Third
Meeting of MSC Spring 2022 What Do Colleges and Universities Owe
Democracy?
A. Oveview of
Daniels:
pp. 9-10: But this book is about more
than the self-interest of universities; it also makes a
broader claim about the role of
universities in advancing the public good.
Liberal democracy is the system of government best equipped to mediate
among the different, competing, and often irreconcilable conceptions of the good
and to ensure appropriate care for individual autonomy and dignity.
The values of the university, in particular, are aligned with this
system, given the premium each places on freedom of speech and thought,
tolerance for dissent and heterodoxy, the free flow of information and ideas,
and shared and distributed authority.
Universities are places of such influence that they will, either through
action or inaction, shape the society around them, and it would be a scandal for
them to sit passively by as the political structures aligned with their mission
degrade around them. They cannot be
complacent: they must look hard at who they admit, how they teach, how they
explore and share knowledge, and how they connect their discoveries with the
teeming, diverse world beyond their walls.
In this light, the relevant question is not, How do we shape society to
nourish the university? but rather, How
does the university best foster democracy in our society?
p. 240: “Throughout this book, I have
sought to develop a holistic mapping of the role that the university plays in
liberal democracy by focusing on four key functions:
promoting social mobility, educating for
citizenship, checking power with facts and knowledge, and
modeling and promoting pluralism.
In each of these functional areas, I showed how universities in the
United States evolved to take on these responsibilities and how well (or poorly)
they are requiting them today.”
p. 98: “Colleges and universities are
uniquely positioned for leadership on
civic education. Most
undergraduates are between the ages of 17 and 24, a period of development often
referred to as the “impressionable years,” in which young adults develop the
civic skills, political convictions, and habits that will persist into
adulthood. As these take shape,
they can be given depth and nuance in a classroom or campus setting.
In fact, studies have consistently shown that
well-designed courses and educational
programs with a focus on political engagement can help college students develop
greater political knowledge and motivation to participate in democratic life.
This is particularly true for students who enter college with little
political interest or socialization.”
p. 98: “The young republic in its
earliest days looked to its universities as bearers of an education in
democracy. Episodically, and
particularly at moments of democratic threat, the country and its universities
have returned to this endeavor. But
now, more than two centuries later, we are still without a concrete and enduring
program in democratic citizenship in our colleges and universities.
Why have these efforts repeatedly
faltered? And how can universities
answer the latest call to civic purpose, without meeting the fate of those that
came before? For that, we will need
to peer back and track the ebb and flow of the history of universities as places
of unending promise and repeated disappointment for civic education.”
Is Daniels right here—in the beginnings
of the Republic were extant college
focused on civic education? Did
Jefferson believe this?
B. Daniels’
Chapter One: Universities and Access, Mobility, and Fairness:
Chapter Overview:
pp. 23-24: at this moment, the liberal
democratic dream of equal opportunity is more elusive than ever for many in
contemporary America. For most of
their history, colleges and universities gradually expanded access to college
for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, a feat achieved through the
creation of public university systems and community colleges, through visionary
legislation like the G.I. Bill and the Higher Education Act, and through massive
investments in financial aid. But
in the past thirty to forty years, states have scaled back financial support for
higher education, federal funding has stagnated and lost focus, and universities
have embraced admissions practices that too often advantage wealthy students and
disadvantage poor ones. These
trends have accelerated the stratification of higher education.
The solution for addressing this dire problem will need to be
far-ranging, including robust financial aid initiatives to mitigate the burdens
of student debt. To start, I call
for the reinvestment in financial aid by governments and for the elimination of
legacy preferences in college admissions.
p. 35 still, one of the more striking
facts of American economic life in the past century is that
even when actual mobility has faltered,
faith in mobility has endured.
The American Dream, in other words, has held strong.
Social scientists have long marveled that Americans managed to remain far
more optimistic about their ability to get ahead than citizens in other
countries, even as those countries begin to catch or even surpass the United
States in rates of actual mobility.
p. 36 a college degree makes it 3.8%
more likely that someone in the lowest income quartile might move to the highest
quartile, and the annual fiscal return on a bachelor’s degree is about 14%.
p. 37 highly ranked schools were
effective in moving poorer students’ in this manner, but they serve very few
such students, lower ranked schools can have a greater effect
p. 39 The National Center for Education
Statistics, meanwhile, reported that among a cohort of young people who were
high school sophomores in 2002, only 14 percent of those from the bottom quarter
of incomes had earned a four-year college degree (or higher) in 2012, compared
to 60 percent for students from the top quarter.
Add to this the fact that 59 percent of children whose parents hold
postgraduate degrees graduate from a four-year college, while only 17 percent of
children of parents who never went to college do so.
By some measures, then,
educational immobility exerts an even firmer grip on American society than
socioeconomic immobility, as highly educated parents pass their education on
to their children at a greater rate than the rich pass on their socioeconomic
status.
p. 39: far from being the incubators of
democratic mobility across generations, universities have come to represent, in
the words of The Economist, a new “hereditary
meritocracy.” Daniel’s mentions
Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit:
What’s Become of the Common Good (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) on p. 38.
