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CHAPTER 1

An Existential Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic poses an existential threat to public higher education.

And yet, I am hopeful.

While the pandemic’s economic shock has exacerbated the conditions afflicting institutions of higher education, it is not the primary cause. Public postsecondary education has been ailing for a long time. And while some kind of monetary bailout will be necessary to keep colleges and universities afloat through this crisis, we also need a more significant reset that will put institutions on a sustainable path going forward.

That reset is clear. All public two- and four-year postsecondary education institutions should be tuition-free. We should also cancel all existing, federally held student loan debt. Some people might think these suggestions are far too grand. But we can achieve them if we, as a nation, can collectively rediscover our capacity for imagination.

In his recently published cultural history, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, Kurt Andersen argues that America has lost its hunger and ability to “improve” itself. While the quest for a more perfect union once animated American life, America since the Reagan Revolution has been significantly less innovative as a people and as a country. Innovation is something that happens to us, rather than because of us. While this has created a highly hospitable atmosphere for corporations to enrich themselves beyond imagining, it has also stifled progress and created invisible, yet very real, boundaries around our notion of what is possible.

Andersen writes, “Almost a half-century ago, the country began a strange hiatus from its founding mission of inventing and reinventing itself in pursuit of the new and improved.” He asks us to consider the upheavals the country faced in every decade of the twentieth century: the Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam-era peace movement, environmentalism, and others. He sees strife, of course, but also genuine progress rooted in experimentation, a willingness to not be over-beholden to the “old ways” and to move forward.

“Openness to the new was a defining American trait,” Andersen observes. But this trait has largely been absent since the election of Ronald Reagan. The project of the “evil geniuses” (corporations and right-wing ideologues) in Andersen’s formulation has been to realize William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous goal to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” Or worse, to throw the country into reverse. In Andersen’s view, their method for achieving this has relied on years of making our democratic republic significantly less democratic through a long campaign of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and capturing the judiciary. But perhaps more importantly, these nefarious figures have worked to shape the American psyche around what is and is not possible.

It is as though Andersen’s evil geniuses convinced us that things are as good as they ever can be, and now it’s just a matter of tinkering around the edges, of finding the right formula to dial in the results we desire. This illusion has been achieved by ensuring the dial has been set to a place that most advantages the corporations who fund the Republican Party and the white—primarily male—majority that supports it politically.

The innovations and societal advancements of the relatively recent past are almost inconceivable to think about proposing today. Could you imagine the government looking at a problem like poverty among the elderly and enacting a program now with the size and reach of Medicare? Today, the response to most big initiatives that could hold the potential for broad-based societal improvement and prosperity is a reflexive dismissal: That’s just not possible.

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This is as true in higher education as it is anywhere else in America, but it wasn’t always like this. Consider the audacity of our system of land-grant colleges, established through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. Who could imagine taking federally controlled land in every state (seventeen million acres total) and setting it aside to build institutions dedicated to agriculture, engineering, and other practical fields, while also “not excluding classical studies”? The establishment of these schools seeded our system of public universities, which have in turn benefited states in countless ways and provided economic benefits in equally countless billions and trillions of dollars. Even more recently, the 1960s saw the establishment of nearly 500 community colleges, which provided access to postsecondary education on an unprecedented scale.

For decades, up until the 1980s, America’s large societal problems were identified and tackled. Possibilities were not constrained by spasms of questions concerning how we were going to pay for new programs and initiatives. The result was a century of progress. It was progress in fits and starts, and it was coupled with all of the conflict and contention that one would expect when not everyone is on board with change, but it was progress, nonetheless.

When we examine the consequences of the last forty years of public austerity and corporate largesse, however, it’s clear how wrong a turn we’ve made. Andersen argues that now, our problems are not economic in the monetary sense—after all, prior to the pandemic, the country was richer than it ever had been—but are instead rooted in the problems of our “political economy.” Big ideas and playing the long game have been subsumed by doing what it takes to win the next election cycle, or worse, the next day’s news cycle. It is not a problem of money, but of vision. Andersen sees us at an “existential crossroads” in general, where we must collectively make “important choices.” We are at one of those moments when it comes to postsecondary education in particular. Which path will we choose?

Collapsing Revenues

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the revenue sources that drive institutional operations around the country are drying up all at once. It is very, very bad. State revenues, many of which are predicated on sales and other consumption taxes, are cratering. An April 2020 projection from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projected an aggregated loss of $650 billion at the state level for 2020 through 2022.¹ This collapse in state revenues is happening at the same time that legislatures, on average and in aggregate, have only returned to about half of the previously reduced appropriations to higher education following the 2008 recession.² Charitable giving, including that to colleges and universities, will almost certainly decline in the near future. The individual incomes of students and their families will be severely affected by COVID-19, leaving them hard-pressed to fund tuition and other educational expenses. And international students, who often pay higher tuition rates at public institutions, are significantly less likely to enroll at an American university while the virus’s uncertainty still looms over our ability to travel.

