Humanities and Social Sciences under Fire in Florida

William A. Link

In the coming days Florida Governor Rick Scott’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform will submit its final report. At its center are recommendations that state-determined “accountability” metrics shall determine university funding and that Florida adopt a new funding model of differential tuition rates that favor “strategic programs” (mostly science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM disciplines) also to be determined by the state legislature. Students will potentially pay much higher tuition rates for "non-strategic programs" (mostly humanities and social sciences).

A group of concerned faculty from the Department of History at the University of Florida has drafted a letter to Governor Rick Scott opposing the task force’s recommendations and calling on him to incorporate faculty input into reforms to the state university system.  (See the petition here.)

For more, see:

Jordan Weissmann, "Should Science Majors Pay Less for College Than Art Majors?" Atlantic, November 5, 2012

Elizabeth Popp Berman, "More STEM Majors Won’t Solve Higher Education’s Problems," Chronicle, November 1, 2012

William A. Link, Richard J. Milbauer Professor, History Department, University of Florida

Superabundance

Chris Beneke
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NPR recently aired a story on the tower of 7,000 Abraham Lincoln-centered books (they’re actually replicas and amount to roughly half of the 15,000 total Lincoln volumes in existence) that now extends 34 feet above the floor of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. It’s an arresting sight, a soaring tribute to our most important president and the historians who have written about him.

What this immense stack portends to a graduate student considering a career in Lincoln studies, I can only dimly fathom. It’s worth noting that there was no foundation of journal articles here; just books. Most of us won’t have reason to find the Lincoln book tower so daunting. We spend our professional lives erecting theses upon much less imposing and much more manageable stacks of historiography.

Still, the Lincoln Tower heralds an increasingly universal condition among historians that we might term superabundance. The problem derives from the formidable supply of primary sources—thanks to Google Books and other online repositories of historical texts—as well as our output of monographs, journal articles, and dissertations. As a result, what often makes historical research challenging today has less to do with the scarcity of primary sources or their geographic dispersal than the mini-towers of primary and secondary sources that we need to sort through on our way to an original argument. Superabundance is a first-world-type problem in that it mainly afflicts the comfortable and its direct consequences, which may include regular bouts of ennui, are far from catastrophic. Still, it’s an “issue,” as Americans like to describe their non-fatal maladies.

Historians aren’t alone in confronting the scholarly challenges posed by superabundance. Nearly every other academic field is afflicted by its own prodigious production. In a 2009 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein reported that “[f]rom 1986 to 2008, Wordsworth collected 2,257 books, chapters, dissertations, etc. Faulkner came in at 2,781, Milton at 3,294, Whitman at 1,509, Woolf at 3,217, and Shakespeare at 18,799.”

No doubt many thousands of illuminating volumes on Lincoln and Shakespeare are yet to be written. But how many more—and at what rate? This is the weightier question posed by our own scholarly superabundance. The good embodied in that indomitable stack of Lincoln volumes is not the profit that some ideal reader might reap from digesting every single one of them, because no sane person would—and certainly not a person who hoped to ever write anything themselves. Moreover, and this warrants more than passing mention, only a handful of libraries can now afford to own more than a fraction of the total.

Recognizing that humanities research contributes a great deal to the public good and that every teaching historian should have extensive and regular experience with it, would higher education be any worse if only 2000 works on Lincoln were produced over the next decade, as opposed to 2500? Would our public culture suffer? Over the last three years or so, Mark Bauerlein has been unsettling Chronicle readers with questions of just this sort. In particular, he asks: Might there be diminishing marginal returns in humanities scholarship? And might the sheer volume of this production bury high quality work under a heap of scholarly mediocrity?

Last May, Stephen J. Mexal countered Bauerlein with a stout defense of research quantity, arguing from the twin premises that 1) “we cannot know in advance which projects will matter, or in what way. The easiest way to account for this uncertainty is to produce as much work as possible and let the future worry about quality or utility” and 2) the peer review process is indefinitely scalable and “a larger community of active scholars means a stronger, more democratic community of ‘peers’ to perform the valuable work of peer review.” (For another astute consideration along these lines—comparing scholarly projects to the risks inherent in new business enterprises—see Johann Neem’s post, “The Value of Useless Research.”)

