Every threat is an opportunity.
I do not remember who first told me this, but I’m fairly sure it was someone at my post–grad school employer, a market research and consultancy firm.
Generally, I’m distrustful of consultancy-speak because it usually presages consultancy actions, which often seem overdetermined and work for the sake of having something to sell to a client, but I’ve found this framework useful as a thought starter over the ensuing years.
(Example: The arrival of ChatGPT.)
In the reports I was responsible for at the market research firm, I was often required to identify “threats” surfaced by the data and then asked to turn the threat upside down and essentially ask, “If this is true, what other thing is possible, and is this other thing potentially desirable?”
The current threat to higher ed is a rapidly collapsing belief in the value of the so-called elite meritocracy. Some may recall JD Vance declaring professors “the enemy” and the explicit pledges to rein in this enemy during the recent campaign.
But things are even worse. When even David Brooks has lost almost total faith in the meritocracy—after years of attempting a moral reformation from inside the house—you know things are dire. Brooks’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” declares, “The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.”
I wish Brooks had gotten in touch with me at some point, because this is something I’ve been bleating on about repeatedly in this space, perhaps starting all the way back in 2014 with my dive into the underbelly exposed in William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, in which Deresiewicz tries to shame the meritocratic elite into delivering experiences more meaningful than preparing Ivy League grads for jobs in finance and consulting.
My stance, articulated at the time and many times since, is that the rest of us needed to free ourselves from the power and influence of the elite institutions because the very idea that competition was a good framework for delivering broad-based gains to a diverse populace was, on its face, totally absurd.
By buying into the notion that a competition for prestige should drive the operations of our higher education institutions, we created a culture of waste that both harmed students and eroded public trust in the entire sector of postsecondary education.
To no one’s surprise, least of all my own, a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked into several generations of the socioeconomic origins of the “U.S. educational elite.” I urge folks to read the whole study, which makes use of a massive trove of publicly available data, but I’ll cut to the chase by relying on the characterization of Harvard economics professor Susan Dynarski: “Low-income students have been a ridiculously tiny share of elite college enrollment for a century.”
We all knew this was true, that these institutions and the place they hold in society are, on balance, damaging to the general welfare, particularly if they are followed as exemplars by institutions with missions that go beyond reifying the position of the already rich. That they have come to stand in for all of higher education is fairly tragic.
In the end, prestige doesn’t mean much to those of us shut out from the institutions that can confer such things, and to buy into a system where prestige is viewed as a kind of currency was a terrible, terrible, mistake.
Some data we must now recognize in terms of threats to four-year postsecondary institutions:
- Prestige is reserved for the already elite.
- The meritocracy, as embodied by these elite institutions, will find itself under siege for the foreseeable future. Elite as a brand is undeniably tarnished.
- Fewer traditional-age students are enrolling in college.
- Demographic changes mean there will be fewer traditional-age college students, period.
This is a recipe for a contracting sector. Some may be tempted to double down on building prestige as insulation from these trends so as to compete harder for the shrinking group of students. For the vast majority of schools, this is a mistake. The flagship institutions that have swum against the tides and grown—ex. the University of Alabama—have figured out how to effectively sell not prestige, but experiences (football, sororities). This has resulted in some perceived increase in prestige as wealthier students have been attracted to enroll, but this has also crowded out students from the actual state of Alabama. While this may be a good survival tactic in a state that is not investing heavily in education, it’s a betrayal of the mission.
All is not lost, however.
Here’s some data that suggests there is an avenue for opportunity among these threats:
- The relative cost of college attendance has been declining in recent years.
- After years of hearing how expensive college is, lots of people have mistaken, hugely inflated notions when it comes to how expensive college is. College is cheaper than they think.
- While many students see college as a transactional experience—pay tuition, pass classes, get degree—there is a strong desire for experiences that help them engage with and make sense of the world. Colleges should be uniquely positioned to provide these kinds of experiences.
Here’s my recommendation, free of charge, the kind of thing consultants will charge tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for: Pivot from prestige and competition to accessibility and collaboration.
Many Americans have been convinced, for a variety of reasons, some reasonable, some rooted in political culture war bullshit, that college is not for them. Others, including low-income and minority students, continue to face structural barriers to matriculation.
Prove them wrong. Prove that postsecondary education is truly a way for people to become better versions of themselves in community with others.
The good news is that lots of people working inside institutions already embrace this vision. The extra-good news is that if institutions live this vision when outside forces come calling, there will be more people willing to stand up for the university. Consider the lesson of the recent election regarding K-12 school vouchers, where even as the electorate almost universally edged toward Republicans, one of the signature issues of Republicans was defeated by significant margins in three red states.
Broad swaths of people do not have the same positive sentiments for public higher education as they do for their local K-12 schools, but they could, provided colleges and universities focus on the values of accessibility and collaboration.
It’s not like the chase for prestige has been serving institutions particularly well. When a threat comes for a bad status quo, why not take advantage of it?
This is will be easier done in some states than others, as in some spots, (Texas, Florida), state legislatures are actively suppressing freedom and accessibility at their institutions, but this only increases the opportunity in the states without such hostilities. Schools that have achieved relatively high prestige can message around how they’re hoping to bring their established high-quality experiences to more people as an act of goodwill.
No harm to their reputation should result.
The institutions that move first will have an advantage in the marketplace, but I suspect, if done well, there’s lots of room for success.
At this point, what’s the alternative?
