Robert Atwell
Robert Atwell is retiring as President of the American Council on Education on October 31. The interview was conducted by Patrick M. Callan, Executive Director of the California Higher Education Policy Center.
Patrick M. Callan: As President of ACE (American Council on Education), you have been known to comment from time to time on some of the ways American higher education is in sync or out of sync with the society. What are your current thoughts?
Robert Atwell: There is a kind of disconnection between what society thinks it wants and needs from higher education at the moment and what we're offering. And that for me goes back to problems in graduate education. We're overproducing like crazy. And there are no incentives for the producers to produce less or to lower the cost of production. In fact, quite the reverse.
We're spending more and more time and money producing more and more Ph.D.s that we don't need for academia. And the nature of the graduate experience, the doctoral experience, is out of sync with the needs of the market. What we're doing is trying to produce research scholars, and what we need are teachers. And we need teachers for mainstream institutions, not research universities.
PC: If someone tries to change the production side, will the market respond? Are the faculty that make faculty appointments at teaching institutions ready to hire people who do what you're saying society needs?
RA: No. And I don't mean to just lay this at the doorstep of research and university faculty. I also mean to lay it at the doorstep of presidents who in many cases inappropriately have their institution aspiring to offer doctoral education, and they reward research grants and so forth and so on. But I think if we were able to move the oil tanker three degrees one way or the other, it could make quite a difference. I think the market would appreciate it.
PC: If the market is broken on the producing side and the hiring side, does this make higher education a candidate for a regulatory fix?
RA: Well, I always hope not. But yes, I think if we don't get about fixing things--like accreditation--and being more accountable, then some of our patrons may try to do the fixing for us. After all, research and graduate training are the most expensive things we do, and there are no incentives to reduce cost of production, no incentives to produce less, and plenty of incentives for more people to get in the game with inadequate attention to the market realities that are out there.
PC: One of the distinctive features of higher education in the post World War II era has been unprecedented increases in access and participation. You've written that for the foreseeable future higher education probably can't expect to increase its share of national or state resources from the current three percent of gross national product in the foreseeable future. Does this mean that the era of broadly accessible higher education is over?
RA: One of the most dangerous things that has happened is the welfare legislation. The feds are going to turn around and say, "It's your problem, states. We're going to give you 85 cents on the dollar of what we're spending. And by the way, you need to pay attention to training and so forth."
I don't need to tell you what the impact of that is on state budgets. It becomes almost a mandate to raise the other 15 cents. Where's the money going to come from? That's going to squeeze everything in state budgets that is discretionary, and higher education is often discretionary. Higher education is going to suffer tremendously from that. It probably means further damage to access.
On the other hand, when you look at what the states are spending and the ways they are spending the 40 or 50 billion dollars, whatever it is now, I think they ought to think about spending it in ways that reward success with the under-represented, that reward higher graduation rates for people who are at risk, that kind of stuff.
I'm not talking about lowering the bar. None of us wants to see the graduation bar lowered. But when you're dealing with a difficult population, a population that has been educationally deprived on the way up, state budgets ought to reward success. And I don't think they really do that now.
PC: Are you suggesting that states are logged into expensive commitments, at the high end, to research and graduate programs that are over-producing, at the expense of more pressing needs.
RA: Yes. We're subsidizing the high end, even in some instances using undergraduate student fees to finance graduate education. I've been talking to a state lately that seems to be moving in the direction of allowing public institutions in the state to make decisions about whether they want to go into graduate education. If you allow the regional and state universities to do that, then you'll have ten or 12 doctoral-granting institutions in a state that's lucky to afford one.
I would orient the state funding a bit more toward students as distinct from institutions. That's not a popular thing to say as the head of an association that represents institutions, and it's not that I would have the whole system be student-driven. But I think that we've got to tweak the thing more in the direction of student success.
PC: At the federal level, it appears that you've led a successful effort to protect the funding of students through financial aid.
