The Financial Aid Bubble(?)

This is a semi-serious post, for a change. But it's something I've been thinking about since Darren posted the question (originally from Instapundit):

Will higher ed be the next bubble to burst, with student loans providing the easy credit that inflated it?

That got me thinking. I think there would be a number of short-term bad impacts, but there might be some longer-term good changes, IF colleges are intelligent about things.

The bad, first:

1. A certain number of students would find themselves unable to go to college - students who want to go but whose families don't have the money. This is probably the worst impact, but then again, it might open up the market for smaller, less expensive schools. Or it might encourage some kind of flexibility, like the night-school programs many places have for MBAs and such. (I have no idea how good those programs are; all I know is some of my students have said that online programs - like University of Phoenix - vary widely in their quality. And I suspect that taking a degree online shorts a student in the human-interaction side, and perhaps to an extent in the problem-solving side. Certainly, it's hard to do lab science well if most/all classes are online. And arguably impossible to do lab science well if course delivery is 100% online).

There would be a period of "retrenchment" where people who could not afford college and could not get loans would have to figure out a plan B.

2. On campus, some of the systems that are suffering right now (libraries, perhaps landscaping, "deferred maintenance") would suffer more. I worry what would happen to my campus library under severe budget cuts; having served on that committee I can see how close to the bone they are operating now. Probably most journal subscriptions would have to be dropped. (Which might actually have a beneficial ripple of forcing the journals to drop their prices, or do away with the annoying "library supplement" that doubles or triples the price of the subscription for libraries).

3. Non-tenured folks on campus would be let go. This would be another potentially bad impact - it would be difficult for years thereafter to attract quality people, at least in any discipline that is "marketable" outside the academy. We have had a hard time keeping geneticists because industry tends to hire them away from us.

I also fear, if things got really bad, there'd be RIFfing - Reduction in Force, which is a legal way to fire tenured faculty (who are otherwise performing OK). I don't know how they'd do it for sure - if it would be seniority based (which would mean at my school, I'd be third or fourth in line on the chopping block) or if it would be based on "duplication of effort" (in which case I'd be safer, as there are two courses I teach that no one else could, and a third that I co-teach with the only other person on campus who could teach it).

I do think the sciences would likely be safer than some of the humanities; we still need doctors and engineers and nurses and soil scientists and such even in bad economic times. (Or at least that's how it would look to administrators)

I also suspect that the Rise of Adjuncts will continue; there's an army of poorly-paid, non-benefit people mostly teaching intro-level classes, especially on campuses without much of a graduate school. And I do not think this is a good thing; you cannot live on adjunct pay and often adjuncts are working more than one job.

4. There might be pay cuts for faculty. I could deal with that IF I felt they were justified, and other cuts had already been made (I would be extremely angry, and seriously consider quitting, if, say the college president continued to receive a $300K salary while the faculty are being told to give up $10K or more each per year).

5. There might be benefit cuts. Again, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with that - though I wouldn't want to see medical (at least not MAJOR medical) insurance go away for us.

6. Outreach to the community might decline, which would probably be bad long-term. Pressures for "giving" would probably go up, which would be annoying. (Already alumni get dunned way too much, IMHO).

7. Some universities might decide to drop the charade of undergraduate teaching and become solely research based institutes dependent on grant or industrial money. Not sure if that's good or bad; certainly there are some schools you don't want to go to as an undergraduate because despite their good names, you will be taught nearly always by TAs and you will be a number in a multitude of numbers.

Other schools might go the other way - grind the effort of research to a halt and become more like the old "Normal Schools" - where teaching, and especially education the next generation of educators, is the main mission. Again, I'm not sure that's an entirely good or entirely bad thing.

So that's the bad, as I see it. There might be some neutral, or even good, outcomes, if the universities are intelligent about things:

1. One way money could be saved would be by trimming and flattening administrations. Most campuses I've been on have pretty bloated administrations - lots of v.p.s that do things that may be important, but which campuses seemed to get along without 10 or 15 years ago. Sometimes campuses "kick people upstairs" they want out of the classroom for whatever reason (but can't fire because of tenure). Possibly, altering tenure to include a "If you are demonstrably offensive to the students, if you teach from 30 year old crumbling notes you have not updated since the Reagan administration, if you can't speak English, or if you have demonstrable conflicts of interest, we can fire you, tenure or no tenure" clause might help with this. I'd also like to see an end to the "let's reward him with an administration post" dealings - too often in that case, good people get yanked from the classroom.

