Wisconsin Public Television University Place Future of Public Higher Education  Harry Brighouse Unequal Access and the Missions of Public Flagships  March 30, 2012 UP709   >> Will give a talk on unequal access in the missions of public flagships. Harry is a professor in the philosophy department and an affiliate of educational policy studies. Most of his teaching is in political philosophy or applied ethics, and he has a variety of research interests spanning political philosophy, philosophy of education and educational policy. We're very happy to have him here today. Harry's going to talk for about 30 minutes or so at the most, and, unfortunately, his scheduled discussant wasn't able to be here today so we're going to have more time to engage Harry in provocative Q&A which I'm sure that we can count on. So, it's all yours. >> So I was very touched by Cory Mason's comment yesterday, and I should just sort of say he's not here today, but he didn't effect what I do a little bit. He effected what I do quite a lot when he bugged me about the Wisconsin Idea. I'm going to tell you a story, basically, and it's not a very nice story, really. I agree with what they said, by the way. 

Maybe I should just sit down. Unequal access is a fact and it's a fact that won't go away absent really radical changes in society, which I don't think are going to happen in the time frame I have. I don't mean in the next half hour. I mean the time frame that I have to do anything myself. Maybe my children, maybe my children's children, but I don't see any political will. And because of that fact of unequal access and the facts about the world around it which I think are bad facts, I think we live in an unjustly unequal society, but I don't think that's going to change much in the time frame I'm interested in, 20, 30, 40 years. Because of that, we, in public flagships, play a role we'd like to think we don't play. This is Richard Vedder's that's a bunch of bull comment, and I'll spend a bit of time explaining that. And that role, the role that we actually play that we wouldn't like to play, because we play it gives rise to a bunch of obligations that we have that are stringent and they're a bit more demanding than we'd like them to be. I think Sheila talking about we don't want to change what we do. 

I think because of what we actually do, we have some obligations to change some of what we do. I'm going to start by just introducing two principles. These are principles of justice. Those of you who read Rawls all recognize them. The first principle is what Rawls calls the difference principle, or it's a version of what Rawls calls the difference principle. And it's a principle, really, when you think about it in relation to education, about the development of human capital and the uses to which human capital are ultimately put. The second principle, a quality of opportunity principle, this is the bunch of bull principle for Richard Vedder, is an ideal about the distribution of the development of human capital. What the second principle says is that the distribution of the development of human capital should be independent of people's social origins. Those smart, poor kids that she was talking about should be getting just as high quality experiences in schools and in colleges as similarly smart, wealthy kids and maybe better experiences than dumb, wealthy kids. I will just say, Richard, I do agree with Richard. 

There is a distribution of human capability among people. I know there are some people I don't think can take a bunch of what we offer in higher education or what we should offer in higher education. I will say that coming from Britain, which I do, I always think of that group as being much smaller than I think some people do because we have Prince Charles. [LAUGHTER] And the native capacities really are visibly not very great, and yet he's a remarkably, in fact, remarkably capable functioning person. [LAUGHTER] A lot of educational investment went in there. >> George Bush. >> Well, yeah. But he didn't take advantage of it. Prince Charles was actually taking advantage of what was being given to him. And has a sense of obligation too, which is maybe part of what my story is. 

Okay, now I'm just going to ask, it takes me a little while to get to the point here, but I hope you'll bear with me. So those are the principles I want you to be thinking about. Now, I'm just saying Rawls' theory of justice, equality of opportunity, has absolute priority over the priority principle. It's so important to get quality of opportunity that you don't do anything that might harm a quality of opportunity for the sake of benefiting the least advantaged. I think that that's a totally implausible view, that quality of opportunity is that important, even in an ideal world. I think it's also, even if it were plausible in sort of ideal theory, it would be the wrong way to think about things in our actual world in which both of these principles are very poorly instantiated. Okay, this is the only principles I'm going to show you. The rest of it's going to be more straightforward. So, here is a question: what do universities do? Here's a nice answer. This is the answer that we have when they evaluate us for tenure, this is sort of the answer that we have on our sheets. 