RA: I wouldn't call it success, I'd call it damage containment. And looking to the future, I think that we will be fortunate to hold our own. We've got commitments in both [political] parties to balance the budget by the year 2002--without touching defense, without touching social security, without touching Medicaid and without touching veterans' benefits, says Mr. Dole. The [Clinton] administration is not quite so draconian. But in both cases, discretionary domestic spending, which includes all of student aid except the loans, is going to be very lucky to hold its own. But holding our own means less access, as student fees rise and so on.
PC: It really means, just as with welfare and the other things you've talked about, that more of the burden falls on states, institutions and individuals. Under these kinds of pressures, will access be a priority for colleges and universities?
RA: We in higher education have got to extend ourselves. I think that we have to transform ourselves. When we've done that and still can't meet the demands of the folks coming in, then I'm sympathetic to the institutions. You've got to draw the line somewhere, but before you draw the line you have to have done some internal re-engineering.
PC: One place where lines are being drawn these days is around students who appear to be not fully prepared to do college-level work. You've suggested that higher education has some responsibility to people who come unprepared, and that it isn't just the responsibility of open admission institutions.
RA: That is the way I feel. Remediation is a legitimate activity and we should not walk away from it. And that does not have to mean lowering the bar at the end of the day. But it means that we invest in the success of those who are less well prepared.
PC: I'd like to turn to higher education governance which you have characterized as "in despair."
RA: It's broken.
PC: What are some of things that are broken?
RA: Politicization of governing boards in the public sector has been growing for years. And on elected and appointed boards we've seen increasing tendencies to want to micro-manage, or to have agendas that correspond to those of the governors or legislatures in the case of appointed boards. What we've got is a lot of people who are protecting their turf. So we just have a system that doesn't work anymore.
There is something to be said for systems. There's got to be something between individual campuses and legislatures and governors. And I think that how you work out the system-campus relationship is important. The California State University is my model right now, where I think Barry Munitz has worked that out pretty well, much better than it ever worked in the past. Now, if you asked me ten years ago I would have said the University of California was the best example. I certainly would not say that now.
PC: The answer of some people to the accusations of politicizing the public institutions is that higher education doesn't want to adjust to a group of more conservative trustees who reflect the views of the kind of governors states are electing now, and that what's happening isn't political intrusion but the pendulum swinging into balance.
RA: If it were only money--that higher education doesn't want to adjust to new fiscal realities and that causes the tension--then there would be a point to what you have just presented. But I find that it's more than that.
There is a political, sometimes a religious, agenda here. There is micromanagement, and there are people on those boards who believe that they represent an interest group that they think sent them there. I think that's the danger. I think people who are on a governing board of a college or university or a system need to feel their loyalty to the institution as a whole and not to one particular part of it.
PC: With respect to accountability, you have written about a new social contract between colleges and government predicated upon a different kind of accountability that is less procedural and based more on results. Could you say something about what that means and why it's important?
RA: Well, there's a lot of pressure for accountability, for results. That certainly is the corporate mode. And colleges and universities have typically measured their quality by resource inputs of one kind or another that we're all aware of: faculty-student ratios, buildings built, size of endowments, books in the library, Ph.D.s and the faculty, stuff that doesn't tell you really anything about what's going on in the place.
Every institution ought to be looking hard at what its student learning outcomes are. And I don't mean by that necessarily either a standardized test or admission to graduate schools or any of that. It's going to be very different for different kinds of institutions.
PC: As President of ACE you've done, in your own words, a bit of "poking and prodding" at higher education, advocating for it. What are some of the areas that could use some poking and prodding over the next few years?
RA: My last letter to the membership is going to deal with this graduate education issue that I talked about right at the beginning. Another area is technology, including the virtual university concept. I notice a lot of skepticism and even resistance on the part of the higher education world to that, which I think is unfortunate, because it will happen.
Technology is a wave that's rolling over us, and if we don't understand that, if we're still stuck with the 50-minute lecture, the commercial providers are going to take our markets away. That competition is in some way sort of healthy. But I don't think we've thought about it enough. We really don't understand yet what this is going to mean to us. This is not a field I know very much about. I just believe it's coming.
