The Future of Higher Education

Transcript

[Sandro Galea]
Welcome to Ideas Matter, a podcast hosted by WashU. I am Sandro Galea, vice provost of interdisciplinary initiatives and dean of the School of Public Health at WashU. In 1088, the University of Bologna was founded. Today, it is the oldest university in continuous operation in the world. The long history of the University of Bologna reflects the deep roots of higher education, the role it has played in shaping intellectual and cultural life around the world. We are in a moment when this very role is being questioned.

Higher education faces many challenges, including high tuition costs, the disruptive effects of new technologies like AI, political pressures, and funding cuts. Higher education also faces something of an identity crisis, a re-evaluation of its commitment to core values of free speech, ideological neutrality, and fair admission practices. So with that backdrop, what is the future of higher education? How can it engage with challenges to emerge stronger to support the next generation of students, the next era of ideas?

Today, I look forward to tackling these questions and more with today’s guest. Mitchell Stevens is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford University. His research interests include educational sequences, lifelong learning, alternative educational forms, and the formal organization of knowledge. At Stanford, he convenes the Pathways Network and the Futures Project on Education and the Learning Society. I am delighted to be speaking with Professor Stevens today. Mitchell, welcome.

[Mitchell Stevens]
Thank you.

[Sandro Galea]
So let’s start with a bird’s eye view. Let’s start with a bird’s eye view analysis of the state of higher education today. What are some of the biggest challenges it faces and what are some of the most significant opportunities?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Great place to start. Higher education has never been more central to the organizational architecture of the United States than it is today. Higher education organizes the entire class structure in this country. It sorts and certifies experts across all domains of human knowledge.

It is a very large producer and consumer of economic value, right? It’s a costly enterprise, but it also produces a great deal of value. It’s also never been more in the public eye or faced more conflict or interrogation than it has in the last 10 years. On my view, this has substantially to do with the fact that we are in a period of institutional change that is comparable in its scale to the second industrial revolution, the period between the United States Civil War and World War I, when the education system, the entire education system as we know it in the United States, was invented and institutionalized.

[Sandro Galea]
Let’s talk about values for a second. So what in your view are the core values that have sustained higher education during its history? And to what extent are some of the challenges we’re facing now reflecting a drift away from those values?

[Mitchell Stevens]
I might replace your word values with the notion of promise. What is the promise of higher education? And by that, I mean how and why have colleges and universities been given the privileged position that they have in American life today? And what do I mean by that privileged position? One is that they are presumed to be worthy of substantial direct and indirect public subsidy. We support colleges and universities directly in all sorts of ways with grants and other forms of direct subsidies. And we also give them the privilege of tax exemption. We also give them a great deal of autonomy and the ability to self govern. That support and that autonomy on my view is predicated on the promise that universities exist at least somewhat at remove from the politics of everyday life, that their pursuit of knowledge and truth is a general civic value, but it also brings economic value to the polity and that it can serve as a kind of conscience for the rest of the society.

So it’s those promises, their ability to preserve knowledge, to create knowledge, to deliver economic value, and to provide at least some degree of a moral compass on the rest of the polity, the condition on which their great privilege has been sustained.

[Sandro Galea]
So, it’s no secret that as we’re taping this, we’re in the middle of a strain, let’s call it that, between the universities and higher education and the federal government. So, trace us through why that strain, is it in part to drift away from what you’re calling promise?

[Mitchell Stevens]
I want to start by referencing two moments in the historical evolution of colleges and universities in the United States. The first is in that interwar period between the U.S. Civil War and World War I, when the nation was being established as a continental society.

All of that Western settlement was carried in part by the founding of schools, colleges, and universities. Stanford University itself represents the end of a long line of Western expansion that is carried in part by organizations like WashU, Northwestern, the land grant institutions of the upper Midwest and the greater West and the hundreds of private colleges and universities that stake their claims to service to particular towns and regions across the entire country. In this phase of history, colleges and universities are literally placemakers, putting particular towns and regions on the map. And the nation rewarded that project by again, subsidizing it directly or indirectly through public funds. The second chapter is the great service that your university and mine and hundreds of others across the country played in the various projects of warcraft in the middle of the 20th century, World War II, and the 20th-century Cold War in which colleges and universities became substantial actors in the creation of the kind of democratic capitalist society that American leaders wanted to promulgate worldwide and also just providing the human capital and technological resources to wage the various chapters of the Cold War. So it’s those chapters of service to the country that really gave colleges and universities the status honor and the privilege that they enjoyed and in fact continue to enjoy. It’s just that they have, as you said, that status honor, as well as the financial and material supports the colleges and universities enjoy, has come under scrutiny in the last decade in ways that we literally haven’t seen before in US history.

