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Insights
The Partnership is Broken
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
In North Carolina, the relationship between the flagship public university and the state seems to be broken and getting worse. And that’s despite the good intentions of the chancellor, the chair of the faculty, and the leader of the Board of Trustees.
Trust is at the foundation of any healthy relationship, whether it’s a marriage, a business partnership, or a sprawling university. Partners must share a vision and trust one another to carry it out. Jonathan Cole, the former provost at Columbia, describes the relationship between a university and the government as “an uneasy compact,” sustained by tacit agreements and mutual understanding. “When trust breaks down, the other values and all that is built on them are in peril."
In Our Higher Calling, the book I wrote with UNC’s former Chancellor Holden Thorp, we summarized Cole’s concept as a partnership with the public. In exchange for educating a highly competitive workforce and leading the discovery of new knowledge, academic communities will be funded and allowed to run as a meritocracy, with the freedom to both explore and occasionally espouse unpopular ideas. Recognizing that education and discovery are messy enterprises, universities get a freer hand than just about any public entity to run their own affairs. When the trust level is high, this tradeoff works well for both sides. When the trust level is low, it becomes a recipe for disaster.
I’ve witnessed that disturbing spiral at Carolina. I teach a class on higher education with the current chancellor, and I’m well acquainted with many former and current trustees, some of whom were college classmates. I’ve also been a member of the faculty for seventeen years. The recent controversy over the failed hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones in the School of Journalism and Media brought worldwide attention to the dysfunction that’s been building for at least a decade between the University and its governing bodies. Both internal and external forces have contributed to the erosion of trust, threatening a partnership that has benefitted North Carolina since 1789.
The internal forces begin with the partners themselves. Faculty, for the most part, do not recognize that academic freedom and shared governance come at a price. Students and their parents expect job-ready graduates who are also equipped to be thoughtful and productive citizens. They expect research that drives the economy and supports a better quality of life for citizens of the state and beyond.
At the same time, trustees are skeptical about the ability of academics — most of whom have little training in business, finance, or politics — to run an institution as massive and complex as a modern research university. There aren’t many multi-billion-dollar enterprises run on consensus-oriented shared governance models, and many trustees would like to see a more top-down approach that prioritizes action over a discussion. One trustee, when asked how long it takes to understand the university’s decision-making process, replied, “I hope I live that long.”
For many years, an environment of relative trust was enough to reconcile those different worldviews. So long as Carolina continued to win basketball games and turn out loyal graduates, there wasn’t much soul-searching about its relationship to the life of the state. Battles were fought over the budget, with trustees asserting an increasing interest in governance in the interest of maintaining state funding. When cultural issues such as the removal of a Confederate statue from campus entered the debate, public trust declined, and the University faced greater scrutiny from lawmakers and governing officials. At the same time, these same hot-button issues galvanized large segments of the faculty who had previously paid little attention to governance structures outside their own department or field. Faculty outspokenness led to deepening frustration among trustees, who saw high-profile stands on political issues causing unnecessary friction with legislators and donors.
Chancellors, like institutional leaders across our society, have been caught in the middle, trying to forge compromises that satisfy almost no one. Trustees think the chancellor should be tougher on the faculty, forgetting that the chancellor is a member of the faculty. And fellow academics think the chancellor should stand up to the powers that be, forgetting that chancellors are selected and removed by governing boards. It’s not surprising, then, that turnover in these roles is on the rise across the country. Carolina has had three Chancellors in the last decade.
External factors also play a role. Public support for all institutions has been eroding for decades, a process accelerated by a relentless media culture. Critics are asking whether a college degree is worth it amid a long-term rise in tuition and student debt. (It should be noted that tuition at UNC has remained flat for the last five years.) Calls for greater efficiency and reform come from parents, as well as lawmakers. And even more fundamentally, conservative politicians believe colleges and universities lack viewpoint diversity and turn pliable young people into eager liberals.
The ongoing racial reckoning in America and the controversy over critical race theory have added considerable fuel to the fire. And a significant portion of the faculty now question some of the foundational academic principles that underpin the partnership with the public, rejecting ideals like meritocracy and even elements of free speech as harmful to marginalized members of the community.
Social media and open meeting laws also contribute to an environment where ideas and policies are litigated on screens, not around a conference table. After a recent off-the-record seminar on university governance, a faculty leader said it was a relief to have an honest conversation about difficult issues without worrying she would say something clumsy or imprecise that could be vilified by her critics or lead to litigation. She noted that public meetings are now highly scripted affairs, offering little opportunity for genuine engagement between faculty and trustees.
