Johann Neem's blog

Johann Neem

A recent survey of Americans has suggested that they have lost faith in higher education. In fact, they believe, there is little difference between higher education and a business. Both seem to be out to generate money, and both, Americans feel, care little about people. (See link.)

On the one hand, this is not true. Faculty members could have had much more lucrative careers in other fields. By choosing to teach rather than to go into law, medicine, or business, they have already decided to earn significantly less than their similarly-educated peers. They did it out of love: love of students and love of subjects. 

On the other hand, it is all too true. It reflects the success of the Reagan Revolution, and the effort to privatize all American institutions, especially those of the public sector. Since the 1980s, American policymakers have been seeking to make higher education more market-oriented. One result is the emergence of college presidents who are paid like CEOs with high salaries and exorbitant benefits. This is a result of colleges acting more like businesses.

But the real danger is not college presidents’ salaries but that colleges and universities will no longer be special places devoted to the development of students’ minds and character. And this is what Americans in the recent poll have concluded. 

Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been told to rely less on public revenue and more on generating their own. As a result, colleges and universities have invested less in teaching and more in promoting investments in research and programs that generate patents and revenue.

Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been told to orient their programs around the needs of the private sector rather than society at large. As a result, many of the disciplines—such as the humanities—that once catered to student learning are being gutted—even eliminated on some campuses—to make room for revenue-generating, market-oriented vocational programs.

Since the 1980s, colleges and universities have been forced to raise class sizes in order to achieve that great market goal of efficiency. Of course, it’s not efficient. Larger classes mean less personal attention to individual students, less feedback on courses, and, ultimately, less learning in a less caring environment. But they’re cheap. They’re also impersonal, and parents and students do not appreciate being treated like commodities.

Americans have discovered that they were wrong to ask colleges and universities to become more like businesses. By reducing public funding, they have created a system that violates their own values of what a place of learning should be like. They want teachers to focus on students. They want teachers to care. They want classes to be small and personal. They want higher education, in fact, to be different from the business world.

The only way to do so, however, is to fund it. Since the 1980s, we have been told that public funding is a bad system, and that the market mentality is superior. But now that colleges and universities have responded by focusing on their bottom line rather than students, Americans are questioning the results that they themselves demanded.

There is good reason to focus money and energy on workforce development and training in Washington’s community colleges. After all, as the recession worsens, many Washingtonians need access to local institutions and the opportunity to retrain themselves. In the short run, this is all good and necessary.

But in the long run, we need to learn from China what China has learned from us. The secret to economic growth lies in the intellectual and creative capacities of a nation’s citizens. The key, they discovered, is to ensure that college education does not just train but that it educates students to think up new ideas. In short, many in China are urging Chinese colleges to follow America’s example of providing a broad, general liberal arts education.          

China has recently opened a new liberal arts institution and its leaders are encouraging a broader, general education than China’s universities have traditionally offered, according to a January 3, 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  To encourage student creativity, China is pushing for smaller student-centered classrooms rather than large, impersonal lectures. To encourage innovation, Chinese leaders are urging students to explore learning in interdisciplinary environments rather than pursue pure vocational training. Increasingly, Chinese are embracing residential colleges that encourage student sociability and intellectual exchange.

What’s going on? What is authoritarian one-party China doing?

The Chinese seem to know that if they want to be on the leading edge of technological innovation they will have to reimagine their education system. They will need to offer students and professors the opportunity to think deeply and freely about complicated ideas. They cannot expect students to be creative if the curriculum is not. Nor can they expect to remain economic leaders if their education is narrowly practical, preparing students for what exists today without thinking about how they might be the ones who lead tomorrow. In short, the Chinese are realizing that they must do what America’s colleges four-year colleges do best: liberal arts education.

It’s ironic that as the Chinese become more American, Washington is becoming more like China. Vocational training is not enough to be a world leader. Our economy, and our society, depends on generating new ideas. This means teaching students to be broad thinkers. Oddly, the practical thing may be to offer less practical education!  

China knows that the creators of tomorrow’s economy will be educated in liberal arts institutions. Educators in other countries are coming to similar conclusions as they seek to move beyond serving Western economies to becoming leaders in their own right. If Washington wants to compete, it needs to invest in four-year liberal arts education so that our graduates are capable of doing more than finding work today. We want them to create jobs for tomorrow.

Washington state does not produce enough bachelor degrees to meet its economic—much less its civic and social—needs. For individuals, there is a clear correlation between education and future earnings. For the state, there is a clear correlation between investing in education and future economic growth.

At the moment, much of the state’s focus seems to be on community colleges and on vocational programs that train people for specific economic tasks. To an extent, this makes sense, especially as hard times force many experienced workers to return to school, retool, and find new opportunities. Yet, as earlier posts have suggested, there is a fundamental difference between training and educating. This difference is not only philosophical and ethical, but also economic.
 
