the social mission of higher education
i wrote this for the november 2004 issue of the graduate voice.
uri
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uri
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The Social Mission of Higher Education
We are used to thinking of the missions of higher education as being teaching and research, and indeed this is the view that is usually promoted by university administrators, politicians and business leaders. But from the perspective of poor and working people – the large majority of us – there is an important mission that’s not usually mentioned: the social mission of promoting greater equality. In this article I will briefly try to show why we should consider this mission central to our concerns.
The social mission
It is established that a strong positive correlation exists between educational level and income in the United States. According to the RAND corporation’s report “Breaking the Social Contract”, educational level is the single most important factor in determining income level in the United States. Comparative studies have shown that countries that have achieved relatively high levels of social equality have done it in large part thanks to an accessible higher education system. Increasingly, a college degree is the necessary level of education to qualify for middle-income jobs.
This suggests an important social mission for public higher education: promoting economic and social equality. At times, universities in the United States have served these functions. For example, millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of 1944, in which the federal government covered tuition and most expenses for war veterans going to college. This undoubtedly played a significant role in pulling many people into higher income levels. If social and economic equality are important social goals, then the accessibility of higher education to low income individuals is a crucial necessity.
The fact that universities have a social mission does not mean that they don’t also have other missions, such as research excellence, education and training. The argument is not that universities should be turned into welfare centers. The point is that as a result of the way that higher education institutions are currently structured, qualified students are unable to get a college education, to the detriment of themselves, their communities and society in general. Higher education institutions in general need to be more open to qualified students. And public land grant universities like UMass have an extra responsibility to prioritize the social mission. Our state has its Harvards and MITs, where cutting-edge research in the humanities, pure and applied sciences are supported. If UMass is restructured in an attempt to be a more mediocre version of these schools, we would lose a very valuable potential tool for social equalization.
Free higher education: Affordable
Can higher education be made accessible to every qualified individual who desires it? In a country with the wealth of the United States, the answer is an undoubted, unequivocal yes. The cases of free higher education that we can point to as precedents – the GI Bill, the CUNY system in New York City that provided free education for city residents, the free tuition in European countries and elsewhere – have all been implemented by governments with far fewer resources than our current federal government commands. All of these precedents have been strong successes.
The annual cost of tuition and fees for all students currently in colleges or universities is estimated at $25 billion. In terms of federal expenditures, this is paltry. It is a fraction of the portion of the Bush tax cut that went to the wealthiest 1% of the population. To look at it another way, it is a fraction of the differential between the US military budget and the combined military budgets of the next ten highest spenders.
The issue is one of priorities. An accessible college education is clearly not a priority for the current Republican administration, nor for any Republican or Democratic administration in the recallable past or the foreseeable future. As is often the case with bipartisan priorities, we can see a class dynamic at play: while working and poor people would love to see free higher education, as surely as we would love to see free health care, the wealthiest Americans do not want such a system, so the issue is off the political map.
Accessible higher education: A human right
Besides being a progressive idea, accessible higher education is recognized as a human right by the world’s highest authorities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” (Article 26). International conventions such as the Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) and the Declaration of the World Conference on Higher Education (1998) reaffirm this right, and accessibility is enshrined as one of the basic principles of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The corporatization of UMass
Decisions concerning the accessibility of education belong most naturally at the federal level, secondarily at the state level, which is the level of government where decisions about the funding of universities actually take place. But making higher education accessible is the responsibility of the individual university as well. The decisions that are made by a university's board of trustees and administrative officers can have a significant impact on whether low-income people can get into the university, and if so, whether they can survive it.
Here at UMass Amherst, the main players are the Board of Trustees, President Wilson and his staff, and the administration of UMass Amherst, headed by Chancellor Lombardi. The Board of Trustees is the ultimate decision-making body of the university, and is largely drawn from the world of corporate executives and corporate-friendly bureaucrats. President Wilson is as much an entrepreneur as an academic, if not more so.
Given this type of leadership, along with the inherently conservative nature of bureaucracies, it is not surprising that the concerns of these decision makers are largely the same as the corporate agenda for higher education, which includes innovative research that will result in marketable products and skilled graduates suitable for work in our advanced economy. The social mission of the university is not part of their agenda. In fact, it hampers their agenda, since all else being equal, it's cheaper and easier to produce the research and workers that the corporations want if the raw materials are well-educated students from middle- and upper-income families, and not students from poor areas who went to substandard high schools, if they attended high school at all.
Chancellor Lombardi comes from a bit of a different place - he is an administrator with an academic background. Along with President Wilson, he was hired in order to implement some specific sorts of changes at UMass, namely to consolidate its transformation from an institution that has had some success in implementing its land grant mission - a social mission - into a top-notch research school – an academic mission. The chancellor has for years been involved with initiatives to measure performance - meaning performance in terms of academic and research missions, not social missions - of higher education institutions. His plans for UMass Amherst have been stated clearly and repeatedly, and can be found online in the Executive Summary of the Amherst Campus Strategic Plan.