[Sandro Galea]
So let’s talk about the scrutiny. From your view, what are the roots of that scrutiny?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Yeah, they are multiple and intertwined. I would say what public health experts often call the fundamental cause of this conflict is the extent to which possession or non-possession of a four-year college degree came to divide the United States substantially economically, culturally, and politically by the second decade of the 21st century. The official American response to deindustrialization in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s was to encourage as many Americans to enter and complete four-year college degrees. That was our antidote to deindustrialization. Americans were told that the so-called knowledge economy into which the country was transitioning in the wake of the movement of industrial manufacturing overseas economy into which the country transitioning in the wake of the movement of industrial manufacturing overseas was to enable as many of us as possible to have the kind of skills purportedly learned in college that would enable us to flourish in a post-manufacturing economy in this country. And that strategy proved to be quite successful for the 40% of Americans who managed to enter and complete college. What we did not do in that strategy was think in any more comprehensive way about how to support and enable mobility and prosperity for the majority of Americans who would never enter college or never complete college.
In a sense, over the last 30 years, as our human capital strategy put all of the eggs in the four-year college basket, and we really didn’t distribute other mechanisms of opportunity to those for whom that enterprise was unavailable or unaffordable or undesirable. No one planned in the second half of the 20th century to have four year college degrees divide the country economically and politically, but that’s essentially what happened. And very canny politicians in the second decade of the 21st century recognized that the so-called college divide could be used as a lever to narrate a larger political and even moral conflict in this country between people who are often called coastal elites or academic elites generally and the rest of the polity. That’s the fundamental cause. We can talk about other mechanisms that have brought scrutiny to higher education, but I think it’s really important to start there frankly with the class politics of higher education in our time.

[Sandro Galea]
That’s a really interesting answer, thank you. Let me just stay on the workforce thread for a second because you’re making the point about the universities for your colleges workforce. How do you see universities balancing their function in terms of workforce preparation with their function which you alluded to earlier around broader civic and intellectual goals?

[Mitchell Stevens]
That’s great. So the first thing to remember is that higher education in this country is a many-splendored thing. There are some 5,000 post-secondary institutions in this country. They range from well-endowed admissions-selective, primarily research institutions like the one that I work at to thousands of community colleges and public and private technical institutions that are within an hour’s drive of most Americans. Higher education does many things in many different ways for many different groups of people. And it’s important to remember that, because again, on this distinctively American strategy of investing in a category of institutions called colleges and universities rather than a more diversified human capital portfolio like we see in many European countries, you get a spectacularly diverse post-secondary sector. That said, for decades the target goal of most of those institutions, from elite universities to the community college in your neighborhood, were channeled toward four-year college degrees. And other kinds of training that happen very often in colleges and universities across the country, what we would think of as sort of vocational tracks, direct job preparation strategies, were given sort of categorical lower status. So in many schools, that would be of the credit bearing side and the non-credit side of a curriculum. The credit bearing side are the courses that accumulate to four-year college degrees. The non-credit side may accumulate to credentials, but not the high status bachelor’s diploma.

While higher education has been and done many things to many people, the prestige, right, and the incentives have sort of flowed toward the academic side. And again, that made some kind of sense in when we were building what the Clinton and Obama administrations called a knowledge economy. But the specter of artificial intelligence substantially upends that presumption. The knowledge economy for which we were preparing workers with college degrees for the last 40 years turns out to not be as stable a target as we had imagined and so that prior emphasis on academic degrees as opposed to more applied training has created a great deal of ambiguity about precisely how college and college education and workforce preparation stick together, that clean presumption we have that four-year degrees were the best way to prepare people for a dynamic economy, but just no longer holds and that creates a great deal of uncertainty for employers but then also for education institutions that have been organized around producing a certain kind of credential for several decades.

