Beneath the Surface

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Robert Samuels sees “two major movements in education around the globe: increased stress on efficiency and standardized testing, and a growing focus on teaching the whole student and covering a large variety of subject matter. Driving much of the first movement is the idea that education’s only purpose is to prepare a student for a future job in [the] knowledge economy; the second movement is centered on helping students become better citizens and thinkers.” Samuels is concerned that universities are placing too much emphasis on the first set of goals, to the detriment of the second.

One area in which these goals are in tension is instructional technology. Several years after I joined the sociology faculty at Salisbury State College (now Salisbury University), I reorganized our Social Research course, expanding it into a two-semester sequence and adding a computer lab. Since this was in the 1970s, few of my students had ever used a computer, but now they had the opportunity to do computerized data analysis under my supervision. For the first few years, the college had no computer of its own, and so the students had to punch their instructions onto punch cards, have them read by a card reader, and send them over phone lines to the mainframe on another campus. In 1983, the college acquired its own computer and created a proper lab with individual terminals. I think this is a good example of technological enhancement of education, but it did entail some cost. In addition to the cost of the technology itself, the college had to pay me for a one-hour overload to teach the lab. That cost one-third of what the college would pay a part-time instructor to teach a three-credit course; in other words, a pittance. Nevertheless, there came a time when the administration no longer wanted to pay for it, and I had a dean in my office asking me to downgrade the class from four hours to three. I asked what academic justification he could provide for forcing me either to eliminate the computer lab or to reduce the instructional time by a third. He could provide none, and backed down when he saw that I was willing to fight for the course I had worked so hard to develop.

On the one hand, technology has the potential “to make undergraduate education more collaborative and learner-centered as a positive move to update traditional methods of instruction.” On the other hand, university administrations like technological investments that promise to save money rather than just cost money. Often they see technology as a way to teach more students with less professional labor, possibly weakening rather than strengthening the academic quality. Samuels is especially suspicious of completely online courses, which can take the large lecture hall to its ultimate extreme–one professor beaming lectures to hundreds or thousands of students. Undergraduate instruction, which is already getting most of the cost-cutting, is becoming the focus of online instruction as well. “Of course, if the university really wanted to save money, it would move its expensive graduate and professional schools online, but this option is not being discussed because the faculty and administration know that you cannot provide high-quality education in large online courses.” It’s not that students cannot learn from online lectures–I have done so–but that higher-level mental activities are better supported by other types of class organization, including more creative uses of technology.

Underlying Samuels’ whole critique is a strong commitment to college education as a counterpart of democracy. “If you want a democratic society, you need democratic learning environments.” Taking in and giving back lecture material may prepare a student for certain kinds of jobs, but it is an insufficient preparation for participating in democratic decision-making as creative workers and informed citizens. From that perspective, education is a public good, but even public universities are treating it too much as a private commodity purchased by an individual student for the purpose of individual career advancement. “Universities have been privatized because they no longer serve a public mission; instead, they often operate like large corporations.”

Samuels places his argument squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition:

Thomas Jefferson argued for a free public university because he knew that in order to have a real democracy, you need to have highly educated citizens. Jefferson proclaimed that “it is safer to have the whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance.”

No university would admit to wanting to enlighten the few at the expense of the many, but the financial trends described by Samuels do seem to move in that direction, shortchanging undergraduate instruction while spending generously to support star faculty, research and graduate education, and campus amenities.

Samuels would like to see more direct public support for public universities, reversing the recent trend in the opposite direction. He believes that much of that cost could be offset by savings in direct aid to students, as well as in tax breaks on educational savings accounts and expenditures. The federal government alone lost $40 billion in tax revenue from such breaks in 2010, but the entire cost of making public universities free would only be $95 billion. Of course, many of those tax breaks went to wealthy families sending children to expensive private schools, but Samuels sees that as part of the problem. Tax breaks are much more valuable to the wealthy than anyone else, both because they are in higher tax brackets, and because they can afford to contribute generously to the educational savings plans that are sheltered from taxation. The lower half of the population can offset very little of their tuition with tax breaks, since they make too little to pay much income tax anyway. They tend to pay the rising tuition costs by going more deeply into debt. Samuels would rather make public funding of public education the top priority, leaving people free to pay for private education themselves if they want to.

In return for getting more direct public support, Samuels wants to require public universities to control tuition increases (if they charge any tuition at all) and spend a higher percentage of their revenue on direct instructional costs. That would enable them to create more secure teaching positions and support a larger proportion of small classes.

