Higher education: It ain't broken, but still needs fixing

1.      American universities are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s international students market. In the 2006/07 academic year, 583,000 foreign students contributed 14.5 billion dollars to our economy.

2.      Out of 500 top universities in the world, 166 are American. The distant second is UK with 42 top universities.

3.      Among developed countries, the United States spends the largest proportion of its wealth (2.9% of GDP) on post-secondary education.

 

Despite the imminent state budgets cuts, higher education is likely to weather the recession well. High unemployment tends to send more people back to school.

 

However, the picture is not as rosy as it may seem. It is not clear if foreign students seek great education, or American culture, way of life or are simply trying to learn English. The United States’ population is five time bigger than the Great Britain’s, so proportionally, the Brits have more top universities. And the third point about spending is not as much an achievement as it is a reason to worry.

 

Growing spending on higher education, both private and public, does not seem to bring any obvious bang for the buck. Colleges are not very good at measuring learning outcomes. With all the problems and excesses of the accountability movement, secondary education is decades ahead of higher education in its ability to measure student achievement. Because the value prestige is so high, colleges try to manipulate various rankings rather than show evidence on student learning.

 

An average college professor is very poorly trained in teaching; most have no preparation for teaching at all: they teach the way they were taught. Universities, especially research universities, value professors’ research higher than their teaching, which does not help to improve quality of instruction.

 

All of this is well-known, and there are attempts to improve. However, a profound reform of higher education should impact student motivation to learn and professor’s motivation to teach. We need to create a system, where the more effort a student applies, and the more she can learn on her own, the lower is her tuition. Like any other industry, higher education will improve only if it reduces its labor expenditures (less teaching, more independent learning), and becomes more efficient by harnessing the new information technologies. We need to abandon the credit system, which measures education by sit time, and develop a sophisticated nation-wide assessment network. Students must demonstrate actual competence, and not how many hours they spent in classroom, and how many hoops they had to jump. Higher education should become cheaper, better, and more equitable, but retain its flexibility, competition, and connection to research.