Summer Melt
Higher ed’s global-warming problem — and promise.

By Peter Wood, associate provost at Boston University
June 27, 2001 8:50 a.m.

t some point in the last 30 years, American higher education crossed a shadow line. Something old and important vanished; something new took hold and, in a moment, seemed pervasive and nearly in complete control. The story has been told over and over again, mostly by those who lost: conservatives who recognized that the Left had gained a virtual monopoly on one of our culture's central institutions. For many conservatives, the loss of the universities was an irreparable catastrophe, for it meant that a generation or more of youth would be cut off from the traditions of humane learning and disinterested scholarship, and that, in turn, pointed to an ominous loss for our culture.

The conservative lament, however, did little to change the college-going habits of the American people. It was as if, in the 1990s, Americans had struck a practical deal with the Cultural Left. "OK, you can have the universities provided that, when our children graduate, they will still land good jobs and promising careers." Indeed, a college education, considered in terms of what it adds to lifetime earnings, became a better and better investment through the '90s. A 1999 U.S. Department of Labor study showed that the average college graduate earns 71 percent more than the average high school graduate — up from only a 38 percent advantage in 1979. And between 1990 and 1998, the earnings of individuals who had bachelor's degrees rose by 18 percent after adjustment for inflation.

I wrote that it was "as if" Americans had bargained to overlook the Left's politicization of higher education as long they saw the financial benefits continuing to flow, but the bargain is plain enough in national surveys. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, has surveyed college freshmen around the country for 35 years. The HERI survey found 73.4 percent of last fall's college freshmen interested in "being well off financially," and 28.1 percent interested in "keeping up with politics" — this in a presidential election year. The figures nearly reverse the picture in 1966, the year the survey began. Then only 44 percent of college freshman claimed their goal was "being well off financially," while 60.3 percent were interested in "keeping up with politics."

A politically complacent student body focused on preparing for well-paid careers may sound good to some conservatives, but that's a shortsighted perspective. It bespeaks a nation in which the "educated" are careerists who are ignorant of the liberal arts either because they have stayed away from the intellectually vapid ideologues who dominate history, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences — or because they haven't.

Many Americans assume that their children can pass through the Left's dominion unscathed. They are right, in a way. Students can indeed go through college like neutrinos through solid matter. "Miniscule and devoid of electric charge…they pass unnoticed. In fact, they are practically undetectable," says Kenneth Chang…of the neutrinos.

But encouraging students to emulate the aloof neutrino hardly seems a way to foster a decent respect for the accomplishments of the past, a well-founded understanding of nature, or a tempered view of human possibility. Nor is it an especially promising approach to teaching students to write well, read thoughtfully, or weigh carefully the complex tradeoffs of politics and practical life. Those are among the attainments that a college education should provide.

All in all, the bargain over higher education that Americans struck with the Left came at too a high price. And, the old songs being the good songs, I pause here for a dirge to the tune of The Closing of the American Mind. Feel free to join me.

Feeling better? Good. Now let us consider what happens next — for the bargain between the Left and the American public seems increasingly shaky. The business community, for example, has recognized that a college diploma per se is no guarantee of simple competence in writing and math, let alone more advanced subjects. Of course, some college diplomas still have more cachet than others, but cachet is a limited-purpose currency. The hard fact is that an humanities major from an elite private college who can discourse on the differences between Luce Irigaray and Jacques Lacan but who has never read a serious book is of little practical use to anyone.

Students likewise recognize that a contemporary bachelor's degree carries as little weight in the marketplace as the vellum it is printed on, and that the new price of entry for well-paying jobs is the graduate degree. In effect, students are forced to pay twice in both money and time to get the heft that a single credential once held.

And the monopoly itself shows some fractures. Increasingly, individuals who seek to improve their marketability are not going back to the traditional university for that second or third degree; they are turning instead to the vendors of "distance education," usually in the form of on-line degree programs. The University of Phoenix is perhaps the top player in this arena, but a few clicks through a site such as cyberu.com shows the hundreds of competitors who offer stand-alone courses and programs ranging from associate degrees through the Ph.D. Although tech stocks are in a slump, the NASDAQ index for companies that produce software for distance education has been on a steady climb since December.

So the public has both motive and opportunity to renegotiate its bargain with the Left. Will it?

Perhaps that depends on how much frustration has built up over the categories of students who have been slighted during the Left's domination of the universities. For instance, boys may disproportionately forego traditional colleges in favor of distance education. The Left's well-known gender gap in politics is mirrored in college enrollments: substantially more girls than boys now go to college. If Christina Hoff Sommers is right, some of the missing males are casualties of the feminists' War Against Boys. Given short shrift all the way through grade school and high school, fewer boys are prepared for college. But the colleges add their own discouragements in the form of curricula that give lop-sided precedence to feminist perspectives. Moreover, during the Clinton years, the Department of Education and liberal courts turned Title IX into a dis-assembly line for men's college sports. The message clearly gets through: College is increasingly unfriendly territory for boys. But the Internet is not, and it seems quite possible that residential colleges and universities will lose ground in this market to the on-line vendors.

At some point soon, American higher education will cross another shadow line: this time, from the Left's monolithic control to a rambunctious marketplace full of alternatives. Although I welcome the weakening of the Left's chokehold on the academy, I don't find all that attractive the prospect of distance education filling the gap. Much of what is valuable in traditional education will not be replicated in online courses. The kind of education in which a faculty member gets to know a student as an individual and plays a sustained role in cultivating the student's mind and interests will inevitably be sacrificed. Distance education is not to be underestimated. Some of it is very good indeed, and it will only get better. But the virtual community of online students is not the setting in which to expect the return of humane learning and disinterested scholarship in the old sense.

By late spring, millions of high-school seniors have mailed in deposits to confirm their college destinations. Some of these "confirmations," however, will be broken. A student will be belatedly admitted to a school he prefers; a family will re-examine its college nest egg and judge it too small for a tuition omelet; little Jack will decide he would rather spend the year hitchhiking the Maghreb from Marrakesh to Mahdia. The folks who work in admissions call these defections "the summer melt."

The term calls to mind the polar icecaps, and when I hear rumors that colleges and universities around the country didn't fill their classes this year, let alone reach the margin needed to accommodate summer melt, I wonder if higher education's equivalent of global warming — the rise of distance education — has begun in earnest. If not this year, someday soon the Left's glorious winter of domination over the universities will melt away. The shape of the world after the ensuing flood remains to be seen, but no one should expect a simple restoration of civilized values or an easy technological fix. Still, it is hard not to take a little satisfaction in the drowsy heat of summer.

Ice cream anyone?