On this we all agree: Higher education is in crisis. Rolling protests, rising tuition, and growing distrust have compelled elected officials to speak seriously about reforming our nation’s postsecondary education system for the first time in a long time.
Voices as disparate as Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres are coalescing against radicalism on campus. Members of both parties have raised concerns about rising college costs and diminishing economic outcomes for graduates. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education seems to be much more focused on higher education than on K-12, reflecting Republican concerns about DEI and university accreditation.
Now that the public has elevated higher-ed reform to the fore, disagreements are bubbling to the surface.Underlying our sour diagnosis, however, are divergent assumptions about what education is for. So long as the banner of reform flew over a ragtag group of outsiders who enjoyed the sort of intellectual disjointedness critics can afford—there being no consequences for decisions we aren’t able to make—conflicting diagnoses could be accommodated. Now that the public and a critical mass of elites have elevated the movement to the fore, disagreements are bubbling to the surface—and rightly so if we intend to do more than complain.
In 1987, Allan Bloom penned The Closing of the American Mind. In his career-defining invective against American higher education—specifically elite higher education—Bloom identified what he understood as the core defect of the modern academy: its newfound moral relativism. Harvard’s motto remains “Veritas” (Latin for “Truth”), but Bloom reckons (and not unreasonably) that a quick survey of Crimson faculty and students would reveal widespread disillusionment with even the idea of objective truth. Tributes to truth and to God in many universities’ founding maxims are treated as relics of a quaint past at best.
Declining belief in truth occurred at the same time as the university’s once-unified disciplines splintered. Today, professors of biological psychology speak a different language than their colleagues studying history. “Colleague” is doing a lot of work there—often, professors in varying disciplines rarely meet one another, let alone engage in conversation. (Remnants of such dialogue still exist at English universities, especially in the form of pub culture and the college system, but not in the United States.) Bloom lays a lot of blame here on America’s adoption of the German research model of the university, which purposefully siloes the disciplines.
Higher education in this understanding has really become a lower education—an education in how to do things in the world but never in what to do things for. The modern university has evolved into glorified vocational education, impelled by research grants and faith in economic progress. Today’s academics resemble Pontius Pilate, asking those few remaining professors who profess to believe in something more than nothing, “What is truth?”
To this group of higher-education reformers, whom we will call “Bloomians” for the sake of pithiness, universities have become far too interested in their students’ cultivation of “skills” that can be put to use in the marketplace. They have forsaken moral formation—liberal education, an education in civilization and citizenship. Institutions’ Faustian bargain with the almighty dollar has wrought havoc, fomenting the crisis we encounter today.
The Bloomian thesis is quite distinct, however, from the diagnosis of higher education’s decline underlying much of the average American’s and the average elected official’s concerns today.
That higher education is primarily a means of socioeconomic advancement and economic growth is an assumption most people take for granted. Since the end of World War Two and the passage of the G.I. Bill, postsecondary education has been “a ticket to the middle class” (this remains one of President Joe Biden’s favorite phrases and for good reason: Almost everyone agrees with it). When you ask Americans why they attend college, they overwhelmingly say it’s so they can get a job. For these critics, the Bloomian analysis is turned on its head: Colleges today aren’t doing enough to prepare students for the workforce. Complaints about classes on “underwater basket-weaving” embody this line of argument, pointing to how out of touch the ivory tower has become.
That higher education is primarily a means of economic advancement is an assumption most people take for granted.The primary issue for these reformers is that higher education is a raw deal for large swaths of Americans. What used to be a solid economic investment is no longer an unalloyed good: Data suggest a growing number of undergraduate and graduate programs now have net-negative return on investment for students. This line of argument is of particular concern to elected officials, because many of their constituents have attained postsecondary education, and because the government manages the federal student-loan program, which now accounts for over 90 percent of all student loans. Higher education, no matter its higher ends, remains an investment—and taxpayers are more likely than not on the line when it doesn’t pay off.
This latter camp sees the Bloomians as out-of-touch at best and part of the problem at worst. If only universities focused more on students’ post-graduate economic outcomes and less on the liberal arts, college could become a better bet for the average American, or so they argue. They will occasionally defend the liberal arts but only insofar as the soft skills such an education imparts on graduates benefit them in the workplace (for instance, “Great Books” programs at elite institutions are farms for management-consulting companies, who value their graduates’ critical-thinking abilities).