On pp. 41-44 he traces the history of
higher education in America from the first scholarship [1643] through the
training of ministers and careers in law engineering and banking, to the
establishment of more scholarship opportunities at the time of the Civil War.
There the Morrill Act began
“…audacious investment in the future of American education at a moment when the
future of America itself was in severe doubt” (p. 44).
By 1890 the second Morrill Act
tried to extend the admission of black students though “…States could
sidestep this stipulation, however, if they established separate institutions
specifically designed for African American students.
Southern states uniformly chose this latter option….” p. 47
pp. 48-49 by 1900, Black colleges
and universities—in one count—had graduated nearly two thousand students.
More than half of these graduates were teachers who played an
essential role in expanding the educational attainment of young African
Americans across the South. The
racial gap in school attendance between whites and Blacks halved, and African
American illiteracy rates sharply declined.
This, in turn, helped to expand professional opportunities and create the
conditions for higher-level collegiate work for the generations served by these
teachers. It was in this sense that
W. E. B. Du Bois observed in a 1907 letter that Black colleges represented “the
foundation of the school system and not its cap-stone.”
Black land-grant colleges were indispensable in giving credence to
assessments like Du Bois’s and, like the institutions established by the 1862
act, in helping to set the stage for the next massive expansion of access to
higher education that would occur in the early decades of the twentieth century.
p. 49 the number of students enrolled
in colleges and universities skyrocketed from 63,000 in 1870 to more than
1,150,000 in 1944, the year the G.I. Bill became law.
As a share of the college-age population, enrollment grew fivefold in
this period. Central to this shift
was the spread of public K–12 schooling as a mainstay of American life, which
generated a pipeline of students ready for a college education.
And thanks to an economy increasingly reliant upon specialized knowledge
and a higher education sector ever more defined by growth and differentiation
(aided by the rise of technical schools for engineers, normal schools for
teachers, and full-scale research universities capable of training students in
applied science), the economic returns to a college education began to far
outpace those of a high school degree.
On pp. 49-52 he traces the
development of State Universities from the 1890s through the development of
Junior Colleges in the 1900s (by the start of WWII here were more than 200).
The extensive broadening of the number of state universities and junior
colleges (and of students receiving higher education) led to a transformation
for private colleges:
pp. 51-52 as Dartmouth President Ernest
Hopkins told undergraduates in 1922, “Too many men are going to college!”
What was needed, Hopkins said, was for elite private colleges to begin
recruiting students of the highest intellectual merit, thereby cultivating “an
aristocracy of brains, made up of men intellectually alert and intellectually
eager.” Such an attitude was a
stark change from the private college admissions scene a few decades prior.
For most of the nineteenth century, college had been a buyer’s market,
and admissions processes at elite private colleges were designed to let in as
many students as possible. Harvard,
for instance, publicly advertised in 1870 that 88 percent of that year’s
applicants had been admitted. The
process was simple: applicants took a series of entrance exams catered to the
curricula of elite regional preparatory schools that served as feeders.
Those who passed the exams were admitted—and most passed.
Even those who didn’t could still be admitted conditionally.
But this traditional system was quickly becoming outmoded.
The expansion of public secondary schooling in the United States had
sparked an explosion in college applications.
Academic leaders eager to form a “natural aristocracy of talent” by
identifying meritorious students from all parts of the country welcomed this
surge of new prospects. But
determining who should be admitted and why required retooling decades-old
policies and procedures.” This
led to the birth of standardized testing.
However admission via testing alone didn’t produce quite the “aristocracy
that the private colleges wanted and so
p. 53 throughout the 1920s, these
colleges abandoned exam-dependent admissions processes in favor of a holistic,
character-based one that considered test scores as one factor among many, with
applicants judged on their personal qualities and achievements (assessed through
written materials, in-person interviews, and detailed family backgrounds) as
well as their academic ability. The
introduction of this new, more open-ended approach gave admissions offices
tremendous latitude in shaping the character of a student body.
This also led to the phenomenon of “legacy
admissions.”
On pp. 55-60 he discusses the more
“modern history of higher education form the G.I. Bill [1944] and Roosevelt’s
hope “…to develop new social programs that would extend the promises of the
New Deal into the postwar era, especially in higher education, a field in which
he had long searched for an “entering wedge” that would allow him to amplify the
federal role” p. 55). He also draws
attention to the efforts of the State of California to develop a more democratic
Higher Educational System.
Of course, the G.I. Bill was a boon to
mobility for many, but it did not extend such mobility to all Americans.
But in 1965 President Johnson “…the
HEA into law…at Southwest Texas
State Teachers College, his alma mater.
In his remarks that day, Johnson retold his own rags-to-riches story, but
he also spoke movingly of his experience teaching impoverished youth in rural
Texas, for too many of whom the American Dream had remained only a dream.
