December 21, 2006--We're Number Ten!

These days it’s not enough for many of our large public universities to want to be Number One in just football or basketball. They also want to be Number Ten. Actually, they aspire to be included among the Top Ten ranked academic institutions.

Here’s how it works; and, even though the NY Times reports about this as if it were a recent phenomenon, it’s almost as old as America itself. And it’s not a pretty picture, that is if you care about democracy. (Article linked below.)

In the Colonial period all colleges were private and were reserved for the (male) children of the elite. By the middle of the 19th century only about 5 percent of what we today think of as college-age students attended places such as Harvard or Yale or Columbia.

But with the vision and leadership of Vermont Senator Justin Morrill, in 1862 the first so-called Land Grant Act was approved by Congress and signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. It set aside at least 90,000 acres of government land per state which they could sell or use to fund and establish colleges that were by law required to provide post-high school educational opportunities for the children of farmers and mechanics. Thus began the long process to democratize higher education opportunities.

So far so good. But within decades of the establishment of these “people’s colleges,” most began to offer more and more liberal arts courses in an attempt to emulate the offerings of the still-elite private colleges. And quickly they began to become more selective—less open and democratic.

To maintain the commitment to open access and to continue to teach and especially train young people for jobs in the growing and complexifying economy, at the end of the 19th century the country began to invest in the founding of what at the time were called “junior colleges.” These quickly took over what had been the initial role of the Land Grant colleges. But since they offered just the first two years of a complete undergraduate education, if children of the working classes wanted to earn baccalaureate degrees they needed to transfer to four-year institutions to complete them

So far, not so good because it happened along the way that our system of higher education became highly stratified with the lowest-income students more and more needing to start at two-year colleges (now renamed “community colleges”) either because of lack of academic preparation or because they couldn’t afford all of the costs associated with beginning at the more selective and expensive senior colleges. And since very few managed to complete community college, much less transfer to four-year colleges or ultimately graduate, this also led to a stratification in the results of higher education—the gap between rich and poor in degree attainment grew and grew so that it is now unacceptable in a country that calls itself a meritocracy: if you work hard, you all will have an equal chance to succeed.

Now we see that many public universities that have retained at least a measure of equal access are striving to become more exclusive. This means they are turning away many students who in the past would have qualified for admission. And in order to compete with the highest-ranked institutions for the most sought-after faculty they have had to increase tuition to be able to “buy them” (that’s the phrase in common use) and are as a result beginning to price themselves out of the reach of good but low-income students.

All to be ranked in the Top Ten. Shameful. They should stick to football.