Mexal and Neem make a convincing case for generous funding of a wide-range of humanities research, which I’m pretty sure Bauerlein also favors. But Bauerlein’s argument is really about priorities. It assumes a resource-neutral environment in which the superabundance represented by the tower of Lincoln books is not a reason to halt, or even significantly curtail research, but simply to reevaluate our priorities as scholars and teachers. Perhaps wary of too close an association with market economics, Bauerlein calls it “redistribution.” What he’s really pointing to is the need for a realignment of incentives. It boils down to this: If we’re going to improve the quality of higher education and expand its impact, we may need to reward interaction with students more generously and reward individual research quantity less so.

College football has changed over time. And it hasn’t.

Chris Beneke
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With Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno’s dismissal amid the sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed Happy Valley, college football is under scrutiny again. So too are the huge sums of money that sustain this monumental sports and media enterprise. Paterno will be paid a little over $1 million from Penn State this year. That is actually modest by comparison with his peers; in 2010, University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban received over $6 million in compensation. Paterno’s salary and celebrity stand out only in contrast with everyone else—his players for instance, as well the faculty who teach them. For good reason then, the head football coach’s salary is often treated as an index of the distance a college has departed from its core academic commitments (we’re still awaiting the first news van to be overturned in ousted PSU President Graham Spanier’s name), not to mention its ethical standards.

What is the history that got us here?

In his book Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, historian Michael Oriard contends that the big change in college football occurred in the early 1970s. Until then, head coaches were paid much like deans or upper-tier professors. Moreover, many held tenured faculty positions. They were themselves part of the faculty. But with “the NCAA’s transformation of student-athletes into athlete-students in 1972 and 1973—making freshman eligible, dropping the 1.6 rule [which stipulated that a college could only offer you a scholarship if you were projected to receive at least a 1.6 GPA], and instituting the one-year scholarship” big-time college began to serve its own interests rather than the universities or their student-athletes (192). “When universities and conferences won the right to negotiate their own television contracts in 1984, and the competition for market share intensified, coaches were in a position to cash in.”* Huge, president-humbling salaries (PSU’s Spanier earned a mere $800K this year) followed.

But the exorbitant pay awarded to college coaches isn’t the only blemish on the system. While it has shot up shamelessly since the early 1970s, the compensation (essentially tuition, room, and board) at schools with big-time athletic programs has barely budged. “It’s socialism for athletes,” sociologist Allen Sack told New York Magazine, and “free enterprise for everyone else.” Agreeing that student athletes should be paid, Taylor Branch offered a devastating critique of the current system in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “[T]he real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited,” Branch writes, “it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

Since its improbable emergence on the most cerebral of campuses in the late 19^th century, college football has represented something of an anomaly—a consistently irresistible anomaly, it should be noted. Male-dominated and devastatingly brutal, it plays out its gridiron dramas nearly every Saturday at institutions which aim at very different ends during the week. Such tensions date at least to 1892, the year, Oriard notes, when the newly established University of Chicago hired Amos Alonzo Stagg, “a former Yale All-American, two years out of college, to start a football program [and agreed] to pay him as much as the school’s top professors in order to lure him from the East Coast.”^ In Stagg’s day, football deaths were common and corruption was rampant.

But don’t count on college football’s extinction, or even its radical reform, any time soon. Though the decimal points have moved to the right, the often indefinable allure of this sport—along with the celebrity it generates, the money it attracts, the ethical corruption and moral deprivation it sometimes invites—endures as ever. More on that, maybe, some other time.

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*Michael Oriard, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192, 193.

^Oriard, Bowled Over, 191

Does Florida need Anthropologists?

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, Florida Governor Rick Scott declared that Florida did not need to waste effort educating students in fields outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM fields. Degrees in those fields, he said, would guarantee Floridians jobs, while tax money spent in other fields was thrown away. Florida doesn’t need “a lot more anthropologists,” he said. “It’s a great degree if people want to get it. But we don’t need them here.”*

While Governor Scott’s comments have raised hackles in the non-scientific academic community, he wasn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. Indeed, there is something to what he says. Americans desperately need better training in math and the sciences, and we don’t currently have the tools to make that happen. Last year, for example, when New Hampshire officials listed the areas in which there were critical shortages of qualified teachers, they discovered critical shortages in mathematics and all the sciences—chemistry, earth sciences, life science, and physics—from grades 5-12. Ouch.

