Letters from Academia

I just published a new article of my weekly column “Letters from Academia.” It is about fake universities. You can read it at:

Fake Universities Are Not Necessarily A Rarity

Many believe that geography is just a matter of knowing the capitals of countries and states, but the science of geography is much more than that. It is, among other things, about correlating human activities and place. Now that institutions of higher education are scrambling to ensure that they have the enrollment they need in order to be financially sound, the location of colleges and universities has itself become far more important than ever before.

In a study published recently by the American Council on Education and the Center for Policy Research and Strategy titled “Education Deserts: The Continued Significance of ‘Place’ in the TwentyFirst Century,” its authors, Nicholas Hillman and Taylor Weichman of the University of WisconsinMadison, provide us with new and very revealing data about the importance of geography in higher education.

To begin with we need to understand that the choice of college is largely driven by four factors: cost, academic offerings, job preparation and location. One of the major findings by these researchers was that despite allegations that there are too many institutions of higher education in this country, the fact of the matter is that there are many of what they call “educational deserts,” that is, geographic areas where college opportunities are quite few and far between. Essentially these are locations where the only higher education institution within a 50-mile radius is a community college – if even that.

This is particularly relevant to public institutions. Despite the fact that there are private institutions in rural areas, they are not only small in size but also tend to be more selective when screening student applications. They also tend to serve many students from far outside their geographic area.

Based on their definition of an “educational desert” in relation to the population by county, the report identified that the two biggest “deserts” are located in the Lexington-Lafayette (Kentucky) and Columbia (South Carolina) areas. Although this may be surprising given that both of these communities have large flagship public universities – the University of Kentucky and the University of South Carolina, respectively – these are institutions that are moderately selective and do not serve their communities as a whole.

But this dearth of educational opportunities goes far beyond those two areas. The researchers calculated that these educational “deserts” are home to about 25.3 million adults, roughly 12 percent of the total adult population in the United States. This lack of educational opportunities particularly affects minorities, including Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos. Furthermore, the graduation rate for those residents that still manage to go to college is well below the national average.

These geographical disparities can only serve to increase socio-economic inequalities among Americans. Many of the residents in these educational “deserts” work full-time or have to care of dependents, meaning that they lack the mobility they need to seek educational opportunities elsewhere.

Some may think that in this internet age that these issues are irrelevant, but they would be wrong for numerous reasons. To begin with many people who live in rural areas do not have the means to buy a computer or have access to broadband internet. Also, as we have explained in past editions of this column, distance education is not very effective for students who work and/or for first-generation college students (many of whom are minorities). In fact, only about 10 percent of undergraduate students enroll exclusively online and the quality of education they receive is generally poorer than that delivered directly in a classroom, a lab, or a studio.

There are also other reasons why distance matters. For example, about 57 percent of incoming freshmen attending public four-year colleges enroll within 50 miles of their permanent home. The farther a student lives from a college or university, the less likely she or he is to enroll. Despite the fact that a lot of public colleges tout their affordability in an attempt to increase enrollment, a number of studies have shown that many students are more responsive to distance than to price.

We must realize that the location of a public higher education institution serves to encourage applications by locals because they represent a financial advantage in terms of transportation costs, better partnerships with local high schools (the main feeders of students who are college-bound), as well as community ties. Because of family, work, and even cultural reasons, many college students want to stay where they grew up. Some studies have shown that is particularly true for Latino, African American and Native American students.

As Ruth Lopez- Turley, professor of sociology at Rice University, has stated, we “should stop treating the college-choice process as though it were independent of location and start situating this process within the geographic context in which it occurs.”

One of the reasons this country was able to become an economic and political power was because it was able to expand higher education opportunities throughout the land, first through the creation of land-grant institutions in rural areas, a movement that started during the Civil War, and later by expanding federal funding as a result of both successive GI bills and after the Sputnik “shock” of 1957. I am afraid that in the current climate of diminishing pubic funding for higher education, and the increase in disparaging comments about the value of higher education, there will be little political will to eliminate higher education “deserts” from our cultural geography.

If America is the land of opportunities, then we should make sure that opportunities for higher education are available to all, irrespective of where they live. Otherwise the current economic gap between the “haves” and the “have not’s” will continue to grow.

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Fake Universities Are Not Necessarily A Rarity

The Renaissance took place, among other reasons, because a number of wealthy patrons, such as the Medicis, bankrolled artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Donatello. Thanks to their generosity we all enjoy many of the benefits of western civilization.

