Feeling the Pinch

Higher education responds to increased pressure

Richard P. Chait serves currently as the director of the Center for Higher Education Leadership and Governance at the University of Maryland. He will join the Harvard faculty in September as a senior faculty member in the Administration, Planning, and Social Policy area of the Graduate School of Education. He spoke recently with Alex Huppé and Merry Touborg for the Gazette about issues affecting higher education in the nation.

Next week, Provost Albert Carnesale discusses how national changes affect Harvard, and how the University is responding.

What are the stresses or pressure points that you see for higher education now?

A major concern for higher education is the public discontent, or at least public puzzlement, about why the cost of higher education seems to have escalated rapidly. People are asking why the work force appears to be uncontrollable or unaccountable; why faculty enjoy what seems to be an anachronistic privilege of lifetime employment that insulates them from the vicissitudes of the marketplace. These questions contribute to a certain sense of public discontentment. And if that weren't enough, there is uneven satisfaction with the product, with the graduates of our institutions of higher education.

A second pressure on higher education is a shift in resources, starting with changes in the role of federal and state government. This shift has forced universities into efforts at cost containment, restructuring, and even reinvention of the university, in order to bring greater order to what is typically described as an organized anarchy. These efforts in turn have raised questions about how to manage what some people believe to be an unmanageable enterprise and about whether the organization should be managed.

How have colleges and universities reacted to these new pressures?

One of the net effects of the shift in resources and in public attitudes, I think, has been an increased pressure on colleges and universities to commercialize. This is seen most visibly from the public standpoint in the admissions wars, but it is also evident in the ways in which the institutions are marketing themselves. Endless capital campaigns emphasize selling the educational product to a donor just as admissions is selling the product to a potential student. There are even efforts to sell the product to non-degree customers, and to craft strategic alliances with industry. It is commercializing -- it's more than just marketing. For example, if Penn State University says that Pepsi Cola will be the exclusive vendor of products on their campus for a fee and Coca Cola will be sold nowhere on the campus, that is an effort to generate more revenue. It is commercialization. Nonprofit institutions, which generally have been mission-driven, are now becoming more market-driven. For university management or administration, the real challenge is how to be responsive to the market, and not prostitute a mission or set of values while doing so.

How are colleges and universities working through that tension between market and mission?

Some institutions have decided that they are very comfortable as entrepreneurial market-driven institutions, and they have accepted that. A few institutions have decided that if the market doesn't want them, they won't stay in business. Others have been forced to either restate, reaffirm, revise, or sharpen their mission to more closely meet public expectations.

I'm of the view that colleges and universities are exceptionally adaptable institutions. They have developed a remarkable set of marketing skills. Higher education is a tremendous marketing success story. Now whether that is without cost is a whole other question.

Marketing literally drives up costs but it also tilts the history. Admissions marketing has really heated up. Some college-eligible 17-year-olds are receiving as many as five 4-color brochures a day in addition to CD-ROMs and videotapes describing various campuses. Colleges and universities are persuading 12-13 million people a year that they have a product worth paying for. So there are all sorts of successes. The success of capital campaigns indicates that higher education still has the capacity to stir people's dreams to the point that they are actually prepared to part with money to support the dream.

You said before that one of the reasons for the discontent among the public was the product. Could you say a little bit more about why that is?

If you wanted to put it most baldly, people have no idea what they are paying for when they buy a college education. In the purest sense, what higher education sells are learning gains. The implicit contract between the parents and the school is that the undergraduate will have a much greater knowledge bank, and a much more enhanced capacity to replenish that knowledge bank, four years hence. But there is very little evidence to indicate the degree to which that service contract has been fulfilled. The undergraduates may nevertheless be satisfied because what they are buying is often a four-year "experience" and a part of it is knowledge. But a part of it is being away from home, maturation, and fraternities and football and the like.

On the other hand, higher education does seem to perform a critical credentialing, sorting, and sifting function which does have validity in the marketplace. Businesses seem generally willing to accept the assessment of the university that its graduates have some innate qualities and the capacity to learn.

Some colleges and universities, however, are "trading down" in that they are accepting students that 15 years ago would have been unthinkable. They are taking on a bigger task in trying to produce learning gains in this population, and produce an acceptable product for employers. As a result, people read about college graduates who can't compute, or who can't read, or who have to be retrained in the work force, and that leads the public again to say, "Gee, I thought that was what college was for."

