To be fair, much of it is deserved. Far from marketplaces of ideas, universities are hostile to dissenting viewpoints. Faculty openly discriminate against their colleagues on political grounds. Universities’ reputations have taken back-to-back-to-back hits from replication, antisemitism, and plagiarism crises. Academic hoaxes have exposed entire fields of study as preposterous.
Perhaps the worst indictment: American higher education has failed to adequately support economic mobility. Controlling for inflation, college attendance costs have tripled over the last 60 years. Meanwhile, 30% to 37% of bachelor’s degrees produce zero or negative net returns on students’ educational investments. As a result, fewer young people report interest in attending college.
Yet, for all its many failures, higher education remains vital to the nation’s economic and national security. The people need these institutions to shape up and fly straight.
They need them to be great again.
No proposal in higher education has the potential to make greater progress toward this goal than the College Cost Reduction Act. The CCRA would drive down tuition costs, resolve the student loan crisis, and most importantly, disincentivize colleges from directing students toward expensive and unnecessary low-ROI degree programs. It achieves this last feat through two “skin in the game” mechanisms:
- Holding colleges partially liable for student loan default costs. Colleges can then discharge 50% of their liabilities by closing low-ROI programs.
- Creating new “PROMISE” grants linked to graduate earnings. Colleges offering higher-ROI degrees will receive more grant funding.
These critical fiscal provisions are likely to be included in the House of Representatives’ reconciliation legislation. Other provisions may not survive the Byrd rule. If enacted, they would go a long way toward addressing higher education’s ROI problem.
But the CCRA is controversial. Disincentivizing low-ROI degrees could negatively affect disciplines in the already struggling humanities. Whatever labor markets may think, the study of philosophy, history, the classics, and literature is valuable. These disciplines cultivate students’ critical thinking skills and provide them with deeper knowledge of and appreciation for their culture and civilization.
If enacting the CCRA’s ROI provisions caused the humanities to go extinct, America would be the worse for it. Fortunately, such concerns are misplaced.
First, it is necessary to distinguish the value of broad exposure to a field of study from the value of narrow specialization in that same field. It is reasonable to expect the latter, in the case of a bachelor’s degree, to pay for itself. By contrast, nothing in the CCRA prevents universities from preserving general education requirements in humanities disciplines. In fact, universities could increase these requirements to offset their reductions in humanities degree offerings.
Second, the CCRA creates a path for colleges to save their low-ROI degree programs, if they want to. ROI means benefits outweigh costs, and universities are limited where benefits are concerned — they cannot compel employers to value their degrees more highly. But they can improve the cost-benefit ratios of degree programs and, therefore, ROI by reducing program costs.
Universities can cut costs by investing in partnerships with community colleges and high schools. Under transfer program agreements, college students take lower division courses at community colleges, saving them 65%, on average, in tuition and fees.
Better still, under dual-enrollment, high school students take college-level courses for both high school and college credit. Dual-enrollment courses can be taught on high school campuses by teachers with subject-area master’s degrees or at community colleges. Agreements vary by district. However, program costs are typically covered by high school districts or community colleges, rather than by four-year universities.
Universities looking to preserve low-ROI BA programs could make targeted investments in transfer/dual enrollment agreements aimed at reducing overall costs in these programs. For example, they could:
- Establish streamlined admissions criteria through articulation agreements
- Guarantee admission for students who complete program requirements
- Subsidize subject-area master’s degrees for high school teachers interested in teaching dual enrollment courses
These investments could transform net-zero/negative-ROI BAs into net-positive-ROI BAs.
THE UK’S SUPREME COURT TRANSGENDER RULING SHOULD BE A WAKE UP CALL FOR THE US
Accountability in higher education is not a death warrant for the humanities. Far from it. The CCRA provisions under consideration in Congress will align degree offerings to labor market needs. However, universities will retain the flexibility they need to continue to educate the whole person and to pursue their traditional mission of discovering, improving, and disseminating knowledge.
The result will be a win-win for higher education and for the people.
Dr. Christopher Schorr is the Director of Higher Education at the America First Policy Institute.
