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The liberal art of pricing an education

By DIANE ROBERTS, Special to the Times
Published January 28, 2007

They used to be called "students," those young 'uns in hoodies, clutching their cups of Starbucks chai as they edge into my classroom, pulling out notebooks and pencils. The Bush administration prefers to call them "customers."

"Student" implies a process of growth, of gaining expertise over time and effort. A "customer" enjoys a fully formed state of empowerment. In the interests of "customer" service, Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of education, convened a blue-ribbon panel to consider whether colleges and universities were delivering value for money. Buying higher education should be like buying a vehicle, she says. You go online; you get performance reports and compare prices. "This same transparency and ease should be the case when families shop for colleges, especially when one year of college can cost more than a car."

Spellings wants to create a huge federal database that spells out an institution's achievements in teaching. To address the question famously posed by the president: "Is our children learning?" she wants to impose standardized tests. As former Gov. Jeb Bush was fond of saying, "We measure because we care."

That's debatable. I teach at Florida State, so I've got a dog in this fight. My classes are full of FCAT survivors who actually want to learn and think, not just accumulate knowledge for another one-size-fits-all test. But those of us "professors" ("intellectual service providers"?) who object to the retail model are on notice from Spellings: "There's a little reality check going on here - the American people want and expect more from every institution, every consumer good."

Here in Florida, Jeb Bush may have finally left Tallahassee, but his education "legacy" (many teachers and students think "curse" would be a better word) lives on in the new rule that high schoolers must choose majors. The FCAT still rules our schools, trampling imagination under its Godzillan tread, though Gov. Charlie Crist has indicated he might make some welcome changes in it. Still, the former governor's constant exhortations to universities that they should shape their curricula to the current "needs" of business has created a climate in which learning is ancillary to commerce. You pay the money, pass the exams and get the degree. Your education is only as good as the market says it is.

"It's not about liberal education and critical thinking," says Dennis Baron, a former columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education and commentator on education policy. "It's about training a docile work force."

Despite a robust and increasingly selective enrollment, plus a roster of internationally known faculty, Florida universities are failing at their core commitment to undergraduate education, concludes a report commissioned by the state Board of Governors and released this month. There's too much concentration on marquee research programs. Moreover, according to the BOG consultant, the state's higher education system is heading for financial meltdown. The report says that colleges with "clear and contained" missions provide the best access to degrees.

But an institution that trains accountants, dancers, doctors, teachers, engineers, nutritionists and nuclear physicists has a broad, rather than "contained," mission. So where does this leave the American university, with its traditional emphasis on liberal arts? Should universities have to prove that the Great American Novel, dead languages, quantum mechanics and epic poetry make a person more productive in global capitalism?

Thucydides and Bush

A recent column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times shows how a thorough grounding in "the classics" of a liberal arts education might have better equipped George W. Bush to deal with our current dilemmas. If only Bush had paid attention to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, in which he describes the Athenians' blithe and wholly unfounded assurance that when they invaded Sicily they would be welcomed with bouquets of flowers, he might have hesitated to get us mired in Iraq. If only Laura Bush had put Moby-Dick on his summer reading list, he might understand that monomaniacal pursuits never end well.

Yet the Bush administration insists on the "practical" in education; like one's stock portfolio, Toyota's 2006 truck sales, or Peyton Manning's pass completion rate, education should be objectively defined, computer-graded and plotted on a graph.

Counting creativity

But while you can add up how many trucks Toyota sells, how do you quantify people's sense that Toyota trucks are desirable? Peyton Manning connects on X out of Y attempts, sure, but why is he hot one night and not another? Why is Google a "sexier" company than Microsoft? Quantification cannot gauge creativity. Tom Auxter, a professor of philosophy at the University of Florida and state president of United Faculty of Florida, says a standardized exam for universities propagates "a false ideal." He predicts that Spellings' proposed "College Learning Assessment" would "mirror" the FCAT's many flaws: "The more affluent 'flagship' universities will do better than the urban universities, which have a lot of nontraditional students - part-time or mature students. Just like schools in poorer districts tend to do worse on the FCAT than schools in richer ones."