[Sandro Galea]
So you’re moving to the future, which is where I want to go as well. So let me try to break down a few questions which I think are going to really matter in the future. Let’s start with the financial model for higher education. So there’s been a lot of concern about student debt, which affects a particular segment of students, a particular segment of colleges and universities. But what do you think is the most realistic way for a sustainable, high-quality higher education that serves this broad range of social needs that you’re describing?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Let’s go back to that fundamental cause that I mentioned earlier, which is the extent to which the four-year diploma came to divide the country culturally and politically by the second decade of the 21st century. A big part of the reason that happened was even while public policy and philanthropy was almost in unison about advocating the importance of four-year college degrees, Americans never figured out how to pay for that higher education without consumer debt. We never structured a higher education marketplace with the intent of having college be affordable for everybody. In fact, just the opposite. The Higher Education Act of 1965 passed at the height of the Cold War during the Johnson administration and then reauthorized to include federal guaranteed loans in 1972 was built on the presumption that people did not need to attend a four-year college in order to get a well-compensated job. Higher education was regarded as a privilege and a necessity for technocrats, but by no means a baseline for economic stability or prosperity. But of course, that was at the height of the industrial economy when union strength was at its height in the United States. It was convenient and in fact reasonable to presume that a post-secondary diploma was not necessary for economic viability and prosperity. That was the condition under which we only partially funded higher education for Americans through public subsidy. As the four-year degree became more and more essential for any kind of economic prosperity, we never matched that change with a substantial reorganization of public subsidy.

That’s where the student loan problem metastasized. And also we never constrained colleges and universities and how much they charged. So institutions like WashU and Stanford were really free to bill however they wanted. And there was no ceiling on costs that were tied to government subsidy or loans. And so those two things together, right, no guaranteed provision plus, you know, no ceiling on costs, created a kind of perfect storm of inflationary growth. So we wake up, you know, in 2010 and realize that we’ve consumed, you know, millions of hours of higher education that we never figured out how to pay for.

And the nation still can’t even decide whose problem that is, right? Is it students’ problem because they took out loans that didn’t serve their careers well? Is it the institution’s problem for charging at rates that required consumer debt? Is it the federal government’s problem because we funded higher education through loans rather than direct subsidy? We don’t even have the answer to that question. And it’s that ambiguity about who is responsible for talent investment in the American people that I think is kind of at the center of controversies over higher education at this moment.

[Sandro Galea]
So that’s a terrific analysis, but you did not answer the part of the question which asked where is this going? Where is this headed?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Right, right. Well, frankly, Sandro, that’s the question that I’ve decided to devote the rest of my career to, helping the nation answer.

[Sandro Galea]
Then I’m asking the right person.

[Mitchell Stevens]
But first I will say, this is not a technical question, right? The question about higher education cost is often framed as a technical problem, which isThe question about higher education cost is often framed as a technical problem, which is how much should higher education cost? How should we price it? And how should we organize payment for that? I think the question is actually more civic, which is who is responsible for the lifelong employment of the American people?

This question got answered very differently on the other side of the Atlantic in the years following World War II. One of the big reasons that the human capital systems of Europe looked quite different is because in the decades immediately following the second world war, Europeans variably settled on an agreement that, say for example, who’s responsible for the employability of the German people? That answer was resolved with a triune answer. Industry, government, and organized labor share responsibility for the lifelong employment of the German people. And that’s baked into public policy and corporate strategy in the United States. We never came to a similar settlement in the United States. The only thing that Americans are owed by right of residency is access to a high school education. After that, I call it the United States of you’re on your own. It’s your human capital. It’s your career. It’s your education. And you are responsible for sort of equipping yourself for economic prosperity and resilience. And we sort of kicked that can down the road by subsidizing higher education loans but that debt itself, right, that inability to figure out that if anyone beyond the individual is responsible for their employability and where we’re at at present. What heartens me about this moment is that private industry in this country is really starting to change that conversation itself. Major employers, Walmart, Coke Industries, Microsoft, Workday are renegotiating the labor contract themselves because they’re increasingly recognizing that technological change is happening so quickly and our legacy institutions may not respond quickly enough.