“I remember even yet,” he intoned, “the pain of realizing and knowing
then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because
they were too poor” p. 57).
On pp. 60-62 he discusses how
some private colleges began to redress
their “aristocratic character” by reducing “legacies,” developing
“need-blind” admissions policies, and generous financial aid packages:
p. 63 from 1992 to 2010, the percentage
of public research universities’ budgets attributable to state funding was
slashed nearly in half, starving the very schools that had been built to be
“democracy’s colleges.” These cuts
were the product of a medley of forces: the fiscal pressures on state
governments, the priority that states accord health care over educational
funding (not surprising, in light of the relatively high rates of voter turnout
by seniors in comparison to young adults), and the growing perception that a
college education is primarily a private—as opposed to a public—good (and
therefore its costs should be borne by its beneficiaries rather than society at
large).
However the
1980’s saw a substantial retreat in
Federal funding for Higher Education, and many private colleges found their new
policies were too costly.
Concurrently States began to decrease finding for their systems.
Concurrently the
rise of “College Rankings” such as the
U.S. News & World Report annual
ranking begun in 1983 led to significant changes as higher educational
institutions modified admissions criteria in light of such report’s (changing)
criteria. Such criteria ranges from
average GPAs and standardized test scores to the 2018
U.S. News & World Report adoption of
“altered its formula in an explicit effort to reward schools that promote social
mobility by adding indicators for how many Pell-eligible students a school
enrolls and how many graduate” (p. 68).
While Daniels thinks it is too early to
tell whether such “social mobility indicators” may enhance access, mobility, or
fairness he does say
pp. 68-69: this shift has lent tangible
support to the decisions we have made at Johns Hopkins—especially in the wake of
an extraordinary $1.8 billion gift that was earmarked for student-based
financial aid from alumnus and former mayor of New York City Michael R.
Bloomberg—to commit to enrolling at least 20 percent of our class from
Pell-eligible families. Moreover,
these changes have had a notable impact on the rankings themselves.
In a single year, the new mobility indicators moved schools like the
University of California, Riverside, and Howard University up thirty-nine and
twenty-one spots, respectively, while causing a number of formerly top-ranked
institutions to drop. On p. 77:
Daniels notes that Bloomberg’s gift made it possible for Johns Hopkins’ to have
an admissions policy which is need-blind and no-loan!
He points out (p. 70) that
now roughly 48% of endowment income goes
to financial aid, and this is important for the enhancement of access,
mobility, and fairness. But the
following section on “Inequality Machines” contends the current situation is
dire. He contends that to address
this situation:
p, 73: there must be increased
efforts to provide direct funding in the Pell Grant tradition (including
direct federal funds to cash-strapped state universities)
Of course Daniels’ school has an
undergraduate student body which is about 6,300 students.
A State University with 20,000 undergraduate students could require an
endowment of roughly ten times the
unprecedented Bloomberg gift. Thus
we need to talk about whether his advocacy here is really feasible.
If Daniels is on target with his
recommendations for providing more equitable access to undergraduate education,
h=should his program be expanded to graduate education?
pp. 73-75: there must be increased
efforts to ensure timely graduation for such students
pp 75-76: “means testing” for free
tuition proposals
pp. 76-78: in the absence of increased
government tuition funding, there must be increased funding from “other
organizations.”
pp. 78-84: he offers an indictment of
legacy admissions.
p. 80: at most top-ranked national
universities with legacy preferences, legacy students comprise anywhere from 10
to 20 percent of incoming classes. With
numbers like these, legacy students can significantly influence the racial and
socioeconomic composition of a class.
pp. 82-84: many top ranked schools are
ending legacy consideration for admissions.
pp. 84-85 I began this chapter by
arguing for the essential role social mobility plays in the liberal democratic
project and how vital the collective belief in the prospect of mobility is to
sustaining it. Democracies
draw their credibility and their resilience from an implicit covenant that
anyone with enough grit and talent can move beyond the confines of the
circumstances into which they were born. As
income inequality and stratification have grown more acute and intergenerational
mobility has stalled, this central tenet of the American Dream has become
increasingly fragile. Legacy preferences
exacerbate this problem by eroding the credibility of colleges and universities
and irreparably damaging the meritocratic ideal that is a centerpiece of
democratic faith and that institutions of higher education ought to embody.
They are, in a word, corrosive of the
faith in mobility and therefore of the spirit that lights democracy itself.
No matter how many first-generation and low-income students they admit,
how many scholarships they award, or how many more urban and rural high schools
they engage, my view is that universities cannot truly stand for equal
opportunity until they muster the courage to eliminate the most conspicuous
vestiges of caste that still cling to them. Only
then can they lay claim to their heritage as carriers of the American Dream….
Question for Next Class:
Could one contend that mandatory civic
education might be “indoctrination?”
Midcoast Senior College Website
Email: hauptli@fiu.edu
Last revised: 03/23/22