There is much to like in Washington Monthly’s latest college issue.

Kevin Carey has written a terrific piece on the University of Minnesota’s new campus in Rochester, which has embraced a highly unconventional model of undergraduate instruction.

The UMR experience is highly structured at the beginning, a marked contrast to universities that hand freshmen a huge course catalog and expect them to fend for themselves. UMR faculty from different disciplines carefully map out the sequences of their courses together, coordinating topic areas week by week. But the curriculum will be much less structured at the end. The plan is for these undergraduates to have a senior year devoted entirely to a personalized “capstone experience” like getting an allied health certificate at Mayo, taking graduate classes, or working with professors on new research.
The groundbreaking UMR model could not have been created at an established college or university. Stephen Lehmkuhle was only able to make all the right connections, hire all the right people, and build the right organizational culture by starting a new university from scratch.
Traditional research universities defend their departments, vice chairs, and classically tenured professors on the grounds that autonomy is vital for research. The point is arguable, but also largely irrelevant. According to the Carnegie Foundation, there are only 167 public research universities in America, out of nearly 1,700 public colleges and universities nationwide. Only sixty-three qualify as top-tier research institutions. The vast majority of students enroll somewhere else.

Carey’s work, including a brilliant, non-Pollyannaish piece last year on the potential of for-profit personalized higher education published in the Monthly last year, is always insightful. I don’t always agree with him, but I always learn something, particularly on the subject of ground-level educational innovation.

I found Daniel Luzer’s piece on George Washington University fascinating, cynical, and occasionally overdrawn:

The former president gambled that students who couldn’t quite get into the nation’s most exclusive colleges—and who would otherwise overlook a workmanlike school like the old GW—would flock to a university that at least had a price tag and a swank campus like those of the Ivy Leagues. “It serves as a trophy, a symbol,” he says. “It’s a sort of token of who they think they are.”
What’s amazing is that this strategy worked.

Now, Luzer is doing middle-class parents a service by puncturing some of the pretensions that surround a university like GW. Yet given the growth in the number of upper-middle-class households, it’s hardly surprising that we’d see positional competition in this space. Of course a handful of enterprising schools would try to increase their prestige and engage in high-priced empire-building.

What’s more depressing, as Luzer notes, are the heavy debt loads taken on by students from middle and working class households:

Many GW students come from families that can’t afford high tuition. As a result, students borrow—a lot. The average borrower leaves Foggy Bottom with $31,299 worth of debt, among the highest levels in the country. That’s thousands more than the average at nearby Georgetown. Some students, like Greg Godfrey, graduate owing $100,000 or more. The son of a Cleveland single mother, Godfrey spent years living hand to mouth after graduating with a business degree in 2006, and still owes more than $75,000. “You just don’t know what you’re doing when you sign up for this stuff,” Godfrey says.

I still wonder if we should fret about the GWs of the world. After acknowledging that the quality of a GW education might one day catch up to the school’s ambitions, Luzer follows with the most biting line of the piece:

But it seems just as likely that GW could turn out to be one more overleveraged artifact of our gilded age.

Ouch. And the conclusion also packs a punch:

But above all, GW seems vulnerable to a potential change in the way we thinkabout higher education. What if we actually started measuring how much students learn at their colleges and universities? How would that change the competition among institutions? Would the schools with the blue-chip price tags and high average debt loads fall from the top ranks? Would it spell an end to the era in which a forbidding set of entrance standards and a few stone facades are enough to tell us that a school is doing a great job? Let’s hope so. It would be great if more universities competed to be excellent. What we have now is schools that spend a lot of money—students’ money, taxpayers’ money—merely to look that way.

The future Luzer outlines is obviously appealing. The thought that kept crossing my mind while reading the piece was that our tax dollars massively subsidize Trachtenberg’s empire-building, and that doesn’t seem like a very sound way to distribute what is essentially a large public investment.