Higher Education: It's Not Just for College Students Anymore

It is a magnificent autumn day in the mountains, but the Sawtooth Range is no longer enough to keep Robert Belletzkie here. After 26 years in academia, the last eight as chair of the psychology department at Boise State University, he is packing up. The books and paper records from his carpeted, mahoganied office fill three liquor cartons. His computer and the software he has collected, most of it multimedia CD-ROMs and DigiDocs, require eight cartons. He is a voluble but fastidious man, one who still wears his hair above his ears, and this morning he waxes philosophical about this ratio of analogue to digital.

"Three paper to eight electronic. As it ought to be. Unfortunately, in this world I'm leaving behind, that ratio is inverted." To emphasize his point he flips through the most recent catalogue from the Boise State Press. "The works in blue background boxes are digital. The works in white are paper." The effect of the blur of pages is that of the lightest shade of blue, much lighter than the stunningly bright sky outside the window behind Belletzkie. "Not much blue, is there?" he asks. "Eight to three. Just one of the reasons universities are unraveling."

The unraveling Belletzkie speaks of has become maddeningly apparent in recent years throughout the nation's university system. It is the unraveling of what he sees as the three primary functional strands in the braid of the traditional university: 1) the preparation of the young for economic usefulness; 2) the fulfillment, especially since World War II, of society's research needs; and 3) the provision of values and ethics to the good citizen, a function that holds over from the university's origins in the medieval European church. This braid has become so frayed that in many cases it is only the final strand that any longer bears weight.

The first strand, the university's role as creator of careerists, has been frayed for decades as most professions have become specialized beyond the reasonable reach of an institution whose very name speaks of breadth. In the past decade or more, though, outside competitors have been actively picking at this strand, unraveling it further by providing the specialized educations necessary for individual professions. And more and more students are signing up with these other providers. When adjusted for demographics, the enrollment at U.S. universities has been dropping 2-3% each year for the past five years.

Why are these students going elsewhere? The reasons are largely financial. Skills training offered by corporations and other providers promise a more marketable alternative than the traditional college education. Also, the expense of a university education now proves prohibitive for many young families, especially given that student loans are more difficult to come by and cost more to pay off, and that a university degree does not guarantee a respectable income that will allow one to climb out from under the debt load.

But financial reasons are not the only reasons. One truth unmentionable at faculty meetings is that these corporate training programs are doing a good job of professional certification. General Electric's Career Path program is indicative of the nature of many of these endeavors. Career Path assigns each student a multimedia notebook computer, the primary learning tool. The pedagogy itself, presented both on DigiDoc plug-ins and on GE's Digital Learning Network, involves learning while doing and is cutting edge. Indeed, most research into human cognition and education these days is done by corporations interested in more efficient training and more productive workers. The trainees of these corporations are the beneficiaries of that research. GE now graduates almost 2000 students each year with associate's or bachelor's degrees in narrow fields of professional competency. GE itself hires on almost a third of these graduates. Hundreds of other companies line up for a chance at the remaining 1400.

Indeed, most research into human cognition and education these days is done by corporations interested in more efficient training and more productive workers.

Observers such as Robert Belletzkie believe that financial reasons are secondary. According to them, universities are losing students because they fail to fully espouse the new digital information technologies that are springing up around them and transforming the world, the very technologies that have apparently brought such success to GE's Career Path program. Belletzkie charges arrogance.

"Universities are mistaken when they consider themselves above 'edutainment,'" he says. "Since time immemorial all good educators have tried to entertain as they instruct. You can't teach someone unless you first have her attention."

By that measure the technology is succeeding eminently. It has riveted much of the primary and secondary education market in the U.S., for example. The runaway success here has been Apple Computer's Holistic Learning Program, now the centerpiece in more than 70,000 elementary classrooms worldwide, both public and private, especially in Asia. It has replaced blackboard, desk, books, and, to some extent, teacher. This last aspect of the program--publicly it's advertised as "all the HeLP a learner ever needs," while privately it's referred to as "teacher-proof"--has made it so popular among the homeschooling crowd that Apple claims to have single-handedly tripled the number of homeschooled children in the United States.

Joan Sitomer, now visiting professor at Tulane University, grants that Apple's HLP is the best of the lot.

"There's a great deal of dreck out there," she says, "but there are also gems. The problem is that universities tend to lump these technologies into the former category and to overlook the latter."

Sitomer's experience with these learning technologies--and with university evaluation of them--is long and arduous. Her failure to earn tenure in Yale's political science department in 1998 became something of a cause celebre in academia. Sitomer's tenure committee refused to consider two interactive multimedia CD-ROMs she had published on political decision-making. The CD-ROMs allowed the viewer to role-play in making a series of political decisions. The CD then analyzed the patterns of reasoning applied across those decisions and pointed out examples of classic inconsistencies and fallacies in decision-making. Reffik Cern, chair of the political science department and chair of Sitomer's tenure committee, called the CDs more entertainment than scholarship.

"The CDs are fine and useful tools and are impressive achievements in their own right," Cern said in an interview that year, "but they don't constitute academic endeavors of the first order."

Sitomer's supporters charged that the department railroaded her because she had chosen to avoid traditional paper and text-based venues when creating and publishing her academic work.

"Both of those works were outstanding and became instant classics in the field," claims Brookings Institute Fellow Julie Novkov, who was a colleague at Yale at the time. "Even today every undergrad who studies how citizens make political decisions relies on some edition of those CDs. Cern and his crew were really acting out of fear of change and out of prejudice against anything that was popular."

It would be another ten years before Yale's political science department would grant tenure based partly on a multimedia work published on digital media. Meanwhile, Sitomer's CDs have made her widely-sought in a world of faculty that has increasingly split into the categories of star and drone.

