Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College, has just performed a remarkable public service. I am out of practice praising college presidents, few of whom do much more than wend a path among their numerous adversaries, the obstacles that confront their institutions, and the obstreperous demands of faculty, students, alumni, trustees, legislators, and radicalized interest groups. It is a hard job to helm a university, and turnover is high.
Very few do what President Beilock did. But I recommend that others try.
If you have not yet caught up with this story, here is what Beilock did: She published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, frankly acknowledging the drastic decline in public confidence in American higher education. She allowed that the loss of confidence is warranted.
As a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education and other megaphones of the liberal establishment, I know that college presidents know Beilock is right, but they also know that it is an unspeakable truth. The best they can do is declare that the loss of confidence is temporary and that when people come to their senses, they will realize that their colleges and universities fully deserve the respect that students, parents, and taxpayers used to have for the nation’s thinkeries.
But the American public is more skeptical than ever before in our nation’s history that college is “worth it” and that judgment will only grow more intense in the years ahead—unless Beilock’s sage advice is heeded.
Her short essay names five problems and their possible solutions. The problems are: unaffordability, poor return on investment, political posturing, erasure of poor performance, and corrupt admissions. I’ve phrased some of those more bitingly than Beilock does. For example, what I label “corrupt admissions,” she phrases as the need “to reinstate an SAT/ACT requirement.” That requirement was, however, banished mostly because it stood in the way of favoritism in admissions.
Beilock’s willingness to allude to this, even indirectly, is astonishingly brave. All five pieces of her indictment are glued together by the fundamental dishonesty of contemporary colleges and universities. They pretend to uphold the highest standards of integrity, but they actually trade it away in pursuit of goals they rarely acknowledge.
Why is college unaffordable? Because it can get away with charging extraordinary prices. That’s mostly because students can be tricked into borrowing the money through federal loans. But it is also because of the antiquated organization of the enterprise. Colleges typically acquire and maintain a mammoth investment in lightly-used real estate, and they employ a highly paid professional workforce that puts in a few hours per week teaching. And some people have begun to wonder if a convivial artificial intelligence (AI) robot may be as good as the tweed-jacketed pipe-smoking human whose office hours are from 3 to 4 on Thursday afternoon.
These are gross exaggerations. I loved my tree-lined, duck-ponded, nineteenth-century campus and my deeply learned college professors. And I did my best during my own professorial years to deserve the respect and attention of my students. But I also learned enough as a university administrator to understand that the institution was profoundly predatory.
Which brings us to Beilock’s second point: poor return on investment. A College degree might be better reckoned a luxury good than a capital expense, but apologists for higher education are forever saying it is an “investment.” But I suppose you could say a weekend at the spa is an investment too. “Me time” is always an investment in self-regard, but the rewards seldom align with the demands of the marketplace.
Higher education captures billions of dollars in federal loans and leaves a great many students stuck with unsupportable debt. American parents are at last awakening from the deceit that they must pay (one way or another) for their children to attend “good” college, or those children will have a sketchy future.
That proposition was never really true, but it is now patently false. Lots of occupations that require no college degree at all provide annual incomes greater than those of average college graduates. How could this be? The laws of supply and demand are strictly enforced. Too many under-qualified college graduates have to compete with too few plumbers and licensed electricians. And so on.
But if college is to be seen as an “investment,” it is right and proper to ask, “What is the return on said investment?” This opens the door to the expectation that colleges will provide some auditable account of average earnings per degree over a suitable span: Five years after graduation? Ten? By age 40?
Beilock is open-ended at this point but explains that Dartmouth starts “career- and life-planning programs” freshman year and guarantees “a paid internship or comparable experiential opportunity for any student who wants one.” That’s not nothing, but I wouldn’t trade a down payment on a house for that.
Beilock’s points about the need for colleges to jettison political posturing and the fake grades that result from grade inflation could be straight out of President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education or the National Association of Scholars’ playbook. The most noteworthy things here are not the ideas themselves, but the source. These are declarations from the president of an Ivy League college. No other Ivy League president—not Christopher Eisegruber at Princeton, not Christina Paxson at Brown, not Alan Gruber at Harvard, not Michael Kotlikoff at Cornell, not Maurie McInnis at Yale, and not J. Larry Jameson at the University of Pennsylvania has gone anywhere near such straightforward declarations.
I am fairly sure they aren’t about to be swayed by President Trump or by the National Association of Scholars, but—who knows?—maybe President Beilock will shame them into doing the right thing.
There are more than 2,000 other colleges and universities in America that could also take Beilock’s message to heart. The Ivy League institutions can coast on their endowments for decades to come, but most of the rest are in more perilous positions. As Beilock points out, public confidence in them is in short supply. But they must also deal with the decline in the number of college-age students, the uncertainties surrounding the age of AI, and a discouraging job market for college grads. Maybe it is time to get serious about affordability, return on investment, political posturing, honest evaluation of student performance, and admission metrics.
Beilock’s recommendations stop short in some areas. She is silent, for example, about the way the faculty excludes conservatives. (99 percent of political donations from Dartmouth faculty last year went to Democrats.) But you have to start somewhere, and Beilock has—shockingly—shown where.
Photo by US Department of Education - https://www.flickr.com/photos/48445211@N06/53457567309/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146131799