What we do is we teach undergraduates ,and you have to do it pretty badly not to get tenure, but I think you can do it badly enough not to get tenure. We do research, and that's really important because that's what we like to do, and the world really needs that 25 thousandth article on Shakespeare in the last 20 years. Then we do service. It's not quite clear what service is. I think these interact, and I think of a lot of undergraduate teaching as being service. I also think of a lot of service which is not for undergraduates as being teaching. Going out and talking to people in the community or writing op-eds or whatever, that's teaching, it's just teaching people who didn't ask to be taught. [LAUGHTER] So, that's what we like to say about what we do. I think that's a nice answer. In fact, it's not exactly what we do, or at least it's not the full story. 

So there's a certain normative story about higher ed in the US which higher ed is a motor of social mobility. It's a mechanism for equality of opportunity. And it really is not. I don't know the over time changes but I do know the over time changes in Britain. Actually, contrary to what David Ward said is that over time the proportion of working class or lower class kids in university relative to their proportionate population compared with the proportion of upper class kids has not changed in a hundred years. Higher ed has done nothing to increase relative mobility. The extent to which it has effected relative mobility hasn't changed over a 100 year period. I imagine in the US it has a bit. And it may have done in the last 15-20 years in Britain, though I doubt that. Let's just look at the social origins of kids. 

I think Richard, I can't remember who said this but somebody said this. If you look at the percentage of students in the 150 elite colleges, thankfully is us and a lot of state flagships, only 3% from the bottom quartile, 74% from the top quartile. And then the next 256 that are somewhat selective or moderately selective, you get 46% versus 7%. That's the top 10% or so of colleges in terms of selectivity. This actually could change some, but I'm inclined to agree with Sheila. I think higher ed in a world that is stratified in a way that ours is and is going to continue to be, higher ed performs this function, and there are huge political pressures for it to continue to perform this function, of essentially replicating elites. Now, you take those kids from the more advantaged parts of our population and, I'm pointing this in the wrong direction, there we are, and what do you do for them? So there are three things that colleges do for students, but I'm really interested in undergraduate education here. I'm not really interested in the research function. We can talk about that later if you want to, but it's the teaching undergraduates function that I'm interested in. So, we do a number of things that benefit undergraduates. 

One is that increase their competitiveness for the desirable positions in society and the benefits attached to them. When college recruiters go out to high schools, or middle schools even, what they do is tell them, my daughter got this when she was in middle school, they came and told us why we should go to college there. I said, why is that? So we can get a good job. And I just looked at them and I think who the hell told you that. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, there are lots of people who should go to college for that, but you should not be going to college for that. That's outrageous. She also shouldn't be going to college for this. I'm glad to say I didn't get that. I really had a horrible time. [LAUGHTER] But most people seem to, and I am glad they do, it's just not the point of going there. 

There's also the intrinsic value of learning, and I think, again, this is going back to Sheila. In a world in which only, first of all, I think there would be relatively small numbers of people in college if the only people who went to college were the people who really wanted to get just the intrinsic value of learning. So actually there wouldn't be that many jobs. But the truth is, lots of people go to college and get the intrinsic value of doing the learning even though it's not what they wanted. And if we do our jobs properly, and I'll say something about what that would mean later, then it doesn't matter whether they want to or not, they're going to get it. You get these kids, all they want to do is increase their competitiveness, but you force them to get this intrinsic value of learning, and they think, wow, that was great, I got that, fantastic. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Seduced by the pleasures of analysis, yeah that's great. I know people in this room were for whom I'd like to think I played a role in that. So, there's a premium that attaches to going to college. This is the higher earnings, and we think about higher earnings and we talk about higher earnings a lot. 

