A Perfect Mess

The landscape of higher education in the U.S. is a strange hybrid beast. So many institutions of different shapes and sizes; some in a burgeoning metropolis and some seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Expensive and cheap. Rich and poor. Highly stratified. Seemingly market-driven and offering flexibility, yet drawn towards a liberal arts core in aspiration. How did it become the envy of the world? While I’ve heard its story told in many ways, I find that David Labaree’s book cuts through the cacophony, highlighting the salient points and key issues without getting bogged down into too much marginalia. It is appropriately titled A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education.

 

With little government support, and usually with a goal to further specific parochial interests of a sect or religious group, a motley crew of small colleges began to sprout often in far flung outposts eager to portray a fresh bucolic beginning. Academic excellence or “higher” learning was not the key driving force. Landowners thought a college would increase land value, provide economic benefits, and increase local political clout. Thanks to the 1819 court ruling disallowing New Hampshire to “meddle in the affairs” of Dartmouth College after granting it a state charter, college-founding activity becomes a frenzy.

 

Quoting Labaree: “church officials and civic leaders around the country scrambled to get a state charter for a college, establish a board of trustees made up of local notables, and install a president. The latter (usually a clergyman) would rent a local building, hire a small and modestly accomplished faculty, and serve as the CEO of a marginal education enterprise, which sought to draw tuition-paying students from the area… the result was the birth of a large number of small, parochial, and weakly funded institutions… most of these colleges faced a difficult struggle to survive…”

 

But survive and thrive some of them did, and the period between 1880-1910 marks a crucial period for the genesis of the hybrid U.S. university from three disparate pieces: undergraduate liberal arts colleges, land-grant “public” state institutions, and the German research university model. The “winners” in the early competition were poised for expansion. They had proved adaptable. They threaded the needle of being both practical and popular. And the time was right with an apprenticeship model of work disappearing, and a rising middle class seeking to secure “management” roles in newly formed and growing corporations of industrial scale.

 

Grafting the graduate-level research model into the U.S. university gave it the prestige and academic credibility that were previously lacking, but it was crucial to retain the large undergraduate base to support this enterprise. Keeping the base happy was important. Selling the possibility to parents that social advantage would be passed to their children through university education was key. And of course, getting donations from alumni was crucial for continued operations and growth. Labaree writes: “colleges and universities invented most of the familiar elements… that made attending college attractive to so many students (or copied them from peers): fraternities and sororities football, comfortable dormitories, and grassy campuses adorned with medieval quadrangles in a faux gothic style. It was a mix that said: this is a place where you can meet the right people, acquire the right knowledge and skills, walk away with a useful credential, enjoy social life in a middle-class style, and do all this in a setting adorned with newly created social traditions and imported adornments form the great [European] universities.”

 

So well sold was this dream that we’re still selling it today. A college education is your new ticket to upward mobility. And if you don’t have one, you will be increasingly left behind. And did the prestigious institutions open the floodgates to the masses for their hope of a better tomorrow? Well, no. That won’t help them maintain their competitive advantage at the top of the heap. As the pinnacle of U.S. higher education rises, newer institutions prop up the base. Labaree provides a clear explanation for this state of affairs: it comes from the “basic tension between democratic politics, with its willingness to constrain liberty in order to maximize social equality, and liberal markets, with their willingness to tolerate inequality in order to maximize liberty.”

 

This accommodation leads to stratification. Quoting Labaree again: “We can make universities both accessible and elite by creating a pyramid of institutions in which access is inclusive at the bottom and exclusive at the top. Such a system simultaneously extends opportunity and protects privilege. It offers everyone both the possibility of getting ahead through higher education and the probability of not getting ahead very far. It creates a structure in which universities are formally equal but functionally quite different, where those institutions that are most accessible provide the least social benefit, and those that are the least accessible open the most doors.”

 

Labaree provides four basic rules constraining how universities and colleges operate:

 

Rule 1: Age trumps youth… Before competitors had entered the field, the oldest schools had already established a pattern of training the country’s leaders, locked up access to the wealthiest families, accumulated substantial endowments…

 

Rule 2: The strongest rewards go to those at the top of the system… every college below the top has a strong incentive to move up the ladder… Despite long odds, the possible payoff is big enough that everyone stays focused on the tier above…

 

Rule 3: It pays to imitate your betters… [although it] has rarely produced the desired results… it’s the only game in town. Even if you don’t move up in the rankings, you at least help reassure your school’s various constituencies that they are associated with something that looks like and feels like a real university.

 

Rule 4: It’s most prudent to expand the system by creating new colleges rather than increasing enrollments at existing colleges.

 

And thus, along with Higher Ed, we also have Lower Ed, and everything in between. We’re all trying to move up; my institution is no exception. Increased research expectations, even in undergraduate-focused liberal arts colleges are part of the prestige piece in moving up. By involving undergraduates in one-on-one mentored research experiences, we’re selling a “high-impact practice”, now a much-overused word in higher ed. Compared to my experience as an undergraduate, my students enjoy much nicer living spaces, better food, a beautiful well-manicured campus, and the many other trappings that entice the feeling they’re getting their money’s worth.

 

All this is baked into selling the dream of upward mobility to potential students. Labaree has much more to say about this that I’ve found interesting, but this blog post is already overly long. Next post, I’ll discuss what he has to say about the tension between liberal and professional education. It’s messy. It’s not perfect. But it’s interesting.