The chancellor’s priority is to turn this campus into one of the top centers of research in the country. As he readily acknowledges, this requires money, and money that is spent in pursuit of this mission is money that's not being spent on things like health care, child care, student support services, wages for workers, and other expenditures more in keeping with the ideal of an accessible university. It's also money that's extracted from students through higher tuition, service fees and housing costs. This means driving up the cost of a UMass education, pulling it further out of the reach of low-income people. Though not necessarily driven by it, this approach fits well with the corporate agenda for education, and it undermines the goal of social equality.
Tuition and debt up, access down
The corporatization of education at UMass is indicative of a more general trend. The results across the country and the world are worrisome: tuition at public institutions is climbing steadily, in some places skyrocketing. Meanwhile, the traditional way of paying for an education – Pell grants and other non-merit-based grants, are covering less and less of the cost of an education, and are being replaced by loans. As a result, many qualified students are not able to attend college.
Adolph Reed’s article “Majoring in Debt” (The Progressive, Jan. 2004) cites a report by the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which finds that “by the end of this decade as many as 4.4 million college-qualified high school graduates will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and two million will not go to college at all because they can't afford it.” The same article reports that for the majority of students at four-year public institutions who graduate with debt, the average debt load is $17,000. Undoubtedly this figure will continue to rise. Other students avoid this fate by working long hours outside of school, delaying their graduation or dropping out altogether.
The picture at UMass
At UMass, the result of these trends, together with the state’s slashing of our budget, has been the elimination or scaling back of many services. To mention just a few, we have lost our on-campus pre-school program and our foreign language resource center.
Many of our other programs, including academic departments and all sorts of support services, have sustained cuts at different levels. UMass used to have a highly-regarded ALANA advising program, but as a result of restructuring, many students have been switched over to advising through their academic programs, an unpopular move among the students who have been affected. And tuition and fees continue to climb.
The way forward
The corporatization of UMass is part of the war against the working class and the poor that is happening nationwide and worldwide. It goes hand in hand with Bush’s dismantling of the progressive taxation system, Clinton’s welfare reform, the attacks on unions, and the replacement of social programs with the prison system, which now has more young African Americans “enrolled” than colleges and universities do. The fight against the corporatization at UMass is part of the fight for people’s rights more generally.
We need to keep in mind and to articulate the social role of higher education. We cannot accept the administration’s emphasis on research and teaching excellence as a cover for the dismantling of the accessible university. While supporting high-quality teaching and research, we must demand that the university meet its obligations as a social and economic institution and as a community of human beings. To relent, to allow UMass to degenerate until it is a mere knowledge factory, would be to surrender to the corporate agenda. If we don’t identify with corporate interests, we must fight them at all levels, including at UMass.
It is established that a strong positive correlation exists between educational level and income in the United States. According to the RAND corporation’s report “Breaking the Social Contract”, educational level is the single most important factor in determining income level in the United States. Comparative studies have shown that countries that have achieved relatively high levels of social equality have done it in large part thanks to an accessible higher education system. Increasingly, a college degree is the necessary level of education to qualify for middle-income jobs.
This suggests an important social mission for public higher education: promoting economic and social equality. At times, universities in the United States have served these functions. For example, millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of 1944, in which the federal government covered tuition and most expenses for war veterans going to college. This undoubtedly played a significant role in pulling many people into higher income levels. If social and economic equality are important social goals, then the accessibility of higher education to low income individuals is a crucial necessity.
The fact that universities have a social mission does not mean that they don’t also have other missions, such as research excellence, education and training. The argument is not that universities should be turned into welfare centers. The point is that as a result of the way that higher education institutions are currently structured, qualified students are unable to get a college education, to the detriment of themselves, their communities and society in general. Higher education institutions in general need to be more open to qualified students. And public land grant universities like UMass have an extra responsibility to prioritize the social mission. Our state has its Harvards and MITs, where cutting-edge research in the humanities, pure and applied sciences are supported. If UMass is restructured in an attempt to be a more mediocre version of these schools, we would lose a very valuable potential tool for social equalization.
Free higher education: Affordable
Can higher education be made accessible to every qualified individual who desires it? In a country with the wealth of the United States, the answer is an undoubted, unequivocal yes. The cases of free higher education that we can point to as precedents – the GI Bill, the CUNY system in New York City that provided free education for city residents, the free tuition in European countries and elsewhere – have all been implemented by governments with far fewer resources than our current federal government commands. All of these precedents have been strong successes.
The annual cost of tuition and fees for all students currently in colleges or universities is estimated at $25 billion. In terms of federal expenditures, this is paltry. It is a fraction of the portion of the Bush tax cut that went to the wealthiest 1% of the population. To look at it another way, it is a fraction of the differential between the US military budget and the combined military budgets of the next ten highest spenders.
The issue is one of priorities. An accessible college education is clearly not a priority for the current Republican administration, nor for any Republican or Democratic administration in the recallable past or the foreseeable future. As is often the case with bipartisan priorities, we can see a class dynamic at play: while working and poor people would love to see free higher education, as surely as we would love to see free health care, the wealthiest Americans do not want such a system, so the issue is off the political map.
