Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Chapter 3: A Federalized Market with Little Incentive to Change

38 A Federalized Market with Little Incentive to Change 3 A sizeable portion of the American professoriate has a different explanation about what has gone wrong; in a Clintonesque moment they are ready, willing, and able to remind higher education’s critics that “It’s the market, stupid.” Colleges and universities, professors remind all who will listen, are not businesses with a singular focus on their bottom line and therefore shouldn’t be expected to achieve the kinds of efficiencies being demanded of them principally by legislators and congressmen. Instead of giving in to the antitax mantra and its consequences, higher education ’s leaders ought to be demanding sufficient funds to ensure the continued primacy of American higher education. The most disaffected and angry of these voices lament that the market has made learning a salable commodity by turning faculty into production workers and yielding control of the academy to cadres of well-paid, even coddled, collegiate administrators-turned-managers. Such lamentations are not so much wrong as they mislead in their casting of the story as a conspiracy in which business-mogul trustees and aggrandizing presidents push aside the scholarly values and processes historically championed by the academy; in an age of markets and marketdominated politics, it is hard to imagine any cogent explanation of higher education’s current travails that does not begin and end with market forces. The quite different reality, however, involves not a conspiracy, 39 A FEDERALIZED MARKET WITH LITTLE INCENTIVE TO CHANGE but rather the unintended entwining of market mechanisms and public policies put in place with the best of intentions. A Twice-Told Tale Most accounts of the federal government’s support of higher education offer a tale with two beginnings. First, the Morrill Act of 1862 established a network of state-owned and state-operated land grant universities. Second, the G.I. Bill eased the demobilization of the country’s armed forces following the Second World War. In the spring of 1972, the New York Times drew on both these iconic legislative beginnings to warn of an era of diminished opportunity if then current trends in higher education were to continue: For more than a century, American higher education has followed a consistent democratizing trend. Beginning with the Land Grant Act of 1862 and reinforced by the G.I. Bill of Rights after World War II, the colleges have been on a steady course toward greater egalitarianism. . . . Now for the first time, it’s in danger of being turned around. The rising cost of going to college makes it increasingly difficult for all but the affluent or the completely subsidized poor to attend the expensive campuses. (New York Times 1972) The trouble with such iconography is that it too freely mixes cause and effect. To be sure, the Morrill Act represented a precedent-setting federal investment in economic productivity, principally agricultural, and citizen education. The G.I. Bill eventually came to play the democratizing role the Times ascribed to it, but the tale is a more complicated story full of twists and turns that, over a forty-year span, has federalized the higher education market in truly unexpected ways. That story begins in mid-1943 and the specter of a postwar America in which, as President Franklin Roosevelt warned, a victorious army was “demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or on a corner selling apples” (quoted in Haydock 1999). The antidote became the G.I. Bill of Rights, which Roosevelt signed into law on June 22, 1944, two weeks after the landings in Normandy. The bill itself was a four-legged stool with a focus on protecting the labor market and providing an economic stimulus to spur the economy. The first leg promised veterans fifty-two weeks of unemployment compensation at the rate of $20 per week. The second guaranteed 50 percent of loans up to $2,000 for the purpose of buying a house or establishing a business. The third leg provided $500,000,000 for the construction of veterans’ facilities, including hospitals. The fourth and final leg contained the educational benefits: grants of $500 a year for training and education, plus monthly living allowances of $50 a month for single and $75 a month for married veterans. In 1945, $500 in annual tuition and a $75 a month living allowance was roughly equal to a 2011 student aid grant...