I would like to see higher education move in these directions, but I don’t think it will be easy.  Those who benefit the most financially from the current system will, of course, resist change. Beyond the financial issues, there is the question of how well educated we want the citizenry and the work force to be. For example, do we want machines to do more of the routine work so that human beings can participate in society in more thoughtful and creative ways? Or are we willing to reduce the majority to the level of machinelike order-takers, while only a few people get to think and create? Do we really want undergraduate classes to develop creative thinkers, or just note-taking drones? If we are sincere in our support for higher education, we will have to put our money where our mouth is.

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Robert Samuels charges that large public universities have been shortchanging students by charging them higher tuition while spending less of their revenue on undergraduate instruction. Students face larger classes and more classes taught by graduate students, part-time instructors, and other untenured faculty. Some courses may be less available altogether, so that students take longer to complete their requirements, driving up their expenses even more.

How much all the cost-cutting actually affects the quality of college education is harder to say. Samuels is sure that it does, since he believes strongly in small classes taught by fully credentialed professors with job security (and the academic freedom that goes with it). He cites research showing that “students understand and retain information best when they apply new knowledge in an interactive fashion, [but] most large lecture classes at research universities give students very few opportunities to interact with each other, the professor, and new research.” As a retired educator, I agree with him. A good lecture can certainly convey knowledge, but higher education should also give students an opportunity to develop their own thinking processes through engagement with the thought processes of their professors and fellow students. That requires more than a transmission of knowledge packages from teaching authorities to passive learning receptacles, and more than a completely free discussion without informed critical feedback on what is said. It’s never easy, but professionally guided, interactive learning is learning of the most creative kind. Without it higher education becomes a misnomer.

The negative aspects of large classes often become apparent when students take a small class and demonstrate that they cannot speak or interact in an effective manner. Since their big lecture classes have rewarded them for being silent memorizers who try to figure out what the professor will put on the next test, they are unable to think independently or to examine the ideas of others critically.

Now I’ll ask the reader to assume that Samuels is right, that university cost-cutting is jeopardizing the quality of undergraduate education. That raises the deeper question of why a public university would choose to shortchange its own students. I say “choose” because although public funding has fallen, the total revenue from undergraduate instruction seems more than enough to support it.

Samuels develops two different kinds of answers. One is that large public universities give priority to other aspects of their educational mission, namely graduate education and research. They cut costs on undergraduate teaching so deeply that undergraduate revenue subsidizes other legitimate activities. The second answer is even more troubling: that universities are losing sight of the educational mission itself, focusing instead on financial goals that are in tension with educational quality.

In some ways, graduate students seem to benefit from trends in public education. While undergraduate programs bear the brunt of the cost-cutting, grad students get small classes and opportunities to earn money as teaching or research assistants. However, because universities do rely on them so heavily as a source of inexpensive labor, their job duties can interfere with their studies and prolong the process of completing their degrees. If and when they do complete their degrees, they are unlikely to obtain secure college teaching jobs because universities prefer part-time and/or temporary labor. Many students spend years running up debt to complete their doctorates, only to discover that universities now offer very few positions providing pay, benefits and security commensurate with their qualifications. “In other words, most of the graduate students are really untenured faculty on short-term contracts and are being trained for jobs they will never get.”

Research can go hand-in-hand with instruction in a mutually supportive relationship. “We can understand research to be the scientific, critical, and creative investigation of truth, and we can define instruction as the effective communication of that truth.” But after examining university finances, Samuels concludes that a heavy emphasis on research comes at the expense of undergraduate instruction. “Once research becomes the priority at a college or university, the cost of administration and facilities skyrockets, and this increase is paid for in part by undergraduate tuition and state and federal taxes.” And later, “There is…no way of knowing if universities lose or gain money overall from research. However, we do know that money from student tuition and state funding that is earmarked for instruction ends up being used for research, although it is rare for any money that is made through research to end up funding teaching.” One way that research universities can shortchange undergraduates is by releasing professors from teaching and replacing them with less qualified substitutes; another is by hiring professors for their research abilities and overlooking their ineffectiveness as teachers. Samuels is also concerned that some of the research conducted at public universities primarily serves private interests. The purpose of some research grants is to promote corporate products  rather than develop new knowledge, and the research may be highly biased and secretive.

