We have come to the terminus of what Christopher Newfield, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and an expert on higher education institutional finances, calls “The Great Mistake,”7 the steady commercialization and privatization of our public colleges and universities. Having embraced the ethos of the market, we have managed to reduce the value of a postsecondary education entirely to its credential, while simultaneously leaving institutions starved of the revenue necessary to do their work.
Responding to this current crisis with the remedies of the past will consign a significant portion of institutions to a final demise. Those schools that are left behind will barely resemble what we once believed them to be, and they will turn many localities where they exist into ghost towns. Consider a school like the University of Wisconsin-Stout, which enrolls nearly 10,000 students while being situated in Menomonie, a town of 16,000 people. In many places like Menomonie, the local college or university is the town’s chief employer, its cultural center, and a technology hub for the residents who surround it. To allow these institutions to die or turn into virtual shells of their former selves would be an economic disaster. Consider a Midwest that has been both ravaged by deindustrialization and stripped of its regional higher education institutions. What will be left?
If this is not enough, the total student loan debt in the United States at the time I’m writing is over $1.6 trillion. It may be noticeably larger by the time you read this sentence. The drag on prosperity that amount of debt creates is incalculable.
And yet, even with all this I am hopeful. I am hopeful because now we have little choice but to act.
CHAPTER 2
Nowhere to Go but Up
One of the reasons I am hopeful about the future of public higher education is because the threats it is facing now are not new. In fact, the reason the current crisis is so threatening is because it has been building for over thirty years. It has been a slow-motion sabotage, and the remedies are well understood.
Sadly, though, there are signs that the lessons of the past have not yet been learned. Once anyone starts asking whether or not a college education is “worth it,” the inevitable end point is to reduce education to a dollars and cents return on investment (ROI), a mere credential needed for gainful employment.
The future of higher education as it is envisioned by the school of ROI is positively dystopian. Scott Galloway, an NYU marketing professor who has become a go-to voice on the future of higher education during the pandemic, sees a horizon where higher education for most people will be an almost entirely virtual experience, one where elite (primarily private) institutions will partner with giant tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to create online universities with expanded enrollments, swallowing up market share at the expense of less elite, small private schools and nonflagship public institutions.
Galloway has reduced education to its credential and decided that this is the thing of value that should be preserved; after all, the credential is what students are “buying.” If an MIT or Stanford credential can be earned online at a lower cost than an in-person degree at UCLA (Galloway’s alma mater), he believes it will be highly unlikely that students will choose UCLA.
Galloway recognizes this as a “reduction in humanity,” but by accepting the logic of competition and credentialing, he also sees it as an inevitable development, just another business opportunity for tech companies who need to go “big-game hunting” to justify their stock prices.1
Apple has to convince its stockholders that its stock price will double in five years, otherwise its stockholders will go buy Salesforce or Zoom or some other stock. Apple doesn’t need to double revenue to double its stock price, but it needs to increase it by 60 or 80 percent. That means, in the next five years, Apple probably needs to increase its revenue base by $150 billion. To do this, you have to go big-game hunting. You can’t feed a city raising squirrels. Those big-tech companies have to turn their eyes to new prey, the list of which gets pretty short pretty fast if you look at how big these industries need to be in that weight class. Things like automobiles. They’ll be in the brains of automobiles, but they don’t want to be in the business of manufacturing automobiles because it’s a shitty, low-margin business. The rest of the list is government, defense, education, and health care. People ask if big tech wants to get into education and health care, and I say no, they have to get into education and health care. They have no choice.
This type of world isn’t just in the future, either. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is currently working with the federal government to create something called the US Digital Service Academy, which is intended to rival Stanford and MIT in terms of funneling tech workers into government work focused on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, exactly the type of competition Galloway envisions.2
Galloway sees a future where all the resources flowing toward education will be privatized. Students will be instruments to juice the stock price of our wealthiest corporations. To get an education at all will mean consigning oneself to some period of service to corporate tech overlords.
This is not me doomsaying. This plan is dictated by the logic of the market and the absolute primacy of credentialing as the purpose of postsecondary education. Galloway believes there’s literally no other choice. According to his logic, colleges and universities are destined to go the way of department stores if they do not adapt to this new reality.
But what if there is an alternative?
A Fully Embodied Education
Scott Galloway has found a highly receptive audience—those keen on disruptive innovation and all that jazz—for his vision of a future where significantly expanded elite institutions dominate a primarily online space. But I am hopeful his dystopian vision will not come to pass because if our experience of the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us the limits of lives lived at a distance from each other.
This is not a critique of the modality of online education. Online courses can be just as effective as face-to-face courses in terms of helping students learn. And if we are comparing a massive face-to-face lecture—like the ones I often experienced as a student at the University of Illinois—with a well-designed online course that consists of a small cohort of students and a dedicated, engaging professor, the online course is clearly superior.
But at the same time, the embodied experience of college matters. While online courses can provide excellent options for some students, they are not an adequate replacement for everybody. Those of us—like Galloway and myself—who were fortunate enough to use college not only to earn a credential but to become a more expansive person than we were before, know this to be true.
College is where I met my wife. It is where I was tested as a leader, where I both succeeded and failed as president of a fraternity. It’s where I took a class with Professor Philip Graham, who counseled me toward a graduate program two years after I got my degree and then, years later, helped me secure my first college teaching job back at the University of Illinois. College is where I became so inebriated the night before an 8:00 a.m. Econ 101 exam that I vomited in the bushes outside the lecture hall and answered the multiple choice questions almost at random, receiving my well-deserved F, and where I had to ace everything else the rest of the semester to pull myself up to a B.
Animal House meets a lesson in personal responsibility.
Yes, I was credentialed with my BA in rhetoric at the end of four years, but college was also the place where I took a desktop publishing course in the early days of PageMaker and got comfortable wrestling with unfamiliar software, a skill that has paid off time and again over the course of my career. In a nonfiction writing course, we were asked to