cc >> I want to thank you all for
returning for the Educational Policy Studies Department
Conference on the public interest and the future of
public higher public education in the 21st century.
I'm Sara Goldrick-Rab of Educational Policy Studies, and
I'm going to be introducing the panel for this morning, which is
on the future of academic work in public universities.
We have a really nice lineup for this conversation that will be
taking place between Sheila Slaughter who is the Louise
McBee Professor of Higher Education at the Institute for
Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
She's a distinguished scholar of higher education who is also a
graduate of Educational Policy Studies at UW Madison.
A stellar program. >> Wonderful plug.
[LAUGHTER] She's perhaps best known for her
work on academic capitalism, including the book Academic
Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets,
States, and Higher Education with Gary Rhoades.
Some of you may have seen Gary when he was here a few weeks
ago. Her scholarship concentrates on
the relationship between knowledge and power as it plays
out in higher education policy at the state, federal, and
global levels. She will be in conversation with
Professor Richard Vedder, who is an economist, historian, author
and columnist, and a professor at Ohio State University.
No. >> I'm sorry, I did it.
Ohio University, at Ohio University.
And also serves, and I won't mess this up, as an adjunct
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, DC. He has a degree in economics
from the University of Illinois, and has studied US economic
history, particularly as it relates to public policy, and
has a center that some of you might be familiar with, a center
on college affordability and productivity.
The conversation will be moderated by Fran Schrag,
professor emeritus in educational policy studies and
philosophy. He is an expert on the
philosophy of education, ethics, and a variety of important
topics that I think will actually make him quite a very
interesting moderator to have in this particular conversation.
So, Fran has structured the discussion, and I believe that
each of those in the conversation are going to begin
with about 20 minutes, and then have some Q&A as constructed by
Fran, and then opening it up to the audience as well.
And we an hour and a half for this time.
So, thank you all for being here.
So Sheila, why don't you begin.
Okay. I'm going to talk about academic
work, and if I had to give this a title it would be American
Higher Education in the 21st Century: Stratification,
Segmentation, and Fragmentation. And I think that my basic
argument is that, particularly in research universities,
although certainly in all universities, but more so...
Can you hear me? >> You need to get closer.
All right. Oh, it's a moveable one.
Okay, but more so in research universities, we have a changed
human resources profiled that we have to consider as a whole.
We can't just look at professors because we have to consider all
of them if we're to understand what academic work looks like in
the 21st century. So, research universities
consume and inordinate amount of revenues for higher education.
There are probably about 70 research intensive universities.
Certainly, there's only about 70 that get probably over 80% of
federal R&D dollars. Those public universities have
revenues that are double those of master's universities, and we
have to remember that not all research universities are equal.
Private universities have 2.5 times greater resources than
public universities. So, when we put this in the
picture of higher education revenue generally, the federal
dollars spent on post-secondary education are about as much,
spent on all of education are about as much as we spend on
research. And when you look at federal
research, the money that goes to those universities is, in most
years, larger than all the money that goes for all kinds of
federal student financial aid. So you can see how the money is
concentrated on these areas. When I say they consume
an extraordinary amount of education resources,
I'm not exaggerating. And I think we have to,
ultimately, consider whether these research universities are
so different from every other kind of university that we have
to think about them differently, whether it even makes sense to
think of them all as part of a loosely constructed same sort of
field. Of course, professors are paid
more, on average, at these research universities, much more
at privates than at publics. And I think that, again, that's
a mark of how much money they receive.
But there's also tremendous stratification within public
research universities, and professors that are close to
fields that are in high-end markets, close to the market,
they earn sometimes three times more than professors who are not
close to the market, and those are largely humanities and fine
arts and female dominated fields.
So, that's an enormous difference.
