Is Higher Education Built to Last?

This was the title of a symposium last week held in Aspen under the aegis of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. An eclectic assortment of presidents (current and former), provosts, deans, educational consultants, journalists, and opinion leaders. Chatham house rules, so the discussion was candid in addition to being well-grounded. Interesting that the conclave took a relatively light touch to the biggest elephants in the higher ed room these days: AI and the Trump war on education. Not that these issues weren’t discussed, but the focus was on some of the enduring and vexing issues that are salient in the shadow of AI + Trump. I suppose we can view this as both a relief and concern that our colleges & universities face serious challenges separate from these twin threats.

Two first-day panels tackled the mirror-image questions — what does higher education need the most and what does American need from higher education? The answers to these questions are rather symmetrical. We need reform, sayeth the diverse panelists. Remarkably, a big theme of the commentary from higher ed leaders is that the failings of our institutions are to a large extent self-imposed. We have lost public trust, and the road back is hard to map. We have maintained structures that are well suited to protecting the interests of internal constituencies, especially faculties and, further, have not accounted for the brute fact that the general public doesn’t embrace, or even see, the value added from elite higher ed. Of course they can connect the dots from prestige and selectivity to expanded economic opportunity. But they can also do the simple arithmetic that reveals an oversized attention to the preferences and pivots of a tiny sliver of the educational ecosystem — thinking here of the journalists’ obsession with every move of Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, etc. — and, with it, the neglect of focus on where the lion’s share of education happens. Can we diagnose our real problems without accounting for the complexity of our modern educational landscape? Sure, Harvard matters. But the attention to Harvard matters is way out of proportion, and, to the point, such preoccupation impedes not only news of innovation happening elsewhere, but also may in fact impede real innovation, as institutional leadership models their decisionmaking on elite playbooks.

The despair among educational leaders about how unsuccessful colleges and universities have been in making the case for residential higher ed was palpable in this group. And palpable as well was the ownership these leaders took of their failures. The matter of tunnel vision and of failing to account for the lack of serious ideological diversity and, alongside it, the temerity to weigh in to public debates in ways inconsistent with commitments to institutional neutrality was a theme that panelists and audience members picked up upon and used to push and propel institutional leadership to better practices, to real reform. The mea culpa reports of Yale, Vanderbilt-Wash U humanities committee, and the Harvard Medical School were very much on the minds of the groups. Self-reflection was resonant and the boldest voices in the room called for efforts that went beyond the confessional, and would point to real reform.

The public was brought up (and leaders occasional let slip the term “consumers”) in their discussions of how to respond to the demands of a democratic citizenry that wants the next generation to be well-educated and well-prepared. A panel entitled “can we prepare citizens to be engaged beyond college?” engaged in a robust discussion of how educational content must be nested in the larger enterprise of preparation for good careers and for the good life. How exactly a comprehensive liberal arts education does that is a question that persists and that requires creative rethinking. One leader remarked, memorably, that a successful liberal arts education requires a faculty that has one foot in the library and the other foot in the streets. Can faculty members manage such a trick? Ought they?

We heard from folks who work squarely in the space that aspires to connect educational institutions with workforce imperatives and their description was sharp and worrisome. They saw as the existential failings of the current model the absence of effective and sufficient opportunities for externships, ones that would enable students to not only refine their skills but actually position themselves for post-graduation employment. Connecting employers with new entrants to the modern workforce was, we heard, the fundamental responsibility of the college, and not something at the end of the transmission belt following the conferral of the diploma. That the best calculations reveal of a gap between what colleges can realistically do in this space and what employers can furnish by way of remunerative opportunities is a serious problem for our students and graduates and, a fortiori, for our institutions looking to thrive or even survive.

I’ll share some thoughts from some of the other discussions, but, for now, a couple summary remarks:

First, higher education lawyers were fairly engaged with the magnitude of the problem. The matter of the demographic cliff loomed large in the discussion, as did the steady “other than college” movement, factors that augur really bad news for a very large number of colleges and universities, as well as challenges for even the relatively well-heeled institutions, those that get most of the ink in higher ed news. That there was one full panel focused on college shuttering was revealing.

Second, a few folks mentioned that colleges & universities disserve the common enterprise of advancing the mission of the larger enterprise with their relentless focus on competition. How can we learn and observe institutional best practices when the agenda is about pushing content and ideas that are styled as entirely bespoke and beneficial to the particular college rather than to the larger educational ecosystem of which this college is a part? To be sure, competition generates incentives to innovate, but it also can impede efforts to scale and to promote the commonweal. We should have heard more of how to square this circle, for, after all, the answer to the question of whether and to what extent higher education is built to last lies in how best to lift all, or at least most, of the boats.