Accessible higher education: A human right
Besides being a progressive idea, accessible higher education is recognized as a human right by the world’s highest authorities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” (Article 26). International conventions such as the Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) and the Declaration of the World Conference on Higher Education (1998) reaffirm this right, and accessibility is enshrined as one of the basic principles of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The corporatization of UMass
Decisions concerning the accessibility of education belong most naturally at the federal level, secondarily at the state level, which is the level of government where decisions about the funding of universities actually take place. But making higher education accessible is the responsibility of the individual university as well. The decisions that are made by a university's board of trustees and administrative officers can have a significant impact on whether low-income people can get into the university, and if so, whether they can survive it.
Here at UMass Amherst, the main players are the Board of Trustees, President Wilson and his staff, and the administration of UMass Amherst, headed by Chancellor Lombardi. The Board of Trustees is the ultimate decision-making body of the university, and is largely drawn from the world of corporate executives and corporate-friendly bureaucrats. President Wilson is as much an entrepreneur as an academic, if not more so.
Given this type of leadership, along with the inherently conservative nature of bureaucracies, it is not surprising that the concerns of these decision makers are largely the same as the corporate agenda for higher education, which includes innovative research that will result in marketable products and skilled graduates suitable for work in our advanced economy. The social mission of the university is not part of their agenda. In fact, it hampers their agenda, since all else being equal, it's cheaper and easier to produce the research and workers that the corporations want if the raw materials are well-educated students from middle- and upper-income families, and not students from poor areas who went to substandard high schools, if they attended high school at all.
Chancellor Lombardi comes from a bit of a different place - he is an administrator with an academic background. Along with President Wilson, he was hired in order to implement some specific sorts of changes at UMass, namely to consolidate its transformation from an institution that has had some success in implementing its land grant mission - a social mission - into a top-notch research school – an academic mission. The chancellor has for years been involved with initiatives to measure performance - meaning performance in terms of academic and research missions, not social missions - of higher education institutions. His plans for UMass Amherst have been stated clearly and repeatedly, and can be found online in the Executive Summary of the Amherst Campus Strategic Plan.
The chancellor’s priority is to turn this campus into one of the top centers of research in the country. As he readily acknowledges, this requires money, and money that is spent in pursuit of this mission is money that's not being spent on things like health care, child care, student support services, wages for workers, and other expenditures more in keeping with the ideal of an accessible university. It's also money that's extracted from students through higher tuition, service fees and housing costs. This means driving up the cost of a UMass education, pulling it further out of the reach of low-income people. Though not necessarily driven by it, this approach fits well with the corporate agenda for education, and it undermines the goal of social equality.
Tuition and debt up, access down
The corporatization of education at UMass is indicative of a more general trend. The results across the country and the world are worrisome: tuition at public institutions is climbing steadily, in some places skyrocketing. Meanwhile, the traditional way of paying for an education – Pell grants and other non-merit-based grants, are covering less and less of the cost of an education, and are being replaced by loans. As a result, many qualified students are not able to attend college.
Adolph Reed’s article “Majoring in Debt” (The Progressive, Jan. 2004) cites a report by the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which finds that “by the end of this decade as many as 4.4 million college-qualified high school graduates will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and two million will not go to college at all because they can't afford it.” The same article reports that for the majority of students at four-year public institutions who graduate with debt, the average debt load is $17,000. Undoubtedly this figure will continue to rise. Other students avoid this fate by working long hours outside of school, delaying their graduation or dropping out altogether.
The picture at UMass
At UMass, the result of these trends, together with the state’s slashing of our budget, has been the elimination or scaling back of many services. To mention just a few, we have lost our on-campus pre-school program and our foreign language resource center.
Many of our other programs, including academic departments and all sorts of support services, have sustained cuts at different levels. UMass used to have a highly-regarded ALANA advising program, but as a result of restructuring, many students have been switched over to advising through their academic programs, an unpopular move among the students who have been affected. And tuition and fees continue to climb.
The way forward
The corporatization of UMass is part of the war against the working class and the poor that is happening nationwide and worldwide. It goes hand in hand with Bush’s dismantling of the progressive taxation system, Clinton’s welfare reform, the attacks on unions, and the replacement of social programs with the prison system, which now has more young African Americans “enrolled” than colleges and universities do. The fight against the corporatization at UMass is part of the fight for people’s rights more generally.
We need to keep in mind and to articulate the social role of higher education. We cannot accept the administration’s emphasis on research and teaching excellence as a cover for the dismantling of the accessible university. While supporting high-quality teaching and research, we must demand that the university meet its obligations as a social and economic institution and as a community of human beings. To relent, to allow UMass to degenerate until it is a mere knowledge factory, would be to surrender to the corporate agenda. If we don’t identify with corporate interests, we must fight them at all levels, including at UMass.
posted by Uri at 12:11 PM
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