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University Challenge

Slim down, focus and embrace technology: American universities need to be more businesslike.

Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents, who are at the heart of a political firestorm. Mr. Obama is trying to channel the anger. The White House invitation complained that costs have trebled in the past three decades. Arne Duncan (阿恩·邓肯), the secretary of education, has urged universities to address costs with “much greater urgency”.

A sense of urgency is justified: ex-students have debts approaching $1 trillion. But calm reflection is needed too. America’s universities suffer from many maladies besides cost. And rising costs are often symptoms of much deeper problems: problems that were irritating during the years of affluence but which are cancerous in an age of austerity.

The first problem is the inability to say “no”. For decades American universities have been offering more of everything ── more courses for undergraduates, more research students for professors and more rock walls (硬件设施) for everybody ──on the merry assumption that there would always be more money to pay for it all. The second is Ivy League envy. The vast majority of American universities are obsessed by rising up the academic hierarchy.

Ivy League envy leads to an obsession with research. This can be a problem even in the best universities: students feel short-changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass. At lower-level universities it causes dysfunction. American professors of literature crank out 70,000 scholarly publications a year, compared with 13,757 in 1959. Most of these simply molder: Mark Bauerlein of Emory University (埃默里大学的马克·博伊尔莱因) points out that, of the 16 research papers produced in 2004 by the University of Vermont’s literature department, a fairly representative institution, 11 have since received between zero and two citations. The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching. In Academically Adrift Richard Arum (理查德·阿鲁姆) and Josipa Roksa (约西帕·罗克莎) argue that over a third of America’s students show no improvement in critical thinking or analytical reasoning after four years in college.

Popular anger about universities’costs is rising just as technology is shaking colleges to their foundations. The internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. Testing and marking can be automated. And for-profit companies such as the University of Phoenix are stripping out costs by concentrating on a handful of popular courses as well as making full use of the internet. The Sloan Foundation (斯隆基金会) reports that online enrolments grew by 10% in 2010, against 2% for the sector as a whole.

Many universities’ first instinct will be to batten down the hatches and wait for this storm to pass. But the storm is not going to pass. The higher-education industry faces a stark choice: either adapt to a rapidly changing world or face a future of cheeseparing. It is surely better to rethink the career structure of your employees than

to see it wither (the proportion of professors at four-year universities who are on track to win tenure fell from 50% in 1997 to 39% ten years later.) And it is surely better to reform yourself than to have hostile politicians take you into receivership.

A growing number of universities are beginning to recognize this. They understand that the beginning of wisdom in academia, as in business in general, is choosing what not to do. They are in recovery from their Ivy League envy. They are also striking up relations with private-sector organizations. And a growing number of foundations, such as the Kauffman Foundation (考夫曼基金会), are doing their best to spread the gospel of reform and renewal.

Western Governors University (WGU) in Salt Lake City was founded in 1996 by 19 state governors who saw the crisis coming. To squeeze costs, it does all of its teaching online. It also separates lots of things that are bundled together in traditional universities. Professors decide what they want students to know and design tests to see whether they have learned it. But they buy teaching materials from independent publishers and employ “mentors”to guide students. It is notable that the head of WGU was one of the nine university bosses invited to the White House.

BYU-Idaho (杨百翰大学爱达荷分校) has decided that focusing on teaching undergraduates is the way forward. It has got rid of expensive encrustations (门面) such as the athletics and PhD programs and introduced year-round courses. Cornell teaches 10,000 students online every year, most of them working adults. Southern New Hampshire University has five satellite colleges that make it easier for students to live at home while studying. The University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education (罗西耶教育学院) has formed a partnership with a private company to design courses for students in 45 states and over 25 countries.

Nearly 100 years ago American universities faced similar worries about rising costs and detachment from the rest of society. Lawrence Lowell (劳伦斯·洛厄尔), the president of Harvard, argued that “institutions are rarely murdered; they meet their end by suicide… They die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work that the world wants done.” America’s universities quickly began “the work that the world wants done”and started a century of American dominance of higher education. They need to repeat the trick if that century is not to end in failure.