The Future of Higher Education: Prerequisites for Success.

• Author: Gee, E. Gordon

Higher education is at an inflection point. Tuition and room and board at state-supported higher education institutions has more than doubled in real terms since the late 1990s (Webber 2018). The college wage premium, which had risen substantially for individuals born between 1950 and 1970, has flattened out with subsequent cohorts (Ashworth and Ransom 2019). This has led to a decline in how the public perceives the value of higher education to both individuals and society (Gavazzi and Gee 2021).

Many books have come out in recent years critiquing the academy and offering solutions for reform (Vedder 2004; Ginsberg 2011; Brennan and Magness 2019; Vedder 2019; Zywicki and McCluskey 2019; Koch and Cebula 2020). We have done so as well (Hall 2010, 2019; Gavazzi and Gee 2018, 2021, 2022). In this article, however, we discuss how one institution--West Virginia University--has dealt with, and is dealing with, the headwinds facing higher education. We hope that our institutional-level focus, though not providing any silver bullets to fix higher education, will provide some insight as to how institutions can take concrete steps to create more value for students and other constituents.

Take Mission Seriously

We work at a land-grant university. One of us has coauthored a book on how landgrant institutions need to remember and then reimagine their land-grant mission (Gavazzi and Gee 2018). State funding to higher education has generally stagnated in recent decades (State Higher Education Executive Officers Association 2022), while the need for land-grant institutions to serve the citizens of their states has only increased.

At West Virginia University, our mission begins with recognizing that we serve the nearly 1.8 million residents of West Virginia, not just the twenty-eight thousand enrolled at our three campuses at any given moment. Our size, our expertise, and our mission make it incumbent upon us to tackle the biggest problems facing the citizens of our state while also staying true to our original charge to teach agriculture and engineering and the liberal arts so that all citizens can obtain a practical liberal education.

In West Virginia this means that we focus on the greatest three needs in the state: education, healthcare, and economic prosperity. West Virginia ranks in the bottom ten of US states in terms of the percentage of citizens with a high school diploma or higher, at 87 percent. In terms of bachelor's degrees or higher, we are dead last at 21 percent. West Virginians have some of the worst health outcomes among the fifty states, being forty-ninth in terms of obesity prevalence and dead last in the percent of individuals over eighteen with multiple chronic conditions (United Health Foundation 2021) to name but two important health concerns. Finally, per capita personal income in West Virginia is near the bottom of all states, at approximately $45,0000, with nearly 34 percent of that being transfer payments (nearly 10 percentage points higher than the United States average; Lego et al. 2022).

West Virginia University has focused its efforts on trying to move the needle on education, healthcare, and prosperity. For example, we started the...