One of the things I’ve learned by studying nonprofit organizations like hospitals and charities is that the lack of a profit motive doesn’t stop such organizations from being financially driven. The decision-makers in those organizations can still want to generate a lot of revenue and earn large salaries. In recent years, institutions of many kinds have become caught up in an effort to generate higher incomes for their best-paid employees, while at the same time cutting labor costs down the line. At the University of California, Samuels found that in just two years, compensation went up almost 40% for professors and administrators making over $200,000 per year, and that “virtually none of the top thousand earners in the UC system have anything to do with undergraduate instruction.” At the other end, undergraduate teaching is increasingly synonymous with low pay and job insecurity, even for highly qualified, effective teachers. “In this system, a small minority of wealthy star faculty are rewarded for concentrating on research, while the people who are teaching the undergraduate courses are often punished with lifetime job insecurity and low compensation.” In addition, administrators are becoming more numerous and better paid than faculty. While universities are often considered “the last bastions of liberal ideology, they actually are leaders in the generation of income inequality and the movement of wealth to a small minority of star faculty and administrators.”

Large universities are also major investors. When their investments do well, they can spend more on programs that add to their reputations, generate more grant money and student applications, and increase compensation for star faculty and administrators. When their portfolios do poorly, they use the losses to justify more cuts in undergraduate instruction. As major investors, universities are also heavily influenced by financial advisors such as bond rating agencies. The advice is based on financial rather than educational considerations: Cut instructional costs, avoid unions, rely less on public funding, borrow heavily to invest in projects with a future return, boost investment returns by accepting more risk, and so forth. The reports of the bond raters bolster Samuels’ claim that universities cut undergraduate spending because they choose to, not because they have to. “For instance, in 2010, at the same time the UC system was claiming a dire financial emergency, Moody’s gave it a high rating for its financial health.”

Economic considerations also help explain why students put up with being academically shortchanged. They need a college degree more than ever to get an edge in a competitive job market. They are, quite frankly, less concerned about the size of their classes and the quality of their instruction than about the ease with which they can accumulate credits and graduate. They don’t like the high tuition, but the fact that they will graduate deeply in debt only reinforces the idea that college is for getting a good job, not becoming a more creative thinker. Many students like large, impersonal classes because they are unchallenging. The tests are multiple-choice, the assignments are shorter and quicker to grade, and average study hours per week have dropped from 24 to 14 in the past half-century. It’s just easier all around.

From the professor’s perspective, it is simply easier to present knowledge and not have that knowledge questioned or criticized. From the student’s perspective, it is easier to just record, memorize, and then forget information; and it is much more difficult to actually think about and examine critically the knowledge presented in a class. In this type of educational cease-fire, students agree not to challenge the teacher, and the teacher agrees not to challenge the students. Everyone is happy, but is this good for democracy or even capitalism?

Samuels thinks not:

In response to this analysis, many people will argue that students go to prestigious institutions because they have great reputations, which allows students to go on to the best graduate schools and get the best jobs. If students at elite institutions do not get an effective education but simply purchase prestige, our country will produce leaders, workers, and citizens who lack the basic skills and knowledge to be effective inside and outside of the workplace.

Continued

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Robert Samuels. Why Public Education Should Be Free. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Robert Samuels is a lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and the author of the Changing Universities blog, as well as several books in the area of cultural studies.

For this book, I would have preferred a slightly different title. Samuels doesn’t come to discuss his proposal for free public universities until Chapter 9, and the rest of the book has much to offer readers who may not agree with his ultimate recommendations. Mostly it is a book about how tuition hikes and cost-cutting are shortchanging college students. In Samuels’ view, they are paying more and getting less. If that is true, it’s a matter of concern for everyone.

I also wish that the book had been longer, with more supporting research. Although it is heavily footnoted, I would have appreciated more extensive research summaries to support some of the crucial conclusions. In particular, how much a university can both control costs and maintain quality is a very difficult question, especially because a high-quality educational experience is an elusive goal. Samuels maintains that it can be done, but that public universities are generally failing to do it. I think he makes a good prima facie case, but more research would help make the argument fully convincing.

Samuels begins Chapter 1 with his main charge:

Every year, tuition at American colleges and universities goes up, but virtually no one seems to know why. In fact, the average cost of higher education in the United States increases at twice the rate of inflation, and by going up 8 percent each year, the cost of tuition doubles every nine years. Meanwhile, educational institutions claim that they are losing money and that they have to rely increasingly on large lecture classes and inexpensive, untenured faculty in order to remain afloat.  In other words, the cost is going up, but the money spent on undergraduate education is going down. And once again, no one appears to have a coherent explanation for this state of affairs.

