America’s Universities: A Multi-Generational Perspective

I recently passed my 85th birthday, having been born on a now constitutionally prohibited event in American history (the Election Day victory of FDR to a third term) in 1940. Old age can be annoying, filled with aches, pains, and memory loss, but it does confer a sometimes useful longish historical perspective. I have now passed two-thirds of a century directly involved in America’s colleges and universities, first as a student, then as a professor, and even as a public policy guru offering commentary on the state of higher education at the bequest of politically powerful potentates. I was teaching class the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and participated in a PhD in history final examination very recently. What are the big changes over my career (which was preceded by growing up in the shadow of a major research university, the University of Illinois, in the 1940s and 1950s)?

1. Learning has declined per student even as the number of them has grown. Actually, this proposition is a bit hard to prove, since universities, in the business of disseminating information, try hard to keep the public from being informed on how much their students actually learn. Government time use data suggests the typical student spends perhaps 30 percent less time on academic activities today than in the Golden Age when I was in college, mid-last century. 
2. Grade inflation. The declining work effort of students reflects the fact that at most schools today, including virtually all the elite ones, grades below “B” are rare, and a large percentage of students get an “A.” Personally, typically in a big principles of economics class in the 1960s, maybe 5 to 10 percent of my students got A grades, the most common grade was “C,” and large numbers (at least 20 percent, often more) got “D” or “F” grades. Today, an untenured professor giving those grades might lose her job—we can’t damage the delicate self-esteem of today’s youth. 
3. The faculty, always moderately liberal, has become more so, and generally less tolerant of divergent points of view, jeopardizing robust civil debate of issues of the day. Conservative faculty and students increasingly self-censor, worried about negative effects of expressing views that are actually in sync with those of a majority of the American populace. The pronounced leftish orientation of campuses has probably contributed importantly to a radicalization of American politics, including such phenomena as New York City electing a hard-left socialist as mayor.
4. Frenetic growth has been replaced by enrollment stagnation or even decline, and additionally reflects a flight to quality by students. New or rapidly growing state universities of modest reputation booming in the mid-20th century are usually now facing falling or precariously stable enrollments, while the top schools, especially private ones, have record numbers of attendees, although perceived excesses of the past few years have significantly hurt some elite schools, especially in the Ivy League.
5. Administrative bloat has become very real, very expensive, and very disruptive to promoting an atmosphere devoted to learning and discovery. The faculty can be loony and impractical, but they are mostly scholars primarily devoted to teaching and research, typically worrying at least somewhat less about, say, the racial composition of their students, or campus efforts to promote climate change or sustainability than their own research and teaching. In many schools, the faculty has declined in its influence in determining the priorities and resource allocation of the university. An often highly leftish jihad of administrators has gained increased clout. Partially to counteract that, faculty unionization has shown some increase.
6. College has become more costly, one of the very few things financially more burdensome on family budgets than two generations ago. Buying a new car, taking a week-long cruise, or buying a loaf of bread or a bottle of beer takes far less work effort today than six decades ago because of rising productivity in the general economy. But it takes more, not fewer, employees to educate a college student today than in the middle of the last century (implying college productivity may have fallen), and, despite some recent moderation, tuition fees have soared.
7. Residential campuses have become more upscale, with better facilities than prevailed during the mid-20th century. As living standards have generally risen, they have improved for students too, with somewhat nicer living facilities, more recreational options (e.g., climbing walls, even lazy rivers). North Carolina’s High Point University, for example, has a booming enrollment, and lets its students occasionally take their dates to a filet mignon dinner in a university owned gourmet restaurant. )
8. The vocational advantages of a college degree, which generally rose throughout the late 20th century, have now stabilized and are probably now in decline. Whereas the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago hurt the uneducated and unskilled who were replaced by machines, the AI Revolution could well lead to educated college grads losing their jobs to a new generation of machines. The vocational attractiveness of, say, being a plumber or welder compared with a math, finance, science, or computer-oriented college major, declined in the late 20th century, but seems to be rising lately.
9. The Federal role in education has dramatically increased, reducing the institutional autonomy of universities. Affirmative action programs and federal rules about using humans in research projects became part of 1970s campus life, and regulation continued to grow after the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in the 1980s, culminating in decrees such as the 2011 “Dear Colleague letter” mandating harsh Star Chamber justice for males accused of sexual misconduct. Increasingly, until very recently, college resource allocation decisions seemed often to be more determined by “diversity” criteria reflecting national and campus identity politics than pure academic merit.
10. Federal student financial aid was modest in the mid-20th century but exploded with new student loan and grant programs. These programs have had profound and often profoundly negative unintended consequences, including sharp increases in tuition fees and an actual probable decline in the proportion of college graduates coming from lower-income groups, frightened by soaring tuition fees.
11. Although initially slow to evolve, new approaches to computer-based distance learning gained acceptance in a dramatic way after the COVID epidemic erupted in 2020. More students now rarely personally interact with a professor. Mass forms of lecturing at low tuition fees to students using superstar professors through MOOCs (massive open online courses), which 15 years ago was thought to hold great promise, has not become dominant. And the COVID crisis showed both the possibilities but also the grave limitations of online learning.
12. A traditional emphasis on the humanities, social sciences, as well as education training has waned, while some vocational-oriented areas such as business, communications, and some STEM disciplines have grown in importance.

The list above is far from exhaustive. For example, college sports have become big business at many schools, with increasingly tenuous ties to higher education. Even at smaller liberal arts colleges, collegiate athletic opportunities are considered a major student recruiting device.  Medical education has also changed a good deal, with dozens of schools operating vast clinical and hospital facilities at which student training itself sometimes seems to be a distinctly second-tier emphasis. For a long time, federal research funding was growing rapidly, again increasing campus dependence on federal support. New PhD programs were also abundant, but now doctoral enrollment is in decline at some schools.

On balance, international interactions have grown over time, with foreign student enrollments generally growing and study abroad programs more popular for U.S. students. Closer to home, campuses were heavily dominated by white males when I started teaching, while today that is definitely not the case, even to the point that perhaps there is a strong anti-male bias on some campuses today. 

As the French say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Change is the norm. In some ways, however, things have not changed too radically. Classes today still bear considerable resemblance to those in the mid-20th (or even 18th or 19th) century, with students listening to professors lecturing much of the time, although today’s students do far less reading of supplemental materials or textbooks. The social life of students has evolved and expanded, with social media today playing a role non-existent even a generation ago, although there is also some very recent evidence of a decline in the once growing, more hedonistic forms of campus social life, with less drinking and even more church attendance at some schools.

Is the “bottom line” one of continual improvement? As a practitioner of what one sage once called the “dismal science” of economics, I am highly skeptical. I long posted in my office a saying inspired by Winston Churchill: “Never have so many spent so much for so long learning so little.” Perhaps, however, another Churchill-inspired plagiarism is more appropriate: “American universities are the worst form of higher education, except for all the others.” You be the judge.