The Future of Higher Education.

• Author: Whaples, Robert M.

Critics say that American higher education has significant flaws and that these flaws will only worsen in coming decades. Others say that American higher education continues to improve and that it is the best in the world. What do you think? What are the key problems higher education will face over the next thirty years? Can they be fixed? Will they be fixed? How? What will be the biggest opportunities for higher education in the next three decades? How can it successfully grasp them? Bottom line: How will higher education change? How should it change?

This issue of The Independent Review contains nine thought-provoking responses to the questions posed above. The authors' essays, which we limited to around 3,500 words and so cannot fully answer all the questions, are intended to help guide a discussion that is vital to American society and to the American economy. We begin with essays by scholars who have spent their careers examining higher education and envisioning its future, and we close with administrators who have grappled daily with the challenges of implementing their own visions.

Richard K. Vedder, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America (2019), begins the symposium with a brief but authoritative overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly of American higher education. American higher education's strong points include research excellence--the US is home to sixteen of the top twenty-five universities in the world, ranked by research strength--and its decentralized structure, "with many different educational philosophies and specialties, competing often fiercely with other educational enterprises." However, higher education in the US is increasingly expensive and increasingly inefficient. Enrollment is falling, partly because of rising college prices and an increased awareness of the financial risks of attending college. Far worse, time spent by students on academics--reading, writing, studying, learning, and thinking--continues to ebb, while grades continue to climb. The ugly face of higher education is a loss of academic freedom and intellectual diversity on our campuses. Vedder predicts that "residential colleges and universities will survive, although possibly with significant changes in the form of educational delivery," and he closes with about a dozen predictions of what the future will bring, including a weakening of tenure and an expansion of federal control.

Amanda L. Griffith, who regularly teaches a course on the economics of higher education and serves on the editorial board of the Economics of Education Review, asks why the price of higher education continues to rise--highlighting its dependence on high-skilled labor, whose cost continues to rise, and increased demand by students and their parents for higher quality education and more expensive experiences from their colleges and universities. She warns that these growing costs have eroded taxpayer support for higher education and predicts that higher education will respond with cost-cutting measures, such as the increasing use of non-tenure-track instructors, online teaching, and larger class sizes. However, she worries that these moves may erode quality and cautions that universities and colleges must not overcorrect.

George C. Leef and Jenna A. Robinson, both with the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, an organization dedicated to improving higher education, "foresee a whirlwind of Schumpeterian creative destruction in higher education in the next thirty years," similar to what occurred in the telecommunications industry over the past four decades. A few higher education sectors will be insulated from these changes, especially professional degree programs in law, medicine, and other fields that are protected by regulatory barriers to entry. However, most colleges and universities will need to adapt as more and more employers stop demanding college credentials, learning becomes "unbundled," and mastery supplants the credit hour as the primary determinant of course completion. This reorientation of career education will be complemented by continued innovation in the "learning for its own sake" sector. "Old models of postsecondary education are not suitable for most students," so Leef and Robinson predict that "the country is about to turn sharply away from the postsecondary education model that has dominated since 1965 and experience a burst of educational innovation that will force most institutions either to adapt to a far more consumer-driven marketplace or wither away."

Next, Phillip W. Magness, coauthor of Cracks in the Ivory Tower (2018), and David Waugh--both at the American Institute for Economic Research--document the "hyperpoliticization" of higher education. Since the first systematic surveys of the political outlooks of faculty members, college professors have self-identified as standing to the left of the American population, with about 45 percent identifying as "liberal" or "far left" in both 1969 and 1998. However, since then they have made a hard left turn. In the most recent survey, 60 percent identify as "liberal" or "far left." In fact, the "far left" are now 11.5 percent of faculty members and are as numerous as those identifying as "conservative." Magness and Waugh argue that it is not necessarily problematic for professors to all lean one way or the other politically, as long as they are committed to free and open inquiry. However, this supermajority of left-leaning academics is responsible in recent years for rampant discrimination against non-left job seekers, both conservatives and moderates, and the trend is likely to worsen. "Faculty who...