News reports claim that university costs are driven by administrations that have gotten very, very large and that there are no brakes on the system. Is administrative growth out of control at colleges and universities, and if not, how do you justify that growth?

First off, I'm really not sure administrative costs are out of control. A lot of studies of so-called administrative bloat have shown that, given the changes in the expectations of parents and students, the growth has not been that remarkable. For instance, it is unthinkable to most youngsters today who want a residential college experience to consider a place that does not have a state-of-the-art weight room, a state-of-the-art computer system, e-mail, around the clock security, psychologists, psychiatrists, OB-GYN, 24-hour security, hard-wired dormitories, and cable TV outlets. More and more students are saying that even the notion of having a roommate is an unthinkable proposition!

Dennis O'Brien, former president of the University of Rochester, claimed that the ratio between a college education and a Chevy has remained virtually unchanged over the last 20 or 30 years. Think about what is in today's Chevy. Would you buy a car without air bags, air conditioning, anti-lock brakes, or without automatic windshield wipers?

Are there other factors contributing to the increase in administrative costs?

Yes. Some of the growth is the direct result of increased regulation. Every institution must have staff to be responsive to OSHA, to EEOC, to the General Accounting Office, and to the rules governing federally financed student aid. There are many new impositions from the outside.

But, I think the part that is harder to control is that colleges and universities don't seem to have the capacity to undo what they've done, on the administrative side. We don't have the capacity to disassemble or to dismantle in higher education. In a new study about why costs are up (using Harvard, Yale, Duke and Carleton) Charles Clotfelter writes that the number one driver of costs -- and I think he put it marvelously -- was an "unquenchable thirst for undefined excellence." If you have a desire to be the very best and you cannot define what makes the very best, you spend money everywhere. That is what some institutions seem to be doing. Donald Kennedy last year wrote about "why sunset never arrives on campus." Campuses never have sunsets, they only have sunrises. And that is the way we operate. The curious part is we have the best system of higher education in the world. So if you go around benchmarking, the world benchmarks against us. We don't benchmark against Japan or Germany or England or France in higher education. And if you look at the import-export balance of trade, think about how many students come to the United States for their education.

Some see a widening gulf within universities between the administration and faculties as a result of conflicts over which areas should be reorganized or cut to decrease costs. Is that a cause for concern?

No, I think the rhetoric is much sharper than the reality. The rhetoric tends to be a little bit more divisive. The reality is that colleges and universities today are quite adaptive. They endure quite nicely, and one of the reasons that they do -- particularly the best of them -- is because they create an environment where decentralized initiatives are really the life blood of the institution.

Most people who judge universities from the outside live in a world where centralized initiatives are the way in which work is accomplished. In fact, even within the decentralized university environment, administration and faculty working together are able to develop programs, to develop new initiatives, to develop whole new fields of study.

It's true that, according to a survey done by the Carnegie Foundation, over half of all faculty think that their institutions are autocratically managed. But I think you have to balance that off against the fact that most institutions manage to strike viable arrangements. The shared government system does not allow faculty and administration to get too far from each other.

Faculty are inherently skeptical and inquisitive, cynical, and want to be left alone. Most of them believe in the academy because they have gone through a fairly monastic process of getting a doctorate, and you don't get a doctorate by group work. Faculty tend to be wary of authority, and the really skillful administrators don't walk around like campus police looking for trouble. They develop collaborative relationships with the faculty to ensure that administrative processes are responsive to faculty needs.

You spoke about decentralization on the American campus as a good thing, a kind of a healthy thing. Could you elaborate on that point?

For a lot of institutions, decentralization is a healthy thing. But it also has drawbacks. I would put it that way.

I think most colleges and universities are trying to centralize the areas that can most sensibly be centralized, and that usually consists of the non-instructional, non-research functions. They may try to centralize the operational functions such as data bases, purchasing, and security. They may also centralize technology transfer, patents, or managing federal regulations.

But in the intellectual enterprise I don't see any tendency towards centralization. There is a growing tendency to "orchestrate," but that's different from centralization. An example of orchestration would be to try to create the mechanisms for the expansion of interdisciplinary programs, or the context that allows a multidisciplinary research team to function. The core research product is still going to come from some single wellspring, an individual or small pockets of genius. It is very hard to centralize that.

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