The Best of Times, The Worst of Times ...

• Author: Vedder, Richard K.
• Position: Higher education in the United States

In describing the state of American higher education today, it is hard to improve upon Charles Dickens's memorable opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.... Dickens was remarkably prescient. By many indicators, the United States has the best system of higher education of any nation in the world. Our universities dominate the world rankings, and large numbers travel to America from all over the planet to attend them. But simultaneously, there is abundant evidence that America's universities are in decline and in trouble. Vast numbers of students fail to even graduate, or they take jobs traditionally filled by high school graduates. Our global research leadership is starting to slip as other nations increase research resources dramatically, enrollments have been falling, academic freedom is increasingly imperiled, and public confidence is at a low ebb. Borrowing from an old but recently revived television quiz show, "Will the real American higher education please stand up?" To do that, we need to look at the good, the bad, and the truly ugly. We have abundant amounts of all three.

The Good: Intellectual Diversity and Competition

America is truly unique in the number of institutions of higher education run largely in a decentralized fashion, with many different educational philosophies and specialties, competing often fiercely with other educational enterprises. Regarding so-called private schools, the United States has large numbers, educating about one-fourth of college students pursuing bachelor's degrees, and an even larger proportion of those attending the perceived best and most selective institutions. Private schools provide something for everyone: the religious, the agnostic, the academic wunderkinds, the progressively woke, even intellectually clueless party animals and jocks wanting to socialize more than to learn. Yet diversity is considerable even among government-controlled institutions. Instead of one government running the schools, we have dozens if not hundreds. Each of the fifty states and other territories has its own government schools, with no uniform curriculum, and variations in how faculty and students are selected. Within states, degrees of uniformity differ greatly (e.g., California has more than Ohio or Texas), but most individual institutions have at least some freedom in devising their own curriculum, their admission and faculty hiring criteria, and so forth. This promotes needed intellectual diversity and intercollegiate competition.

For most of its history, the U.S. government has played a minimalist role in higher education. Although federal-land grant universities began about 230 years after Harvard College was founded in 1636, they were firmly under state, not federal, control, and major federal financial support to students and schools largely began in the middle of the twentieth century, after most of the existing collegiate infrastructure was firmly established.

The federal student loan programs, whose large expansion began in the 1960s and 1970s, however, led to increased federal involvement, enhanced by the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1978, significantly increasing federal regulatory control over U.S. colleges and universities, reducing campus diversity at least modestly and ultimately individual choice and competition. The all-powerful national education ministry common in countries like France and Germany is increasingly being duplicated in the United States, somewhat diluting America's higher education exceptionalism centered on private institutions and a multiplicity of state universities operating within a federal system of government. Also, a fervent emphasis on academic merit, a hallmark of America's colleges for centuries, seems to be somewhat diluted by increased political involvement and control, and greater emphasis on equalizing educational opportunities by race, gender, income, ethnicity, and so on.

The Good: America's Research Exceptionalism

A second form of American higher educational exceptionalism has been the development, mostly in the twentieth century, of dozens of major research universities, some also with large medical centers training physicians and hospitals serving patients, in addition to performing important medical research. The Germans are rightly credited with founding the modern research university model, but in the twentieth century the Americans not only emulated Europeans but far...