But, in fact, and by the way, professional degrees are really a good deal in terms of higher earnings. But we'll just say that philosophy Phds... [LAUGHTER] Which is sort of the secondary bit of my business, don't. If they say on the philosophy grad school site we will increase your earning potential, they're lying. [LAUGHTER] And they just might be sufficiently out of contact with the real world enough not to know it. So we think about that a lot. But, in fact, that's only a small part of what going to college gets for you. What does money matter? Money can't buy you love, right? People who care about money and so care about what I just talked about, they're kind of shallow people. But there are lots of other things that you get. Maybe if you care about status, you're a shallow person too, but it gets you higher status. 

You get the position to which higher status is attached. Now, it's not so shallow to care about your job being interesting. People care about having interesting jobs, and being more competitive helps you get a more interesting job. Control over your daily life, that's something everybody cares about and everybody should care about. It's really important for avoiding stress. And one of the reasons that poverty is so awful, it's not really because you don't have any money, it's because you lost control over your daily life. You're at the beckon of a landlord at the beckon call of a low level manager who is, A, incompetent and, B, doesn't care about you. It also gets you better health. The education seems to get you better health, and being in the more interesting job and having the highest status and more control over you life gets you better health and a longer life. And I'm willing to say that people who care about higher incomes are shallow. 

I have to say that having a relatively high income myself I feel kind of safe to say that. I wouldn't say that about people who had lower incomes and cared about higher incomes, but nobody's shallow for caring about better health and a longer life. Those are important goods that everybody cares about and should care about for themselves. Except for totally weird religious people who want to die because it gets them to heaven, but that's actually a small proportion of even totally weird religious people. I'm not implying the religious people are weird. Weirdness is well distributed between religious and nonreligious people, in my opinion. [LAUGHTER] So, this has all been about elite education. Most public flagships would count as elite in the terms that I gave above, and some of these are not flagships, etc. ut what, is there something particular, specific, about the public flagships relative to other elite institutions. Well, it's really, public flagships are established and supported directly by the state. And they're more heavily subsidized by the state, or at least I thought they were until Richard told me that Princeton was more heavily subsidized by the state with respect to the undergraduate teaching. 

This is what elite universities did. This is the not so nice answer. This is the answer we don't want to tell ourselves. What we do is we use public subsidies to help relatively advantaged parents secure a relative advantage for their children in the competition, the rewards of which are fairly unequal and the rewards of which are really important. They're not like winning, my little boy, my 5-year-old, is very concerned about getting a trophy, about winning a trophy. And we're not talking about a trophy, we're talking about longer life, health, status, things that really matter. I love this quote. I was really struck by this quote in Zemsky/Wegner/Massy's book, Remaking the American University, because this is what I always thought higher education was about until I encountered these people who talk about liberal education and the liberal arts and improving people. When I went to college, I thought I was learning how to do philosophy and everybody else was learning how to make money. Going through a process they had to go through in order to get into the positions that they wanted to get into. 

I went to a relatively elite college, not the top-top elite, and it always seemed to me that lots of people sort of misunderstand the core business. The core business is supplying competitive advantage at necessarily high prices. One of the reasons that tuition at elite institutions has gone up so much is because so much more money, relative to 30 years ago, is in the hands of a very small proportion of people who now can outbid everybody else and want to be able to outbid everybody else. And those top elite institutions actually, I'm friends with people who are in those institutions and have senior positions in those institutions, they're my friends so they're not bad people because I wouldn't be friends with bad people. They're trapped partly by this, and they try and do their best, in fact, to use the resources they get to do good things. But, still, this is what they're doing. And to some extent, we're doing that too, but we're doing that not as a private institution that's set up to do that but as a public institution that is set up and does that. The state authorizes us and, to some extent that I don't' know, I'm sure Sara can tell exactly, but to some extent it subsidizes. So what could possibly justify is us in existing? The first answer is there's nothing. We should just get rid of, we should privatize, we nearly did, we should privatize these institutions. 

