The Past Speaks

You should check out a piece that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago. It certainly got me thinking about higher education.

In An Academic Rip Van Winkle, David Hiscoe discusses his experiences returning to academe after two decades in the private sector. Hiscoe was a contract English literature professor in the early 1980s and then left for the marketing business due to vastly better pay and working conditions. Following the recent collapse of his last private-sector employer, an IT company, he decided to go back to university teaching. He is now director of communications for a large land-grant university.

Hiscoe argues that American universities are being run into the ground by short-sighted cost-cutting managers who bear an uncanny resemblance to the managers who, in his account, recently destroyed so many companies.  I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but his piece is a very good one that deals with many important issues in higher education: access, the social function of the university, and the importance of passionate teachers. He also speaks about the ways in which IT changed higher education during his two decades away from university.

I really liked this paragraph of his piece:

“A big part of my day is spent in the university library. Coming in one morning recently, I paused to watch a young man walk up and join three students who had pulled chairs together around a table. As the new arrival settled in, he let out the archetypal “That’s awesome!” cry, loud enough so that I leaned in to see what he was admiring. He was looking at what appeared to be an animated differential equation making itself visual in stages embedded in a PowerPoint chart. As I walked by, he was practically chewing his lower lip off in his enthusiasm and was asking the laptop driver, “How did you do that?””

Hiscoe’s essay generated many comments (31 and counting at present). I was very interested in the observations made by a reader who did his or her first degree in Ireland, a country that famously abolished all university tuition fees in 1996. Many people credit the abolition of tuition fees with helping to increase the percentage of young people going to university. Some even argue that free university contributed to the tremendous economic growth that Ireland experienced in recent decades.

Anyway, here are the Irish reader’s comments in the feedback section at the foot of Hiscoe’s article:

Consider the following comparison, my Alma Mater in Ireland employed seven full-time groundskeepers for a 45-acre campus when I graduated. The first American university I attended had 83 people full-time workers for a similar acreage. The overseas study office I worked at in Ireland as a student, employed three people, one of whom still kept his teaching duties. The American one I also worked at employed roughly 20 people. The Irish Dental School and Teaching Hospital on campus, which served the entire Eastern part of the country, had one joint administrator (a very, very gifted manager); the American university employed three people to do the same job for a much smaller patient population (I know this because the Irish administrator had visited the American school and was mesmerized by what he perceived as its inefficiency). The American dental school eventually closed for lack of funds. Perhaps Academia in America – which has either soaked the state or the customer (and especially its graduate student customers) to pay for its relentless expansion – has lost sight of its mission?

The Irish reader’s comments are consistent with what I know about the abolition of tuition fees in Ireland and how it was paid for. The Irish government paid for this reform mainly by forcing universities to become more efficient rather than simply giving more money to the universities. Through some miracle, the Irish universities cut costs in ways that undermined neither the quality of the education nor the research. Academic salaries were kept at internationally competitive levels (not that different from a UK university or US state college) and class sizes remained at a reasonable size, although I’m told that some small-group seminars were replaced with lecture courses, which meant that each student got less 1-on-1 time with professors.

Abolishing tuition fees while keeping government per-student grants to universities constant is one way of way of reducing higher education’s share of a country’s GDP. In the US, universities account for 3.9% of GDP, which is higher than in Canada or Ireland. There are both advantages and drawbacks to the Irish approach. The US university system, which consumes a relatively high proportion of GDP, is probably riddled with waste and useless expenditure. A few months ago I was a big US university and I noticed just how well-manicured the lawns were. The faculty offices I saw were sumptuous and I bet the senior administrative offices are even nicer.  The stadium was huge and had box seats too.

I was impressed until I realized that all of this luxury and hideous waste was paid for by a combination of students, most of whom have to go deeply into debt to pay their fees, and the state government, which should probably be using the money to cover the vast number of state residents who lack health insurance. I also noticed that the highways between the university and the airport were is a disgraceful condition. So on one level, the current American approach to higher education, Cadillac funding, is a bit immoral.

On the other hand, all of this lavish funding generates a lot of spin off benefits for society, such as the Silicon Valley firms that grew out of Stanford University, a deep-pocketed university that had plenty of cash for professorial research into electronics and the like. Stanford probably could have cut tuition fees back in 1950 but slashing the budget for lab space and by forcing profs to teach more courses per semester, but that would have had a big impact on the future economic health of California.  Cadillac funding for its university sector allows a country to nurture researchers and poach Nobel Laureates.

For some interesting OECD-based data from 2005 and earlier, see here.

Ireland’s “Chevrolet” approach may drive the best researchers out, resulting in a teaching-centric university system.  This may or may not be a bad.  There is one school of thought that says the best strategy for a country is to let other countries do the research and invention and then borrow their ideas. Ireland, which is home to the manufacturing facilities of many US high-tech companies illustrates this approach– the R&D gets done in California and then Ireland’s plentiful supply of computer science graduates do the making.

In addition to the issue of how large a proportion of GDP we should devote to higher education, there is the secondary question of how we go about cutting costs if we decide to squeeze down the universities’ share of the national economic pies. It appears that the Irish and the American models of cutting costs in higher education are radically different.

It is common knowledge that US universities have, since the 1970s, cut costs by reducing the proportion of faculty who are tenure-track, which effectively cuts the hourly wages they have to pay to get a unit of teaching done.

The  US universities have been trying to slash labour costs in order to cope with reduced support from state governments and the need to find money for luxuries such as expensive stadiums.  Many undergraduates in the United States are now taught by people earning little more than minimum wage and who don’t do research. In fact, many so called professors in the US are really PhD students, which means that a person can graduate without having had a class with an academic who has a PhD, let alone someone who is research active.  I think we would agree that it is better to be taught by a professor who is distinguished in his field and who has the leisure to write good lecture notes rather than PhD student who is teaching nine courses just to survive.  Under the US model of cost-cutting, the quality of education suffers, since the students are no longer exposed to research-led teaching, even though “research-led teaching” is a slogan popular with admin people.

It appears that the Irish have cut costs in a different way–students are still being taught by proper, well-paid, research lectures,  skimping on frills such as landscaping and replacing computers less frequently.

Speaking personally, I would be willing to accept a modest cut in pay, benefits, and working environment if that was part of a package of reforms to make all universities in Canada tuition free.  A slightly smaller salary and a few more weeds on campus would be worth it since it would make for a better society in the long run. Needless to say, I would only take such a pay cut if every other professor was also making a similar sacrifices. If everyone else is getting a free computer each year, then I want my free computer too.

At some point, a comparative historian of education will write a book explaining why American and Irish universities  had such different approaches to cost cutting.  Ireland is probably the most American country in Europe, with low tax rates and a very free-enterprise minded type of government.  Yet the education policy is totally different.

I suspect that inter-university spectator sports, which consume so much time, attention, and money at American universities are part of the problem.   It takes a bold university administrator in the tradition of Robert Maynard Hutchins to abolish sports programs. Hutchins was the President of the University of Chicago who shut down its football team in the 1930s and put the money into academic departments, a decision which helped Chicago to become a first-class university.