As recently as five years ago, Americans were generally pretty proud of their higher education system.  Sure, there were complaints, but even when the criticisms were more systemic, they were usually prefaced by the words “we’ve got the best system in the world, but…” It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, and not just because COVID has reduced the frequency of my jaunts to DC, where I most often heard it.  It’s not that Americans have fallen in love with some other countries’ model of education, but they have definitely fallen out of love with higher education as it currently exists in the United States. 

Two recent books which tackle the question of American higher education decline from different angles are After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch and Wrecked: De-institutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy by Barrett J. Taylor.  Though they have different foci, villains and audiences, together they represent a fair bit of left/centre opinion about what ails American higher education these days.

I’ll start with Wrecked because it makes a narrower argument, specifically with respect to higher education in certain Republican states.  Basically, Taylor’s argument is this: there are several states in which white over-representation in higher education is declining, which triggers a White Backlash.  In some states, this also coincides with Republicans capturing state governments, and these new regimes, according to Taylor, choose to try to undermine higher education through a combination of de-funding and de-legitimation which undermines institutional autonomy and capacity (something Taylor refers to as “de-institutionalization”).  He presents a series of state-level case studies – North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Iowa – in which higher education has been the subject of attacks by Republican legislatures and/or governors in terms of funding, autonomy. Postsecondary has more generally become the subject of a culture war, especially with respect to universities offering “useless” degrees (mainly in the humanities) and being insufficiently attentive to state economic needs. 

He then suggests that university administrations are semi-complicit in this project on two grounds.  First, instead of defending the intrinsic value of higher education, they argue for it on instrumental ground.  Second, they respond to cuts in budgets by looking for more fee income either through increasing in-state fees or by looking for more out-of-state/international students (both of whom pay greatly-elevated fees), which reduces accessibility and alienates flagship institutions from the population.  In other words, declining white privilege leads to Republican backlash leads to attacks on higher education leads to vacillating administrators who sell out higher education.

There is a lot of good stuff in here: the four short case studies are, to my mind, pretty much impeccable examples of how to document legislative/gubernatorial actions in a particular policy field.  The problem is that working from case studies alone tends to blind you to counter-factuals.  Yes, governments in red states have cut funds to higher education, but as I showed a couple of days ago  it’s not as though blue states have a solid record in supporting higher education, and as any reader of Howard Bowen will tell you, institutions don’t require cuts in government funding in order to seek out new funds (see also Ontario Colleges).   I don’t think one could argue that Democratic state governments go in for de-legitimation, but lord knows they aren’t very good funding institutions.

There’s also a problem in the identification of cases.  Taylor chooses cases where there is both a reduction in white overrepresentation and a recent change of control of the state legislature, and then asserts that both are causal factors in the subsequent Republican attack on higher education.   I suspect that’s wrong, and contend Taylor’s argument would be stronger if it were narrower: the evidence he amasses is pretty good that new Republican state administrations – that is, in states that have only recently flipped to Republican control – see universities as independent centres of expertise/authority which need to be neutered politically in order for Republicans to consolidate power.  The rest of it is less convincing.  And as for criticizing administrators for looking for alternative sources of revenue when state budgets are cut, the question of what exactly the alternatives are (deeper cuts, maybe?) are not well addressed.

Will Bunch’s After the Ivory Tower Falls reverses the causality of Wrecked.  Here, it is not polarization and right-wing radicalism which produces attacks on public higher education, but rather it is the failure of public education.  To simplify Bunch’s argument: the GI Bill was a great thing, and the failure to continue towards making higher education free during the Truman administration was the start of the eventual slide into ruin.  Rising fees, increasing educational stratification, the rise of meritocracy and the academic left’s turn in the 1980s to fight rather arcane cultural battles rather than main street political ones (see Todd Gitlin’s famous remark that after the early 1970s radicals were more likely to be “marching on the English Department than on the White House”) served to estrange large portions from higher education. They turned to the populist right, which in turn attacked higher education (this bit is where Bunch dovetails with Taylor), which created a new round of attacks on higher education. 

Now, the argument that higher education is itself central to the story of American polarization is a bit, well, weird.  What about de-industrialization? Or even Rupert Murdoch?  And while he does clearly recognize the role of racism and the unwillingness of whites to subsidize things like higher education once Black people start getting access to them, somehow higher education itself is still at the centre of the story rather than, you know, the actual resistance and backlash to the Civil Rights movement.  And Bunch’s primary solution for higher education – more money to make things cheaper and access wider – has been tried elsewhere with very mixed results, something Bunch himself half-concedes during a 4-page global tour d’horizon in the penultimate chapter.

After decrying the failure to institutionalize of “college for all” for the better part of 300 pages, Bunch takes a 90 degree turn in the final chapter to argue for something quite different: that what America needs most of all is a better set of vocational/technical colleges so that not quite so many people need to go to university.  I think this is pretty much true; as is often the case, the solution to a problem in American higher education is to adopt a Canadian model, in this case a functional technical/vocational system delivered through community colleges. 

Two blind spots common to both books are the lack of attention to counter-factuals (which, to be fair, is a blind-spot of a lot of books), and – perhaps more seriously given their focus on cost as a factor in popular alienation from higher education – any real attempt to come to grips with why higher education prices have risen.   Partly, it’s because student numbers are increasing (many American analysts hand-wave around this point by focusing on per-student transfers to institutions rather than on total transfers), but also because costs per-student are also rising in many cases.  Bunch spends some time talking about this but focuses on tired tropes about amenities arms races (climbing walls, lazy rivers, etc.) but neither book deals the hard truths about Baumol’s Cost Disease, a phenomenon which causes labour-intensive goods to increase in cost over time relative to other goods, nor does either deal with spiraling costs related to higher education’s research mission over the decades.  In the absence of these, the two books’ analyses seem somewhat incomplete.

In short: both books are interesting reads (I prefer Wrecked as it is the wonkier of the two books, but YMMV), if only see how Americans are falling out of love with their own system.  But treat the actual analyses with caution.