Michigan, Virginia have effectively done that or nearly done that. Or abolish them. Abolishing something this size is hard, but I bet you could do it. So the state shouldn't, it's bad enough that there are these private institutions doing this awful thing, the public institutions with public money should be doing them is just unforgivable. We're not going to privatize, well, we might, but we're not going to abolish public flagships. And I don't even think we should privatize them fully. Why? There are a number of reasons. One is there are lots of good things about public flagships, and I'm a conservative in a sort of general sense. I think, basically, human beings are quite good at destroying good things, and it takes them quite a long time to create good things. And when there are good things, even when they're attached to bad things, you want to be pretty cautious about getting rid of the whole things that you're getting rid of because you may end up replicating the bad and not replicating the good. 

So just a general conservative principle makes me reluctant to abolish these institutions. I also think that nothing would fundamentally change. The injustices would be just as bad without them. I don't think that privatizing UW Madison a high state, etc, would suddenly, would do anything, in fact, to improve more equal access or to improve the quality of what happens in the colleges and what happens beyond them. It may be easier to exert pressure to diversify access to elite positions. And it may be easier, and this is what I want to talk about the rest of the time really, to orient developed talent to socially valuable ends through public institutions. And it may even be the public institutions exerts some pressure on private institutions to do this. I would just say, this is more about the diversify access to elite positions, actually, contrary to what you said earlier, in the last 10 years on any measure of disadvantage, the proportions in absolute numbers of students at UW Madison undergraduates who are disadvantaged has increased. And the graduation rates have increased for those students as well. Not dramatically in either case, but it hasn't gotten worse. 

Okay, so what could justify the, sorry. There's a joke about a really horrible old man who dies and people come to his funeral and the preacher says, look, now somebody is going to give a exaltation about him and nobody says anything. He says, somebody must have something nice to say about him. And they sit there in absolute silence, and then finally an old man at the back stands up and he says, I new his brother, he was worse. [LAUGHTER] How much worse things would be if we got rid of these institutions depends on what, that is to say, it depends on what we currently do and what we would do if we weren't abolished, what we decide we're going to do in the future. So, let's see. Why doesn't this do what I want it to do? I've already talked for a long time, and I've got a couple of things I want to say. Maybe that's it. Okay, that's it. I've got to fiddle with that. 

So, maybe. I just want to make an observation then about what the missions of elite institutions, and in particular the missions of public undergraduate colleges, should be. So I'm at mission variability, which David talked about. I think it's right. I think it's absolutely fine that there should be religious institutions with religious missions. It's absolutely fine that even public institutions that are flagships should have different missions. But the fact that we're complicit in a system that incurs unfair advantage incurs obligations. One is the modification of real unequal access, that is the decrease of unequal access. I don't think we can do a lot about that, but we can do some about it. And by real access I don't mean getting low income disadvantaged students on to college so they can drop out after a year. 

I mean getting them to college so they get taught in ways that enable them, actually, to graduate after however many years it take people to graduate, five-year, six-year rates. The thing I want to focus on is service to the public, service to the public interest. This is something I think we could do a lot more about. And I think that we, if you like, some institutions sort of miss some of what they could be doing. Sorry, I'm going to skip through this. How is it that undergraduate teaching serves the public interest? So, how we serve the public interest depends. Assume just to stratify entry. So assume the same students are coming from the more advantaged places. Whether we're serving the public interest in teaching them depends on these factors. Are we just passing them, credentially passing them, or are we actually building their human capital? That's the first question. 

To the extent that we're building their human capital, we are increasing the pool of human capital available for everybody to use. Then, to what extent do they use that human capital simply for their own interests, their own ends, and to what extent do they use them to the public benefit, in particular, the benefit of the least advantaged? And to what extent, however they use it, does the human capital and its uses get widely dispersed. Obviously different answers for different institutions. Sorry, this is really frustrating. Well, maybe I should just give up on this. I'll just tell you. I just thought I'd give you an example of two institutions. Harvard. In 2007, the proportion of Harvard graduates, I've actually got two different figures, I'm not sure which is the right one, who didn't attend law school or graduate school but who got jobs on Wall Street was either 47% or 65% depending on who you listen to. Now let's compare that with the UW Milwaukee School of Nursing. 

