Tim Burke worries:
On the Bubble « Easily Distracted: Harris’ N+1 essay doesn’t really probe that deeply into why the costs of higher education at its upper end went up so fast for so long, relying instead on cynicism plus Marc Bousquet’s oft-repeated mantra that administrative growth, not faculty growth, explains most of the budgetary expansion.... I think he underestimates how much of that growth on the staff side has been driven by the changing expectation of students and their families that highly selective institutions should be full-service institutions.... If the best-resourced selective institutions are the equivalent of an expensive house in a highly desirable zip code, then this kind of staffing is the luxury feature that most of the customers expect....
The worst thing that can happen when a bubble begins to pop or a form of professional labor begins to undergo major transformation is panicked retrenchment....
W[J]ournalism... retreated into surly, hyperexaggerated assertions of what they took to be their essential prerogatives. The music industry... chose lawsuits and and legislatively-mandated market capture....
What I’m seeing... is a... curricular version of the Smoot-Hawley Tarriffs is threatening to take hold, with the same disastrous consequences, as faculty scurry back inside their disciplinary walls.... [F]aculty at many institutions mandate that students pursue the liberal arts via distributional or general education requirements, but there are no obligations on the faculty themselves to match or embody that vision.... If students at an allegedly liberal arts institution are confronted by a landscape of curricular rivalry and enrollment capture... they will quickly regard institutional rhetoric about the liberal arts as an insincere atavism.... At which point, many students may reasonably ask why they shouldn’t just cut to the chase and leave for an openly vocational institution.... Maybe that only gets you a job for a few years... but that might be preferable to a program which offers no vision at all besides “choose a discipline, become an apprentice academic”...
I think Swarthmore will do absolutely fine. If the willingness to pay for higher education drops significantly, they may have to abandon their commitment to need-blind admissions if they want to maintain their current business model, but I don't think that will happen--for them. Swarthmore, you see, is selling five things to its students and their parents:
- A first-class set of discussion leaders as people read the books and learn the subjects to put a capstone on their education.
- A first-class set of peers to serve as sounding boards, educators, and companions in that educational task.
- A safe, protected, but stimulating environment in which the students can try out being an adult.
- A comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle for four years.
- The creation of a personal social network that spans some of the smartest and best-educated Americans of their cohort--people with the strongest work ethic around--who will serve as friends and friends of friends and contacts and contacts of contacts throughout their life.
All five of these strike me as rather valuable. There is the question of why other colleges haven't undercut Swarthmore--haven't offered the same five things for less--but until you attract the super-750 SAT students you cannot offer them, and no college that attracts the super-750 students seems in any hurry to greatly expand and take a larger share of the market by expanding and underpricing its peers.
Why not is a question I do not know the answer to...