Four-year degrees carry more market value than two-year degrees. The most valued degrees come from schools that emphasize the liberal arts and sciences. This may be surprising. We often think that vocational degrees—“practical” degrees that prepare people for a job—make economic sense. And, for many, it does. But one need only look around at the most prestigious universities and colleges to realize that the most highly-prized degrees in the market are not vocational. In short, supporting four-year colleges’ liberal arts and sciences programs makes good economic sense.
 
Why is this? It appears paradoxical. We all hear stories of the liberal arts major who now serves coffee. But in reality, the liberal arts and sciences majors offer exactly what Washington’s economy needs: highly capable creative thinkers with portable skills for an ever-changing market. The more narrow, the more useful, a major sounds, the less it prepares students for long-term success, and Washington’s economy for long-term growth. The bachelor degree’s market value stems from the simple fact that business leaders know that students educated in the liberal arts and sciences can think, write, and analyze; have had exposure to other cultures; understand how to use data; and have developed creative and imaginative perspectives on the world. All of this has cash value. The liberal arts and sciences are practical; they always have been.
 
Students in baccalaureate institutions are not trained to be specialists but to have depth. To the extent that our economy depends on innovation, training specialists is not enough. We need economic leaders who are imaginative and who can use their knowledge to create new, exciting things. To the extent that our society depends on creative answers to public problems, many unknown today, we do not need specialists but citizens able to think critically about the past, present, and future. Otherwise, we might as well have a planned economy.
 
Ultimately, the value of a liberal arts and sciences education extends beyond the workplace. America’s Founding Fathers supported liberal education because they understood that educated citizens and leaders were vital for a successful democracy. (The word “liberal” in liberal education shares the same root as “liberty.”) Moreover, a liberal arts and sciences education enriches those graduates who gain a vantage point from which to understand the human condition—our relationship to the social and natural worlds.
 
The nice thing, however, is that the civic and personal benefits of liberal education are not in tension with its economic benefits. In business, this is called synergy. By promoting the liberal arts and sciences in baccalaureate institutions, we can improve the health of Washington’s democracy, enrich our citizens’ lives, while also producing the most valued degrees in the market

In a previous post we noted that reduced funding for classroom instruction is not sustainable. In the short term, some faculty may be willing to over-enroll students in their class, taking on extra work, in order to help those already enrolled graduate. In the long run, however, without adequate funding, there will be fewer classes, and perhaps bigger classes. In essence, quality of instruction will go down even as the time it takes to get a degree goes up.

To understand this equation, we must clear up a misconception. When higher education funding is cut, faculty are constantly asked, "why don't you just raise class sizes?" It is often assumed that faculty are too lazy to raise their class sizes. In reality, faculty are protecting the quality of education, not the quantity of work.

Faculty will work the same amount regardless of class size. They already spend well over forty hours each week on teaching, research, and service to the university and the community-all part of their job description. Think about teaching. A good teacher must not only be up to date in his or her field-which takes time during the school year and over summer-but must design effective courses, evaluate student learning, and offer meaningful feedback on student work. Moreover, we know that students learn better when they are engaged in the learning process-when they can discuss the readings, design their own experiments, write their own research papers. If we want students to learn well, we must invest in each of them.

This simply cannot be done effectively in a large class. Faculty work the same number of hours whether the class is large or small, but students do not get the same quality of instruction. Large classes tend to have more lecturing. Large classes have fewer and inferior assignments. Often, multiple choice tests replace essays. Large classes offer students fewer opportunities to engage with the material. Certainly, large classes rarely allow faculty to cultivate the kinds of relationships with students that research suggests is vital to student learning. Smaller classes, on the other hand, allow faculty to offer detailed feedback on papers and assignments. Faculty can assign more work per student, can evaluate that work better, and give each student more time to ensure that she or he leaves the class comprehending the material. For faculty, the work is the same. For students, larger classes are decidedly inferior.

Reformers and policymakers often accuse faculty of not paying enough attention to teaching and learning. Almost all scientific research on learning suggests that students learn best when they have meaningful relationships with their teachers, have opportunities to be actively involved with the learning process, and can grapple with difficult material in class and in their assignments. Compare this with a large lecture class filled with half-engaged students scribbling notes and taking multiple choice tests that assess their short-term memory rather than their long-term development!

Faculty do not teach small classes because they are lazy. Small classes often take more preparation time because faculty cannot recycle notes from last time and because they must offer more feedback on complicated assignments. If we were lazy, we would just teach large classes straight from the textbook and offer tests that machines could grade. Instead, we want our students to learn.

Large classes are inefficient. Efficiency means doing the same for less. Large classes are, however, decidedly inferior because faculty simply cannot offer the same quality of instruction as they do in smaller classes. For faculty, their workload does not change. For students, however, it makes a big difference.

Johann Neem is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts.