The Battle for the Soul of American Higher Education
This is a guest post by Joshua Travis Brown, an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a Research Fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a new book — Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed — published by Oxford University Press. I met Josh at a workshop a few months ago on the current state of U.S. universities. As part of THB’s continuing focus on the many dimensions of the challenges and opportunities facing U.S. universities (see the recent five-part THB series), I invited Josh to publish a guest post here at THB, drawing upon his new book focusing on how tuition-driven univesities balance budgets while trying to keep true to their mission. Enjoy!
“You say you care about mission, and you say you care about these students and yet it seems like everything you are doing is undermining that… the only way I can make sense of the decisions that are made here and the rhetoric is to say, ‘Oh, the rhetoric is just bullshit...it is all just about money.’”
This admission from one faculty member I spoke to captures the tension between maintaining their university’s values, while fighting to survive the competitive crucible of American higher education. As I traveled across the country from college to college meeting with more than 150 university leaders, I repeatedly heard sentiments from administrators that described the precarious tightrope leaders walk between institutional mission and financial margins.
One senior vice president pointedly asked me in a raised tone,
“How do you change the world as a scrappy young institution when you do not know where the next dollar is coming from?”
While many institutions remain committed to their core values of serving and providing educational opportunities to students, administrators have been forced to operate within a highly competitive market and make budgetary decisions that threaten their ability to fulfill these commitments. A board member at another school framed the tension as an impossible battle:
Those two things fight each other. If all we wanted to do was to be deeply mission-conscious and make sure our students have wonderful experiences things would spiral out of control rapidly and we would be out of business. Or we could just decide to hell with that and let’s take the
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.