So, if you look at the difference from 1987 to 2004 in
constant dollars, the gap between the highest and lowest
fields in '87 was $48,000 at public research universities,
and in 2003, $56,000. That's not an inconsiderable gap
among what people are paid in the different fields, especially
when you consider that in 1975 there was probably not more than
$10,000 difference between any one field at research
universities that salaries are about flat in four-year
universities, public universities, especially if
they're unionized, and the same is true with the community
college. And the differences are so great
that it is not unusual, despite the average pay being higher at
research universities, for professors in the low fields to
actually have people in community colleges make more
than they do. So, we have this great
stratification within research universities, and we also have
segmentation. And I think that's most clearly
saying, well, there are a number of ways people have there
buildings here and there, and they're very different and their
quality at some places, not here, you have this absolutely
wonderful education building, but this is not true at all
places. But I'm speaking here of the
growth of centers and institutes and the growth of
interdisciplinarity. And centers and institutes have
grown exponentially so that they really take in a large amount of
work. Of course, they're most marked
in the sciences. That's where they have the
greatest number. We did a little study of that,
and the life sciences have, by far and away, the greatest
amounts of centers and institutes.
We did four universities, two public, two private research
universities, and the number of centers in life sciences ranged
from a high of 104 to a low of 24.
And two of those four universities, in the centers
there were dedicated lines which means that the centers are
becoming their own place rather than there necessarily being a
department home because if you've got a dedicated line then
you don't have a department home.
So, I guess for me, it raises the question of whether centers
and institutes have become a means of supporting and
incenting certain segments of the faculty, who I would assume
would be entrepreneurial or high grant or high external revenue
generating because there's many ways to generate external
revenues. So then they're located by
themselves so they can be more highly rewarded and more highly
monitored. And perhaps they're located in
places where they can be, as I said, incented to pursue
administrative priorities such as tech transfer or other forms
of revenue generation. Perhaps even distance education.
Revenues come in many shapes and forms unconstrained by
departmental service or undergraduate teaching.
Faculty may choose to participate because they accrue
resources for research and there's status and prestige,
and, again, they may be favored by administration because it's
an easy way to incent certain areas.
And I think it helps solve the greatest problem that managers
have, senior managers, and that has always been in universities
how to manage experts. In other words, research faculty
have knowledge and expertise that managers don't.
That's why they're valuable. That's why they're hard to
manage and tell them what to do and things.
And the knowledge isn't codified, especially when it
comes to things like innovation and entrepreneurial science and
discovery. So, centers and institutes may
separate relatively small numbers of faculty from their
discipline or professional home and offer those faculty rich
rewards and align them with administrative priorities in a
way you can't do for departments as a whole.
This is what I would like to research.
I don't have empirical evidence of that.
There's some. People study centers and
institutes a lot. Barry Bozeman has done a
wonderful job on that with empirical evidence.
This is certainly a plausible interpretation of what is
happening. I think the flip side of science
and engineering into disciplinarity is what I call
the interdisciplinarity of despair.
And that's where things are pushed together because they're
not funded anymore. And I think you see examples of
that in the humanities. Recently, a lot of women
studies, African American studies, and Latino Studies have
been pushed together to become diversity studies and things
like that. So, I think there are lots of
different sorts of segmentation that are taking place, and it's
really something to look at. And I think it's important
because departments, whatever we may think about them, are the
basis of faculty organization and power in universities.
And if you're concerned about faculty work and you divide
people into centers and institutes and into fragmented
areas, it becomes much harder to have any work within your
department where you have a cohesive response to issues that
face the university as a whole. So that's one of my great
concerns with the move toward centers and institutes and
transdisciplinarity. That said, departments have
issues and they have grown by accretion and we have very
rarely cut any of them, which I don't think is plausible over
the long-term that you can have and maintain everything, but I'm
not sure whether I see centers and institutes and
transdisciplinarity as the way to go because of my concerns
about faculty work. Then I think some fields,
although they're not gone, are fragmenting.
And if we use, as a marker of fragmentation, the number of
contingent faculty in the field, I think that gives us a sense of
how fragmented any particular field is because the more
usually part-timers, although not always, are accompanied by
decline of faculty positions. And, also, I don't know if you
have it here, but many universities have sharp
differences in graduate student stipends which I also see as a
marker of fragmentation. So now all fields have large
numbers of part-timers, but there are fewer part-timers and
the lowest rate of increase in engineering and the natural
sciences and perhaps the health sciences, but that's because of
the way they classify the health sciences that that's hard to
tell. And the fields with the highest
rate of fragmentation as marked by contingent faculty are, and
I'm sure you already know the answer, the liberal arts, the
humanities, the fine arts, as well as women's professions.
