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Millenial
Fizzle
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Millenial
Fizzle
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Possibly the only thing worse than millennial hype or millennial crash is millennial fizzle--nothing new under the sun. In this quadrant, we have millennial fizzle. This is the quadrant in which we see older, wiser versions of ourselves stumbling upon these Vision 2010 materials fifteen years from now and chuckling at the cheek of the other three scenarios. Given no great impetus for major change, universities in this scenario exist in a holding pattern, hoping for clear weather and happy landings, but for the time being just circling, praying they're still over the airport.
The time frame dawns partly cloudy.
Simple demographics indicate shrinking freshman classes in the coming few
years, while the political climate seems to be not at all enthusiastic
about public support of higher education. It's not that the political
will or the public sentiment has turned against higher education. Rather
it's that other concerns have the public's attention and therefore its
resources. The number of young people in prison in our nation exceeds
for the first time the number of young people in college, so
"corrections" must have a greater claim to the public purse. At 15% of
the U.S.'s GDP, with a 20% share looming just around the millennial
corner, health care also has a greater claim on the public purse. With
the Social Security shell game, our society puts its dollars into caring
for the growing sector of elderly citizens rather than the shrinking
sector of post-adolescent citizens. Higher education suffers from a
less-than-benign neglect.
Public universities afraid of the rumors they hear from the western
desert, and private universities facing decreased alumni support from
their baby-boom alumni initiate productivity quests of their own. These
changes often incorporate a modicum of mid-level technology. The Pac 8
universities use fiber-optic links to connect professors on video to
classrooms throughout the consortium. Primarily used for introductory
and survey courses, this distance-learning does save Pac 8 universities
some money, though some students--and some parents--grumble. Multimedia
makes isolated inroads in the classroom, but generally doesn't offer
productivity increases, so its use remains sporadic.
The search for new revenues sends increasing numbers of universities
to contract with corporations to provide continuing education for their
employees. The University of Michigan's College of Engineering, for
example, arranges with the university's Transportation Research Institute
to provide week-long minicourses each summer to keep Ford's engineers
up-to-date on advances in computer-aided design. This is just one of
many new cozy relationships between higher education and industry.
The incessant quest for new sources of income also sends universities
back to their alumni. The University of Illinois acquires a condominium
complex in Champaign to serve as housing specifically for alumni who have
returned to the school for refresher courses. Swarthmore extends the
trend by being one of the first colleges to offer life-long learning
contracts to its alumni, contracts that warrant that students, for a
modest fee, will be kept current in their chosen field of endeavor for
the rest of their lives. Growing problems with the economic status of a
college degree--decreasing value, increasing cost--have combined by the
late 90s to make such contracts attractive. By 2003, fully one-
third of Swarthmore's students have signed such contracts, a success rate
that lures dozens of other schools into the market. A coda: several
class-action suits are brought by early takers of guaranteed-for-life
degrees who try to get some form of compensation from universities whose
"lives" turned out to be much shorter than anyone had anticipated.
While federal support drops--student loans and research grants both
become harder to come by--costs at universities continue to rise, though
not at the breathless rates of the eighties. These chronic financial
pressures are addressed in a variety of ways. Public universities are
subject to the tempestuous and changeable winds of statehouse politics.
In 1998, Albany cuts costs by mandating year-round operation of the State
University of New York system, a move that creates years of chaos in the
SUNY system and that leaves tenure-track faculty scrambling for positions
in other states. Intrigued by Albany's lead, Texas follows suit in 1999
and goes New York one better by establishing the standard undergraduate
program throughout the UT system as a three-year program. The folks in
Carson City wish to cut costs while avoiding the upheavals seen in New
York and Texas, so they establish productivity requirements for academic
departments within the University of Nevada. These productivity
requirements are effectively along the lines of K-12 funding
guidelines--each department gets a set amount of money for each student
credit-hour its faculty teaches.
Financial pressures and declining enrollment set many universities to
casting a wider net. The Ivies begin a well-organized campaign to recruit
the best and brightest from throughout the Pacific Rim, while the University
of Arizona and several of its southwestern compatriots turn their eyes
southward, sending recruitment officers to Mexico and throughout Central
and South America. Among these is the University of Texas at El Paso, the
first in the country to implement a fully bilingual English/Spanish
curriculum. The following year it arranges an open enrollment deal with
the Free University of Mexico.
Other universities have been hedging against such possibilities by merging with sister institutions or by acquiring smaller colleges. Smaller colleges, though particularly vulnerable, have begun to look more and more attractive as they play to their strengths--intimate learning communities made intellectually intense by a high level of access to faculty. When larger universities are not trying to swallow them whole they are often busy trying to recreate them as islands of refuge on their own huge campuses.
A few large research universities, though, take the opposite tack--they focus almost entirely on their research functions. Stanford, for example, has contracted out its lower-division undergraduate courses to nearby state colleges and has shifted its focus to the revenues available from intellectual property licensing fees and copyright royalties. By 2010 it is taking in almost half a billion dollars a year from these sources, a staggering sum that sends administrators from other research institutions out to Palo Alto by the busload.
Challenges to universities do come from unlikely sources, however.
Hard-squeezed parents have finally begun to revolt against outrageous
tuition rates. In the Southwest a group of as many as 2000 families of
high-school juniors and seniors have formed the Southwest Tuition
Alliance. These families have agreed to act as a block in deciding which
Southwest schools to send their children to. They have required colleges
to bid on credit-hour tuition rates. The three schools the STA finally
contracts with offer them an average tuition discount of 15%.
More challenges spring up in Idaho, where the legislature in Boise
has enacted the Idaho Young Leaders program, which gives tuition credits
to Idaho's state schools for every student the schools channel into a
community service job. In each of the program's first three years, the
number of graduates taking community service jobs climbs by about 10%, as
do the value of tuition credits garnered by the state colleges.
One looming challenge from the 90s that seems to sputter and grow dim
in the next decade is the "edutainment" specter. Such programs are
hugely popular, especially with college students, who tie up university
computer systems with them. But the prevailing social attitude--and the
prevailing quality of the programs themselves--keep the emphasis on
"edutainment's" latter syllables. When multimedia programs are used in
higher education they are generally used simply to expedite the learning
process laid out in lectures, labs, and seminars.
Such a premium is placed on hurrying students through the system as
quickly (and therefore as cheaply) as possible, that by 2010 Wichita
State University in Kansas announces the implementation of "a
comprehensive K-14 degree track" that will usher students from
finger-sucking through a bachelor's degree by age 20.
The push to shorten the cycle time is accentuated by an unlikely turn
of events: the closures and mergers throughout the university system have
created a situation in which demand has outstripped available capacity.
This leads to increased entrance standards throughout higher education.
Yale University, for example, will now admit only students who have
scored a perfect 1600 on their SATs.
This situation of increased demand and reduced supply is part of
what stimulates the Carnegie Foundation to convene seminars to envision
upcoming changes in higher education. The seminars are tentatively
titled 2020 Vision, and there is much talk of revolution.
Send comments to vision-2010@umich.edu.
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4/25/96
