This is the second part of Nate Rosenfield’s conversation with Goldie Blumenstyk. You can read the first part here.
-MS
The Trump administration talks about colleges being unaffordable, that degrees don’t lead to jobs, that schools are focused on spreading “woke” ideology instead of teaching the Western canon and practical skills that students can use to get a job. They say that universities are too dependent on foreign students and foreign funding. Can you talk about their diagnosis of the problem? What’s your take on their stance?
For nearly 400 years, American higher education was always for elite students. Only in the last 30 or 40 years, higher education has really started to become more accessible to students who are not from wealthy families. It feels to me like that is what this government is objecting to.
We have a K through 12 system that’s vastly unequal. There were efforts to make sure that inequality didn’t perpetuate itself into higher education. Efforts like creating developmental and remedial courses. Creating tutoring centers for students who were smart enough, but didn’t necessarily have calculus or physics in their high schools. Or programming efforts to make institutions more welcoming to students of all races, ideologies and heritages. These efforts became known as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They were a way to create opportunity. Certainly in some cases it got taken to some silly levels and became a little too much about identity politics. But the main purpose of all those efforts was to create opportunity for students and make sure that a diverse pluralistic country had a higher education system that was open to them.
And that’s what is now attacked as woke. Woke didn’t used to be such a negative term. It used to mean that I’ve woken myself up to the fact that our system was not fair and we have to do something about it.
Are universities, generally speaking, in a financial position to be able to push back on these attacks? What were some of the vulnerabilities in the university system that have made the administration so effective?
The biggest vulnerability is that they’re big employers. They’re concerned that if these vital funds are cut off, they’re going to have to end research, limit who can go to college and end people’s livelihoods.
I think right now that canceling research is the biggest threat. Cancer research programs, Alzheimer’s research—if you stop those studies, they’re not easily restarted. Research efforts will die, and programs will go away. I think most colleges feel like they don’t have a choice, because they’re doing important work and they’re afraid that they’ll jeopardize it if they don’t find a way to accommodate the threats that are coming at them. So that’s why a lot of schools are folding.
A capricious government coming along and just declaring one day grants that have the word diversity in them are no longer valid—they don’t really know what to do about that.
Some of the bigger institutions have gone out and borrowed billions of dollars on the private bond market to give themselves support in case they do lose their funding to backstop some of the cuts.
The American Council on Education and some other coalitions have been fighting back. They’ve managed to fight back on the government’s attempt to cut the overhead rates on research. They sued, which is a very unusual step for them, and now there’s a private effort underway to negotiate a new overhead rate. Harvard and the California university system have fought back.
In many states, the lawyer for the public universities is the state attorney general’s office. In Republican states, sometimes their attorneys general won’t challenge the cuts.
Is this a time where the university system is in a strong position to maintain integrity against pressure, financial or otherwise, from this administration?
There’s such a diversity in American higher education among institutions, so you really can’t generalize about whether institutions are vulnerable or not. Some are much more vulnerable than others.
But this probably couldn’t have come at a worse time. Schools have been in an era of financial challenge that wasn’t likely to improve. Now we’re seeing this sort of political attack on top of it all. Obviously the wealthiest schools can survive a lot. Although if the government takes a giant ax to their biggest funding sources like research, international students, financial aid—that’s a problem.
But higher education is not just standing like a deer in the headlights. There are a lot of places where significant efforts are still going on, even though there’s been a giant attack.
Speak a little bit about the strengths of the university system. What are some things that schools could do to push back and persevere in this moment?
It’s not a system. That’s one of the more remarkable things about American higher education. It’s made up of many disparate kinds of institutions with disparate interests and approaches. And that actually works to its disadvantage because schools are also pretty competitive with each other. And so even if their instinct would be to band together right now, they might be hesitant to do so because it feels like they might be undermining themselves in the marketplace. It makes it difficult at this moment to do some sort of a big collaborative response. There’s also always the threat of the government accusing them of anti-competitive practices if they band together.
It sounds like you think that the most logical way for schools to fight back is to work together, but that it’s hard for them to do it because the system we have is so fragmented. But is there any benefit to the fact that schools are relatively autonomous?
They do have strength actually in their ability to build community support locally. They have alumni all around the country who went to their schools. There are still millions of people every Saturday who tune in college football because they care about their state team, even if they didn’t go to the school.
For all the noise that we hear about how America has lost faith in higher education, I don’t think America has necessarily lost faith in its individual colleges.
This is an aside, but it’s important to emphasize that on the research side, higher education serves such an important role for the country. I don’t think people want cancer research to stop. I don’t think they want research on Alzheimer’s to stop. I don’t think they want research on Parkinson’s disease to stop. It’s hard to get that message out right now in the current media environment, but every institution needs to be continuing to find ways to remind their local officials of that. If we sacrifice that, we are giving up on generations.
You mentioned that improving the school to job pipeline is one of the key areas schools need to improve. Can you expand on that a little bit? What does that look like in practice?
There are some really easy things institutions can do to help students be better prepared to get their first couple of jobs. Give students some work experience in college—an internship or a campus-based job.
There need to be models where students can loop back into school again over time as they get to different stages in life. If higher education was a much more flexible enterprise with a lot more on-ramps and off-ramps, I think that would be pretty interesting.
It could look like a whole host of things. Some schools are already offering similar things like Massive Open Online Courses, Google certificates and microcredentials. I think it’s where higher education needs to be heading. The business models are not as evolved around those approaches yet. The supports outside the institutions aren’t aligned around them either. We don’t really have a lot of government programs right now that help students pay for these nontraditional forms of education once they’ve graduated.
Is there anything else that you want people to know at this moment?
I’m incredibly concerned about the efforts right now to cut funding for things like food assistance for students and to make loan programs harder and more restrictive.
We’re going to make it really difficult for low-income students to go to college and that’s going to be devastating for the country. One of the only hopes I have is institutions will get better at serving older and adult students, so the young people right now who are not going to be able to go to college will be able to go at some point in the future. Maybe institutions will be better designed for them then, but that’s really not much of a silver lining. I’m feeling pretty grim about the whole thing right now.
- Nate Rosenfield