Arizona State University is enormous. Not confined to a single campus (or even three), it has the largest undergraduate enrollment in the country, it’s gobbling up research dollars, and it has no plans to stop adding either students or dollars.
ASU’s colossal ambitions reflect the ambitions of its president, Michael Crow. “We cannot hope to develop a university that is ubiquitously present,” he proclaimed during his 2002 inaugural address, “but we can certainly strive toward that objective.”
Crow seemingly wants his university to do it all, including taking “major responsibility for the economic, social, and cultural vitality and health and well-being of the community,” as the official mission statement has it. When Crow came to ASU in 2002, he set a number of goals for the university to accomplish by 2012, including spending $300 million on research, enrolling 100,000 students, and raising the graduation rate to 70 percent.
This July will mark the ten-year anniversary of Crow’s tenure. During that time, he has become one of the most popular figures in academia, in no small part thanks to his loquacity on the subject of innovation in higher education.
Crow has been a veritable factory of popular if somewhat breezy neologisms. He proclaimed during his inaugural address, for example, that Arizona State would henceforth be a “New American University,” and set a new “Gold Standard” for American universities in general. At a colloquium in 2009, he said Arizona State represented the “reconceptualization” of the research university as a “comprehensive knowledge enterprise” committed to “perpetual innovation.”
Such phrases have earned him celebrity status among academic observers around the globe.
Though it may be impossible for any university to live up to his rhetoric, Crow has managed to produce a few dramatic changes. In a field that is usually mule-like in its resistance to change, this is remarkable. It’s also apparently magnetic, as it has attracted increasing numbers of bright people and money.
Enrollment at Arizona State’s four campuses (in Tempe, Phoenix, Glendale, and Mesa, Arizona) rose to 72,254 students in Fall 2011, the largest enrollment of any public university in the country. This is up by about twenty thousand since 2001. Although attendance is still short of Crow’s stated goal of 100,000 students, that growth is nothing to sneeze at.
Among those additional students are a significant number of poor students, something Crow is particularly proud of. According to Crow, the number of ASU students from families below the poverty line has increased eight-fold during his tenure. As Crow has often repeated, this is part of his initiative to measure success “not by who we exclude, but rather by who we include.”
(Given several weeks, the ASU media relations department has yet to provide hard figures backing the eight-fold increase claim.)
Research expenditures (including funding from both government and private sources) have risen significantly under Crow, too, going from $119 million in 2001 to $282 million in 2009. This helped ASU earn a spot on the National Science Foundation’s list of top 20 research universities without a medical school.
And while research dollars have gone up, state subsidies per student have gone down—if only slightly more than the national average.
Crow is also famous as a leading proponent of breaking down the “silos” of academic departments. To avoid the excessively narrow focus of much academic inquiry, Crow devised “strategic recombinations” of faculty members from various fields geared to focus on problems of regional importance.
In other words, he took professors from different fields, put them in the same building, and told them to work together.
Though other universities have interdisciplinary centers or institutes focused on particular areas or problems, none has gone quite as far as Arizona State. ASU, for example, no longer technically has a department of anthropology; instead, it has the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC). The school, larger than a typical department, is still the academic home primarily of anthropologists, but it also houses mathematicians, geographers, economists, and specialists from other fields.
Whether this new approach improves scholarship is difficult to determine, but initial studies show that it has at least gotten researchers in different disciplines to talk to one another about their work.
Another feather in Crow’s cap is the increased rate of student retention. In the last ten measured years (2000-2010), ASU’s self-reported six-year graduation rate has improved from 47 percent to 59 percent. Fifty-nine percent is not bad compared to most colleges (the six-year graduation rate for the UNC system is 59 percent, for example), but it’s still not good when compared to other flagships.
Freshman retention rates (i.e., the percentage of freshmen who stay to become sophomores) have also improved, from 73 to 84 percent. A press release from Arizona State in October attributed this success to ASU’s innovation in teaching methods, such as individualized and computerized freshman math and English classes.
Another part of that success is a new program called eAdvisor, which helps students pick majors and classes to go with those majors. The program is partly a search engine for selecting majors and partly a watchdog to make sure students are on track to complete a degree. If a student goes off track, an actual human advisor is notified and the student is required to set up a meeting.
“When we started eAdvisor,” said Elizabeth Capaldi, who originally developed the program for the University of Florida and now runs it for Arizona State, “only 22 percent of our students were on the correct course path for their majors. Now 95 percent are.”
On the other hand, some of ASU’s bragging points don’t stand up to scrutiny, and other changes have been abysmal in any light.
For instance, although Arizona State recently publicly proclaimed itself a leader in education efficiency, in-state tuition has multiplied under Crow. Tuition has risen at public research universities across the country, but Arizona State’s tuition rose at a faster rate over the last few years than most. While it started well below the national average before Crow took over, it has since nearly caught up.
Free-market enthusiasts may be encouraged—with lower subsidies and higher tuition, more of the discipline of the market comes into play. However, evidence of market discipline is scarce, as total cost per student is still increasing.
Total revenues at ASU have increased dramatically under Crow, but a large portion of that money has been spent on administration. In an August 2010 report on “administrative bloat,” the Goldwater Institute, a public policy group in Arizona, noted that the university has a particularly high number of administrators per student. From 1993 to 2007, the period surveyed, the number of administrators per 100 students increased an astonishing 94 percent at ASU, compared to the country’s top 198 universities’ average of 39 percent.
At least as troubling as his failure to halt administrative bloat is Crow’s embrace of mission creep. Crow has declared that ASU’s mission assumes “major responsibility” for the economic well-being of “the community.” (When asked, ASU did not clarify whether the word “community” referred to the state or a smaller group).
The idea that a university can determine a state’s (or any “community’s”) economic health is doubtful, to say the least. If we take it seriously, however, ASU has been doing less well at it under Crow than before he took over.
Using data from the University of Arizona publication Arizona’s Economy, I calculated the average annual per capita income rise for the six years before Crow took office (1996-2002) and the six years following (2002-2008, stopping at 2008 to leave out the effects of the current recession). During the pre-Crow years, inflation-adjusted incomes grew by an average of 1.4 percent per year, while with Crow incomes grew by only .9 percent per year.
If Arizona’s economy is the “major responsibility” of Arizona State University, then, it hasn’t been doing a very good job in recent years.
Extravagant pretensions aside, Crow has received a lot of credit for his willingness to innovate, and he deserves some of that credit. But excellent public relations work also has a lot to do with it. Observers should note that at the “New Gold Standard” in American higher education, not all that glitters is gold.