Since its inception, higher education in this country has also benefited from philanthropy. From the time of the great industrial expansion in the U.S. in the last part of the 19th century, great industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller fully funded universities named after them. Many others have also had their names associated with particular schools, professorships, or buildings. The intent of those donors was – for the most part – to support higher education without imposing a particular ideological slant.

However, in recent years, we have seen a new wave of funding in higher education where the motives seem to be much more ideological while attempting to exert a direct influence on the day-to-day operations of those institutions.

After the famous picture accompanying this article became widely publicized worldwide, alarmed conservatives such as John Olin, a multimillionaire and a former trustee of his alma mater, Cornell University, directed his foundation to act aggressively at Ivy League schools to promote conservative ideas on their campuses. His basic strategy – soon mimicked by other conservative donors – was to fund a conservative movement on campuses by supporting scholars with a conservative ideology and by creating conservative “beachheads” at those institutions.

The expectation was that a number of programs would be created in those institutions that would counter the movement of ethnic- or environmental-based ones seen a portraying “liberal” ideals, even Marxist ones. The programs would not be named specifically after a particular person or creed that could unmask their real ideological aim. As detailed by Jane Mayer in her recent book “Dark Money,” most of these “beachheads” were established at law and economics schools, such as those at Harvard, Yale, The University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown and the University of Virginia. And their strategy worked. As they expected, many of the graduates from these programs went on to occupy positions in academia and in government furthering conservative ideals.

Since the 1980s the conservative movement started a much more aggressive approach by funding programs and institutes on campuses. They became bolder in their aims, going as far as supporting ideas such as that slavery was actually consensual, that the real slavery was created by unions, that the doctrine of supply-side tax cuts for the rich was beneficial for the economy and that taxes were actually “theft” to support “immoral” welfare. George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., (which just renamed its law school after the late Justice Antonin Scalia) became a hotbed for those ideas. Many of the initiatives supporting such ideas were funded directly or indirectly by the Koch brothers and other conservative advocates.

Of course, the more money conservative donors have poured into these institutions, the more control they have exerted over them. In some cases these donors go so far as to dictate the content of courses, no matter how unsubstantiated some of the information they want passed on to students is. They are also having a direct input on faculty hires. Needless to say this has created a very bad environment in academia because many, particularly faculty, feel that the names of their institutions and their mission to educate students in an open and transparent manner is being betrayed.

This funding has flouted the principles that have been in place to ensure freedom of thought and innovation since universities were founded in medieval Europe. One such principle is that faculty decide on matters of curriculum and in the selection of who will be hired as their colleagues. It is true that this system does not always work as it should. After all, we are all humans and make mistakes, but the problem that we are facing now is that the system is being subverted by money backing ideological agendas.

Historically nobody saw anything wrong with naming professorships, endowed chairs, even a whole school after a major donor. Most institutions of higher education have specific policies that require a minimum donation for naming rights, as well an understanding that the academic freedom of choosing the person for the named position, as well as what is taught, is up to the college or university, not the donor.

In many ways the violations of these principles have been the result of the thirst for money and prestige by administrators who feel compelled to take cash from dubious sources. By doing so they can claim they are responding to the financial needs of the institution while touting their fundraising abilities.

The problem here is a lack of integrity. Institutions of higher education are supposed to be teaching ethics and moral principles besides the contents of subjects, not providing their own bad examples. But the issue is not just an ethical one, but also a practical one. Universities that sell their parts for a little bit of money are risking that supporting certain ideas, such as tax cuts for the rich, will in turn result in misguided public policies that will hurt those same institutions, including fewer tax dollars to support their endeavors.

It also means losing one of the main tools they have to attract good students and faculty: prestige.

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When Higher Education Gets Put Up For Sale

In the last few months a number of books have been published advancing the idea that the great American economic growth that the country witnessed since the Civil War is a thing of the past. Stagnation is now being used to describe the fact that since the 1970s the economic growth of the nation has actually been significantly slowed down and that the younger generation of Americans may be the first to not meaningfully exceed their parents’ standards of living.

Although unemployment has decreased significantly since the great recession of 2007-09, the fact of the matter is that wages remain flat and the inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” has increased dramatically. While the U.S. economy has grown over the last few years, particularly when compared with other countries including the European ones, we do not see much vitality in the world economic output as a whole, and that has also had an impact on the U.S. economy. And since economic growth and higher education are clearly interconnected, one wonders if “stagnation” is also what’s happening to this nation’s colleges and universities.