How do you measure the ineffable? Sure, you can test for how much information a person retains, how she or he uses language to communicate - that sort of thing. But the complex interactions of critical thinking are tough to quantify. Who's to say reading Macbeth and Julius Caesar in your junior year won't become highly relevant to you 10 years down the line when you find yourself working for a power-hungry boss? Those actually involved in the day-to-day process of teaching understand that passing tests is not the same as getting an education. Or, as FSU president T.K. Wetherell (who teaches his own government course every year) puts it, "You ought to come out of a university a more cultivated, accomplished human being; you ought to come out a better citizen. There's more to a college degree than a job at the end."

Others, however, have a strong attachment to the idea of college as vocational, a place you go to get hire-able. They would argue that since there's a lot of taxpayer money being spent on higher ed, it needs to benefit the public. Defining what constitutes a "benefit" is, naturally, problematic.

Coming down to money

The term du jour is "accountability." In Florida, the FCAT, the A-Plus Plan, the layers upon layers of micromanaging trustees and governors at the university level were all supposed to increase "accountability." The Spellings Report is big on "accountability," too, insisting on a higher ed bottom line, running the university like a business. Spellings asks "how well we're serving the customer."

It all comes down to money (this is America). Everyone agrees college costs more than many Americans can pay. "We must," says Baron, the policy commentator, "figure out a way to make higher ed affordable." Spellings scolds universities for not serving low-income students. Wetherell counters that at his university, lower income students flourish: "In 1967, when I graduated from FSU, 30 percent of the class was first-generation college graduates. (Even now) 30 percent of the graduating class is first-generation college."

For $20,000 you get ...

Yet the Spellings Report has a point: Costs have risen precipitously, large student loans are frightening if you have no financial safety net, especially in this uncertain economy, and scholarships are often available only to the absolute poorest (not the struggling middle class) or the brilliant few. A year at a good state university can cost $20,000 or more - not exactly the democratic educational opportunity state universities supposedly embrace. "Why are costs so high and what are we getting in return?" says Spellings.

Wetherell would answer, "a bargain." He points out that tuition for 5-year-olds at Maclay, a private school in Tallahassee, runs $8,000 a year; FSU charges $3,500 a year: "How am I supposed to run a Level I research institution on half the budget of a kindergarten?"

Maybe Florida universities are too much of a bargain. The Board of Governors consultant's report warns that the Bright Futures scholarship and the prepaid tuition program, while well-intentioned, are unsustainable. Coupled with Florida's rock-bottom tuition both threaten to "bankrupt" the system, according to the consultant, as high school grads enter colleges en masse.

It's urgent that we both find a way to fund higher ed and make money available to those who need it. This will take a diversion of resources: something akin to not just turning an aircraft carrier but making it do fancy figure-eights on the high seas. For all the posturing from politicians in Tallahassee and in Washington, education is not really a priority for either the Democrats or the Republicans. Football coaches at FSU and UF are always going to get paid more than philosophy professors or even Nobel Prize-winning chemists; senators are always going to get paid more than fifth-grade teachers. The Bush administration will sling billions (maybe trillions by now) at a war in Iraq, while arguing that money isn't the answer when it comes to education. So they'll try testing. UFF's Auxter shakes his head: "Accountability is all about not wasting money, but it hardly defines our moral responsibility to the next generation."

The short and the long

The short answer is, as ever, only partially helpful. As an academic myself I suspect that the long answer, or several long answers, will have to be concocted to really address our education issues. Politicians hate long answers, of course: You can't fit them into a 30-second campaign commercial. So we'll keep trying to measure something that can't be measured, and Congress, the Spellings Commission, the Florida Legislature and every other governmental entity will keep demanding a Harvard education on a vo-tech budget.

Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, teaches English and writing at FSU.

[Last modified January 28, 2007, 06:06:30]