What's wrong with higher education?

With the price of a college education back in the spotlight, and President Obama holding a closed-door confab with higher ed hot shots tomorrow, it's worth asking, what's wrong with our industry.

The American higher education industry is probably still the best in the world. It may be the only industry in which the U.S. remains number one. (Certainly the financial industry forfeited any claim it had prior to 2008. That its leading lights are not in a federal prison right now is a wonder to me.) And yet, student debt is rapidly approaching one trillion dollars, as this Blog reported recently. Meanwhile recent graduates are questioning, and increasingly challenging in court, the value of their diplomas, which come with heavy "mortgages" in most cases.

American higher education is not only vast, but highly diverse, ranging from giant public university systems to tiny sectarian and liberal arts colleges... not to mention community colleges on one hand and for-profit schools on the other. No generalization can cover all or escape criticism. But let me offer a few thoughts on a Sunday morning:

1. A provocative September 6 article by Michael Bugeja, director of Iowa State's school of journalism.http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/09/06/12-ways-survive-2011-12

2. My own article of a few years back about what accreditation agencies ought to be assessing.
http://www.todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=721

3. Some propositions for consideration:

--- Universities and accrediting bodies should assess the success of alumni: one year out, five years out, ten years out, 20 years out. This is where the rubber meets the road. Assessing "learning goals," the current rage, is only meaningful if the goals (if achieved) result in good jobs and meaningful careers.

--- Full-time, tenured faculty should be on campus five days a week on average, just like administrators and staff. They should be capable of counseling students on career paths, assisting them in their networking and internship efforts, and helping their institutions to retain students, until they get them graduated on time.

--- State legislatures should reappraise their attitudes toward public higher education. Having built the best higher education establishment in the world, with land-grant institutions among the core components, we ought not to starve these institutions to death. Granted that the first thing corporations do, when hard times hit, is cut training... this knee-jerk solution shouldn't be carried over to public higher education.

--- The for-profits need to get out of the game of paying recruiting incentives and awarding student loans to customers who can't complete the programs or obtain gainful employment. If for-profit universities can't find ways to earn real profits, rather than relying on the subsidy of federal student loans, then they ought not to stay in business.

Just a few thoughts on this sunny Sunday in Philadelphia. To sum up:

American higher education is probably the best post-secondary system in the history of the world. Still it has serious faults. The gravest danger at this moment may be that the trillion-dollar student-loan bubble will be the next one to burst. However, solutions exists. Does the will exist? That's the real question.