Part of the explanation is that state funding has been falling for public education since 1980. However, Samuels reports that despite this, the revenue generated by state funding and tuition combined far exceeds the amounts actually spent on undergraduate education. By considering such factors as class size, number of classes per student and the compensation for different categories of teachers, he estimates the direct instructional cost at $2,656 per student, far less than the average $7,000 tuition plus $8,000 in state funding received by public universities. Research by Charles Schwartz on the University of California found the average instructional cost to be $3,330, and the non-instructional costs attributable to undergraduate education (such as libraries, student services, administration and utilities) to be another $6,817, for a total of $10,147. But the tuition and public support was so much higher, that “the university was still making about $10,000 on each student.”

At the same time as they have been raising tuition, universities have been saving a lot of money by increasing average class size and turning over more of the undergraduate teaching to lower-paid part-time instructors, graduate students, and other non-tenure-track faculty (that is, faculty with no prospect of a permanent position).

“A common annual course load for a student at an American research university is six large classes (averaging 200 students each) and two small courses (averaging 20 students each).” Obviously, classes of 200 only require one-tenth the professional staffing as classes of 20. If that tends to make education too impersonal, universities mitigate the damage by breaking the large class into small discussion sections conducted by graduate teaching assistants. One hour a week taught by a graduate student is much less expensive than three hours a week taught by a professor.

I might add that as a first-year grad student at the University of Pittsburgh, I was assigned to attend a large-lecture class and teach three discussion sections each week. The discussion sections themselves usually had over 30 students. The graduate assistants also constructed and graded the exams. Although I’m sure many students managed to learn something and receive a fair grade, I think the arrangement left much to be desired.

The percentage of undergraduate classes taught by traditional tenure-track faculty has fallen to about one-third. Another third are taught by part-time faculty and the remaining third by other non-tenure-track faculty. Many–although not all–of the latter two groups are less credentialed and experienced than the tenured faculty. On the other hand, Samuels also complains that many of the tenured faculty received tenure more on the basis of their research and publications than their teaching ability. One of his recommendations is to reward different kinds of professors for doing what they do best. Free great researchers from teaching undergraduates if they’re not good at it, but improve pay and job security for more undergraduate teachers who are.

That raises the question of how effectively universities and their customers evaluate undergraduate instruction.

A central explanation for why research universities have been able to get away with shortchanging instruction–as they pursue other areas of interest–is that there is little effective instructional quality control in higher education. Not only are there no shared tests for all universities to see if students are actually learning their course material, but many universities evaluate professors based on their research and not on their teaching, which means that a professor can have a long history of being an ineffective teacher with no negative repercussions.

The reputations and ratings of public universities don’t seem to depend very much on the quality of undergraduate instruction. This is partly because the quality of the classroom experience isn’t as visible as other things colleges provide. “When students and their parents go on college tours, much of the information given them relates to noneducational topics like housing, parking, dining, fraternities, athletic facilities, and entertainment options.” Universities can boost their ratings by providing misleading statistics. They can inflate the amount they spend per student by including graduate and professional students in the average instead of focusing on undergraduates. They can exaggerate the percentage of full-time faculty by not counting untenured instructors as faculty. They can underestimate typical class size by reporting the percentage of classes that are small instead of the percentage of student credit hours that are actually earned in small classes. (To understand the last difference, consider this analogy. The US has a large number of small towns and a smaller number of big cities, but a large majority of the people actually live in the big cities. Similarly, university undergraduates spend most of their time in the big classes.)

One statistic that plays a special role in evaluating universities is the average SAT scores of admitted students. A university may spend a lot on attracting far more applicants than it can admit, so it can be as selective as possible. It may also spend a lot on generous financial aid offers to high-SAT students, who tend to come from wealthy families. Meanwhile, students of more typical financial means and ability have to manage the increased costs of their education by going deeply into debt, if they can get into their public university at all.

Samuels summarizes:

Although tuition has been going up at a high rate during the last thirty years, the use of large classes and nontenured faculty has actually pushed the costs of instruction down. It is therefore false for many universities to claim that they are losing money on each student; the truth is that they are often making a huge profit off of each undergraduate. What research universities do not want to disclose is that the inexpensive undergraduates are subsidizing expensive graduate students, administrators, and researchers.

If public universities are shortchanging undergraduates, it is not because of sheer incompetence or indifference. It is because of other priorities.

Continued