The proportion of those graduates who got jobs on Wall Street in 2007 is zero percent. I called them up and asked. [LAUGHTER] And they told me zero percent. And I said, how many of them went into nursing? And they said, somewhere between 95% and 98%, we're not exactly sure. One of those institutions is attempting to build a capital of people who are going to put that capital to widely dispersed use. And others, the other institution, well, not so much. Now I seem to be on it. I really don't think this is my incompetence. This is a rare case where I don't think it's me just not being able to do it. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah. 

>> Just use the keyboard. >> Oh, yeah. That doesn't work. Oh, yeah it does. I want to do five more minutes. Is that all right? So, how might undergraduate education serve the public interest better than it currently does? How might flagships serve the public interest better than they do? I've just given three main, just three simple thoughts about how we might do better, what we might be doing better than we do. The key thing I wanted to talk about is the last, the fourth, which is in red, which is how you know that it's the one I want to talk about. If you think about to improve undergraduate education, yesterday David Ward was saying a lot of this falls on us, and I think that's right. I wish it wasn't right, but I think it is right because I don't think national and state level policymakers, certainly as a faculty member I've got very little control over what they do. I don't think they are going to respond particularly well to the crisis we're in, or if they do, as I've indicated, I don't' think they're going to do it in ways that really are about building human capital, getting it disperse properly, and diversifying access and making for better public service. 

Institution level administrators and leaders, I'll be honest, I think institution level administration leaders have relatively little power in universities. Though, I also think, my experience, certainly, on this campus has been that they are well willed and competent and just not very powerful. So I'm not worried about them. I think they've got things looking the right way. But I'm an individual faculty member within a department, and that's what I can really do. Whatever those guys do, I have some sort of space for action. I can change what I do to some extent, as can all of my colleagues. And what we could do, we can improve our instruction. I think we need to have, maybe we should be teaching four-four, but whether we teach two-two or four-four or whatever it is, we could be doing it better, in my opinion, than we do. Think about, those of you who do research, think about who looks at and provides feedback on your research. 

And how you do this. What you do is you watch what other people do who are really experts at it and you mimic them and you learn how to do it and you get feedback from experts and you change what you, you put enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort into this and then think about what you do with the teaching. The feedback is some numbers, essentially, from students and some of the things they say, if you bother to read what they can say. And some of what they say is really worth reading. But you don't have continuous feedback, that happens at the end of the semester. You don't' have somebody in the class coming up to you at the end of every class saying you did this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. That would be a rude way of saying it. But you know what I mean. [LAUGHTER] We could have people who do that. We could have people who, we could be watching each other or we could just spend 10 minutes with a student that we've picked out and said at the beginning of class, okay, you watch a lot of people teach, I'd like to know at the end of the class what you think I did right and what you think I did wrong. 

You don't get to control what I do. I get to listen to what you do, and then make more own judgment. We could be putting, if you thought about changing faculty, tenure track faculty have enormous power I think in these institutions, tenure faculty, sorry. Tenure faculty have enormous power in these institutions. If you thought about having them devote maybe 10 hours a year, 15 hours a year, to talking to a student after class and watching themselves teach, say, twice on a video with a group of students who point out all that you only did was talk to her, or you're going back and forth like a ping pong ball rather than letting them talk to each other or have you notice that you keep interrupting them as they finish. These are all things that students have said to me. [LAUGHTER] No, I did not notice I was interrupting them every time they said anything. She did. So, I think there's a lot that we can do that would, there are also other things that we could be doing. We can think about how we mentor, who we mentor. 

Do we, as in the disciplines, we tend to think about students who are going to become philosophy professors eventually, which is, and this is a very good thing, a miniscule proportion of the students we teach, and mentor them? I'm not saying we shouldn't mentor them. I have done. Or should we think about people who are not like us? Think about finding students, or at least be very open to students who are going to do other kinds of things in the world that are valuable things, not that philosophy isn't' valuable, but that are valuable things in the world where we could really play a role in improving the quality of their human capital and influencing how they use it, as well as seducing them with the pleasures of analysis. I'm just going to stop there. >> Thank you. [APPLAUSE]