A huge proportion of our colleges and universities are tuition-dependent, living hand to mouth and semester to semester on the money students pay to attend. According to data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, just under half of all educational revenue comes from student tuition.³ If students fail to enroll, for whatever reason, it can mean the demise of an institution that doesn’t have alternative sources of support.

It is difficult to overstate how tight margins are at most public colleges and universities. When the College of Charleston (my former employer) saw an enrollment shortfall of a total of four hundred out-of-state students over a three-year period from 2012 to 2015, the resulting $2.1 million budget shortfall resulted in “hard choices” that had the potential to “inhibit the college’s ability to fulfill its mission.”⁴ That was a shortfall of one-half of 1 percent of a single year’s total budget.

So what happens when a budget declines by 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent? Maybe it looks something like the University of Akron, which (as of mid-July 2020) had cut 23 percent of its full-time faculty in response to the sudden shock of the shutdowns necessitated by the pandemic.⁵

Every public college and university throughout the country is now facing similar pressures. They are shrinking their faculty and eliminating degree programs. During the 2008 recession, the institutional rhetoric often talked about “doing more with less,” but even this phony optimism is absent now. In July 2020, the chairman of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors instructed the system’s chancellors to prepare plans for budget cuts of between 25 and 50 percent. There is no scenario under which a university can survive after a 50 percent budget cut. That’s it, game over. So long UNC-Greensboro. Been nice knowing you NC State. Godspeed, East Carolina, Appalachian State, and Elizabeth City State University. You had a nice 230-year-run, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, but I’m sorry to say, it’s over.

And yet, even with all these horrible signs, I am hopeful.

What’s beneath the Bottom?

If higher education is meant to be a ladder to prosperity, the ladder doesn’t seem to reach very far and we have left out some of the rungs. Data compiled by Harvard economist Raj Chetty shows that colleges are largely stratified by socioeconomic class in terms of the students they admit. Only a few institutions in the country achieve a high “mobility rate,” moving students from the bottom 40 percent of income to the top 40 percent.⁶

Much of this mobility problem is rooted in how difficult it has become to navigate college for those who do not have access to the funds to pay for it. In Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, Sara Goldrick-Rab of Temple University and the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice shows how the byzantine system of federal and institutional aid prevents students from starting degree programs or finishing them once they’ve started. In one study, half of the 3,000 students Goldrick-Rab followed who enrolled in the University of Wisconsin system left college without a degree. They didn’t leave because they were incapable of handling the academic demands, but because there were too many hurdles in the way of securing the basic resources necessary to live while also attending school.

To continue a program of austerity in order to keep institutions afloat through the current pandemic crisis strikes me as beyond futile. What is worth preserving about this system? And perhaps more importantly, what exactly is left to cut? Colleges and universities now are like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, having had multiple limbs lopped off, keeps insisting, “It’s just a flesh wound!” But as Bryan Alexander, a trend tracker on higher education and the author of Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, observed in the immediate aftermath of school closures during the spring 2020 semester, “We’re out of fat. We’re cutting sinew, muscle, bone.”

We have come to the terminus of what Christopher Newfield, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and an expert on higher education institutional finances, calls “The Great Mistake,”⁷ the steady commercialization and privatization of our public colleges and universities. Having embraced the ethos of the market, we have managed to reduce the value of a postsecondary education entirely to its credential, while simultaneously leaving institutions starved of the revenue necessary to do their work.

Responding to this current crisis with the remedies of the past will consign a significant portion of institutions to a final demise. Those schools that are left behind will barely resemble what we once believed them to be, and they will turn many localities where they exist into ghost towns. Consider a school like the University of Wisconsin-Stout, which enrolls nearly 10,000 students while being situated in Menomonie, a town of 16,000 people. In many places like Menomonie, the local college or university is the town’s chief employer, its cultural center, and a technology hub for the residents who surround it. To allow these institutions to die or turn into virtual shells of their former selves would be an economic disaster. Consider a Midwest that has been both ravaged by deindustrialization and stripped of its regional higher education institutions. What will be left?

If this is not enough, the total student loan debt in the United States at the time I’m writing is over $1.6 trillion. It may be noticeably larger by the time you read this sentence. The drag on prosperity that amount of debt creates is incalculable.

And yet, even with all this I am hopeful. I am hopeful because now we have little choice but to act.