The Power of 10? How UCSB is being Screwed

The University of California likes to say that one of the things that make it the best public university system in the world is that the system acts as if it is a single system with pooled resources and power.  However, there are often large inequities within the system.  In fact, for several decades, tuition dollars and state funds were distributed in a secret and unfair way. It took a UC-AFT sponsored state audit to help change this system.  Now, tuition dollars are kept on the campuses, and there is an ongoing effort to distribute state funds in a more equitable fashion, yet decades of inequity cannot be easily reversed.

One of the major effects of this long history of secret subsidizations is that the campuses without medical centers have much lower staff and faculty salaries.  Unfortunately, these under-funded campuses are also the campuses with the highest numbers of under-represented minority students.  Adding insult to injury, the new healthcare plans for the UC system discriminate against UCSB, which also has some of the lowest salaries in the system.

  

Although we should support the UC effort to take advantage of the fact that it has many outstanding medical facilities, we should remember that these institutions have been built out of a secret subsidy, which has disadvantaged campuses like UCSB.  The medical centers and schools have also relied on shared UC resources to finance their debt and construction endeavors. Moreover, while it is not uncommon for medical professors and administrators to make over $300,000 a year, most other UC faculty and staff have seen their salaries stagnate.

Everyone in the system has to embrace a broader understanding of equity and the power of 10.   

Is a College Degree Worth it? The Wrong Debate Continues

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There are two dominant views concerning the value of a college degree currently circulating in American culture.  One view is that on average, people with college degrees make much more money over their lifetime than people without degrees.  The other view is that the over-production of college degrees has deflated their value, and we now have taxi drivers and baristas with PhDs.  I have often presented a third view, which is that a value of a college degree should not be equated with future earning power or job prospects, and instead of seeing higher education as a private good, we must see it as a public good.

The first problem with the idea that a college degree means higher earnings is that this correlation can have multiple causes.  We know that on average, students with wealthy parents and more social connections to high-paying jobs graduate from college at a higher rate.  Likewise, SAT scores are highly correlated with the wealth of the parents, and college rankings are highly correlated with SAT scores, and even financial aid is now often linked to SAT scores. The system as a whole thus reinforces class privilege, and so it may be that people who attain college degrees earn more because they start off with more and are given more opportunities and advantages as they move through the education and job systems. 

On the other side of the coin, the over-production of college degrees can be directly related to the under-supply of good jobs.  What we are seeing in many different job markets is that due to the lack of unionization, the increase in automation, and the globalization of labor and consumption, employers are able to depress wages and benefits.  One interesting test case for this theory is in higher education itself where we have witnessed a significant decrease in “good” jobs.  In just a few decades, we have moved from a system where the majority of the teachers had full-time, tenure-track positions to a situation where the majority of the faculty have part-time, non-tenure-track positions.  During this period, enrollments have increased, so we cannot say that there is a decrease in the demand for people with PhDs.  Instead, universities and colleges have decided to de-professionalize the professoriate.  As I have pointed out before, one cause for this problem is that the same institutions that produce the PhD degree do not require a PhD to teach undergraduate students. 

In other fields, this casualization of the labor force has been pushed by the use of technology to reduce compensation.  Due to the Web and the new media economy, professionals in journalism, entertainment, and other services have been replaced by citizens who are willing to work for little or nothing.  This reduction in earnings was once countered by the recognition that workers in a domestic economy must be paid enough to participate in the local consumer economy, but now in a globalized economy, there is always another person willing to consume our products.

What this analysis tells us is that we cannot expect higher education to fix our employment problems since so many of the labor issues are derived from the power of employers to reduce the compensation and benefits of their workers.  Just as the current funding model of higher education is rigged to reinforce class inequality, our failure to protect workers from destructive labor practices functions to enhance economic stratification.  When we throw high student debt into this mix, we see that our entire economic and social system is programmed against the future.    What we need is better labor laws and better employers.  Once all of the income gains stop going to the top 1%, we will see more good jobs, but education alone cannot fix this issue.

The Quality of Education Problem

In my book Why Public Higher Education Should be Free, I argue that universities and colleges can only reduce costs and improve quality if they concentrate on their core missions of instruction and pure research.  When schools fail to focus on these basic activities, they end up spending enormous funds on side projects; in other words, when quality education is not the main priority, there is no way to contain costs.  However, the problem remains of how do you define and monitor educational quality?

This question of educational quality became a topic of debate at a recent meeting at Governor Brown’s office.  The objective of this stakeholder’s meeting was to discuss how best to implement Assembly Bill 94, which calls for the UC and CSU to report on the following performance measures:  the four-year graduate rate, the six-year graduation rate, the two-year transfer graduation rate, the number of low-income students, the number of transfer students from community colleges  enrolled, the number of degree completions in the STEM disciplines, the number of course credits accumulated by undergrad students at time of graduation, and the total amount of funds received per undergraduate degree.

At this meeting, I argued that while I applaud the governor’s focus on the state’s university systems, his metrics will be counter-productive if the quality of education is not protected.  For example, to increase graduation rates, the UC can simply increase the size of classes, inflate the credits given to particular classes, and offer more credit for non-UC classes.  Although I do not think we should push for standardized tests to see what students are actually learning in their classes, I do think the state can motivate universities to focus their attention on undergraduate instruction by reporting on the following: percentage of the core budget spent on direct instructional activities, student credit hours generated in courses of less than 26 students, and student credit hours generated in courses taught by full-time faculty (whether tenure-track or not). The universities should also report on the increased costs related to administration on each campus. 