I will spare you the tables. This is the details of the
decline of faculty positions on offer in these fields and the
low graduate stipends. Another marker of fragmentation
is number of PhDs granted. And in 2007-2008, the last year,
I think, which data are available for, although there
should be data again this year, the number of PhDs awarded in
the liberal arts and sciences general studies and the
humanities are steadily diminishing.
And the social sciences combined awarded about half of any single
STEM field, and some social sciences, sociology for example,
there are more joint and outside job offers in 2010 than in the
discipline itself, which I take to be a real marker of
fragmentation. And sociologists always say, and
I believe there is empirical evidence that addresses this
point, that there are more sociologists in business schools
than there are in sociology departments.
So, I think the increasing degree of fragmentation in some
fields raises the question of how long highly fragmented
fields will remain viable at research universities and
whether they're going to be recombined in other ways,
combined themselves, or cut. Although, we're not big on
cutting, as I mentioned previously.
So, what happens, I think, so that we can have this big
stratification as universities is we have a new human resources
profile, which means we pay some people very highly, and to be
able to do that we have to pay some people very little,
otherwise we can't pay the high people high.
And I think that also we have this greatly expanded managerial
capacity in universities. Historically, faculty salaries
were the greatest salaries, and people would always say, oh, you
can't cut universities because they're high professionally used
people, and you have to cut the faculty and that's where all
your costs are. That is no longer true.
While personnel is still the greatest cost at universities,
full-time faculty are no longer the largest component.
Full-time faculty are now only 27%, track faculty are only 27%
of the human resources professional profile, and now
non-academic professionals are about 55% of the human resources
profile. And non-academic professionals
are people who do business, most of them are in the business
function of the university and from the administration.
I think the second one is information technology.
And the student personnel is actually quite low, the student
advising and personnel, but you can look at the charts and
see exactly what they are. But the point is that, again,
it's a changed human resources profile, and that means, again,
that there's sort of in many ways less money for faculty, and
it also means, and I think this is the biggest thing, it means
at research universities faculty work has been specialized
Faculties do research, they don't do, I mean, you have
contingent faculty, you have lecturers, you have graduate
students, and graduate students are relatively expensive
compared to lecturers or contingents.
So what you have is this specialization where faculty are
mainly doing research. They do some teaching but it's
more likely to be graduate school.
What? >> Three minutes.
Okay. And so, again, I see huge
changes in faculty work where we've become very specialized
and we're not allowed to do these other things because we
have to do the things, those special things we do which are
research and actually teaching graduate students and sometimes
juniors and seniors. And you may say you don't do
that here, and Wisconsin is probably good, but if you look
at it nationally, that's the way it is.
And I don't think these changes are driven by market
rationality. For example, STEM fields,
they're relatively flat. There's not high demand, even
with the infusion of very large numbers of foreign nationals.
Rather the growth is due to federal research subsidies tied
to industrial research interests and concern for economic growth.
And we can't get undergraduates to go into STEM, and we can't
teach STEM, as we all know from our K-12 failures.
I see little market discipline. Instead, I see state subsidized
entrepreneurship with very few penalties for failure.
And I think that the changes that have occurred are closely
tied to stratification processes and the broader society that are
also not market rational, but I think I don't have time for
that. So, for me, I think the
important thing for you to think about is that I think faculty
work has really changed. I think we have become very
specialized, and I think we have a new human resources profile
where we are far from being the only professional workers at the
university. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Professor Vedder. >> Thank you, Fran, and thanks.
I want to thank Sara particularly because she invited
me, and Sara and I have battled back and forth for 10 years, but
she still puts up with me so I appreciate it.
One of the few advantages, and there are very few, of getting
old is that you do gain a good bit of historical perspective
based on your own personal experience.
So when I was a young professor, say in the late 1960s, I told my
best students that they should consider becoming professors
themselves, as it was the best job in the world.
