The following is an adaptation of a speech I gave at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany last week. My thanks to the University’s President Dr. Professor Katherina Lorenz for inviting me to give the talk.
Across what we used to call the developed world, there are, at the moment, many things that are driving tensions between universities and society. There’s no single cause but rather a confluence of factors, and the exact mix of factors changes a bit country-by country. I’m not going to try to deal with all of them today – in any event, I think my friend Jamil Salmi did a pretty good job of it in his opening address to the International Association of Universities conference in Rwanda last month (see coverage here) about how universities can regain public trust.
Jamil’s principal message was that universities needed to confront their weaknesses in three key areas: first, with respect to labour market outcomes and the challenge of equipping students for careers in a time of rapid technological change (a phenomenon I think is largely overblown, but it’s the perception that counts here). Second, the challenge of the perception of high costs (which I would argue is at least as much an issue of underfunding as anything else, but again, perception), and third, the fact that decades of “widening access” have not changed the fact that there is a lot of stratification in the system, either by field of study or by institution (in Canada more so the former than the latter) and decades of policies to widen access have done almost nothing to loosen the grip of the children of the rich on the very top institutions. Jamil went on to make some suggestions about how the sector could challenge these positions.
I am not going to argue any of that because it’s basically all true. Rather, what I want to argue today is that the misfires we are currently seeing in all of these areas – the labour market, costs and stratification – have their roots in the fact that all around the world, higher education systems made some pretty rosy assumptions about massification and it’s effects when they began expanding rapidly between 25-40 years ago. And these assumptions have turned out to be largely wrong. It’s worth asking, in retrospect, whether all these trade-offs were actually worth the challenges that came along with them.
So, let’s start back in the 1980s and 1990s, when massification still had not really been achieved anywhere outside the United States. The idea was pretty simple: university was a pretty good and profitable experience for most students, and it shouldn’t be one reserved for the upper-middle class. Open up the doors! Give more people an experience! And, by and large, this is what governments did. They chose different routes to do so – by expanding free tuition in most of continental Europe, by twinning higher tuition fees with better student aid across the Anglosphere and China, and doing it mostly through tuition fees in Korea – but we all ended up at more or less the same place in the end (which makes one wonder what all the fuss about fees was about back in the day, but that’s another story). Victory! Or so it seemed.
But now let’s look at massification through the lens of the three challenges Salmi referenced.
Job market mismatch and technological change: So, obviously, technology has changed the world of work quite a bit in the past few years and universities have been asked to do more thaninprevious generations. That’s not on massification. What you can blame on mishandled massification is the fact that most universities misread their new audience. They thought these new students would behave like their old ones, have the same values and preferences. Nor do they have the same skill level on entry – they need to be taught differently than the smaller cohorts to whom access used to be restricted. Not to put too fine a point on it: the new, larger student population is a lot more vocationally-oriented than the old, smaller one was. The challenge to existing disciplines and the programs based around them is quite profound, particularly in the humanities.
Underfunding/Cost: This was just a straight-up miscommunication between institutions and governments. On the whole, the former assumed that funding would ramp up with student numbers, but this was rarely the case. Growth in funding has been slower than growth in student numbers. In part, that might be because overall economic growth has been slow, which means government resources have increased more slowly tan expected, but also, I think because governments have take a look at institutions and all their (c’mon let’s be honest) inefficiencies and said “you know what, institutions could stand to pay for part of all this via economies of scale. The result in many countries has been either rising tuition fees, or lower levels of service, which creates tensions with students and faculty or both.
Sustained Elitism in Stratified Systems. In countries which are very stratified institutionally (US, UK, Japan), the upper classes have a powerful lock on admissions to the top institutions. Even in countries where institutional stratification is low – Sweden, say – stratification by field of study is quite high (the rich kids cluster in medicine, basically). That hasn’t changed since massification started and in many ways it has got worse. We increased access but allowed the already-privileged to hold on to their near-monopoly at the top. There are some pretty obvious remedies – various forms of admissions lotteries, for instance – but merit-washing to maintain class privilege is pretty Ingrained and it’s amazing how hard people will fight against anything that looks like it might loosen the ability to transfer privilege across generations.
And now let’s come to the unexpected consequences of massification. The first is its effect on society. The centre-left’s response n much of the world has been to encourage more education and to make it more affordable/accessible. The problem – as demonstrated through things like the Trump movement or the Reform Party in the UK – is that there are huge swathes of the population that deeply resent the idea that they need to spend more time in school in order to enjoy a middle-class life. Make America Great Again is to some extent a call to Make Higher Education Less Crucial Again (Germany and Canada have done better at this by providing some non-university pathways to decent careers, but we’re hardly perfect). And a lot of the social polarization and populism comes down, I think, to the belief that the front-of-the-class kids, the swots, whatever you want to call them (us), have monopolized good jobs. That’s not entirely down to universities, obviously, but there is certainly a sense – probably justified – that universities have profited from that belief even if they aren’t the sole cause of it.
But the other big effect of massification has been the change of attitude among politicians towards the sector. When universities were more elite, they were special and could ask special things of government. But from the perspective of government, once higher education becomes something that is nearly universal, why should it be treated differently from secondary schools? What makes one universal service more deserving of autonomy and special treatment than the other? Or, indeed if the service is universal, what distinguishes it from a utility? Utilities that are in the news get in trouble fast, they need to shut up and just work. Universities in contrast have encampments and sit-ins. Nobody cares if utilities are world-class or not. Why should anyone care if their universities are?
I don’t think it occurred to universities that massification might make them less special, or less deserving of policy attention. I think everyone thought that by educating a greater fraction of the population that universities would become more central to government policy and more deserving of resources. Neither happened. In fact, if anything, it’s been the opposite.
So, was massification worth it? I think mostly yes. The expansion of higher education has been a huge boon for all of the developed economies, and most of the developing ones, too (and in those few cases where evidence suggests that things went too far, too fast in the past 20 years, that is in the process of being corrected). But I do think that after 30-40 years of massification, it’s not a bad idea to re-assess bot the good and the bad and work out which bits of the process we want to keep, which we should jettison and which we need to push still further.
One Response
“Not to put too fine a point on it: the new, larger student population is a lot more vocationally-oriented than the old, smaller one was. The challenge to existing disciplines and the programs based around them is quite profound, particularly in the humanities.”
This is the principle problem, IMHO, and points to a basic paradox in how we went about massification.
A university education was sold to previously underserved populations in terms of its vocational outcomes, but the true good of education is quite different, and tends to be occluded altogether. A country could, in fact, achieve most of the instrumental goals of university massification by expanding stand-alone professional schools. This is certainly what the Soviets tried, as did the French republic when it expanded Instituts in the post-war period.
Wiser peoples thought of professional training as something that takes place after or in the interstices of a liberal education. Hence, the US Marines doing all their officer training in summers, or law, business and education being taught (until recently) as postgraduate degrees.
We’re only facing a loss of confidence because we sold the wrong product. Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to explain the value of a liberal education to those who don’t already recognize it, and they’re neither in underserved populations nor setting policy. I recall Phil Christman in The Chronicle saying that explaining the value of the humanities to a techbro “would be like trying to convince Charles Manson that an egalitarian marriage to an adult woman is fun. You’d alternate between points that are true but that your audience can’t understand, and semi-utilitarian arguments that misshape and distort the thing you’re trying to talk about.”