2. As I said, I think the sciences will be pretty safe, as will the "core" disciplines like English and Math. However, some of the more fluffy of the majors - the Various Studies majors, the Pop Culture majors, some of the edgier art stuff - may go away. I'd hate to see art and theater and music go away, because they are an important part of the university, but I think there's a difference between providing Art History classes so people are well-rounded and allowing someone who COULD be out in the "workforce" making and trying to sell his art on the open market to do endless years of graduate work under the university's "protection" so to speak.

I think also perhaps education departments could be re-thought. Require to-be-teachers to major in an actual discipline - be it math, biology, English, Spanish, History...and have them get the same background as the actual majors. Do away with some of the more theory-based Ed classes. And let's please not turn out any more math "teachers" who don't know fractions or algebra, please.

I would also like to see the more politicized of the majors go by the wayside, but I'm not sure that that would happen.

In a very draconian system? Maybe departments could "justify" their existence based on the percentage of their recent graduates who are in or working towards (like are in dental school) a job related to the major. Those that seem to be turning out a lot of 7-11 managers might want to consider how they could better serve the students.

English departments will always be needed; we need to teach people to write and to read literature intelligently. I think music and theater departments are needed because as a people, we need art and entertainment. I'm not so sure that some of the departments where they train the next generation of activists are so necessary; that seems that that could be on-the-job training.

(And yes, yes, I know: I'm doing something I hate right here: being coldly pragmatic. Yes, college should be a time when you can go and learn about stuff you may never use again. Yes, there should be lots of options there. But in a horrible economy, where it's hard to get a job to begin with, you don't want to be selling a major to a student where it's very unlikely they will ever get a job. I LOVED my linguistics classes and briefly considered majoring in it, until I realized the ONLY real employment would be as a Professor of Linguistics, and I worried how many departments of Linguistics might exist in the future)

3. Perhaps we as a culture may rethink what a college degree means, or what a degree is needed for. I could see how someone with, say, lots of natural talent at playing the violin, who has worked with masters for years, could go straight into performing without a college career. Now, true, it might help for them to have some "performance" classes or to hone their talent further - and it might help them to have some business oriented classes so they don't get screwed by some agent - but I do see a lot of things you probably don't need a degree for. And unfortunately, in this country, there are two classes of people who didn't attend college: the "rare genius" like Bill Gates, and "losers." And that's not true at all. There are a lot of people who can have good and important careers without a college degree (as I often point out: you don't need a B.A. to be a good plumber). While, again, some courses might HELP (I can see where business and bookkeeping classes could be very important to someone in business for themselves as a plumber or roofer or something), people who know they want to do skilled trades probably are not best served by whiling away 4+ years on a campus - unless they really WANT to.

4. And that brings me to another issue: the young person who is sent to campus because it's status for the family. I've actually had an occasional student admit to me that they were "trying" to flunk out because they didn't want to be in college, but they felt they had to "prove" to their parents they didn't belong on campus.

And that's sad. That wastes the kid's time. That wastes the parent's money. And it can - if the student just crashes and burns without any mitigating explanation- help lead to professorial burnout. (I still take it kind of personally when what I see as a "smart kid" fails in my class. I know, I know - they failed, not me, but still).

5. Perhaps some of the grandeur and pomp, especially as befits the administration, will decline. (Honestly, the difference on some campuses between faculty and administrator offices is a little shocking - the faculty have pressboard desks and 20 year old indoor-outdoor carpeting, while the administrators have custom-made furniture and Persian rugs. And it's a little bit demoralizing, I think, for faculty to go to a meeting in one of those offices and get the feeling of, "Oh. So that is a marker of how our relative value is seen.")

So, I guess my conclusion is - not all restructurings are bad. There could - if colleges choose to be intelligent about it- lots of good that comes out of it: smaller leaner campuses, perhaps a cheaper way of doing college (maybe less grand fancy student unions, fewer Persian-carpet-lined administrative offices). Hopefully more of an emphasis on what makes college college: learning, preparation for a career, focusing on the enterprise of teaching and research.