I went on the job market in 1965, at the time a surging
demand for professors, falling teaching loads, growing state
budgets, and widespread public support for higher education.
It was a great job. Made all the better, in my case,
because I was a man, and I got an occupational draft deferment
that effectively kept me out of the Vietnam War.
Where else could you get a job where you had no set hours of
work, where a good bit of your time was researching a thing
that you were interested in, and where promotion and advancement
were probable if you did your job in a halfway decent manner
and where you could then, therefore, live a nice, middle
class lifestyle with good prospects that income would rise
meaningfully, if not extraordinarily, over time.
Cool job. By the middle of my career, say
the late 1980s, I told top students that I had had a
satisfying job as a professor, that it was something they might
want to consider as they planned their future, but my enthusiasm
had cooled just a bit. While depression had not set in
for college professors, the hot labor market environment of the
'60s was long past. One consequence of this was a
large increase in tenure requirements with enhanced
expectations for publications. Publish or perish had moved from
describing employment conditions at the elite private and a few
public flagship universities to becoming part of the academic
landscape at a majority of America's four-year institutions
of higher education. In recent years, I have told my
best and brightest students that they would make great professors
but I wouldn't recommend it as a career because a significant
risk that the future posed, not to mention some deterioration in
the contemporary work environment.
And I'm disturbingly close to agreeing with Sheila on nearly
everything. [LAUGHTER]
Uh-oh. >> Which is going to make for a
very dull hour and a half. And I promised Tom Mortensen
we'd have a fight before it was over.
[LAUGHTER] In particular, new PhDs,
previously virtually assured of tenure track positions
somewhere, now no longer find that the case.
The situation is particularly disastrous in the humanities
where only a small minority of trained PhDs get tenure track
positions, and many others lead a nomadic, low income existence
with little job security as part of the vastly growing academic
underclass, the adjunct faculty. Indeed, I think the most
striking feature of the present era is the sharp divide between
the relatively high paid faculty, who hold jobs with good
job security and low teaching loads, and the rest of the
teaching core, those not on tenure track appointments.
A rough sort of egalitarian culture of college teaching that
was fairly prevalent when the Higher Education Act was passed
in 1965 is now gone at the great research universities, and I
think is beginning to disappear at the less renowned colleges of
the world as well. So let's talk a little bit more
about the enhanced risk of becoming a professor and why my
enthusiasm for the future is dim.
This is probably a bummer for some of the students in this
room. [LAUGHTER]
Why don't you go home? [LAUGHTER]
Is Sara making you stay? The following are three
realities. First, higher education costs,
both to students and to society, have increased dramatically over
time, and the possibility of maintaining the status quo
university model simply by hiking fees is low and declining
toward zero. So the lecture discussion model,
also, that has dominated collegiate instructional life
for centuries, if not millennia, is imperiled, in part by the
declining productivity of those using that teaching approach
compared with those utilizing new or alternative technologies.
While this productivity decline has gone on for centuries, the
increasing availability of good alternative ways of instruction
and certifying skill competencies likely will lead us
to an increasing shift away from the existent prevalent
technology which is, roughly speaking, the same as Socrates
used 2400 years ago, the lecture discussion approach.
Compounding this, there are growing questions being raised
about the other main duty of professors, namely their
research. And, particularly outside of the
hard sciences, questions are being asked about the
productivity associated with these efforts.
I've heard competing estimates on the number of scholarly
papers written on William Shakespeare since the 1980s,
but the lowest estimate exceeds 21,000.
As an economist I must ask, at the margin, what is the insight
gained by the 21,001st paper written on the Bard, the 400th
anniversary of whose death is fast approaching?
Does not the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to academic
research? I knew that would be a little
bit provocative. I could get her going on that
one. [LAUGHTER]
I was an English major. >> Second, state of federal
direct and indirect funding for higher education likely will
grow at a sharply lower rate in the next decade than it grew in
the past, in part because of a declining ability of governments
to increase financial commitments, in part because of
what appears to be a long-term slow down in the rate of
American economic growth, and perhaps also because of growing
doubts about the integrity of the higher education enterprise
and the need for increased educational attainment.