In the recently published “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” its author, Robert J. Gordon, points out to a number of facts that directly link economic growth and higher education. Here is some of the evidence that his book provides to illuminate that connection. One is the fact that people with better education increase their life expectancy. Another is that after World War II, the United States led the world in the percentage of young people completing college, thanks in great measure to the GI bill, which subsidized college expenses to veterans. However, completion rates in the U.S. have dropped and as a consequence we no longer shine in that respect. From number one we have descended to number 15 in the world in college completion of our citizens.

Another factor is that although the percentage earning four-year degrees has continued to increase, up to 40 percent of those graduates struggle to find jobs that actually require higher education. Further, even adjusted for inflation, the cost of college education has increased by a factor of 10 since the 1950s and now the total college debt burden in the country has reached $1.2 trillion. As mentioned in a previous column, the U.S. has the most expensive higher education system in the world when measured per capita.

It is also interesting to note that although the percentage of females obtaining a postsecondary degree has increased, the percentage of males has decreased, slowing down the educational attainment for the population as a whole. This reflects also on the average personal income since more education usually results in higher lifetime earnings.

Statistics also show that one of the causes of economic inequality in this country is directly correlated with the level of education. More and more, your level of education is closely correlated with what you earn. For example, income inequality between those with a high school degree and those with a college degree is becoming greater, leading to more inequality. For a two-income household where both members have a college degree, annual earnings are $58,000 higher when compared to when both only have a high school diploma. These economic advantages – and disadvantages – are oftentimes passed on their children, who will either have better or worse educational opportunities because of their parents’ ability to pay.

Finally, another important fact provided in this book is that between 2001 and 2012 funding by state and localities for higher education declined by a third when adjusted for inflation.

The conclusion one draws from this and other sources of information is clear: The less governments invest in education, the greater the negative impact on economic growth. Populist demands to reduce taxes no matter what, now-debunked ideas such as “trickle-down economics,” and an increasing rhetoric against higher education in general have combined to form a perfect storm that is hurting higher education and putting the brakes on economic development. This situation has been directly responsible for the fact that despite gains in employment rates and economic activity since the last recession, the U.S. economy is facing a state of stagnation all the while financial inequality keeps increasing. This combination fuels the dissatisfaction and even anger we are currently witnessing from many levels of society in this year’s presidential campaign. This frustration in turn is leading to even more populist political ideas whose harm to the country will be deeper and deeper in the long run.

We all have a responsibility for this quagmire, largely due to the fact that we have not been proactive enough in communicating the value of a higher education, and, therefore, we have been losing support for it. This is particularly true in the case of public institutions.

At the end of the day we also need to remember the old but true saying that what differentiates a states person from a politician is that the former thinks about the next generation while the latter thinks about the next election. Unfortunately, our political class has become more and more ordinary, with an increasing number of of individuals fixated on cheap slogans and false promises. The political climate in which we are living today has become the reason why so many well-intentioned, educated individuals want to stay away from the political fray. Instead of having a political class of the caliber of our Founding Fathers, we have relinquished – with few exceptions – the helm of government to the ranks of the mediocre.

If we want this country to progress and maintain its leadership in the world, we need a political class with the vision and courage to think about the next generation, not the next election. This is something we have to remember every time we are offered the opportunity to cast our opinions at the ballot box.

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Higher Ed Facing Stagnation In Years To Come

In past columns I have discussed the issue of the deteriorating academic preparation of high school seniors, exemplified but continuous decline in the ACT and SAT scores over the past 10 years.

These tests are designed to measure the preparedness of high school students for college. But I am afraid that this trend is only the tip of the iceberg of how badly prepared many students are for college.

In order to succeed in college, students need a suitable attitude for it, including everything from good study habits to civil behavior in the classroom. Unfortunately, we are also witnessing a decline in these aptitudes. Faculties – including younger instructors – are complaining more and more that instead of being in the classroom to prepare the minds of their students, they have to spend more time and energy acting as behavioral police.

It is becoming commonplace to hear students asking their teachers after lectures whether they “need to know that,” as if the course material could be divided between “necessary” or “useless.” That same message happens when a student who misses a class emails the professor to ask whether if he or she “missed anything important.”

Some students buy used textbooks that have already been highlighted so they don’t have to read and comprehend it.

They simply look at what a past student considered the most critical passages. Sometimes they go as far as asking the professor to actually highlight for them on the textbook what they need to study. It is hard to imagine such mental laziness.

Then there is the attitude in the classroom, from being constantly late, to missing many classes without a good excuse, to falling asleep during the lecture, to spending their time looking into their electronic devices to check on their friends’ messages in social media. Some also play games. Some have even been caught watching pornography. Many don’t read the syllabus and ignore instructions given to them.