All of this has the makings of a genuine if slow-moving crisis. But, perhaps naively, I think there are steps that can restore at least some of the trust that is essential to effective shared governance. The parties need to be willing to pick up the phone, meet for lunch and otherwise talk instead of lobbing public statements at one another. Trust is built person-to-person, not Tweet-to-retweet. Trustees should be encouraged to spend time visiting classes and research labs to see the work firsthand, not just hear about it in carefully curated presentations. Faculty need to break bread with trustees and other citizens of the state. Administrators must be transparent and uphold the foundational principles of the university even when their advisors, especially their lawyers, counsel otherwise.
The partnership itself needs to be made more explicit with clear, definable expectations for all parties. A current effort by the Board of Trustees to clarify decision-making authority will, at the very least, focus the conversation and perhaps avoid the kind of micro-managing that handcuffs multi-billion-dollar enterprises. Focusing the conversation on actual performance, instead of the front-page issue of the day, would be great for all involved. Because that’s the irony of this moment in university history — for all the angst and distrust, Carolina is performing its core roles remarkably well. Record enrollment, record research funding, a fundraising campaign that stayed on track even through the whipsaw economy of Covid. On the fundamentals, UNC has rarely been stronger.
That won’t continue if the rift between the campus and the state grows ever wider. The University’s situation must not be sugar-coated. It is serious, and events have converged to place a spotlight on how leadership responds. Any effective way forward has to begin with honesty about where we are now, and that’s a very bad spot.
Making Room for a Moonshot
Kevin Guskiewicz
Curiosity is at the heart of a good education. It’s also the driving force behind our country’s world-leading academic research, thanks to a distinctly American vision for innovation and discovery.
“Truly creative scholarship and science can only take place in an atmosphere in which people with talent are given latitude to consider ideas, to push against orthodoxy, and to explore the unknown,” writes Jonathan Cole in his seminal history of The Great American University. ”Societies that create conditions for free inquiry, protecting their scientists and scholars from ideological bullies, are apt to produce more profound and significant discoveries, and they are more likely to have truly distinguished universities producing pathbreaking original work.”
It’s a strikingly libertarian idea, and Cole points out that protections for free inquiry on campus developed alongside stronger protections for free speech in our society. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t work if there are top-down restrictions on the kind of ideas you can share or explore. When Cole Zoomed into our American Professoriate class a few weeks ago, he talked about the value of blue-sky research, the edge-of-the-envelope scholarship that could lead to a major breakthrough — or lead nowhere at all.
“How many of you know the name, Stanley Prusiner?” Cole asked as a few hands went up. Prusiner was a researcher at the University of California San Francisco who toiled away for years on a wild theory about disease-causing proteins, a phenomenon dismissed by most of his peers across the country. It was generally understood that bacteria and viruses are the agents that cause disease, and Prusiner’s focus on proteins looked like a useless tangent. “Then came Mad Cow Disease, and suddenly everyone cared about Prusiner’s work,” Cole told our class of graduate researchers. The stubborn, inquiry-driven Prusiner had discovered prions, a new category of a pathogen with huge implications for Alzheimer’s and other degenerative illnesses. It earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
But for every world-changing, Nobel-worthy idea, there are a lot of dead ends. And that’s a hard pill to swallow, this notion that the public will help fund open-ended research and politicians will exert little sway in where it goes. You have to tolerate wrong turns, controversial ideas, and bouts of public skepticism. But when it works, the returns are amazing. This month, the UNC System is honoring Carolina’s Dr. Ralph Baric with its highest award for his years of patient work on coronaviruses, research that helped pave the way for treatments and vaccines when covid-19 became a worldwide emergency.
I think of research universities as America’s venture funds — the places where our society goes to make ambitious bets about what the future can or should look like. Not all of them pay off, but the ones that do result in medical breakthroughs, life-changing technologies, and a better understanding of the society we all share. And Carolina has proven to be a very good bet over the years. We’re now the 6th-largest recipient of federal research dollars in the country, and those government grants combined with other sources of outside funding amount to more than $1.1 billion in sponsored research every year.
One of the things we talked about in class is how you operate on that kind of scale without losing your creative edge. Tenure plays a role, protecting scholars who are pursuing controversial ideas. A healthy mix of grants, private gifts, and university investment plays a role, ensuring that researchers have multiple options for supporting their work.
And thick-skinned leadership plays a role, given the inevitable criticism that comes from hosting a lot of different (and strident) voices under one roof. “The governing impulse of university leaders is a pathological (and essentially nonpartisan) fear of any threat to their institutions’ reputations,” wrote UNC historian Molly Worthen in The New York Times this month. “If university leaders would hang back more often from the temptation to act, to issue a public statement every time someone on campus got outraged at someone else, that would go a long way to protecting the academic freedom of everyone, tenured or not.”
I’m glad we live in a society that celebrates ambitious, moonshot thinking in business, technology, arts, and culture. We need to make sure there’s plenty of room for it on campus, too.
Productive Disagreement
Suzanne Barbour
Public universities are one of this country’s oldest and best ideas. The University of North Carolina was chartered in 1789, the same year our state ratified the US Constitution. There is no doubt the lawmakers of that era considered higher education to be an essential public good.
But in the very first session of my American Professoriate class, a student brought up a sharp point about what serving the public means for a state university. The word “public,” she pointed out, isn’t fixed — it has grown and changed over time. Our definition of who Carolina belongs to — and who belongs at Carolina — is far broader today than it was 200 years ago, just as the state itself welcomes a far larger and more diverse group of people into the civic fold. The latest figures from the US Census, released just a few weeks ago, show that North Carolina is among the fastest-growing places in the country, with a great many of those new arrivals drawn by the promise of world-class education and the opportunities that go with it.
That’s something to celebrate, and it means that our University needs to work harder than ever to speak to the whole state. Our growing and diversifying public is not of one mind about much of anything, which means that a University serving the people of North Carolina isn’t going to find much easy consensus, either.
That’s what The American Professoriate course is all about. It’s a seminar-style course with excellent co-instructors and more than two dozen graduate students representing a range of disciplines from literature to neuroscience. What all of them have in common is a desire to contribute not just to their individual fields, but to the life and health of the University. In today’s world, that means being prepared to show that the great American ideal of the raucous debate can happen without damaging the shared institutions of our society.
I always lead off the class with my favorite quote from Clark Kerr, who led the University of California through another great period of upheaval on American college campuses in the 1960s. “The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself,” Kerr wrote. He understood that a quiet campus, a place with no loudly dissenting voices and no contentious debates, wouldn’t be doing its job.
The genius of America has always been its capacity to welcome strident voices without tearing itself apart, to provide the framework and the forum for working out real differences without breaking the bonds of affection that hold us all together. So long as our society is roiled by great questions, our public institutions must be, too.
Kerr didn’t last as long in the UC president’s office as he would have liked. He was dismissed in 1967 amid a shifting political landscape in California, joking that he arrived on the job “fired with enthusiasm” and departed the same way. But he’s remembered today for laying the foundation of a truly great public institution, and for speaking honestly about what higher education means in a democratic society. “A great university has a duty to the future as great as its duty to the present,” Kerr wrote. “Intellectually, it must be both more conservative of established values and bolder in trying innovations than may be fashionable at any given moment…. It must take the long view and may often have to defend the unpopular.”
That is not a recipe for quiet days. But I think we need more people, more institutions, that take a very long view. The students in this semester’s American Professoriate class are still in the early stages of their academic lives, still with decades of ideas and discoveries ahead of them. The public they’ll answer to will change across the arc of their careers, with new controversies animating the institutions where they work and the society they call home. And through it all, they will seek the right balance of conserving established values and trying bold innovations, searching for the truth even when it’s costly.
I love imagining where all of these great minds might end up, long after they’ve left this class behind. But for now, I’m grateful to be learning with them.
The Virtue of Raucous Debate
Kevin Guskiewicz
Public universities are one of this country’s oldest and best ideas. The University of North Carolina was chartered in 1789, the same year our state ratified the US Constitution. There is no doubt the lawmakers of that era considered higher education to be an essential public good.
But in the very first session of my American Professoriate class, a student brought up a sharp point about what serving the public means for a state university. The word “public,” she pointed out, isn’t fixed — it has grown and changed over time. Our definition of who Carolina belongs to — and who belongs at Carolina — is far broader today than it was 200 years ago, just as the state itself welcomes a far larger and more diverse group of people into the civic fold. The latest figures from the US Census, released just a few weeks ago, show that North Carolina is among the fastest-growing places in the country, with a great many of those new arrivals drawn by the promise of world-class education and the opportunities that go with it.
That’s something to celebrate, and it means that our University needs to work harder than ever to speak to the whole state. Our growing and diversifying public is not of one mind about much of anything, which means that a University serving the people of North Carolina isn’t going to find much easy consensus, either.
That’s what The American Professoriate course is all about. It’s a seminar-style course with excellent co-instructors and more than two dozen graduate students representing a range of disciplines from literature to neuroscience. What all of them have in common is a desire to contribute not just to their individual fields, but to the life and health of the University. In today’s world, that means being prepared to show that the great American ideal of the raucous debate can happen without damaging the shared institutions of our society.
I always lead off the class with my favorite quote from Clark Kerr, who led the University of California through another great period of upheaval on American college campuses in the 1960s. “The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself,” Kerr wrote. He understood that a quiet campus, a place with no loudly dissenting voices and no contentious debates, wouldn’t be doing its job.
The genius of America has always been its capacity to welcome strident voices without tearing itself apart, to provide the framework and the forum for working out real differences without breaking the bonds of affection that hold us all together. So long as our society is roiled by great questions, our public institutions must be, too.
Kerr didn’t last as long in the UC president’s office as he would have liked. He was dismissed in 1967 amid a shifting political landscape in California, joking that he arrived on the job “fired with enthusiasm” and departed the same way. But he’s remembered today for laying the foundation of a truly great public institution, and for speaking honestly about what higher education means in a democratic society. “A great university has a duty to the future as great as its duty to the present,” Kerr wrote. “Intellectually, it must be both more conservative of established values and bolder in trying innovations than may be fashionable at any given moment…. It must take the long view and may often have to defend the unpopular.”
That is not a recipe for quiet days. But I think we need more people, more institutions, that take a very long view. The students in this semester’s American Professoriate class are still in the early stages of their academic lives, still with decades of ideas and discoveries ahead of them. The public they’ll answer to will change across the arc of their careers, with new controversies animating the institutions where they work and the society they call home. And through it all, they will seek the right balance of conserving established values and trying bold innovations, searching for the truth even when it’s costly.
I love imagining where all of these great minds might end up, long after they’ve left this class behind. But for now, I’m grateful to be learning with them.
Grant Tenure to Nikole Hanna-Jones
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
I’m not in the habit of giving advice to the UNC Board of Trustees. Many of them are personal friends and I know they have a tough job. But the current controversy over granting tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones is potentially more impactful than the Silent Sam matter or even the Speaker Ban controversy of 1963, where the state legislature, egged on by a TV news commentator named Jesse Helms, banned communists from speaking on the UNC campus. (Helms also suggested that a fence be placed around Chapel Hill so that it could be designated as the state zoo.) At the same time, the solution is not complicated. In fact, it is obvious. Events of the last 10 days have demonstrated there is no defensible rationale for denying NH-J tenure and to do so would cause irreparable damage to America’s first public university. Failure to grant tenure flies in the face of long-established cultural norms and calls into question the commitment of the trustees to the most fundamental principles of academic freedom and shared governance.
The case for tenure has become front-page news and remains in the daily news cycle as of Memorial Day. NH-J has been hired to teach journalism and is set to begin July 1. She currently works for The New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She has a master’s degree in journalism from UNC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been appointed to a Knight Chair in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media but without tenure. Previous holders of Knight chairs all were granted tenure. Most importantly, the HN-J appointment was vetted through all appropriate university committees and her application for a tenured professorship was delivered to the Trustees, after a request for clarification, in accordance with university procedures. Faculty members with deep historical knowledge have stated that no one can remember the Board of Trustees rejecting a faculty recommendation once it has complied with all procedures and has been sent by the provost for final approval by the trustees.
Events of the last week make clear that rejecting the faculty recommendation, in addition to being unsupportable, is a fool’s errand. Under normal circumstances, denying tenure to any applicant so well qualified would result in some level of controversy and discontent but it would likely fade away after a week or two. Until two weeks ago, most Americans had not even heard of academic tenure. But denying tenure to a black, female award-winning journalist whose enraged professional colleagues get to tell the story, is a fight the trustees have no hope of winning. Moreover, like the Silent Sam controversy, the coverage will continue so long as the matter remains unresolved. As an example, late last week, an infographic illustrating the number of black women at UNC and in higher education generally with tenure was published and, of course, the number was scandalously small. Similar stories will enter the public narrative until the controversy is resolved.
But a hint of the most damaging result of prolonging the tenure controversy is the letter from HN-J’s attorneys warning of a potential lawsuit. Board members who are unpersuaded by NH-J’s credentials or the principles of academic freedom and shared governance must ask themselves if denying tenure is worth risking the national and international reputation of a great university. Extended litigation involving the culture wars that have enveloped the university for generations can do nothing but harm to an institution the trustees have been entrusted to protect. It is hard to imagine any trustee would voluntarily lead the university down that road.
As the difficulties facing the BOT surfaced last week, the path to resolving the controversy became clearer. First, unlike the Speaker Ban and confederate monument issue, there is no state statute mandating or constraining board action. Second, there is no impediment from the Board of Governors that manages North Carolina’s university system. The President of that body, Peter Hans, made clear that tenure decisions are campus matters, not ones where the university system will become involved. Third, two stakeholders, Walter Hussman, for whom the journalism school is named, and Phil Berger, the powerful Republican leader of the North Carolina Senate, made clear they had no intention of interfering in university procedures regarding tenure. Hussman seemed to go out of his way, in an interview with the Raleigh News and Observer, to defer to the faculty on matters of tenure. “I don’t think donors should have a say in who gets hired or who gets terminated in the faculty,” Hussman said, “And I don’t think any university worth its salt should allow that.”
Berger’s public statements suggest he will not attempt to intervene in a decision made by the Board of Trustees. Last, and perhaps most importantly, NH-J has the support of the faculty, the provost, and the chancellor. One faculty member told me she has never seen the faculty so galvanized around a single issue.
In the next week, we should get clarity on the likelihood of resolving the tenure controversy amicably without further damage to the university. Fortunately, there is a clear path toward resolution. The UNC Board of Trustees can defer to the faculty and established norms, just as they have consistently done in the past, and approve the tenure submission. In doing so, they will place themselves squarely behind the basic principles of academic freedom and shared governance and reaffirm that UNC intends to remain one of the nation’s great universities.
My Post-COVID Response - I Don't Know.
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
“I don’t know.” For me, and I suspect, many of you, this is a tough phrase to utter. But in the early stages of a post-pandemic world, these are the words I find most truthful and most impactful when I am asked what is next.
Admittedly, my sample size is small, but I have good reason to demure. My predictions at the beginning of the pandemic were wrong as often as they were right and the world we live in is as uncertain as any in history. A decade worth of change has occurred over the last 14 months, and the dust has only begun to settle. Moreover, own state of mind resembles that of a soldier returning from war. We all seem to underestimate the trauma and the time it will take to recover.
Cataloging my incorrect predictions is easy but painful. At its outset, I thought the crisis would last a semester and higher education would be back in business during the Fall of 2020. I missed the date by an entire year. I was a supporter of beginning the fall semester early to escape an expected second wave in the winter, a decision that led to a second closing on our campus and others and a huge blow to campus morale. I also underestimated the importance of continuous testing for all returning students and faculty.
On a more global level, I overestimated the economic impact of the pandemic on the economy in general and, more specifically, on higher education. As it turns out, most colleges will make it till fall avoiding my predicted bloodbath. I also missed the dramatic increase in applications to selective schools and the dramatic decrease in attendance at community colleges as well as the remarkable momentum for eliminating college admissions testing or at least making the tests optional.
I won’t make the same mistakes again when it comes to the big questions we can’t yet possibly answer. I have a long list. What is the role of online education post-pandemic? Surveys indicate a surprising number of students prefer online to in-person learning and a majority expect to enroll in a mix of online and in-person classes beginning in the fall. Faculty also have a more favorable view of online education in general and the forced covid conversion to online teaching has made them more comfortable teaching remotely. We don’t know if these attitudes will persist once campuses reopen. Much like office workers who question the wisdom of a five-day commute, students may conclude that living on or near campus and participating in face-to-face daily classes no longer makes sense. Evidence from places like Southern New Hampshire University and Arizona State University, both with massive online enrollments, suggests that online education is attractive to students and can be administered at a fraction of the cost of traditional models. When I asked a professor at Arizona State who has written extensively on online education whether it was as effective as face to face, he said, “We don’t know.”
Another unknowable is how the nature of work will evolve post-pandemic and the impact of the current infra-structure bills now before Congress. Without major federal intervention organizations of all types are re-thinking the concept of the office and a recent video in the Times showed a new Google office with eight-person pods. Seats are interspersed with video monitors to facilitate hybrid team meetings. Massive changes in the way we work will inevitably change higher education as well but again exactly how-we don’t know.
The racial reckoning precipitated by a rash of killings of African Americans and other minorities will also have a profound impact on higher education, but we don’t know exactly what that means. Test optional admissions, increased diversity in hiring and a renewed focus on a campus climate supportive of first-generation students are initiatives already well underway. What we don’t know is whether these incremental changes will be followed by a more fundamental restructuring of the concept of merit which is at the heart of higher education and which is now under assault from thought leaders from multiple disciplines and political persuasions. This call for systemic change has the potential to disrupt higher education at its foundations but what exactly that means, we don’t know.
The list of the unknowable goes on. Is it imperative that Americans obtain a college degree, or can other forms of post-secondary education achieve the same result? Can higher education play a useful role in bridging the massive divisions currently ravaging American life and threatening our democratic system? Considering the massive changes taking place post-covid can the basic values of academic freedom, shared governance, and the facilitation of upward mobility endure?
There is no shortage of people willing to answer these questions but how can they amidst so much uncertainty? For most of us, when to get on an airplane or eat inside is not fully resolved. Some decision must be made no matter how uncertain the environment, but I suggest a wise course is to get comfortable with not knowing and pause to let the dust settle. Post-pandemic life is about to reveal itself if we will just be patient.
What's Magic About a College Education
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
The United States spends over $600 billion a year on higher education, and decades of research show that those with a college degree earn more and have a better quality of life. Last month, two distinguished economists announced the shocking finding that college graduates also live 10 years longer than non-graduates. I wrote about the implications of that gap last month, and today I want to spend some time on how it emerged — and why it seems to be growing.
When I asked Sir Angus Deaton, the co-author of the new paper, how he accounted for this astonishing rift in longevity by education level, he responded right away. “Easy answer,” he wrote. “We don’t know!”
That’s because there are some big holes in the data that make it hard to pinpoint causation. Harvard economist Raj Chetty studies life outcomes based on a massive database of tax returns, but that data doesn’t include educational levels. Deaton and Anne case-based their study on death certificates that do include education level but not income. As a result, it’s hard to untangle the interplay of education, income, and other confounding variables.
Professor Deaton, an outspoken advocate for universal healthcare, suggested that those without a college degree are less likely to have adequate healthcare because of lack of insurance and the complexity of the system itself. There is no doubt this contributes to increased mortality. The well-established lifetime income premium associated with a college degree undoubtedly contributes, as well.
But the enormous size of the gap, and the fact that it seems to be growing, suggests there may be other factors at play. In their book, Deaths of Despair, out last year, Deaton and Case dwelled on the role that social esteem plays in life outcomes. In a society where the gap between winners and losers has widened, and where most high-status jobs require a college degree, the self-esteem associated with a college education may play a real role in health and longevity. The prominent moral philosopher Michael Sandel wrote a whole book last year on the need to restore American society’s sense of dignity and respect for all forms of work, not just white-collar knowledge work. “We need to better reward the social and economic contributions of work done by the majority of Americans, who don’t have college degrees,” Sandel argued. “And we need to reckon with the morally corrosive downsides of meritocracy.”
I think that’s right. But it still leaves an important unanswered question: Is there something intrinsic about the process of earning a college degree, some substantive change from the experience itself, that leads to better life outcomes?
The preeminent educational historian, Jonathan Cole, in his book The Great American University, offers a place to start. Cole found that a distinct set of values underpins the American university, and they hold mostly true across different institutions and fields of study. Things like free debate and productive skepticism of received wisdom; a universalism that rewards fact-based argument over dogmatic belief; and a sense of the common good, a mission to serve the broader society.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course, and no institution achieves these foundational principles perfectly. But Cole’s point is that higher education, writ large, has a culture that aspires to basic tenets of openness and inquiry and that inevitably shapes the students who pass through.
Most students have never met a professor when they enter college. Getting to know people who have made academia their life’s work adds a novel perspective to their world view. The whole concept of a marketplace of ideas, or an organized attempt to produce brand new knowledge, is new to most young people when they set foot on campus. The skeptical mindset central to academia is a productive habit in an economy that demands constant adaptation, and in a media environment where dogma and misinformation can easily lead people down dangerous paths.
Not only are students exposed to new ideas but also to a diverse community where they are likely to interact with people different than themselves. The long-term social impact of knowing people who are “different” should not be underestimated. It’s a critical feature in a world that’s changing fast. In North Carolina, half of all adults now living in the state were born elsewhere, so a willingness to meet and welcome new people is crucial.
I taught a first-year honors seminar for many years involving a group of students almost all of whom held merit scholarships. They were highly motivated, accomplished, and often overconfident. Early in the semester, I asked who in the class had heard of Peter Drucker, the leading thinker in the world on entrepreneurship. Silence. After what seemed like an eternity, a young woman slowly raised her hand and gave a perfect summary of Drucker and his theories. I asked where she’d learned all of that. She responded, “In high school in Singapore.”
Her classmates were caught off guard. Eyebrows raised; eyes widened. All of these students with solid accomplishments but narrow life experiences suddenly had their world view expanded beyond North Carolina, beyond the United States. They saw their place in the world a little differently and understood that contributions (and competition) would come from a much wider circle of people than they imagined. I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in reverse when some unbelievably well-prepared student from a private prep school gets upstaged in class by a brilliant kid from rural North Carolina.
Those horizon-widening moments certainly aren’t the sole reason college graduates live a decade longer than those without a BA. But when you look at the broad range of factors that Deaton and Case have explored in their work — not just health care and income, but social connections, a sense of purpose, a feeling of efficacy and esteem in the world — I believe that the actual experience of college makes a difference. If we’re doing our jobs right, it must.
Whatever is driving the wedge between college-educated Americans and their fellow citizens, we need to untangle it quickly. It is indisputable that a degree is valuable but lacking one shouldn’t cost a decade of life. We need to better understand what’s delivering such a stark benefit to our graduates and we need to get it in the hands of more people — now.
A Matter of Life and Death
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
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Don't Give Up on College
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
With the real U.S. employment rate estimated to be in excess of 10%, women and minorities being disproportionately impacted, and unskilled jobs rapidly being replaced by those that need specialized training, it makes sense to invest in the learning infrastructure developed during the pandemic to put the country back to work. But it is important not to confuse this short-term imperative with the long-term goal of increasing the number of Americans with a college degree. Job training should not take the place of providing an affordable and meaningful college education to an increasing number of Americans.
Only a third of Americans have a college degree and based on 2020 enrollment statistics, the pandemic will cause that number to go down at least for the next year or two. More concerning is the dramatic drop in the number of minority and first-generation applications. By any measure, these are the Americans who can most benefit from a degree not only because of the economic benefits it bestows but also because, for the foreseeable future, a college degree is a passport to a better life. Michael Lomax, the CEO of the United Negro College Fund, put it this way, “You’ve got to have been poor, you’ve got to have been at the bottom for generations to understand the absolute urgency of mobility. It is more than the urgency of getting something beyond a living wage. It’s the urgency of economic independence, but it’s also the urgency I find in our students and their families to develop themselves fully.”
The confluence of the two biggest issues now confronting American higher education--student debt and free college--provides a tremendous opening to dramatically increase the number of Americans with a college degree. When you dig under the covers a bit, the opportunity becomes more obvious. Philip Clay, the Chancellor Emeritus at MIT, sent me the following email, “There are more than 30 million people who have some college. After you subtract those who are all set such as those 50 and over, you still have millions who would benefit from a stimulus to complete college. This is low hanging fruit!”. A recent report from the Lumina Foundation entitled Changing the Narrative on Student Borrowers of Color provides nuance to Chancellor Clay’s suggestion. The wide-ranging report suggests that twenty-four percent of those that have not completed a course of study beyond high school are in default on their student loans. Saddled with debt—often in default--and no degree, these students face the further reality of being prohibited from reenrolling until their prior debt is paid off. Roughly 6.6 million students are unable to use earned academic credits because their transcripts are being held as collateral by their former institutions. Not surprisingly, these numbers are dramatically higher among students of color.
Universities, corporations, and the private sector are all beginning to respond to what Dr. Clay referred to in his email as “low-hanging fruit.” At Morehouse College, the legendary HBCU based in Atlanta, starting in August an online course offering with reduced tuition will be available to the roughly 2 million Black men who pursued a higher education but never finished their degree. According to the school’s President, David Thomas, three days after the program was announced 5,000 inquiries had already been received.
Similarly, a new partnership between 2U, Inc. and Guild Education will give millions of employees at companies such as Lowes, Chipotle, and Walmart access to college courses and degree programs. Many of the eligible employees already have some college and the 2U-Guild alliance will make a college degree a realistic possibility.
Innovative approaches to addressing the needs of those learners who have failed to complete a degree are emerging everywhere, and the online learning catalyzed by the pandemic has turbocharged these efforts. Davinci Schools is exploring the sweet spot that connects higher education to employment by creating an experiential curriculum that gives students experience in the workplace to go with their academic training. Alamo Community College has developed particular expertise in addressing the needs of Hispanic students, offering 325 degree and certificate programs. Classes are available during the day, in the evening, and on weekends on six campuses, the Internet, and at various off-campus sites. The Alamo Community College District serves more than 52,000 students, about half of whom are Hispanic. Southern New Hampshire University, the fastest-growing non-profit university in the nation with 135,000 students, has broken new ground by using big data and intensive mentoring to achieve a 76% overall completion rate, while National Louis University is launching ambitious initiatives in inner-city Chicago and by the end of the first year, 60% of their students were on track to graduate in four years.
Now, let’s connect the dots. A national consensus is building to forgive some amount of college debt and to make college free or at least more affordable. There are millions of Americans who started college but have not finished. Outstanding debt and high tuition are major impediments to completion and, coming out of the pandemic, there are an impressive set of models designed to serve the population of learners who have started but not finished college. The average balance on outstanding debt is less than $10,000. Why not target a portion of the aid aimed at higher education to this opportunity? Assuming all college debt will not be forgiven, increase the forgiveness ceiling significantly if a student who has dropped out goes back to school and eliminate the “hold” on re-registration for those with outstanding tuition and fees. Cover the true cost of attendance for students who opt to return to school and make the same financial benefits available to part-time and full-time students. Create financial incentives for institutions that enroll students who have dropped out and increase the incentives if the student completes a course of study. These relatively simple but highly targeted initiatives can make a meaningful difference in the life of millions by allowing them to earn what is still the most meaningful credential in American life—a college degree.
My Gift To You
Buck Goldstein
Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice UNC-Chapel Hill
I have never been accused of growing old gracefully. I was annoyed when AARP started sending marketing materials and I consider even minor physical limitations a personal challenge. I have another admission. I hate standing in line. When it became apparent that being old meant Kay and I would be moved to the front of the vaccine line, I was ecstatic. I never dreamed we would be fully vaccinated by early February. Having been given the gift of early vaccination and knowing most of my readers are still waiting in line, I want to share what I have learned a week after entering this new state of being. Spoiler alert: it is all good news.
We got the Pfizer vaccine and had minimal side effects. After the second dose, we had a day of downtime, low-grade fever, and a sore arm. Frankly, the side effects were comforting because it suggested that the vaccine was doing its thing and we were developing antibodies.
The reality of being fully vaccinated opened a welcome conversation with family and friends. What are appropriate protocols as fully vaccinated individuals once we achieve maximum immunity in another few days? The easy part is to continue wearing masks in public, mostly for symbolic reasons, socially distance, and continue handwashing. Beyond these basics, the conversation becomes more complicated. Ultimately, I have come to understand there is no right answer. The only right answer for you and your family is guided by your tolerance for risk and the understanding that none of the decisions we make about our daily lives is entirely risk-free. We decided it was safe to re-enter a pod with our immediate family comprised of three fully vaccinated adults, one unvaccinated adult two adults in a blind trial with a 70% chance of being vaccinated, and three children 5 or under. We have also decided it is okay to be indoors with small groups of close friends who have also been vaccinated. Our daily errands are less restrictive, but we are not going indoors to grocery stores and other commercial establishments for more than a few minutes. No movie theaters, indoor dining, or public events until more folks have been vaccinated. The toughest decision we are facing is when to fly to Los Angeles to see our son and his fiancé who just became engaged. Of course, balancing risk against the promise of a saner life will be an ongoing process.
The big news, and the reason for writing this blog, is the unexpected psychological effect of being vaccinated. One friend described it this way: “After the first shot, I knew what day it was. After the second, I found my glasses.” For me, two days after the second shot, the walls of denial began to crumble. I began to understand the incredible toll living with Covid had taken on my physical and mental health. My mindset over the past year has been to stay positive and grateful. Our family remained healthy, none of us lost our job and we were not required to put ourselves at risk. As I saw it, I had no right to be sick or depressed or lost because I had been spared the worst of it. Much to my surprise, after being vaccinated, I am beginning to understand the constant state of fear and uncertainty I have been living with and the toll it has taken.
The insight came first on my daily walk. I walked outside the door without going through a mental checklist of things I needed to do to stay safe. Even with a mask hanging around my neck, for the first time in months, I wasn’t worried about dying or transmitting the virus to someone else. A whole section of my brain that was always on high alert was freed up for more productive pursuits. I noticed I was walking faster and thinking about how to extend the distance. I considered when it would be safe to begin swimming which was formerly a big part of my exercise regime. I started to think about my twin grandsons' first birthday party and a lunch date with a colleague and a small dinner party with friends. The everyday events that give me energy and enthusiasm were creeping back into my life. I also began thinking about projects that had a time horizon of more than a few days. Toward the end of the walk, I met a friend I hadn’t seen for a year and the encounter was transformational. The fear of getting too close was replaced with the joy of talking about what comes next. I could be me again.
The joy extended beyond the walk. My health is better. I sleep through the night without the use of pharmaceuticals. I just made an appointment to get a new campus ID (my old one finally wore out), and I get things done in a day that formerly took a week. I read the papers and follow events of the day with interest but not existential dread. I go to the wine store thinking about the wine I am picking up instead of the mistake I might make that would endanger me or my family.
Of course, the first week may be a bit euphoric and some of the flow will diminish over time. Fortunately, my wife Kay is around to calm things down and remind me we need to consider one step at a time, as the world is still dangerous and uncertain and we must continue to respect the deadly virus. But for those of you waiting for a vaccine, what is coming may well exceed your expectations. Only after you have been vaccinated can you begin to understand the extent of the weight that has been lifted. Only then can everyday joy become real and not just an aspiration. Only then can you become you again.