The crowding out of spending within state budgets is well
known, and the stealth privatization of state
universities shows no signs of reversal.
The central problem ultimately is a twin issue of demographics
and public policy. Specifically, the aging of the
American population increases the need to allocate resources
to healthcare, a problem that is aggregated by the growth of the
American welfare state and a growing acceptance of the view
that it is a collective responsibility to care for the
aging. Given a choice, withholding
healthcare for senior citizens and subsidizing education to
kids for fairly prosperous families, the senior citizens
will win out. If for no other reason than they
vote more. Given a choice of maintaining or
increasing college subsides financed by raising taxes or
reducing subsidies without tax increases, politicians wanting
job security will usually prefer the latter alternative.
While the federal government, over the past generation, has
shown a vastly increased willingness to finance student
higher education costs as the negative consequences of
increased deficit financing and a rising debt to output ratio
become apparent at the federal level, even the Feds likely will
put some brakes on their aid programs.
And I think, also, research programs too.
Third, technology is increasing the possibility of meaningful
capital labor substitution with respect to teaching.
Aside from the significant growth in online instruction, I
see the efforts to find new approaches to certifying skills
competencies growing, and who knows, perhaps it will be
successful enough to reduce at least somewhat the demand for
the services of traditional professors.
The possibility of low cost Internet-based instruction by
English speaking low paid professors in, say, India is
real and I think could impact on the traditional education
market. Low cost online education based
on open source materials is coming.
Wikipedia University will be here before you know it.
One can see the possibility, therefore, of some decline in
the traditional residential colleges and universities from
that. On that point, however, there is
a countervailing tendency. Thank god.
Higher education is both a consumption as well as an
investment good. Residential universities are
places for socialization and enjoyment.
The Wisconsin Union was the first union in the country to
serve beer, I think. >> And still does.
And still does. Providing students a pleasant
transition between parental adolescent oversight and the
real world of adult responsibility.
With rising incomes, students crave and demand more, not less,
of this. So the upscale, high reputation
residential colleges and universities will probably
survive, and in their relative price might even continue to
rise, but I expect at a slower rate than in the past.
There are limits to how much the price of something can go up.
As budgets are more constrained, as state universities continue
to face tepid levels of state and perhaps federal student
support, they will be forced and are being forced into efficiency
and fancy moves. To the faculty, this usually is
best met by doing something like loping off maybe 25% or more of
the administrative and support costs that have been added over
the last third of a century. And while some of this may
happen, I suspect pressures will grow to increase teaching loads
and serious questions will be asked about the need for some
academic research, particularly outside the hard sciences.
Battles over university governance will grow.
And I must say, I see the faculty more likely to lose than
win most of those battles. When faculty responds to all
this, of course, could be increased unionization.
Public school teachers went almost overnight from being
almost entirely non-unionized to the opposite extreme.
It could happen in higher ed. The fact that a good bit of
higher ed is private however, many professors rely heavily on
externally generated research grants for some of their income.
Student fees play an important role and other factors make the
unionization possibility far from a certainty, but I suspect
an uptick in union efforts will happen, although the national
environment for unionization is not particularly good nor is it
likely to become so. Moreover, given the nature of
changing competition and the emerging of alternative means of
certifying competency, I doubt unionizations can truly be
effective in changing the work life of a faculty member,
materially. The places at which faculty, at
which professors work may change as well.
I see it continuing, if not a completely certain future, for
the great private universities and first level liberal arts
colleges. The Harvards, the Stanfords, the
Northwesterns, Amherst, Williams, and the like.
I believe that also extends to the top flagship public schools,
institutions like the great Big Ten research universities which
Wisconsin is one. I think two types of
institutions have a distinctly more uncertain future.
The first is the poorly endowed private liberal arts college
with a limited local reputation. That category of schools
arguably belongs on the endangered species list.