A number of studies have shown that cases of cheating keep increasing, not to mention straight-out lies. I have as a policy that any student missing a test needs to document the reason (e.g., illness, major family tragedy) to get a make-up test.

Once, a student who had missed his exam approached me and said that he had a good “reason” why he could not take the exam when originally scheduled. He told me that he could not take it because he had been “abducted by space aliens.” Death of grandmothers (rarely grandfathers) is a typical excuse, although this one has become less and less believable.

Once I heard of a student who used that excuse twice for the same grandmother. When confronted with the fact she said “but this time it’s for real.” Another student, when caught with an exam that was identical (including misspellings) to the one of the student sitting in front of her, said that she did not mean it but that what had actually occurred was she had an “out-of-body experience.”

Although not all students exhibit this behavior, the increasing number of incidents like these should not be ignored. They are signaling a change in attitudes and values among the younger generations of citizens. But from where are these behaviors coming?

One could point fingers at high schools. In order to keep the funding they need, they have to show that students do better and better in standardized tests. This, in turn, leads teachers to become test preparers instead of role models of discipline and ethical behavior. But I think that the problem is deeper than that.

We are currently witnessing in society an increased permissiveness toward vulgarity and mediocrity at all levels, from the behavior of entertainment celebrities to political leaders who do not seem ashamed of discussing the size of their genitalia in a nationally televised presidential debate.

Although greater access to higher education is a noble goal, we need to start asking ourselves whether all those students with a high school diploma are both academically and culturally prepared for college.

But the solution to that question is not an easy one due to a number of factors that are creating pressure on higher education. One is the fact that given the decreasing financial support for state institutions, they are resorting to increasing the number of students enrolled not only to expand their cash flow but also to justify their relevance in society. The problem is that not only are they admitting students who are most likely to fail, but also who will never graduate and will carry large student debt for years without a diploma to justify such an expense. As a result, some state agencies and politicians are starting to emphasize retention and graduation rates, which means increasing expenditures in support services aimed at mending the deficiencies of our high schools. In many cases these efforts are to no avail.

Worse even, there is an increasing pressure – directly and indirectly – on professors to “go easy” on issues of academic rigor and ethical standards of behavior in the classroom.

That pressure is particularly hard on junior professors who have yet to obtain tenure and who want to make sure that they look good in student evaluations.

What better way to do that than to give good grades to students even if they do not deserve them? After all, many students when coming to college feel shocked that they cannot earn straight “A’s” as they did in high schools, no matter how they perform.

I am afraid that unless we all start to provide better examples in our conduct this problem will not be solved.

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College Students Deserve Good Role Models

In last week’s column I reported on studies by researchers at the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California, Los Angeles, showing the need for more efforts in diversifying colleges and universities, especially when it came to issues of inclusion.

Another study by the same group looked at the activism of the first-year entering class of 2015, the one that is expected to graduate in 2019. And you will see why this particular topic required its own column.

The study, titled “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2015,” predicts a much more activist group of college students in the years to come. The implications of this change can be enormous, not only for college administrators but also for politicians and the general public.

After surveying 141,189 first-time, full-time students who entered 199 four-year U.S. colleges and universities of all types, these researchers found that “the entering freshman class of 2015 ranks among the most ambitious in these areas compared to their counterparts.” And the jump of these intentions was dramatic when compared with the previous year.

For example, in 2014 only 5.6 percent of all freshmen indicated a “very good chance” that they would participate in student protests while in college. For the 2015 entering group that figure increased to 8.5 percent of students, the highest level recorded for this item since the inception of the survey in 1967. And these intentions crossed racial lines. For example, roughly 5.8 percent of Native American and 6 percent of Asian American/Pacific Islander students have strong expectations of participating in student protests in college. Yet the highest proportion if for black students, with 16 percent indicating that there was a “very good chance” of participating in student protests while in college. That is a 5.5 percent jump from the previous year.

This big jump in activist intentions may well be related to the numerous racial incidents that have taken place on many campuses in the last year, such as the one at the University of Missouri where the perception was that these problems were affecting disproportionally African-Americans. Latino students reported the second highest level of intention, with 10.2 percent reporting a “very good chance” of participating in student protests while in college. “These figures for both black and Latino students represent the highest recorded in the history of this item,” according to the report.

Another increase has been seen in their intentions to commit to engage with their communities, with almost 75 percent of them considering helping others in difficulty to be a “very important” or “essential” personal objective. Another important increase has been in the number of students (nearly 60 percent) expressing strong commitment toward improving their understanding of other countries and cultures.

