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CHAPTER 3

The Wrong Turn

In 1983, US News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities. And then, over the course of thirty years or so, higher education slowly and inexorably went to shit.

We have reached the end point of what it means for colleges and universities to be run with what I call an “operations on down” approach, rather than a strategy focused from the “mission (pedagogy) on up.” This is because schools are not currently in the teaching and learning business. They are machines meant to capture education-related revenue.

Carol Christ, the current chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, made it plain in a 2016 interview, “Colleges and universities are fundamentally in the business of enrolling students for tuition dollars.”¹ In other words, as explicitly stated by the leader of one of the top public universities in the country, in our system as it is currently structured, colleges and universities are not oriented around the mission of teaching and learning, but instead exist to recruit students, enroll students, collect tuition, and hold class—operations. Oh, also football.²

These conditions are not unique to public higher education. We are experiencing the final reckoning of the failed promise of Reagan’s America in almost every sector of society, where deregulation and the resulting competition was supposedly going to unleash the unstoppable force of the free market to deliver superior and cheaper goods and services for everybody.

In 2020, however, there’s been no shortage of stark evidence of the sheer exhaustion of governance rooted in Reagan-era faiths like minimal government, minimal regulation, maximum competition, and a privileging of profits over sustainability and broad-based prosperity. The lurching governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic, wherein states have been largely left to their own devices as they attempt to “reopen” in order to spur economic activity, despite the obvious consequences of increased infections, is an object example. People are literally being asked to sacrifice their lives for the good of the stock market.

There is little thirst or imagination for structures which privilege safety or prudence over the profits that are accruing to a narrow group of corporations and individuals. The turmoil surrounding campuses’ attempts to reopen for face-to-face instruction in the midst of an unchecked pandemic speaks to the dysfunction and sickness of the present system. Colleges have to open because they must collect fees for room and board. They’re bringing students into coronavirus hot zones and making those zones even hotter, or they’re creating new hot spots in places where conditions were previously promising—all in order to protect the bottom line.

As we compare life in America to other wealthy countries similarly affected by the virus, we can see how misguided the vision of Reagan’s America truly has been.

The Great Unravelling

Other public goods besides higher education have been terribly degraded over the last four decades as well. Competition in the newspaper industry has left us with three national behemoths (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post) while hundreds of regional papers are barely hanging on. Formerly great newspapers like the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune have been drained by the private equity firm Alden Global Capital, using various (and legal) financial shenanigans to drive up debt and extract profits before leaving the discarded husk behind.³

The decline in local journalism is an object lesson in how the loss of a public good can come at significant cost to the public. In the long run, it is the municipalities who are deprived of a robust fourth estate watchdog that suffer when local newspapers shutter. A comprehensive 2018 overview by the Columbia Journalism Review⁴ found that in the absence of local reporters to hold them accountable, local governments are less responsive, less engaged, and more corrupt.

A similar phenomenon is now playing out in health care. After the emergence of the coronavirus, the elective procedures that drive profits in the industry are being canceled, leading to layoffs and furloughs of medical personnel in the middle of a pandemic.⁵ Health care organizations—even nominally not-for-profit ones—are oriented around revenue collection as opposed to actual public health outcomes. Just like the world of local journalism, the Rube Goldberg nature of our overarching health care system has left an opening for private equity to drive up costs as they extract profits⁶ while degrading both the quality of care and the job satisfaction of health care workers. Not coincidentally, the cost of health care at the state level has led to a decrease in funding of higher education institutions;⁷ colleges and universities are also finding their operating budgets getting eaten up more and more by skyrocketing health care costs.

In 1983, the Reagan administration published A Nation at Risk, which warned the country about “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s K–12 schools. The report, authored by the US National Commission on Excellence in Education, kicked off almost forty years of educational reforms—most clearly embodied by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiatives—which have been predicated on the idea of competition, primarily around raising standardized test scores.

It’s become apparent, however, that the tests students were asked to prepare for have been unworthy of their time. Results have remained stagnant, and students are experiencing ever-increasing levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Even reformers are now admitting that maybe they got some things wrong.⁸ Meanwhile, educational corporations like Pearson, which peddle both the standardized tests and the materials to prepare for them, have profited to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars.

The truth is that competition is a lousy framework for education. Requiring students to compete with each other for increasingly narrow pathways to success has indeed left lots of children behind. Even the winners are stressed out and demoralized, alienated from the pleasures of learning. By privileging operations, we’ve lost sight of education’s true mission. That’s just as true at colleges and universities as it is at K–12 schools. We should see the Reagan-era faiths and narratives for what they are—false and bankrupt programs that are literally bankrupting us.