Insulated Higher Ed

Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
--Smash Mouth

Article discusses core problems of higher education, including rising costs and lower student outcomes. One economist suggests that "The American university is a grand political accommodation," meaning that institutions seek to appease all key stakeholders.

This is classic resource dependence theory in concert with institution theory. Create 'negotiated environments' to stabilize resource flows from outside entities and bow to institutional forces that prompt compliance and isomorphism rather than innovation and change.

The author proposes four "obvious and reasonable" changes:

1) Cap administrative costs. Data indicate that, at large research universities, administration costs are growing much faster than costs related to core processes such as teaching and research. I doubt the findings would be different at smaller, teaching oriented schools. Overhead costs have reached epic levels.

2) Operate five days per week, year round. Most schools grossly underutilize their facilities. Friday capacity utilizations are usually below 40% (while about 70% for the rest of the week). I'd guess utilization rates are below 30% during the summer. Paradoxically, institutions have been busy adding more capacity despite the low URs.

3) More teaching, less mediocre research. Citation data that suggests most published research has little or no intellectual or social impact. Many articles are never cited (98% arts and humanities, 75% social sciences, 25% hard sciences) with average number of citations in the 1-2 range. Meanwhile, universities have been incentivizing more research and less teaching via lower teaching loads and use of cheap grad students/adjunct faculty in the classroom. The proposal is to tilt the incentive system toward rewarding more and better teaching.

4) Cheaper, better gen ed. Gen ed options are proposed as largely worthless in their current form, and should be structured around relevant problems of the day. Use of technology to teach large sections of more 'commodity' subjects is also proposed.

Most of these recommendations make sense but they do little to address underlying causes of the problem. Availability of cheap students loans has subsidized demand for higher ed. Higher tuition, underqualified incoming students, excess supply of college grads, delinquent loans, money for expansion are all consequences of these subsidies.

Moreover, by definition, institutions are built for stability--not for change. For example, reward systems do little to incentivize key groups such as faculty for acting entrepreneurially. Instead, rewards favor the status quo. Such systems serve to insulate faculty and other actors from external forces that would otherwise be driving changes essential for adaptation.

Until these underlying causes are addressed, then changes such as those enumerated above will have marginal impact.