But there is a fatal flaw in the reasoning that we must invest in STEM to the detriment of other fields. People making that argument forget the central issue in science and technology today: that it is changing at an extraordinary rate. It is changing so fast, that, as the video below notes, the top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. As the video points out, this means

that we are educating children today for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that have not been invented, to solve problems that we don’t yet know are problems.

To create educated workers and informed citizens in such a world, the solution is not to teach them specific technological skills. They need to be able to think creatively. They need to know how to manipulate information in a variety of ways, and they need to be able to communicate their discoveries. They need to know how to work with a variety of people in wide-flung fields, and they need to know how to adapt to changing technologies. They need to know how societies grow and change.

This is the turf of liberal arts scholars.

Recently, pundits have complained that liberal arts proponents offer as justification for their field of study either that it has an explicit economic use or that its beauty is that it has no use at all. In light of the extraordinary demands of today’s technological economy, it seems to me reasonable to argue instead that the continuing importance of the liberal arts is in providing the skills for today’s workers to move from job to job, from technology to technology, from idea to idea, throughout their lifetimes.

Florida probably needs anthropologists, after all.

“No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?

Dan Allosso

Graduate students in the humanities are well aware that, in the words of Inside Higher Ed this week, many of our disciplines have promoted alternate career paths outside the academy while at the same time encouraging us to hold onto the hope that although others might need them, we won’t. Now, however, the president of the American Historical Association (AHA) has apparently committed his organization to admitting to history grad students that there are not enough jobs to go around, and the situation is not getting better.

These sentiments appear in a statement issued by Anthony Grafton, president of the AHA, and James Grossman, its executive director. The essay, titled “No More Plan B” and posted on the AHA website on September 26th, criticizes the traditional department’s approach to grad students on the grounds that it “ignores the facts of academic employment . . . it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.”

Now it would be easy to blame faculty for candy-coating both the overall change in the academy (or at least, in the humanities), and for making their program seem like one where these issues need not concern grad students. Would we be angry to find how few people our department has placed into significant, tenure-track positions in the last five years? But we’re all adults: why didn’t we know this going in?

Or—and this is where it gets interesting—if we really did suspect that the old center would not hold, why did we come anyway? Forgetting about the traditional academy and its appointment with oblivion, and remembering what we each, individually love about our discipline and subjects might be the key to personal solutions that will change not only our own outcomes, but the academy itself.

Yes, departments that can’t place PhDs should probably stop producing them. But what if this apocalypse for the academy liberates us, the grad students, and forces us to refocus? What do we hope to achieve by our work? What difference do we want to make in the world? Do we see ourselves teaching undergraduates in ten years, opening young people’s minds to creative, critical thinking; sharpening their analytical and interpretive skills; helping them learn to read, write, and speak effectively? If this is our core mission, does it matter whether the students are sitting in front of us in a lecture hall or convening in an online forum? On the other hand, if our main interest is research, or writing—either for expert audiences or for the general public—then perhaps the breakdown of the traditional professional model offers us a chance to focus on what we are really good at, and leave the rest behind.

The scary part is, we’ll have to really be good at it. The authors of “No More Plan B” hint that there’s something wrong with the idea that “the life of scholarship” protects us from “impure motives and bitter competition.” We shouldn’t see non-tenure track employment, they tell us, as a fall from “the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism.” But it goes beyond simply embracing the market or awakening from a dream of the idealized, highly compensated academic life. The academy, after all, exists within society and the market, and responds—albeit slowly—to the needs and desires of students.

The rest of society has been struggling for a generation with many of the issues now facing the academy. Technology has been replacing humans on assembly lines, in service professions, and even in “Knowledge” work for decades. Globalization, outsourcing, and new media have changed or obsoleted entire industries. Along the way, the two questions that have been continually asked of each individual are, “what are your specific responsibilities?” and “what is your value-add?”

Steve Jobs was famous for promoting a corporate culture at Apple centered on the idea of the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Unlike many people at other companies (especially in Silicon Valley!) who rarely achieved anything from one staff meeting to the next, Apple workers got used to seeing a DRI name next to every task and action item. Individual responsibility helped the bottom line, of course; but it also gave people a way to say “I did that,” and know what they had contributed.

I’m not arguing that the academy should adopt direct individual responsibility—there are too many interests arrayed against it. I’m suggesting that each of us grad students can find a way out of the “Plan B” trap, by deciding what we do that benefits society (or the discipline, or the advance of useful knowledge, etc.), and then articulating it and doing it. What is our personal value-add? Regardless of whether we’re given an opportunity to do it in the institutional format we expected. After all, whose “Plan B” was it, anyway?