So I sense a new willingness in corporate America, to consider sharing responsibility for talent development, but there’s no golden rule here. There are hard conversations between capital government, organized labor, and philanthropy that just have to happen in the United States in order for us to come to some shared understanding of who’s responsible for the employability of the American people.

[Sandro Galea]
Let me ask another looking-ahead question now. Let’s talk about the so-called enrollment cliff, which is the demographic shift. So where do you see that going? What strategies do you think that’s going to push on us to remain consistent with what we’re doing?

[Mitchell Stevens]
I’m so glad you raised that question because it suggests how low the intellectual ceiling is on policy debates about the future of education and work at present. The demographic cliff refers to the steadily declining numbers of 18 to 22 year olds who are graduating from high school, given declining fertility and lengthening lifespans in the United States. If you’re a college and university that is organized around tuition dependence and your primary product lines, the ones that you invest in primarily, are your legacy bachelor’s programs, the demographic cliff is a problem. But it’s also the case that longer lives and ongoing technological change means that men and women in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties are going to be needing educational opportunities for up-skilling and life transitions. That’s a demographic avalanche, not a cliff. But orientations toward a sort of institutional status quo, oblige us basically to look in the wrong place for market opportunities on the college side. In the broader public discourse, I will add, the low height of the intellectual ceiling is best manifested by the policy strategy of universal basic income.

Are you sitting down? Here’s this idea. Machines are going to take your job. So we’re going to have large firms give people minimal earnings so they can stay at home and play video games and go shopping, right. That is a leading public policy strategy at present, right, basically putting everybody on free money for the rest of their lives, right, neither of those seem like very wise strategies for institutional and civic flourishing on my view. So I think the task at hand for educators is to think forwardly and optimistically about what our institutional inheritance, this elaborate web of colleges and universities in every community in the country, might do, right, to enable mobility, prosperity, and flourishing over longer lives. But we can’t think in terms of preservation. We have to think in terms of a fundamental reorganization of the relationship between schools, industry, and government. Those are the conversations that I’m trying to convene at Stanford and nationally.

[Sandro Galea]
Let me ask a bit of an inward looking question for a second. I think a question that many of us in universities don’t like to tackle, which is the changing or not changing roles of faculty. When you look ahead, and I think this is an uncomfortable question which often we as faculty don’t like tackling, what do you see in terms of changes around things like tenure, labor of faculty, expectations of research, and teaching?

[Mitchell Stevens]
It’s important that we have that conversation. First of all, it’s important to remember that the professoriate has already been substantially casualized, by which I mean the vast majority of courses in this country are not taught by tenured faculty. The vast majority of academic instructional and research appointments are not on the tenure line.

So tenure is now a rare event in the academy. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. But it’s also the case that one of the enduring features of colleges and universities, from research institutions all the way into the community college sector, is a presumption of faculty jurisdiction over the curriculum. So, unlike K-12 education, where teachers are basically told what to teach, if not how to teach it, college faculty continue to enjoy a great deal of autonomy over what they teach, how they teach it, when they teach it, and which courses are required to some particular degrees.

That is a privilege that faculty have held onto very seriously. And I think part of the reason they’ve held onto it so seriously is because they’ve lost so much other influence and autonomy in their jobs. The problem with that is that faculty in general tend to commit to modes of teaching and strategies of instruction and curricular design that serve their purposes, not industry purposes. If a lot of my identity is tied up in being a philosopher or historian, or a comparative literature scholar or a biologist or a chemist, I want to teach on my terms, not the terms of industry. And unfortunately, that sort of covetous feeling that faculty have toward their instruction has kind of systematically prevented them from bending with the needs of the workforce. And I think that’s a way in which ideals of faculty autonomy and academic freedom have really ultimately come to do a disservice to the flexibility and frankly the viability of legacy diplomas.
And employers are increasingly not looking to colleges and universities for their human capital talent. They’re either building it internally or they’re turning to third parties that aren’t schools, LinkedIn Learning, Grow with Google, Microsoft Learning, Cisco, Masterclass. There are lots of providers.

I call them not schools, right, who are more than happy to provide instructional services to corporations independently of colleges. And that’s frankly where a lot of the action is going and where I see as sort of the largest challenge to the market segment of most colleges and universities.