Like President Obama’s recent push for more accountability measures in higher education, the state’s focus on inputs and outputs does not look at what actually happens in the classroom.  What I propose in my book is that higher ed institutions need to monitor the quality of education by using the model of assessment that is presented in the UC lecturer’s contract.  All higher ed teachers should be able to demonstrate that they can communicate their course material in an effective manner, that they have a clear and effective method for assessing student learning, and that they are current in their field. The idea here is not to dismiss the important role of research, but rather, to tie research to teaching and to make sure that minimal standards for instruction are met.     

Obama’s Liberal Band-Aid for Higher Ed

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President Obama has announced a new plan  for restructuring higher ed, which represents a collection of some of the worst conservative and “moderate” ideas currently circulating in public policy circles.  Although he does recognize the need to control tuition increases and limit student debt, he wants to use a ranking system to punish schools that fail to meet economic-based goals.  Moreover, his plan promotes the use of MOOCs, competency-based education, and credit for non-educational activities, and while he argues that we must concentrate on student outcomes, none of these goals deal with actual learning or teaching.

 

As I argue in my book, the only solution to the problems facing American higher education is an integrated strategy centered on improving instruction and reducing expenses by forcing schools to fund their primary missions of education and research.  I have also shown that we are already spending enough money through federal, state, and institutional aid and tax breaks to make all public higher education free to the students, but what we lack is a belief in our ability to do something big and comprehensive.  

Our current neoliberal problem is that conservatives have been successful in labeling any moderate liberal program as socialistic, and so, liberals tend to present conservative policies as liberal solutions.  Since both sides are afraid of proposing any real, comprehensive policies, the result is the presentation of small, short-term fixes.  Moreover, due to the liberal belief in the goodness of the meritocracy, they fail to see how the wealthy have turned the meritocracy into a new aristocracy. For example, Obama loves to affirm how the system must work because someone like him has made it to the top.  Thus, instead of seeing himself as a rare exception, he believes that the exception proves the rule, and therefore there is no reason to address the fundamental flaws of our education system.

When I made a presentation last year at the White House on how to control college costs, my main point was that the federal government should tie funding to increasing the number of full-time faculty, decreasing the size of classes, and increasing the percentage of institutional budgets spent on direct instruction and research.  In other words, all reforms of higher education have to begin with a focus on the core mission of these institutions; unfortunately, my arguments fell on deaf ears, but let us hope that as the problems get worse, the solutions get more radical.     

Free Public Higher Ed or the Regents’ Way

My book Why Public Higher Education Should be Free is now available, and its central claims address many of the issues brought up at the last UC regents meeting.  My main argument is that if we just used current state and federal funding for higher ed in a more rational way, we could get rid of the need for tuition, student aid, and student loans.  I also argue that anything short of this holistic solution will fail to solve any of the basic issues.  Of course, we now live in a time of diminished political expectations, and so it is hard for most people to even imagine any large new governmental solution.  In short, after forty years of anti-government government, even our leaders can only think about short-term solutions and half-measures.

President Yudof’s farewell speech at the regents meeting was a great example of leaderless leadership.  Form his perspective, all that we can do is manage each crisis and try to find a way to maintain the status quo.  While he still holds out some hope that online education will be a real game-changer for higher ed, he is now even doubting the effectiveness of this possible solution.  In fact, during the regents’ discussion  (minute 28) of the new new UC online program, Yudof brought up the recent problems with Udacity and San Jose State University.  He even stated that distance education might not work, and we need to ask the students and faculty on the campuses if they even want online courses.

Yudof’s doubts were ignored by a series of regents who pontificated about the need to do this online thing faster and to use the money provided by the governor to ramp up the provision of online courses for UC students.  Of course, the governor never really provided additional funds for online education; instead he simply earmarked $10 million from money that was already going to the UC.  Next, the governor vetoed his own earmark, but the regents have seemed to have forgotten this fact.  Worst off all, Lt. Governor Newsome continued his promotion of all things digital by urging the UC to stop moving at a glacial pace.  In other words, he wants the UC faculty to give up its shared governance in order to quickly move to a system of education that is unproven and could result in both significant cost increases and reduced quality.

As I argue in my book, all of the problems in higher ed start with the failure to make high-quality education and research the major priority of these institutions.  My central point is that if you do not dedicate most of the funding to these core missions, you end up spending most of the money on expensive side projects like athletics, sponsored research, administration, and amenities.  Moreover, this lack of attention to the core mission results in non-educators running the show, and in the UC case, this can be witnessed by the regents’, the new president’s, and the state politicians’ lack of higher education experience and knowledge. 

Without a focus on improving the state of actual education, we end up with huge classes, reductive multiple-choice exams, and disengaged students and faculty.  In turn, this poor instructional quality opens the door for massive online courses and the call to move more students through the system in a faster and cheaper way.  Yet, on a positive side, the whole debate over MOOCs is helping to create a public conversation about how we define quality teaching and learning, and so it is possible that we may be able to rededicate our institutions of higher education to high-quality instruction and research.

While some will interpret my book as another attack on useless academic research, I try to make it clear that I also want to defend the importance of academic research, but I want to distinguish between corrupted sponsored research and the academic pursuit of knowledge and truth.   Just as our political system has been corrupted by the way we fund campaigns, our academic system has been distorted by the way we fund research.Study after study has shown that many research experiments in the sciences cannot be replicated, and one reason for the failure of science to be scientific is that researchers are beholden to the people paying for their research.  In order to correct this system, we need a commitment by the states and the federal government to provide funding for pure research; we also have to stop the hidden process of subsidizing expensive research programs by siphoning money out of undergraduate instruction.

None of these problems will be fixed if we continue to be led by leaders with no commitment to basic research and instruction.