A second category of schools with an uncertain future is
state schools with so-so reputations and little outside
support in the form of research grants or private endowments and
gifts. The Wisconsins of the world may
be in for a period of somewhat, and by this I mean Madison,
Wisconsin, may be in for a period of some austerity as
state funding continues to shrink and federal research
support stagnates, but with some ability to raise tuition
revenues and some added private philanthropic endowment support,
they will survive. The for-profit schools face some
significant regulatory challenges and are extremely
dependent on federal loan dollars, but in principle their
future is relatively bright. They offer, at a relatively low
cost to society, basic educational services in high
demand, and they are, frankly, more efficient than traditional
schools in a variety of ways, including more sane utilization
of their fiscal plans. The community colleges probably
will survive again in considerable part because of
their relatively low cost. I'm almost out of time.
I don't know if I'm out of time. Five minutes?
I have tenure, I can do anything I want.
[LAUGHTER] I've even got better than
tenure, I'm retired with tenure. [LAUGHTER]
Five minutes. >> Five minutes.
[LAUGHTER] This is on time and under
budget, believe me. I am a product of a classical
liberal arts education. Myself, with strong core
requirements and such, currently unfashionable subjects as
western civilization, foreign languages, and English
literature. To this day, I believe that
those trained in this tradition develop skills that serve them
well in the workplace, such as an ability to write well and
think critically. Graduates of our liberal arts
colleges do well vocationally, even if they haven't had courses
in marketing or accounting. Yet, higher education has moved
away from this emphasis on the liberal arts to emphasize
vocational training in subjects like business or communication
studies. Frankly, I'm not sure whether
this trend will continue or not, but I don't think it's a slam
dunk that it will. The fields that students study
have changed a lot over time, and the continued success and
prosperity of any of the traditional liberal arts
colleges suggest that model still has a good bit of life
left in it. It's easy to over generalize
and oversimplify about higher ed, and there are a lot of
things I have not talked about this morning.
For example, the academic arms race itself is a topic we could
go into at some length. It has produced the phenomena,
for example, of the academic superstar.
The celebrity professor who makes hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year and does, roughly speaking, what he or she wants
when he or she wants and for whom he or she wants.
I don't see that going away soon.
I haven't spoken about other issues relative to, say,
affirmative action, diversity, or the fad du jour,
sustainability. These impact some on the
professoriate in significant ways but not others, and future
policies are constrained by relatively unpredictable swings
in public policy and judicial actions.
The Law of Diminishing Returns is setting in.
I'm piling speculation on top of speculation.
Let me ultimately conclude by noting that higher education
today resembles Russia in 1939. Speaking about Russia that year,
Winston Churchill said, and I quote, "It is a riddle, wrapped
in a mystery, inside an enigma." Maybe to some extent that is
American higher education today. But Churchill also added about
Russia, "Perhaps there is a key, the Russian national interest."
Perhaps the key to American higher education is how it
adapts to change in pursuit of its self interest.
However higher education does change, albeit sometimes slowly,
looking at American higher education 100 years ago today in
1912, I would note that there was no tenure.
That no school in the United States had as many as 10,000
students. The largest school was Columbia,
by the way. That teaching loads varied all
over the map. That the faculty played a very
small governance rule. By the way, a lot of the change
of that started at the University of Wisconsin with the
American Association of University Professors and so
forth. Half a century later, higher
education was transformed with many schools with 25,000 or more
students. The modern research university
had been established with, generally, a relatively powerful
faculty presence in making the decisions.
And it was the center of the national higher education
enterprise. Today, higher education has gone
from being an opportunity for the wealthy and academically
gifted to serving, one way or the other, a huge portion of the
population. As the French say, the more
things change, the more they remain the same.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Aren't we a cheery bunch. >> Yeah.
These people ought to be depressed.
So, I would encourage you to chat with each other.
[LAUGHTER] >> But what are we to say?
We agree on most things, don't we?
We do, yeah. I think one thing that we didn't
deal with is that these very, the universities that are likely
to survive are also the universities that have largely
an upper middle class student clientele.
And I think that also reflects stratification in the society at
large, and that the places, the Matthew effect, the places that
have things continue to get things as do the students who go
there. I'm not denying there's
mobility, but I believe all empirical studies show that the
students distribute themselves with upper middle class students
at private elites and flagships and then it goes down with poor
kids at community colleges, reflecting again the society as
a whole. And I think that's a real
problem. As a country, we were most
successful in making access available to a broad spectrum of
society when we had low tuition and the GI bill.