Impressions

Chris Beneke

My understanding of art history is tenuous. At best. But one thing I’ve learned from the popular science writer Jonah Lehrer is that a revolution in 19th-century painting coincided with the advent of a disruptive new technology.* That technology was the camera, and the artistic innovation that it encouraged was Impressionism. With the emergence of the camera, Lehrer writes, “painting lost its monopoly on representation.” Once the static could be captured by a mechanical device, the painter’s comparative advantage resided in his or her ability to convey the fleeting, sensory-laden character of everyday experience. Representation gave way to impression, symbol, and expression.

There may be a lesson here for academia, and historians in particular. Educationally related technological breakthroughs of recent decades—yellow lined paper, VHS players, Laserdiscs, PowerPoint, the insulated thermos mug—could be harnessed by the lecturing professor in the traditional classroom. DVDs and YouTube allowed the professor to illustrate her points with a vivid film clip, or to catch a rejuvenating 45-minute nap. However, the larger cyber universe won’t be so easily tamed. The internet, as we have been told, is a genuinely disruptive technology. There will be no napping.

None of this is news. Dan Allosso has been writing about the radical and generally positive impact online learning is likely to have. I wrote something myself a couple of years ago. And nearly every day, someone pronounces the end of the university as we know it. Usually, that person is Kevin Carey, but not always. Online learning clearly presents a challenge to the way things have been done. (If you doubt it, ask yourself whether you are capable of giving a better lecture on a particular topic than anyone in the world—or check out Jonathan Rees’ blog.) It’s concurrence with an increasingly untenable college cost structure should be worrisome to all of us.

Setting aside the daunting tuition and student debt issues, the parallel rise of the camera and Impressionist painting offers us an example of how a disruptive technological change can result in the sort of transformative change that Allosso, Carey, Rees and others been talking about. Like the Impressionists, we need to capitalize on the ephemerality and distinctiveness of each classroom situation, every day. We also need to presume that the seats bolted to the floors in our lecture halls and classrooms will not be occupied because a professor happens to be standing in front of them delivering the same lecture—one now easily recorded and distributed—he has been giving for the past 15 years. Because of the web’s capacity for delivering knowledge to us in the comfort of our homes or our carefully guarded Starbucks tables, the live lecture’s marginal utility as a means of conveying static truths to a passive audience has diminished, maybe forever.

History teachers need not wholly despair. For years, pedagogical experts (don’t smirk, there is some truth to the designation) have been telling us that students need to be actively engaged in order to learn better anyway. Until now, many of us have been able to evade the implications of that insight because our anecdote-riddled sixty-minute accounts of past events have been so, well, engaging. But like the 19th-century artists who found that their value as purveyors of verisimilitude had faded, we too need to develop creative ways to use history to expand our audience’s understanding of the world. That’s a cliché I know—like telling a baseball team that it needs to win one game at a time. And this process will prove challenging for people like me who have always seen ourselves as doing our job best when we represent the past most faithfully. But it may already be past time for us to think seriously about painting water lilies.

________

* It’s conceivable that my art history problem is related to the fact that I derive my conclusions about the subject from popular science writing, but I digress.

What's the Point of College?

Randall Stephens

If you haven't already checked it out, have a look at Louis Menand's New Yorker essay, "Live and Learn: Why We Have College," June 6, 2011. The Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual historian and Harvard professor considers the changing nature of college in recent years and the various ideals that have shaped higher ed. He also discusses several books that take stock of the situation. Are we in the midst of a major change in higher education? Says Menand:

Before 1945, élite private colleges like Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a privileged social class. Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five boys from Groton applied to Harvard. Four hundred and two were accepted. In 1932, Yale received thirteen hundred and thirty applications, and it admitted nine hundred and fifty-nine—an acceptance rate of seventy-two per cent. Almost a third of those who enrolled were sons of Yale graduates. . . .

The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roksa believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated—their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected—and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.

If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.>>>

Notes from Grad School: The Last Professors

Dan Allosso

In a 2010 review of Frank Donoghue’s book The Last Professors, D.R. Koukal mentioned that while reading it he had several pangs of survivor’s guilt, as a member of the “dwindling community” of tenured humanities professors. This is an interesting sentiment, which could open a lively discussion on the role of tenured faculty in the change facing the educational system, but that’s a topic of a future post. Donoghue resists the idea that this is a new crisis. He calls attention to the historical griping of business magnates like Carnegie, Birdseye, and Crane against the academy, and to F.W. Taylor’s claim that progress happens only when people use “originality and ingenuity to make real additions to the world’s knowledge instead of reinventing things which are old.”

