The roots of the current situation go back about a hundred years. In 1900, college education was restricted to a tiny minority of the population, and even a high school education was not common: in the United States in about 1900, fewer than 5 percent of the population graduated from high schools, which often had entrance examinations and charged fees. After World War I, governments in the industrial world, especially in the United States, accepted the premise that economic prosperity required an educated and well-trained workforce. All over the industrialized world, governments invested in a massive expansion of elementary and secondary school education. Countries moved quickly toward universal schooling, ensuring that young boys and girls had the rudiments of writing, arithmetic, and basic civics. This happened at different times in different countries: in the UK, for example, it did not occur until after World War II. Many children moved from classroom to the industrial workforce, even in their early teens, but societies declared mass education to be an essential prerequisite for a modern economy. From a standing start in the mid-nineteenth century, public elementary education expanded rapidly to become virtually commonplace, at least in the world’s wealthier countries.
In the 1960s and after, as the complexity of the modern world increased, societies doubled down on the educational commitment. Publicly funded, universally accessible high school education came into vogue worldwide, as it had already done in the United States. Governments that had invested massively in elementary school classrooms and teachers now raced to build high schools to accommodate the millions of teenagers seeking a high school education. The systems varied, with Germany leading the way in incorporating industrial and skills training in the advanced school system, and countries like the USA, the UK, and Japan focusing more on general education. But the expansion of the high school system was remarkable, with millions of children who, in previous generations, would have entered the workforce in their early teens, continuing their studies at an advanced level. By the 1970s, high school participation had become as commonplace as going to elementary school had been two generations earlier. By the 1990s, in countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and across Scandinavia, university became the new preoccupation, with governments opening up millions of spaces for young people anxious to join the expanding professional class. Mass education had more than arrived; it had leapt up the age ladder into the early twenties.
The resulting global university system is an incredible mishmash, with public and private institutions of widely differing quality, and now, particularly in the United States, for-profit schools as well. The University of Phoenix is the flag-bearer for this quintessential contemporary private-sector institutional model. It is listed on NASDAQ, has produced many millions of dollars of profit for its shareholders, provides student-centric education, without spending money on such things as academic graduate programs or faculty research. Courses are offered where and when students want to take them, not according to faculty biorhythms and preferences. It is also now the largest university in the United States, with close to four hundred thousand students. The University of Phoenix’s parent organization—the Apollo group—is one of a substantial number of for-profit educational deliverers, including the American InterContinental University, Capella University, and Walden University, several of which have expanded operations internationally.
Not all for-profit institutions have operated ethically, particularly in the USA. The University of Phoenix has run into substantial difficulties, closing many physical campuses, facing legal challenges, and seeing its stock price plummet. Several private universities figured out how to capitalize on the generous Pell Grants, a program expanded by President Obama to ensure that any student who could spell “university” got to go. Unscrupulous recruiters convinced students to sign up for expensive for-profit education, without telling them that they had to pay back any money borrowed under the system. The for-profit movement has expanded internationally, with new institutions springing up from Malaysia (Multimedia University) to Grenada (St. George’s University) and Spain (Universidad Europea de Madrid), as well as elsewhere. With governments rushing to meet demand in most countries, it is not clear how much further the for-profit movement will spread at present.
New technologies have accelerated the growth even more. Massive online and distant-education universities, with student populations counted in the hundreds of thousands, offer hundreds of degrees to off-campus learners. If participation and enrolment are proper markers of success, students love them. The largest institutions, located in India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, have over a million students. Many of these universities have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of enrollees, all studying online and most working toward a university degree. Not a great deal is known about the quality and career impact of these institutions. Suffice it to say that digital technology is allowing governments to deliver advanced learning to literally millions of students who would not otherwise be able to attend a standard university. If a student from Pakistan presented a degree from Anadolu University in Turkey, how many employers would know that this institution, with over one million students, served only twenty-two thousand students on-site and educated the rest at a distance? Would it matter? Academics debate and study the quality of the online learning experience and have yet to reach an absolute consensus about the utility of this type of education. For governments unable to cover the costs of regular universities, and for students unable to participate in standard education processes, distance learning is a godsend.
While college conversions, distance education, and private universities all played a role in the growth of the post-secondary system, one of the greatest contributors to university expansion came from institutions already in place. From the 1960s onward, existing universities the world over built new facilities to house the influx of students who swarmed onto campuses and to provide research space for the faculty hired to teach them. (Politicians like new campus buildings almost as much as they celebrate expansion in student numbers.) Money was forthcoming for the laboratories, libraries, classrooms, residences, and other facilities deemed essential for the modern research-intensive university. The results were often spectacular. Moscow State University, operating since the eighteenth century, has grown to an amazing complex of over a thousand buildings covering some one million square metres, more than 40 percent larger than the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. In many instances—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia being one of the latest examples—governments and donors have produced eye-popping architectural masterpieces to grace university campuses. In the vast majority of the cases, however, the buildings had the aesthetic of a nineteenth-century prison or an early twentieth-century factory. Only rarely has design overcome financial considerations, resulting in a network of institutions that lack the intellectual impact of the stunning artistry of the facilities at the University of Leuven, the cold rigour of Cambridge, the majesty of Duke, or the dignity of college campuses like Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Dartmouth.
Declining Standards
These places differ profoundly in history, design, and ambiance, but they are all Dream Factories, institutions devoted to a simple concept: guaranteeing a successful life to those who pay to attend them. Their promotional materials, full of photographs of happy students studying with classmates and enjoying the bucolic campus life, promise great careers and a golden ticket to the middle class. They are the quintessential institution of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy, tackling the challenges of the high-tech, globalized economy and the realities of an international workforce in rapid transition.
It took close to a century for high school graduation to become almost universal in first-world countries. Regular schooling did not suit all students equally, particularly those who were inclined toward the skilled trades. Governments generally did not fund high schools equally, resulting in substantial educational gaps among poor, rural, and minority populations. Equally, the rapid expansion of the post–World War II industrial economy, which drew heavily on low-skilled and semi-skilled labour in the factories and construction trades, meant that it was still possible, in the 1950s and 1960s, for young people, particularly men, to make a good living without a high school education. Many left high school without graduating, often following their fathers’ paths to plants, mines, or construction sites. The gathering strength of unions, combined with an abundance of low-skill/high-wage work, ensured that these jobs paid well and carried generous benefits. As a result, high school graduation rates did not rise