Let me start by saying that I do not for one second think that everyone needs to go to college. Further, without question, many of the smartest and most successful people I know do not have college degrees. Same goes for some of the most compassionate, creative, and thoughtful people I know.
This said, it is without question, that the United States has a higher education problem. I’ve been working in higher education since 1992 and have taught at eight different universities across my career—seven of which were American universities. From this backdrop, let me say that there are multiple systemic problems that surround the university in the United States. And while not everyone needs to get a college education, at a macro level, it is critical to have an educated workforce for all kinds of reasons.
We need health professionals, computer scientists, educators, engineers, experts in public policy, and more. Many of the basic industries that comprise the American workforce require advanced education. This is all not even to mention the fact that there are various intellectual, life-skill-related, and fiscal benefits to a college education at the individual level, as I describe in this Psychology Today piece.
Herein, from the perspective of someone who has been working in higher education in the US for more than a quarter of a century, are five major problems that surround academic in the United States.
Low Intellectual Diversity
It is not secret that intellectual and political diversity among university professors in the United States tends to be relatively low (see Duarte et al., 2015). From a political perspective, conservative voices and ideas are hard to come by in modern academia. Further, from an intellectual perspective, several intellectual frameworks, such as the evolutionary perspective as applied to human behavior, have been found to run into all kinds of resistance within modern universities (see Geher & Rolon, 2019).
This point is not a trivial one. In fact, large-scale efforts, such as the creation of organizations such as the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science and the Heterodox Academy, have emerged on the larger scene, taking great efforts to have universities expand intellectual diversity. As someone who is a member of both organizations, I will tell you that it can sometimes be an uphill battle.
Importantly, people of any intellectual or political pursuasion can endorse intellectual diversity. I consider myself, politically, deeply progressive and egalitarianist. That said, I also think that being open to multiple ideas and perspectives is critical for advancing our understanding of the world and of our place in it. In short, the push for intellectual diversity within the academy is hardly some kind of conservative conspiracy. Rather, it is an effort to create a more inclusive and better context for the advancement of knowledge and educating the next generation of leaders—which is the whole point of higher education.
Major Distrust of the Academy
In 2019, the renowned Pew Research Center released a summary of data from over 1,500 American adults (summarized well in this Forbes article), asking them about their opinions on, among other issues, higher education. A meager 50% of the sample reported that they thought that higher education is a good thing. And there was an effect of political orientation, with Republicans reporting, on average, a relatively deep skepticism regarding the utility of colleges and universities.
It is against this backdrop that universities need to function. When half the population thinks that your entire industry is a waste of time, you’ve got a problem on your hands, to put it mildly.
Low Proportions of US Citizens Graduate College
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the major mistrust surrounding higher education in the US, it turns out that the US produces way fewer college-educated people than is found in comparable countries around the world.
According to a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, about 36% of American adults between the ages of 25-64 hold bachelor degrees or the equivalent. This figure is considerably lower than is found for Russia (at 58%) as well as a broad array of other nations around the world (including Australia, Belgium, Japan, and many more). We are hardly the world leader on this one. And this fact adversely affects our workforce in several critical industries. As I see it, this is a problem.
Poor Funding
Funding for colleges and universities across the US actually varies quite a bit from institution to institution. But here is a trend that many people are not fully aware of. At state schools in many states in the US, funding from the actual state has been seriously on the decline for years, putting more emphasis on funding from tuition. Where I work, the State University of New York, for instance, funding from the state has generally been extremely flat over the past decade while funding from tuition has picked up the slack (as I point out in this piece I wrote for the Poughkeepsie Journal). In short, it used to be the case that a majority of the monies needed to run state universities came from state tax revenue. These days, at SUNY and at many state university systems around the nation, the proportion of funding that comes from the state is below 50%. To my mind, it almost seems unfair to even call them “state schools” in this context!
Tenure is Not Perfect
I’ve been around the block in higher education for a while. From this vantage point, let me say (at the risk of making a controversial statement!) that tenure, which provides extraordinary job protection for professors at most colleges and universities, is not really perfect.
Don’t get me wrong. I have tenure and I am not interested in giving it up any time soon. Generally speaking, tenure (also called continuing appointment) is fantastic perk of working as a professor. It generally provides outstanding job security. When most people talk about the purpose of tenure, they usually say that it has the primary function of encouraging academic and intellectual freedom by making it so that scholars can study what they want without having to be concerned about losing their jobs if people don’t like their topics or their findings.
Given the lack of intellectual diversity that characterizes universities these days (see Point 1), I am not sure that tenure is exactly achieving this primary goal. But for me, as I pointed out in detail in this Psychology Today article, there is an even bigger problem with tenure. Typically, tenure takes about 7 years to achieve. This is roughly about 1/4 of a typical career. What people outside of academia often don’t know is that people who are untenured are often treated (typically with good intentions) differently from people who are tenured. Untenured professors are often “protected” by being told that they should not take on certain important committee or administrative roles, such as serving as department chair, for instance. Further, untenured professors are often discouraged by senior faculty members from speaking up in various ways. They are also discouraged from conducting research that might be considered at all controversial.
To me, there is great irony here. Tenure was designed to protect the ability of scholars to study what they want to study and to express their ideas freely. In practice, what ends up happening so often is that for a full 25% of one’s academic career, professors are essentially told to smile and keep quiet. And as a huge advocate of academic freedom, I see this as a problem.
Bottom Line
The United States has a higher education problem. Or, rather, a large set of higher education problems. Intellectual diversity is low and is often discouraged. Mistrust of higher education is rampant among the broader population. The proportion of people who graduate from college in the US is low relative to rates found in comparable nations—a fact that necessarily has adverse effects on the workforce in a whole array of fields. Higher education, especially at the state level, is famously underfunded, creating hardships for various stakeholders—primarily for the students themselves. An additional problem pertains the ironic effects of tenure, as something that was designed to protect academic freedom but that, in many cases, in effect, does quite the opposite.
I have worked in the field of higher education, primarily as a Psychology Professor (with an 8-year stint as department chair) at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In spite of lots of nonsense and problems, such as the ones I point out here, I absolutely love my job and would not trade it for anything. This said, if you’re interested in helping to improve our shared future, fixing the many problems that surround higher education in the United States might not be a bad place to start.
References
Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 1-58. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14000430, e130
Geher, G., & Rolon, V. (2019). Controversies Surrounding Evolutionary Psychology. In D. Wilson, G. Geher, H. Mativetsky, & A. Gallup (Eds.), Darwin’s Roadmap to the Curriculum: Evolutionary Studies in Higher Education. New York: Oxford University Press.