Donoghue also questions assumptions regarding the traditional bundle of activities that go with being a professor. Among these are the beliefs that, “professors are authors,” that “our scholarship determines our relative prestige,” and that “scholarship is integrally related to teaching.” Donoghue suggests that “the typical academic monograph sells 250 copies and goes largely unread, except in institutional venues of evaluation.” He suggests this element of academic work is a product of the quest for tenure, and that once this goal is acquired many professors lose interest in research. It might be fruitful for grad students like myself to try to "unbundle" the various aspects of our chosen profession, ask ourselves which of them we really want to focus on, and then pursue opportunities that match. We might even find that the traditional system is not the ideal solution, which might alter our perspective on the prospect of change.

“Any meaningful debate about tenure,” Donoghue says, “has to start with the fact that it is slowly but surely disappearing, and the current workforce in higher education is unwittingly hastening its extinction.” But when he says the current workforce, Donoghue does not mean just tenured professors. “Tenured and tenure-track professors currently constitute only 35% of college teaching personnel” in America, he says, and “this number is steadily falling.” Non tenure-track instructors are part of this workforce, and “In no other workforce is there such a wide disparity, both in income and in day-to-day life, between groups of people whose jobs are, in part at least, so similar,” he says. Donoghue notes that the use of adjunct faculty varies widely: “at Stanford, 6.4% full-time faculty members are off the tenure track, while at Harvard the figure is 45.4%. One pattern, though, is indisputable: those sectors of higher education that are currently expanding at the fastest pace–community colleges and for-profit institutions–are most resistant to the idea of a tenured faculty. Nationwide, 65% of the faculty at two-year institutions are part timers, and 80% are not on the tenure track.” These are scary numbers, viewed from Donoghue's perspective. But what is it like to teach in a place without tenure if your dream was to teach? What is it like to work in a place without such a rigid, caste-like disparity between roles?

Donoghue describes what he terms for-profit universities as, at best, vocational and professional training institutes, and at worst, mere degree-mills capitalizing on the wage disparity between holders of high school and college diplomas. He quotes a memo from a manager at a for-profit university, assessing the team of instructors based on student evaluations: “most of you do an excellent job . . . if you score below 4.0–I will be talking with you directly. We cannot retain instructors with scores in the 3.0 range. Have a good day!” Although this message is a bit brutal, as Donoghue says, it also seems to underscore an issue of accountability he is less enthusiastic about addressing. He chides the University of Phoenix for granting an MBA to Shaquille O’Neal, but does not seem equally concerned with the weekend “executive MBAs” granted by prestigious academic institutions. Donoghue criticizes the financial performance of these for-profit universities as well as their mission, as if there is no thought of profit (financial or otherwise) at traditional institutions. “They focus on the tight relationship between curriculum and job preparation and the appeal primarily to the older, working adults who are steadily becoming the typical American college student,” he says. But do we really want to be opposing working people who give up their leisure time, in order to try to make a better life for themselves and their families?

Donoghue seems to view the question of why undergraduates go to college as a battleground where the humanities must overturn students’ (and administrations’) market calculations. In the future, he suggests “the BA and BS will largely be replaced by a kind of educational passport that will document each student’s various educational certifications from one or several schools, the credentials directly relevant to his or her future occupation.” But “this will not be the whole picture. Like American society as a whole, with its widening gap between haves and have-nots, America’s universities will grow increasingly stratified. The elite, privileged universities and colleges will continue to function much as they do today, championing the liberal arts and the humanities and educating the children of the elite and privileged for positions of leadership . . . the gulf between these elite universities and institutions that educate everyone else will widen in new ways that will complicate our efforts to define both the idea of higher education and the concept of access to higher education.” While the "educational passport" at first seems like a utilitarian instrument for meeting job requirements, the idea it contains of a lifelong process of education, belonging to the student and portable between schools, has a certain appeal. In addition to a BS and an MA, for example, I hold several certifications, including an NASD principal's license and a UNIX System Administrator's certification from a Tier-1 University's technical night-school. If access to elite institutions does become more limited, flexible and effective educational options for the rest of us will become more important than ever.