[Sandro Galea]
Let me bundle a few questions around technology. You already talked a little bit about how artificial intelligence might be changing the nature of the workforce we need, but let’s look inside the university. So things like AI, the pandemic-era shift to online hybrid learning, where are these technological modalities going to take what we do within colleges and universities?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Well, first of all, Sandro, I want to congratulate you for letting us have a conversation for a full 30 minutes without turning to AI and other 21st-century technologies. Where I live and breathe, we tend to start the conversations with the technology, not with the civic and political context within which those technologies emerge.

I admire you for beginning the conversation where I think it properly begins. That said, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Just so we’re all on the same page, right? By first industrial revolution, the social scientists typically refer to just the harnessing of inanimate power. Fire, for example.

The second industrial revolution is the mechanization of inanimate power for its application at scale, the factory. The third industrial revolution is the internet and semiconductor revolution that was created by the 20th-century Cold War. And the fourth is the massification of non-human intelligence. When those transformations occur, they change literally everything in their path in ways and at rates that are really hard to predict in advance. Artificial intelligence is a direct challenge to the core claim to authority in the university, which is human knowledge. Those few of us who have the privilege of tenure receive tenure on the notion that in our heads and bodies is expertise that is difficult, if not impossible to replicate. Artificial intelligence challenges that core premise that knowledge is ultimately embedded in the minds and bodies of people.

That scares the daylights out of academics who have often sacrificed many other career options for the special privilege and prestige of being an academic. So it’s no surprise to me that university educators are among the most resistant to AI technologies and instruction. You see this very differently, Sandro, in K-12 education, at least in the United States, where educators are, across the board, embracing the technology because they see their job as to enable children to learn as effectively as possible. It’s not a threat to teachers’ identity to use new tools to help children learn. It is a threat to university professors’ identity. If a machine can do something as well as I can or teach someone as well as I can, what am I doing here? So it’s a major challenge to the professional identity of educators. Where does that go? Well, one of the places that it’s already going is an explosion of instructional and learning opportunities outside of colleges and universities. My colleagues at Anthropic and Microsoft, who are also in the education business, you know both of these corporations and many others have very large learning verticals, right. They don’t see technology as a threat to their expertise. And so organizations that aren’t schools can exploit these tools for learning and development in ways that don’t challenge anybody’s reputation or identity. Inside the university, that’s a different question. I think in the near term, what we’re seeing again is this kind of explosion of not school learning opportunities. I personally think that’s a net positive for the human capital system in this country. It’s why I’ve been advocating a paradigm shift away from what I call schooled society logics of human capital investment or school models of human capital investment to learning models of human capital investment that recognize the power and promise of these different ways of learning that aren’t kind of trapped by the grammar of schooling, the logic of schooling, the prestige hierarchies of schooling. How that squares with the mission and identity of places like WashU and Stanford is another hard question. But I think opening up the conversation to recognize the plurality of learning opportunities that are available to people now is an essential first step for any enlightened academic policy.

[Sandro Galea]
Well, let’s take that to its logical extension. So if you were to design a new university today from scratch, what would it look like, knowing what we know today?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Well, and in fact, new universities are being designed from scratch. In the United States especially, we’re a nation of school builders. We love school. There are few problems in modern life that Americans do not presume can be somehow addressed by school. And the fact that we have a kind of what tech people call an open architecture for schools mean that we’re seeing new ones all the time. I’ll give you just a few examples that you may have heard of, one by a friend of mine named Shai Reshef called the University of the People which has been around for a couple of decades now. Essentially no tuition, which it can do because its instructors and administrators aren’t paid, it’s a substantially volunteer operation, truly global, and mediated by digital platforms. Is it a university that looks anything like the one that I work for? No. Are some of the most prominent academics in the world on the faculty and administration of University of the People? Yes. Because they see it as a civic contribution. The Georgia Tech College of Lifetime Learning, which just opened a few years ago and is headed by another friend of mine Bill Gaudelli, is specifically purposed with providing learning opportunities to adults over the age of 25 for the rest of their lives and keeping them as a service to the human capital and civil society of the State of Georgia. You know what is Coursera, right? A publicly traded company that was birthed in the MOOC movement at Stanford in 2012, it now provides learning opportunities from most of the most prestigious universities in the world, but also conveys corporate learning services simultaneously alongside each other at scale worldwide. Is it a university? No. Is it a learning company? Yes.