Further, the entering freshman class of 2015 showed a substantial increase over previous years in placing greater emphasis on wanting to help promote racial understanding (41.2 percent rating it “very important” or “essential”) and wanting to influence social values (43.9 percent rating “very important” or “essential”). The study also indicates “students also seem to be substantially more committed to political engagement, as 22.3 percent report influencing the political structure as a ‘very important’ or ‘essential’ life objective.”

One matter of concern is that the interest in promoting racial understanding varies greatly according to race. Although that is a top priority for AfricanAmerican students (more than 68 percent) and Latino students (more than 52 percent), only one third of white students think that is important. Based on these numbers, there is little question that the entering college class of 2015 “expects to be more involved with and committed to these issues than those who came before them,” concludes this study.

What does it mean for colleges and universities? As indicated in this column last week, not only do we need to diversify our campuses by increasing minority representation at all levels (students, faculty, administrators) but also to create opportunities for those students to be more engaged in positive interactions on campus. To that end, colleges and universities should be offering more chances for community engagement that will serve to channel some of their concerns and enable more discussions about social and political issues.

Long-standing obstacles to these goals have included the lack of predisposition and the lack of skills in discussing racial issues face-to-face. This only reflects in part the American psyche of not wanting to discuss issues that many consider uncomfortable to talk about, as well as the fear of saying something that might offend others.

This is a curious circumstance because higher education has always maintained that in order to preserve academic freedom contrarian views must be not only tolerated but also openly discussed. Yet, the shadow of extreme political correctness has been cast on campuses as shown by the growing number of campus speakers or recipients of honorary degrees being banned or facing loud protests because they may say (or have said) something that may offend someone.

Of course words matter. They oftentimes reveal our deepest biases and intentions, and we need to be capable of distinguishing between ideas that are uncomfortable and true hate speech. And we should not let divergent opinions prevent us from being respectful towards others. A good example of such behavior was recently given by a large crowd at Liberty University, a Christian and very conservative institution that last September hosted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a Jew with very liberal ideas about politics and the economy. Yet, he received a warm welcome and even an ovation when he expressed some of his ideas.

If Liberty University can do that, why not other colleges and universities that proclaim themselves to be bastions of secular and liberal ideals?

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College Class of 2019 is a More Activist One

In the current debate about maintaining an ethnically diverse environment on colleges and university campuses, we have been listening to a lot of generalizations. Among the clichés floating around are assertions such as to ensure equal access to higher education to all regardless of racial background or the need to expose students – as part of their education – to the diverse world they will encounter once they graduate. Although all these thoughts are true, they lack “teeth” when it comes to convincing the skeptics for the need of more racially diverse colleges and universities.

However, there are a lot of data that actually support the notion that more diversifying efforts by campuses do indeed further these ideas about what a college education can provide students. Those statistics come from the recent work by several researchers at the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles.

These researchers found that an increased representation of students of color reduces the racialized vulnerability of minority students, although it has no effect on the frequency with which students of color interact with peers from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. In other words, the more diverse the campus, the more likely that minority students will feel comfortable and the more likely they will be to succeed. Yet, at the same time, they may be more likely to keep interacting mostly with people of their own ethnicity, which leads toward self-segregation. Also, they found that white students who enroll at campuses with greater proportions of white undergraduates feel less vulnerable and tend to interact less with peers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Also black and Latino students who enroll at more racially diverse campuses are less likely to report incidents of bias or discrimination to campus authorities as compared to their peers who attend less racially diverse colleges.

And diversity as a factor affects not how welcome students feel, but minority faculty as well. For example, the relationship between feeling stressed due to subtle discrimination and research productivity depends upon a faculty member ’s race/ethnicity. According to one of their studies, the authors found that white faculty tends to be unaffected in terms of research productivity as their levels of stress due to subtle discrimination increase. By contrast, faculty of color tends to produce significantly less research when they experience greater stress due to subtle discrimination.

Studies like these clearly show not only the need for more diversity on campuses, but also another challenge for colleges and universities on how to achieve more inclusiveness beyond just numbers.

When it comes to recruiting students and faculty, higher education institutions need to be more deliberate in their efforts. To just pretend that nice words and platitudes in their diversity statements will be enough to attract minority students is not going to be enough. First they need to diversify both faculty and administrators so prospective students and faculty can see more faces like theirs. After all, these minority faculty and administrators will be the ones with whom minority students and faculty will interact the most. Therefore, those faculty and administrators need to actively participate in their diversity efforts.

This is a more important factor that it may seem. Despite the fact that the number of people of color getting into academia has increased, according to a study by the American Council on Education, the number of minorities in leadership positions on campus universities has been decreasing – even at minority serving institutions.