May I pick up on that? This love fest is going to
continue between the two of us for at least 30 more seconds.
[LAUGHTER] I quite agree with you.
And, indeed, my latest academic research has been on the
relationship between income inequality in the United States
and higher educational attainment.
And what I find is a little bit along the lines what Sheila
said. And the evidence is pretty good.
There was a period in our post-war history, a long period
in our post-war history, where higher education genuinely did
what it was advertised to do. It promoted equality.
The evidence today, as I read it, and this is regression
equations, it's a Tom Mortensen type thing.
He's back there. By the guy who knows the most
about all this is sitting in the, he came here from Iowa and
he's not even on the program. The evidence is clear that today
we have what Tom sometimes calls gated communities, higher
education gated communities, and it is the Harvards, Yales, and
Princetons, but it's also the flagship state universities.
There aren't enough places at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
No, there aren't. And so Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton say we don't want you. 5.9% is the acceptance rate for
the next class at Harvard. It was just announced yesterday.
They're not industries. They don't expand to meet market
demand. >> So, yeah, the difference
between McDonald's and Harvard is this: McDonald's doesn't have
an admissions committee. That's the difference.
McDonald's wants all the customers they can get.
Harvard wants as few customers as they can get, so they can get
higher US, they don't have to worry about US News rankings.
It's the wannabes that worry about US News rankings.
And, frankly, it's the Wisconsins that worry about it.
It's the second tier publics. Even the Dukes and the
Northwesterns and the... >> Emory, Vanderbilt.
Emory, Vanderbilt, they worry about them.
We've got to turn more kids away so we can be better.
And the kids we turn away tend to be lower income.
Now I'm going to cite Mr. Mortensen again, and he can
destroy me if I'm wrong. In one of his recent
publications looking at recent college graduates, he said in I
think around 1970 about 12% of higher education recent
graduates came from the bottom quarter of the income
distribution. Now it's about 7.2%.
It has declined so one of the great things that we subsidize
universities, higher ed for, using public funds, is to make
this a land of opportunity, the American dream for all.
It's a bunch of bull. >> As two economists once
famously said, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, higher education
is a frail vehicle on which to hang equality.
I think, though, one thing I wanted to say is that I think it
is, where is Gary when I need him, 60% of public colleges and
universities are unionized. I can't remember whether that's
the number of professors or the number of universities.
Do you know? But it's high.
They are unionized, and they, as I said, while not being
successful in stopping increased contingency, have been able to
keep salaries relatively equal among their faculty and raise
them over the years. >> You made the point, Sheila,
and you used the STEM disciplines in this, and the
STEM disciplines are critical in this.
The STEM disciplines... >> For those who don't know what
STEM is, could you? >> Science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics. Sorry about that.
Education jargon, it ought to be abolished, particularly in
colleges of education. The scientific disciplines, let
me us a more, is the thing everyone thinks we need to spend
money on. And Sheila said something that I
agree. I call it STEM scam.
It is. >> First of all, you look at
biologists. There are more unemployed
biologists probably than there are unemployed, dare I say,
graduates of colleges of education.
I don't know that. >> Paula Stephan's new book,
How Economics Shapes Science, really has all the numbers on
that, and you're quite correct. >> I wrote a column called STEM
Stand for the Chronicle Higher Ed, and I got a zillion
indignant people mad. >> You want to talk about
lobbies. >> Yeah, and these people, we
drop money out of airplanes over University of Wisconsin over the
science buildings, I don't know where they are, and we don't
drop money out of airplanes over the humanities buildings or the
rest of the campus, and you look at the data.
Average salary at schools with high research grants versus
schools with little in the way of research grants, the gaps
have widened over time. You look at any indicator, you
look at US News rankings, which, love them or hate them, they're
there and they've been around 25 years.
The state universities are dropping out of the list.