I think what we’re gonna keep seeing, Sandro, is a wide array of instructional experiments, many of which will not last, some of which will become behemoths, and some of which will co-mingle components of legacy schools with corporate learning.
I would say Coursera is an excellent example of that sort of neither this nor that kind of hybrid learning platform. And I think we’re just going to see more and more of that. The question on my view, for those of us who are going to continue to care about what we might call the legacy post-secondary sector, is how do the schools that we inherit from the 20th century adapt and respond to this new ecology in ways that are going to enable their flourishing and the flourishing of their particular communities. This is where I am either too nostalgic or too utopian. I still think that legacy colleges and universities have important civic as well as economic contributions to make to their communities and to the nation. But figuring out what that mandate is, is the existential question of this moment for them.

[Sandro Galea]
You may be one of the last of the West Coast romantics on this topic.

[Mitchell Stevens]
Someone’s gotta do it.

[Sandro Galea]
Someone’s got to do it. Two more questions. So if you had the power, what would be one, just one, policy intervention that you would like the federal government to implement right now, looking forward, understanding all these challenges you’re pointing out, understanding the possibilities, understanding the moment we’re in?
[Mitchell Stevens] What I am trying to do and what I hope that our political and academic leaders can accomplish in the very near term, frankly, is not a policy strategy, but a change in policy paradigm. And by that I mean, I hope that our academic and political leaders can take a life course approach to human capital. And by human capital, I just mean people’s ability to do things, right? My ability to act on the world, that’s my human capital. And by life course, I mean, could we recognize that we need to invest in human capital over the entire arc of the life course, right?

What happens to me in utero matters, what happens in early childhood matters, what happens in elementary school matters and high school and college and in my first, second, and third jobs, right? My ability to work and contribute to this country as a worker, as an employee, and a citizen, right, takes place over the entire arc of a lengthening life. And I do a disservice to people and to the country if I carve up my thinking about investment in early childhood, K-12, higher education, workforce training. It all matters in cumulative fashion. And I need to think about growing human capital in that way. So for example, currently, the arraigning presumption is that early childhood and early education is what really matters and primarily matters, and then secondarily everything that happens before the age of 25, a college degree. Well, what happens to people at the age of 26 who have been poorly served by our human capital system? They basically fall off of our policy imaginary, right? I think that’s a great disservice to men and women over the arc of lengthening lives. We create conditions under which if a system doesn’t work well for you early in life, then the game is kind of over. And I think that’s a profound civic tragedy. I think it’s part of what happened. I think the 2016 and 2024 elections are largely a function of that bias of investment toward children. Again, if there’s one thing that I could do, I would encourage people to think in terms of the life course of talent, and to recognize that in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, especially, it’s absolutely essential that we find ways to equip people to adapt and change and learn throughout the entire course of their adulthood. And we just don’t have that country right now.

[Sandro Galea]
Last lightning round question. What gives you hope in the moment?

[Mitchell Stevens]
Three things, at least the United States. The sheer scale of the country means that there’s gonna be all sorts of experimentation and innovation all over the place that is not centrally structured and manifest. That’s a huge asset for innovation.
The second is Americans’ faith in education and learning as mechanisms of individual and national change. We are a nation of school builders. We are a nation of people who feels good about investing in people as learners, and the third is, frankly, if we can get Americans to see technological transformation is an opportunity, not a fate. We haven’t done that with artificial intelligence. It’s still framed, even by our intellectuals and pundits, as a kind of steamroller that’s coming to get us, take our jobs, and make us work and toil either none at all or forever. We haven’t seen this technological transformation as a huge opportunity to rethink our human capital system. And I think if we can give people a way of thinking about that promise, then the scale and idealism of the American people will enable us to build a future we have yet to envision.

[Sandro Galea]
I’m Sandro Galea. I have been talking with Mitchell Stevens about the future of higher education. Thank you, Mitchell, for joining us. Thank you to everybody who’s joined us for Ideas Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation.