Critics say that American higher education has significant flaws and that these flaws will only worsen in coming decades. Others say that American higher education continues to improve and that it is the best in the world. What do you think? What are the key problems higher education will face over the next thirty years? Can they be fixed? Will they be fixed? How? What will be the biggest opportunities for higher education in the next three decades? How can it successfully grasp them? Bottom line: How will higher education change? How should it change?
This issue of The Independent Review contains nine thought-provoking responses to the questions posed above. The authors’ essays, which we limited to around 3,500 words and so cannot fully answer all the questions, are intended to help guide a discussion that is vital to American society and to the American economy. We begin with essays by scholars who have spent their careers examining higher education and envisioning its future, and we close with administrators who have grappled daily with the challenges of implementing their own visions.
Richard K. Vedder, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America (2019), begins the symposium with a brief but authoritative overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly of American higher education. American higher education’s strong points include research excellence—the US is home to sixteen of the top twenty-five universities in the world, ranked by research strength—and its decentralized structure, “with many different educational philosophies and specialties, competing often fiercely with other educational enterprises.” However, higher education in the US is increasingly expensive and increasingly inefficient. Enrollment is falling, partly because of rising college prices and an increased awareness of the financial risks of attending college. Far worse, time spent by students on academics—reading, writing, studying, learning, and thinking—continues to ebb, while grades continue to climb. The ugly face of higher education is a loss of academic freedom and intellectual diversity on our campuses. Vedder predicts that “residential colleges and universities will survive, although possibly with significant changes in the form of educational delivery,” and he closes with about a dozen predictions of what the future will bring, including a weakening of tenure and an expansion of federal control.
Amanda L. Griffith, who regularly teaches a course on the economics of higher education and serves on the editorial board of the asks the price of higher education continues to rise—highlighting its dependence on high-skilled labor, whose cost continues to rise, and increased demand by students and their parents