Also these institutions need to be more proactive by making more concerted efforts to go where prospective minority students and faculty are to recruit them. The idea that “if we build it they will come” does not work. These institutions also need to understand that while more diverse faces help, the message coming from these institutions also has to be different.

For example, the kind of message to AfricanAmerican students will never be the same as the one needed for Latino students. For Latino students, many of who are first-generation college students, family considerations are important and sometimes require them to put additional efforts in convincing their parents that a college degree makes a tremendous difference both financially and socially. And many times that message needs to be delivered in Spanish.

Also, economic status requires fine-tuning for each case. Even different communities will require different approaches. Latinos from Florida think differently than those from the New York area or from those from California and Southwestern states. These differences are related to the immigration experience as well as issues of discrimination they may have faced in the past.

There are a number of national organizations such as Minority Access Inc., which provides educational institutions useful tools to be more effective in their interactions with minorities, including where to find them and how to interact successfully with a diversity of demographics. Nonetheless, colleges and universities need to have a clear strategy and the right people to carry out those plans.

But together with the increase of diversity is another equally difficult task – ensuring that the problems of integration are also addressed. At the end of the day the issues with diversity require planning, staffing and clear objectives.

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Issues With Diversity On Campuses Continue

One of the major challenges facing higher education is financial stability and that is true whether it is a public or a private institution. We have always known that private colleges and universities are tuition dependent. That is, their cash flow requires a strong input of money from tuition and fees. Because of the constant decrease in public funding we are seeing a wave of “privatization” of public institutions, making them more and more dependent on tuition and fees just as their private counterparts. As the joke goes, public institutions have been transforming themselves from being state-funded to state-assisted to state-located.

So it is only logical that public colleges and universities look into increasing their enrollment of students. The problem is that in many states we are seeing a demographic “deflation” where the number of high school graduates is either flat or decreasing. In competing for new students, these institutions have been engaged in practices such as offering in-state tuition to out-of-state students. This practice, as I have explained in a previous article in this column, is not only ethically dubious for the state’s taxpayers, but also self-defeating in the long run. At the end of the day we end up with a lot of institutions vying for the same pool of students and receiving a net loss of income.

Another tactic that some institutions have tried since the 1980s is the “Chivas Regal effect.” Chivas Regal is a scotch whisky usually associated with quality and endorsements by high profile celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack.” As the story is told in marketing courses, this brand of liquor, facing sluggish sales in the early 1950s, decided to increase its price without changing its product. This tactic was based on the idea that people would believe that “you get what you pay for,” and then pay a higher price for what they believe is higher quality. And it worked. Sales went up and established Chivas Regal as a brand of high quality, popular whiskey.

This tactic, which has also been widely used in the restaurant business, has been employed by colleges and universities with the idea that higher tuition will project the image of providing higher quality education, thus enhancing their ability to recruit students. This was viewed as a win-win tactic: more students and more money by each student. Although this practice was initiated by private institutions of higher education, I am afraid that some public ones that are allowed to set their own tuition and fees will follow the same path.

This phenomenon among institutions of higher education was studied by researchers who published their analysis last January in the journal “Administrative Science Quarterly.” Using data from the “U.S. News & World Report” annual rankings of private colleges and universities from 2005 to 2012, they showed that a typical response by many of these institutions when they sharply lose status in these rankings was to increase their tuition. In other words, the Chivas Regal tactic. The use of this tactic was particularly true among those institutions that appeal widely to college applicants and whose rivals are relatively more expensive.

This approach reveals a number of fractures in the administration of higher education. First is the increasing dependence of what colleges and universities do with the unscientific rankings of popular magazines such as the “U.S. News and World Report.” Once again, many forget that the real measure of quality in higher education is how well we prepare students to be successful in the real world. Rankings by commercial magazines never really measure that and are more a publicity stunt than a real measure of academic quality. This shows the proclivity of many college administrators to use gimmicks when under pressure.

Second, this adds to the criticism that colleges and universities charge too much for the services they provide. This further casts a bad shadow on the reputation of these institutions while fueling political demagoguery about higher education. Higher education already is getting a very bad wrap in the media and in public opinion for us to create further damage to ourselves.

Third, this approach further increases a terrible national problem we are facing – escalating student debt. According to the Web site collegedebt.com and many other sources, the current cumulative student debt in the U.S. is nearly $1.4 trillion. Just to give an idea of how gigantic that debt is, credit card debt is about $882 billion and for auto loans, $750 billion. The fact that we are facing stagnant salaries only makes things worse since that weakens the ability for the population in general to pay back their loans.