Importantly, these reformers’ points of emphasis are distinct. Bloomians are concerned almost exclusively with elite higher education. Bloom says as much in the introduction to The Closing:
A word about the “sample” in this study. It consists of thousands of students of comparatively high intelligence, materially and spiritually free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they are privileged to have—in short, the kind of young persons who populate the twenty or thirty best universities. There are other kinds of students … They have their own needs and may very well have very different characters from those I describe here.
The general public and elected officials, on the other hand, are much more concerned about what higher education means for the average American—who is likely attending a non-elite institution and who is interested in getting a degree to advance economically. They are not concerned about the students who are “materially and spiritually free.” Quite the contrary. In this regard, both types of reformer are speaking past one another.
So why is higher education broken? Is it because it’s becoming a more dubious economic investment for students? Or because universities and the people who inhabit them no longer consider themselves engaged in the task of moral education—in educating free people and self-governing citizens?
Both.
Higher education as it has developed in our nation since at least World War Two is relied on as an engine of social mobility. It’s failing this task for far too many Americans. Elite higher education, once charged with educating our nation’s elite in not only how to govern others but in how to govern themselves, is a husk of its former self. Grade inflation is rampant, the Western canon has largely been abandoned, and many such institutions have succumbed to total relativism. We have the worst of both worlds: We are deprived of virtuous, learned leaders and of competent workers and citizens who, with enough hard work, can get ahead in our economy and society.
Being precise in what we expect of universities is a good starting point.Perhaps we are asking too much of universities as monolithic institutions. We demand they be everything for everybody: community centers, living quarters, research hubs, economic engines, workforce-development programs, and repositories of great books. We expect them to produce statesmen and product developers, researchers who put their heads down and teachers whose doors are always open (we often demand such researchers and teachers be the same people!). In business, this is called scope creep. In higher education, it’s called “business-as-usual.”
Being precise in what we expect of universities is a good starting point as the higher-education-reform movement transitions from opposition party to governing party. Among our challenges will be overcoming the tensions that remain inherent in university governance itself. Take, for example, the 1971 law reorganizing the UNC System, a provision that has much to say about the “economical use of the state’s resources” and goes so far as to mandate a review of the “productivity of academic degree programs every two years.” Despite these concessions to the bottom line, the law also makes clear that college instruction “imparts the skills necessary for individuals to lead … personally satisfying lives.” In practice, the first of these mandates rules: See UNC Asheville’s decision to cut a number of liberal-arts degree programs this past summer. Yet, however fine practicality might be, it is nevertheless destructive to the educational ideal still beloved by Bloomians.
There are, of course, solutions. Maybe we want state-funded research institutions to perform a different task—and produce different sorts of graduates—than elite liberal-arts colleges. Institutional leaders could also do a better job of clarifying their own mission. Western Governors University, for instance, is explicit that its primary interest is in improving its students’ economic prospects. Thomas Aquinas College, on the other hand, is interested in deepening its graduates’ exposure to the great books and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. In a country as large as the United States, such variety is a feature, not a bug. If more institutions narrowed and clarified their own missions, they would be better able to achieve preferred goals—giving students and their families more options as they look at life after high school.
“Unbundling” is a buzzword in K-12 reform circles, impelled by an interest in giving parents more options about the sort of education their children receive. Higher-education reformers should consider adopting this framework, as well.
Schools focused on what really is advanced vocational training require different kinds of teachers, strategies, and cultures than those focused on steeping their students in the Western canon or preparing the next generation of political leaders for governance. There will, of course, remain overlap, and for this reason liberal-arts institutions should exist that integrate the various disciplines, enabling interdisciplinary dialogue—often the site of the most important intellectual discoveries.
Higher education is, indeed, in crisis—and we should celebrate the reform movement’s newfound popularity and vigor. But we should also be thoughtful in implementing solutions, taking the fault lines within our movement into account before making any sudden changes.
Joe Pitts is the CEO of Odyssey Consulting, where he focuses on issues such as higher education, economic development, and smoking-harm reduction.