizens of the state realized that education was important, and they funded it, accordingly.

Even the Huskers won far more than they lost. The state’s football team racked up a 10-4 season that year, leading the Big 12 Northern Division and ranking 14th best in the national AP poll.

My, how things have changed.

Overall enrollment at the flagship Lincoln campus has slipped from 24,100 back then to 23,600 now. Journalism is on the run, with graduates finding fewer opportunities in newspapers and other news operations. And the legislature and governor, engaged in ideological warfare with educators, seem to have forgotten that education both matters and costs.

As for the Huskers, the team seems emblematic of the university’s decline. After several pricey coach and athletic director departures, Big Red eked out a 5-7 season last year, a middling result in the Big 10 West (albeit better than the 4-8 record of the prior year). The university appears to be scrambling to avoid being kicked out of the Big 10, a lingering fear because UNL is the only conference member that doesn’t belong to the 71-member Assoc. of American Universities (the university was tossed by the AAU in 2011 over research funding issues and is trying to rejoin it).

Ameer Abdullah rushes in 2012; Source: Aaron Babcock

But now the ideologues who’ve seized most of the levers of power in the state are busy chipping away at the university’s hopes and ambitions. As a former student of mine, Zach Wendling, reported for the Nebraska Examiner, the regents just approved a $1.1 billion state-aided budget for fiscal year 2025 that will require campus leaders to scrape away another $11.8 million from their budgets in the next year, after they cut about $30 million in the past two fiscal years

While that one-year 1% cut seems like a pittance, it will bite. The earlier cuts did so, with some of the most visible trims being reduced library hours and fewer graduate teaching assistants and student workers. Plans were made last fall for deep cuts in the diversity, equity and inclusion office, undergrad ed and student success programming and non-specific operational efficiency improvements.

I’m reminded of a dark joke an economist colleague at BusinessWeek once told me. “If you cut the feed of a fine thoroughbred racehorse just a little bit each month or so to save money, what do you wind up with?” The answer: “a dead horse.”

In the case of UNL, it more likely will be a hobbled one, but one that limps along, nonetheless. The new round of cuts will involve an elaborate consultation approach with faculty and administrators, so it’s not clear now where they will come from. “As we begin this work, we will utilize shared governance processes to move forward in an engaged and thoughtful way,” Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett said in a message from his office.

But cutting majors and departments with little enrollment has been vaunted as one possible approach, along with eliminating staff jobs. That has been a popular tack at several schools, including the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The University of New Hampshire, as it trims 75 staff jobs, is shutting it art museum. And closer to home, at the University of Nebraska’s Kearney campus, bachelor’s degrees in areas such as geography, recreation management and theater are slated for elimination.

At UNL, just how much university-wide consultation versus administrative fiat will be involved will be difficult to say. When the chancellor last fall proposed a 46% cut from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Academic Success and Intercultural Services – some $800,000 – he triggered passionate objections from a good number of faculty and others. But he was pleasing the regents who had hired him last year.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The university’s DEI efforts – like similar programs around the country – have been hot-button matters for many on the right. Indeed, the chair of the regents opposed the budget in the June 20 5-2 vote, arguing that no diversity, equity or inclusion initiatives or programs should be funded.

“We need to recruit and have folks — diversity — here, but we shouldn’t be using tax dollars to fund and promote certain races or genders above others,” said regent chair Rob Schafer. “It ought to be a fair and level and equal playing field for all.”

Asked whether he’s seen the promotion of one race or gender at NU campuses – i.e., evidence of a problem — Schafer offered a, well, incomprehensible reply. “Just the fact that we have funding and we’re promoting different things, I think there’s some things that we could just do better,” journalist Wendling reported.

Source: Rob Schafer

While enrollments continue to be under pressure, in part because the numbers of teens in the state have been stuck at between 129,000 and 142,000 for the last dozen years, the regents seem to be operating at cross-purposes by making the school more costly. They voted to hike tuition between 3.2% and 3.4% across the system’s several campuses, on top of a 3.5% across-the-board hike they okayed last year.

Despite that, Chancellor Bennett pointed to enrollment growth this past spring. Going forward, though, it’s not clear how making something more costly will draw more customers. Perhaps the regents and administrators haven’t consulted the folks in the economics department.

The tuition hikes drew the other no vote on the budget from Kathy Wilmot, who won her elected post as regent in 2022 in part by attacking “liberal leaning” courses at the university and venting about “indoctrination” at UNL. Now, as she bemoans the planned tuition hikes, she doesn’t seem to be urging more funding from the legislature to make those hikes unnecessary.

“To me, the families have already chipped in because they’re paying the taxes and things that we turn to the Legislature and everybody for,” Wilmot said, according to Wendling. “Then, when we ask those students from those families to chip in again, I feel that’s somewhat of a double hit.”

Back in the late 1960s, when the university was forming its four-campus system and the legislature generously funded the effort, a rising Republican star with a lot of influence in the state named Clayton Yeutter argued passionately for education. The schooling he got at Nebraska – including an undergrad degree, a Ph.D and a law school degree – led him from a small family farm to high levels in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including serving as Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Trade Representative and head of the Republican National Committee. Trained in economics, the late Yeutter understood that quality costs.

Somehow, in these polarized times, the overwhelmingly Republican leaders in Nebraska have lost sight of that. Yeutter, whose statue graces the campus, would likely be disgusted by their approaches now.

Higher Ed Under High Stress

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Schools feel the pressures of politics, economics and demographics

West Virginia University, source: AP

West Virginia University made national headlines in September when its board agreed to cut 28 academic majors (8%) and 143 faculty positions (5%). One-third of education department faculty and the entire world language department will be eliminated, according to the Associated Press.

And those trims come atop cuts made last June, when the board approved slashing 132 positions and cutting 12 graduate and doctorate programs, even while okaying a 3% tuition hike. Impassioned protests notwithstanding, the school will be a smaller place going forward and not only in terms of the 10% enrollment drop it has sustained since 2015.

Like so many other such institutions, WVU is caught in a vise that seems to make the move mandatory: declining enrollment on the demand side and deep trims in state funding on supply side. The cuts fell heavily in liberal arts, as university president E. Gordon Gee said the school needed to refocus to meet job requirements in the future. His argument: “aligning majors with future careers is a necessity in today’s world.”

This is a familiar tune that, sadly, is being replayed all over the country. Four-year state-funded schools are being squeezed on the one side by legislatures keen to cut taxes and on the other by enrollment declines driven by demographics and high tuitions and costs. Such high tabs for students often make two-year schools more attractive.

In Nebraska, for instance, the four-campus university system faces an estimated $58 million shortfall by the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year, “a gap brought on by inflation, muted revenue growth and enrollment declines,” as a report from the university’s Omaha campus explained. Times are tough for Huskers both on and off the football field.

University of Nebraska at Kearney, source: Nebraska Examiner

While officials will step up recruitment to try to boost enrollments, program cuts seem inevitable. According to the Nebraska Examiner, administrators at the university’s Kearney campus have proposed to cut 30 faculty jobs in 14 departments, eliminating the departments of geography, philosophy and theater and killing degree programs in areas including journalism and some languages. So far, it’s not clear what cuts are planned for the flagship campus in Lincoln or in Omaha.

Private schools are feeling the pressure, too. Marymount University, a small Catholic school in northern Virginia, is phasing out majors in English, history and several other areas where student demand has lagged, for example. As The Washington Post reported, art, mathematics, philosophy, secondary education, sociology, and theology and religious studies all are being chopped, along with a master’s program in English and the humanities.

Indeed, some institutions have had to close altogether. The King’s College, a Christian liberal arts school located a block from the New York Stock Exchange, this year laid off its entire faculty and halted classes after a couple years of tumult, for instance. Even support from the DeVos family (famous for former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) couldn’t spare it from what administrators hope will be a temporary closure. To read more about it, check out the richly detailed report by journalism students there, “Inside Story of The King’s College Death Spiral of 2023.”

Distressingly, permanent school shutdowns have become common. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 296 four-year schools closed between the 2015-16 academic year and 2020-21, the most recent year with data available. That compares with just 32 in the prior five-year period. And in the latest half-decade stretch these closures included 71 nonprofit institutions, up from just 16 in the prior period, along with a bevy of for-profit schools. The situation has grown so worrisome nationally that U.S. News & World Report published a piece in 2021 counseling students on what to do if their schools shuttered.

Certainly, particular pressures on the for-profit schools account for most of the shutdowns, which included 224 such four-year schools in the latest five-year period. Headlines about so-called “predatory” institutions have hit them hard, and deservedly so. Indeed, only three four-year public universities or colleges have been forced to close since 2010-11.

Miami University of Ohio, source: MU

Nonetheless, program trims seem all too common among both state and private schools, and they appear to be accelerating. Inside Higher Ed just reported on such cuts at the 150-year-old Christian Brothers University in Tennessee, which plans to “reallocate” its programs; at Delta State University in Mississippi, where a 48% decline in enrollment over the last 15 years is leading to plans to slash the annual $51 million budget to $40 million; and at Miami University of Ohio, which has told faculty members in 17 academic departments that they must merge, reorganize or close. The publication details still other schools in similar straits.

From a hard-headed economic viewpoint, many such retrenchments seem necessary. In the non-academic world, when demand for a product or service slows or disappears, companies drop the lines and often furlough people. Plant closings are not uncommon. So, why shouldn’t higher education behave in the same way? To keep their product lines – i.e., academic offerings – fresh, they should be able to shrink or eliminate some, and to grow others.

Indeed, one could argue that more such flexibility at universities would force them to innovate more to serve changing needs. On an individual level, professors would be required to update their curricula to keep up with the times (something we in journalism have had to do regularly as our industry changed). Even profs teaching, say, classics, history or literature would need to adapt to make their course offerings relevant to the lives of students as their lives, mores and challenges changed. Few if any teachers could simply recycle the lectures they’ve long used.

But in so many ways higher education doesn’t operate like the business world – and that’s mostly a good thing. Tenure, for instance, protects faculty members’ ability to speak and teach as they see fit (not as administrators or, worse, politicians, would dictate — Florida notwithstanding). On the flip side, state funding is notoriously subject to the whims of politicians, many of whom lately seem to be ratcheting up longstanding attacks on academia and who are all too glad to cut budgets.

Moreover, higher education in the United States long has been a magnet for foreign students. Schools in relatively few nations can match American university training, so much so that such education is one of the nation’s biggest service “exports.” That has been changing in recent years, due to Covid and the growth of solid programs in some other countries. Indeed, enrollment of foreign students peaked in the 2018-19 school year at 1.1 million, according to National Public Radio.

Happily, such enrollment seems to be clawing its way back, even as it remains prey to everything from geopolitics to fears of crime and concerns about immigration. China, for instance, has been the largest source of foreign-student enrollment and uncertainties abound about whether Chinese students will return in large numbers.

The bottom line, however, is that after decades of expansion it seems that higher education is hardly a growth industry overall anymore. Until and unless the numbers of high school students rebound and the political climates in varous states change, and until and unless universities can figure out how to deliver more for less money, dark clouds will hang over much of the sector. Painful as it is, the current shakeout seems like an unavoidable and in some ways necessary rebalancing.