According to MarketWatch, student loan debt is growing at a rate of nearly $3,000 every second. About 36,000 Americans lost a portion of their Social Security checks in 2013 due to an unpaid federal student loan, and that is only the federal part of it. Many students also own significant debt to other sources.

Although higher education institutions always try to pretend that they maintain high ethical values, the increase of their tuition and fees to restore their cash flow is an amoral solution to the problem. Instead, they should be more vocal about insensitive budget cuts, more prudent about escalating costs and more entrepreneurial about ethical ways to improve their finances.

In any case, given that this is a national problem with many ramifications, voters this November will have to look into which of the candidates and parties offer real solutions to this issue. Otherwise, the social and financial consequences to the country can and will be as severe as many others we are facing today. It is time to include the issue of student debt in the national political conversation. And we don’t need to do it over a drink of whiskey.

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Student Debt Must Be Addressed In The Election

The Twilight Zone was one of my favorite TV series when I was growing up. Of the 156 episodes, originally broadcast between 1959 and 1964, the one titled “The Changing of the Guard” left a striking mark on me. It was about a teacher named Fowler, interpreted by Donald Pleasence, who, after being forced to retire, contemplates suicide because he does not feel he has made a difference in the world. Then he imagines going back to his classroom where the ghosts of a number of his former students show up and tell him of all of their achievements while thanking him for teaching them values such as courage, ethics, bravery, patriotism, loyalty and honesty.

Fowler returns home where he reflects on the experience and says, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” This is actually a quote from Horace Mann, an American educator and reformer who created the system of public schools in this country aimed at providing free education to all so children would become productive members of society.

The episode, written by the series creator Rod Serling, ends with Fowler saying that he has lived a very good, full and rich life.

This is a good lesson we all need to remember about being a teacher. There is no question that teaching, at all levels, is a noble cause. Nobody becomes a teacher to be rich or famous. People who get into the profession do so because they feel that they can change people’s lives, that they can really make a difference in this world.

However, sometimes that calling can be tested. Education as an enterprise is being assaulted on many different fronts and for many different reasons.

Public education has been receiving less and less support by some politicians who seem to be enamored with the idea of tax cuts under the mantra that fewer taxes on the rich will spur economic development. It does not matter that this “trickle-down” economics idea has been debunked again and again. With the same passion that the Republican-controlled Congress keeps passing on an almost weekly basis a useless repeal of Obamacare, fans of the trickle-down idea keep repeating their blind faith on this faulty concept.

Then we have the numerous falsehoods spread along much of the political spectrum that education is expensive, that faculty earn too much money, and that the whole system is inefficient. To that end those critics propose an overhaul of that system by using some magical “technological fix,” which is nothing but a different version of correspondence courses regardless of how many times it has been demonstrated that such systems only work for a narrow sector of the population, usually the better-off and already educated. The bottom line is that the proponents of ideas like these believe that good teachers can be replaced by robotic systems (i.e., computer programs) that can deliver education at a low cost under the guise of new technologies.

Then we have those who propose an overhaul of what should be taught by concentrating efforts in teaching only utilitarian, technical skills. Their idea is that graduates in higher education should only have a narrow spectrum of abilities, disregarding that to succeed in the modern world requires what have been termed “soft skills,” including critical thinking, communication, problem solving and team-work capabilities.

Some politicians also have concentrated efforts (at the local, state, and national levels) to impose all kind of regulations on education. Their ultimate goal is an ideological control of an activity they find onerous and ultimately inconvenient to their political agenda, despite their protestations that government oversight should be kept away from our educational system. These ideas persist no matter how many times it has been shown that these excessive regulations are not only ineffective but also increase the cost of education. Further, there is also this notion that institutions of higher education should be run as a business, forgetting that this activity is not a manufacturing activity generating a commodity and that students are not “consumers.” The very essence of education is offering personal attention to a population with different needs in a changing world. This is the antithesis of a business, for-profit model.

On top of that, teaching as a profession has become the target of unfounded criticism that blurs not only the actual commitment of its practitioners but also casts a shadow on the honesty and value of professors. Professors are labeled as lazy “liberals” who work very little while abusing the concept of tenure or sabbatical in order to have a life free of commitments and obligations. Their out-of-the-classroom activities such as scholarship and community service are viewed as just a fulfillment of their own hobbies being subsidized by either the taxpayers and/or students and their families through tuition and fees. Although there are always bad apples like in any other profession, the lambasting of teaching as an occupation is the product of unscrupulous generalizations.