The Last Professors presents a series of facts that are interesting and surprising. For example, “nearly 80% of the total PhD’s in the country are awarded by just 133 universities. This is a staggering imbalance, as those…universities make up a tiny fraction–less than 2%–of the 3,500 traditional institutions of higher learning in the country and only one fifth of all institutions that grant PhD’s.” Donoghue also notes that there were “a record 17.3 million students enrolled in college in 2004, up 28% since 1991. Enrollment is expected to increase another 11% by 2013. The image of an 18 to 20-year-old, full-time student in residence at a traditional college, however, is now a figment of the past; only 16% of all undergraduates now fit that profile. Today, the majority of students are over the age of 25, as compared to just 22% in 1970.” Clearly the game is changing, and grad students should begin to think about and act on these changes. Donoghue suggests there are two main things that tenured professors can do to improve their situation. First, they must challenge the main corporatist tenet, “the assumption that a practical, occupation oriented college education leads to a secure job and thus it is crucial to improving one’s quality of life.” The second action that humanists need to take, he says, is to “balance their commitment to the content of higher education with a thorough familiarity with how the university works.” Donoghue suggests tenured professors (and those who want to be tenured professors) “need to resist the tendency to romanticize our work,” and need to better understand the real distribution of work at a university, and the causes and likely effects of this distribution. While I think this is a good suggestion, the pool of tenure-track opportunities is drying up without a corresponding decrease in the number of new PhDs (see graph from 2010).

Some of us may need to think about finding new ways to do what we love, rather than just elbowing our way to the front of the queue. And the prospect of drawing a line in the sand and trying to argue against the vocational goals that bring so many students to higher education seems misguided. The claim that undergraduates have to choose between academic purity and a degree that will help them get ahead in the world sets up a confrontation the humanities cannot win. And it flies in the face of experience, since in many places, the humanities have found at least a relatively safe haven in their role as a vital complement to job-preparation and a key to general education.

Notes from Grad School: The Coming College Crisis

Dan Allosso

The two wide spots in the 2010 US “Population Pyramid” reflect college-age Americans and their parents. For years—since I was an undergrad, really—I’ve suspected that when a graph of the annual cost of college crossed the annual income of average Americans, there would be a problem. It recently occurred to me—now that I’m a parent of two high-schoolers—that the real issue is slightly more complicated.

I’m not a statistician, but I suspect that if you were to look at the numbers, you’d see some interesting things. First, the average US family size (2000 census) was 3.14, with an average of .90 children per family. But wait! 52% of US households had no children at all. The average number of children, in families that have children, is 1.86—for convenience let’s call that 2. This means there are really two groups of people in America: half of us have kids and the other half don't. We probably have different perspectives on education as a social good.

So, in a family with children, the average is two children. They tend to be close in age, which means they tend to get to college age at roughly the same time. So, going back to that population pyramid, on average those college-age Americans in that first wide spot have a college-age sibling. About 60% of American kids go to college, and they’re more likely to go if a sibling also goes. So, in those college-oriented families, the parents in that wide spot that centers on age 45-49, on average have two kids in college.

Add to this the conclusions of studies like the one done by the St. Louis Fed, and the picture becomes even clearer. Their “wealth curve” shows that married couples with children have only half the net worth of married couples without children. And the overwhelming majority of the wealth in America is held by people aged 55 to 75. So what we’re looking at is a big batch of Americans coming to college from families of modest means.

Annual average tuition, fees, room and board (TFRB) at four-year private institutions has grown from $18,312 in 1986, to $30,367. Average TFRB at four-year public institutions has risen from $7,528 to $12,796 over the same period. So if you’re the average family described above, you're looking at over $240,000 to send your two kids to private schools, or $100,000 for public. And the bills come over a six or seven year period.

When I was an undergrad, there was no FAFSA. Parents were not automatically expected to pony up the funds. I saved, took out a small student loan, and worked. That’s not even an option for my kids. But beyond the personal implications, what do these changes mean for the American economy? What are the long-term implications of scooping all the savings, home equity, and retirement nest-eggs of middle class Americans, into this one bucket? Or of this group of Americans taking on huge additional debt? And what will happen to an American higher education industry that has become accustomed to these revenues, when people can no longer afford them, when credit dries up, or when the population pyramid shifts again in ten years, and the narrower bands of parents and children reach college-age?