Another area we didn't talk about, and I have a piece out
that claims that Princeton University is probably the most
subsidized university in the United States, except for Johns
Hopkins which has so much research money coming down, the
overhead on the research money they could operate that school
for 50 years if they wanted to. On the cheap, of course.
[LAUGHTER] Princeton gets $54,000
public subsidy per student if you look at tax breaks.
Trenton State, which is now called College of New Jersey,
12 miles away, gets $2,000. And a lot of this is federal
science policy, a lot of it is tax exemptions for grants to
high endowment schools to make them bigger endowed.
And let us know forget the federal incentives for donors
which are quite substantial. >> That's part of it.
Meg Whitman, have you heard of Meg Whitman?
She's the head of Hewlett-Packard, founded eBay,
billionaire. Gave $30 million to Princeton in
2003 to build a luxury dorm that cost $120 million.
It houses 350 students. That's $350,000 per student.
More than any Donald Trump resort ever cost.
And she probably got a 40% write-off on her taxes.
Her tax bill was reduced by $10 million by doing that, as I
calculate. I claim that and she has not
denied it. >> Then it's probably true.
I did it on Bloomberg which you have to pay $20,000 to get a
terminal to see so I want to be sure she read it, and she's one
of the few people who can afford a Bloomberg Terminal.
[LAUGHTER] So there are some stuff
out there, this is a progressive reputation school, and I am,
by the way, a dyed in wool conservative.
I'm to the right of Attila the Hun.
[LAUGHTER] But I think you
progressives, if you want to get riled up, pick up on some of
this stuff. >> I'm curious, how do you
explain the fact that a far right conservative and a far
left liberal agree so much? What does that tell us?
Well, one this is we're looking at the empiricism.
And then the question, as Lenin famously said, is what is to be
done? >> Would you each say a word
about that? >> Dare we might disagree but we
might not, that's what's really scary.
Do you want to start? >> Could you say each a word
about what is to be done then? >> To make it very clear, I
would do something very different than what Sheila would
do. I want the federal government,
for one thing I want, I think if push came, if I had to vote yes
or no about the federal government getting out of the
student loan business, I would vote yes.
There's intermediate solutions that might be better.
Do I think the government is serving higher education well
these days, be it either state or federal?
I would say no. Do I think we're better off in
American higher education when we had fewer kids going to
college? This is going to give
Mr. Mortensen a total heart attack.
He's going to leave the room and he may shoot me.
I think too many people, yeah, he's going to throw something at
me, but I can still duck, Tom. [LAUGHTER]
I think too many people go to college, not too few.
I think, we have 107,000 janitors in the United States
with college degrees. Should we be spending money
educating janitors? Soon we'll have a master's in
janitorial studies. >> Why not?
Yeah, why not? A master's in janitorial, why
not a PhD in janitorial studies? Okay, now we're getting the
audience involved. [LAUGHTER]
Sheila, you want to say a word?
Then we'll open it up to the audience.
Okay, I, too, think probably too many people go to college,
but my big thing, and this is probably where we disagree, is I
think we have no alternatives to college because we have so
destroyed a variety of ways the wages we pay people who do not
go to college who still work eight hours a day and very often
do important jobs. I would pay people more, have
less income inequality, and then college would probably be more
for people wanted to go to college than not.
And the college I would have would be low tuition without
lifestyle enhancements and without lots of academic
professionals, so non-academic professionals.
So that would be my approach. And if you had low tuition, then
whether you wanted to be janitorial science or whether
you wanted to work or whether you wanted to write the
35,000th article on Hamlet, you could do it.
And then you would be able to work afterward, but you probably
wouldn't be able to expect super high wages but presumably a wage
on which you could live and have a life.
Sheila, how are we going to get these high wages?
Should we just, why don't we have a $25 minimum wage.
Why not a $50 minimum wage. Why not a $100 minimum wage.
What the hell are you going to do to raise wages?
I lived in Australia when there was a minimum wage.
This was in the '90s so it would have been equivalent
to a $25 minimum wage. It was like $12.
And it was a place you wanted to live.
There were rich people and no poor people.
Why don't we open it up to the audience.
I will come around with a mic. If you would raise your hand
with a question or comment.