Belletzkie charges arrogance. "Universities are mistaken when they consider themselves above 'edutainment,'" he says.

Going slow on the digital revolution may be part strategy, part inertia for universities. As Sitomer puts it: "It's the old problem of turning the ocean liner, only made even more challenging by the fact that the captain--the university president--has one hand tied behind his back and lives in constant fear of pissing off the crew." And though such programs have been resisted within most universities, this institutional resistance has not kept individual professors from capitalizing on their popularity. While Joan Sitomer's CD-ROMs were specifically developed for use within the larger context of a college course, other faculty have created programs for the do-it-yourselfer. David Shereshefsky, a professor of biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has his own agent to represent him in negotiations with multimedia publishers. His most recent works have been produced by Autodidact, a blossoming San Francisco company. Shereshefsky's The Life and Times of a T-Cell claims to be a complete introductory course in immunology as taught by an immune system cell on its daily rounds.

Shereshefsky's colleagues at Santa Cruz publicly state that such programs cannot replace the professor and the human element in lectures, laboratories, and discussion groups. In private, though, many say not only that they themselves are developing digital teaching tools of their own, but also that such tools can and should replace the lecturer in many cases. This conflict between the institutional self and the private self on the part of faculty is a major source of the inertia in universities today, according to Susan Gilman, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

"You talk to faculty one by one--on the streets, at social functions, even in my office--and they're brimming with ideas on how to improve the university, how to restore the institution itself to preeminence. You get them in a departmental meeting, though, and forget about it--their feet are so firmly planted in the mud you'd need a backhoe to dig them out."

The blame for the troubles of universities cannot be laid entirely at their own feet, though. By 2000 the deficit barbers in Washington had shaved away most federal funding for universities, students, and research. These funding cuts, at a time of increasing costs and after years of habitual budget increases, meant only the strong were going to thrive. Most universities have demanded--and seen--more productivity from their faculty in the form of more teaching. So great has been the increase in course load and the decrease in research funds that today many faculty find themselves with neither the time nor the money to progress in their own research. Happily for those seeking tenure or promotion, research and publication have become less important factors in those decisions, while teaching success is much more significant than it has been for decades.

In recent years, as the shakeout has intensified, those universities with the largest endowments have of course been the most insulated from the pain. Large research universities have also fared better, contracting out their research facilities and faculties (a dichotomy between teaching faculty and research faculty has arisen at many of these institutions) for corporate or government work. Federal grants for research became scant indeed with the demise of the NSF in 2005. Most research that had been performed by federal agencies, though, has been privatized, and universities have sunk their teeth into a respectable chunk of this work. Much of the research once done by the National Institutes of Health, for example, has been taken on--in attenuated form--by Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas.

The grimmest evidence of the university crisis has been the attrition rate. The number of colleges and universities in the U.S. has fallen by almost 20%, from a peak of 3600 in 1995 to just over 2700 today. About half of these colleges have closed their doors for good. The rest have been folded into other institutions. Community colleges, increasingly devoted to employment training, have fared well enough, but small liberal arts colleges in particular have taken it on the chin. Oberlin, the first coed college in the nation, is no more. The fabled Seven Sisters are now four--one deceased, two merged into sibling institutions.

A particularly insidious sign is that many universities seem to regard each entry in this litany of closings as unique. As Robert Belletzkie puts it, "Colleges have been closing at an alarming rate, but there's a structural unwillingness in universities to see this as systemic. Oberlin closes and everyone just says, 'Oh, that's because they were too liberal arty, or spent too much time navel-gazing,' when they should be saying, 'My god, we could be next.'"

The number of college and universities in the U.S. has fallen by almost 25%, from a peak of 3600 in 1995 to just over 2700 today.

The news is not all grim, however. Belletzkie's final strand in the braid--the provider of values--remains within the university's purview. In the face of revolution, universities as a whole have become reactionary, harkening back to the 18th- and 19th-century model of the liberal education of both mind and heart. There is certainly a niche for such education with a moral focus--witness the rise of religious colleges in response to the resurgence of religions in America. Enrollment at religious-affiliated institutions has increased by 120% since 1990, and old institutions are being taken over by religious or spiritual organizations. Since the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut was rescued in 1990 by funding from a group associated with the Reverend Sun Yung Moon's Unification Church, more than 180 other American universities and colleges have found that a spiritual emphasis can increase both enrollment and endowment. In 2006 Brooklyn College became the Ethical Culture College. Four years later, the college has seen a 35% increase in enrollment even while it has increased tuition by more than 50%.

But in Belletzkie's view--and in the view of many others--this final strand is not enough to bear the entire weight of the university.

"Without the practical, quotidian role of training, and without the integration of research and teaching," he says, "the university will relegate itself to the margins."

In spite of the closings, though, and the ferocious competition from new rivals, universities are still doing well what they do, according to most in academia. Belletzkie speaks for the majority when he says, "If you want rigorous, disciplined instruction . . . if you want a full education, full development of the mind in all its abilities, a university is still the only place to go, and that's because no one else can do that as well. And despite everything we've been tossing around here today, there are still great ones out there, universities as magnificent as ever." This said, the psychology professor smiles ruefully. He is moving his three cartons of analogue and eight cartons of digital east to Connecticut, where he will have a small, windowless cubicle in GE's international headquarters, and where he will develop pedagogy for GE's Career Path program. Looking for perhaps the last time on the view of the Idaho mountains from his office's casement window, he sets his jaw against what will be left unsaid: that there are fewer and fewer students out there who want--or who are able to afford--what only a university can provide.

Home || Scenarios || Discussion || Site Map || Table of Contents

Send comments to vision-2010@umich.edu.
4/25/96