Unlike the ghosts who appear in The Twilight Zone episode thanking Professor Fowler for his teachings, what we have now are zombie ideas about education in general and higher education in particular that are haunting one of the most important endeavors of civilization.

What do we need to do to exorcise ourselves from these ideas? We need to become ardent defenders of our profession, and more active in securing what is now a right of all citizens: good and accessible education. We need to transform ourselves into more articulate defenders of our vocation. As Horace Mann said, we should “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” only that this time that victory is not only to transform the minds of our students but also to transform the system that is ruining education as a vocation.

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Higher Education Being Haunted By Zombies

In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of talk about making higher education affordable. With the cumulative student debt in the United States at more than a trillion dollars, it is not surprising that this issue has become part of the political discussion, especially during the current political campaign. And proposals abound. Bernie Sanders’ free college for all, or President Obama’s free community college nation-wide, or the push by some of the members of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University to provide free tuition to their students, are just some examples.

Although some may see these proposals as too idealistic, possible only with wide (and unrealistic) bipartisan support, or confined only to a few private institutions with very wealthy endowments, there are other alternatives available but that are rarely discussed with the general public. One of those alternatives is the “human capital contract.” This unclear wording needs some explanation.

The term “human capital” was coined by Adam Smith in his 1776 “The Wealth of Nations” book, where he referred to knowledge and skills of workers as a form of “human capital.” This idea of using this concept as a private mechanism to finance higher education was articulated by such Nobel Prize-winning economists as Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and Robert Merton as an “equity-like” financial instrument.

This idea works as follows: People who need financial assistance in order to pursue a higher education go to a capital provider (a financial institution, whether for profit or not), and request that that institution “invests” in them. Once they graduate and start working, then they make a series of periodic dividend payments back to the provider based on their earnings. Unlike a typical bank loan, these payments are variable in amount to be paid since they are proportional with the capital receiver’s income after graduation. It may never total the initial investment amount made by the capital provider in the case of those who never make too much money in their careers. In other words, how much and when the payment is paid back depends upon the receiver’s ability to pay.

The instrument is in the form of a contract by which an individual obtains resources to finance his or her education by committing a percentage of his or her income for a predefined period of time after graduation. Thus, the nature of the contract protects the student against periods in which earnings are small or nonexistent. It also relieves the student from high payments if his/her career path is less profitable than intended.

The students would not be the only ones benefitting from this approach. Comparisons between the price of human capital contracts and education costs would improve the efficiency of the higher education market and will serve to counter the baseless assertions that some have been making lately that a higher education is not a good investment for students and their families. At the end of the day human capital contracts will benefit students through better financing conditions.

There are other advantages for this financial system. For example, it requires minimal – if any – resources from government. Anytime that you can isolate innovative proposals like this from politics, the better the chances for its success. Yet, for them to be applicable we need human capital contracts to be recognized in every state or at the federal level, otherwise we will be at the mercy of courts where their enforceability can only be determined when one of these contracts is legally challenged. Thus, in addition to creating new mechanisms for financing higher education, we should motivate policymakers to ensure that such contracts can succeed.

Although some have criticized this proposal as a form of indenture of life-long financial obligation by an individual, it is, by far, much better that long-term, fixed interest obligations contracted with banks. After all, students are free to make their own career choices and employment decisions at all times. Further, students from lower-income households will be able to pursue a higher education. Unlike the free higher education for all proposed by some, it will distinguish between those who can afford and cannot afford a higher education, making the system much more equitable.

Among the institutions that have already tried this system is Yale University, which between 1971 and 1978 attempted to replace traditional student loans with human capital contracts under its “Tuition Postponement Option” program. Under this program, for each $1,000 borrowed from the university, students pledged 0.04 percent of their future earnings for 35 years, or until the whole class paid off its aggregate debt, whichever came first. The program was eventually abandoned when it was realized that about 20 percent of the students failed to make payments. Also, they did not anticipate that students who opted into such programs were generally those who expected to pursue low-income careers and were least likely to be able to repay their loans. Further, in order to pay less in income taxes, many graduates focused on voluntary (non-financially compensated) work or part-time jobs.

Other educational institutions, such as the University of Colorado School of Medicine and The University of California system are also currently evaluating the Human Capital Contracts system, learning from the Yale experience. Since 2013 several state legislatures have approved similar plans that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. What is clear is that Human Capital Contracts offer a better and more evenhanded alternative to student loans. But in order to make them work their regulatory framework needs to be advanced to protect both investors and recipients in case of generalized financial crisis.

Although there are many uncertainties with this idea, it is one worthwhile to further explore as an additional alternative.

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There Are Alternatives To High Student Debt