2.12: Top 10 Stories of 2023 in American Higher Education

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

We’re going to mix up the format a little for this podcast. Joining me today is Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of the genuinely excellent book Higher Education Accountability from Johns Hopkins Press. In my view, Robert is among the sharpest eyes on the American higher education scene, someone who is always worth listening to.

In his pre-administration life when he was at Seton Hall University, Robert kept up a very active blog on higher education issues, and one of his most-read features was an annual list of the top ten most important stories in American Higher Education, published each December. I asked Robert a couple of months ago if he’d come on the show to reprise the top ten and to my great delight, he agreed.

And so, without further ado: Robert Kelchen’s Top Ten Stories in American Higher Education for 2023.

Alex Usher (AU): Today we have a special format for a special guest. We're doing this old-style David Letterman. We're just going to go straight to the home office in Knoxville, Tennessee. I'm going to ask you, Robert, number 10 this year in the top stories in American higher education, what is number 10?

Robert Kelchen (RK): Number 10 is just the importance of college athletics and some really big shakeups happening.

AU: Are the shakeups mostly around people moving conferences or is it bigger than that?

RK: Some of it is on people moving conferences. American college athletics, for those internationally, is weird. We've got about 100 some odd schools that all think they can be the biggest athletics programs in the universe. The top 20 or so are spending 150 million a year at this. There's been massive conference realignment among the biggest athletic conferences to where the former Pacific 12 conference is down to 2 members. They may or may not continue on in some form. The big 10 is getting close to 20. Colleges are spending ridiculous amounts of money hiring and firing football coaches. Texas A&M is paying its football coach something like 70 million to go away.

AU: People talk about, “look at the waste of public money.” Is it public money? Or is this money that's coming in from TV contracts and alumni and whatever else? What's the cross subsidy at places where you get those big contracts?

RK: At places with the biggest contracts, it is donor funded getting people to go away. Faculty and students don't like it. They think the money can be used for other purposes but in reality, are these donors going to give to the general academic side? Probably not that much.

AU: I'll tell you my number one moment in American higher education this year was taking my daughter to USC, where we saw a $10,000 football helmet entirely made of Swarovski crystal. My daughter just said, what kind of university is this exactly? And I said it's USC so…

RK: Meanwhile, at the other end of American College Athletics, you have hundreds of colleges trying to offer as many programs as possible in athletics to get students to attend. So instead of thinking about the gigantic offensive linemen at the big ten institutions, think of 169-pound freshman playing sprint football, which is the newest craze for institutions trying to get male students. They put a weight limit on students of something like 170 or 175, and then they play football for small people. And that's an effort to get students and to keep the doors open.

AU: Always a good topic in American higher ed. What's your number nine?

RK: Number 9 is why would anyone want to be a college president?

AU: That's not new though, is it?

RK: It's not new, but it's accelerated over the last several years. The pandemic obviously made things harder, and we have a lot of colleges struggling financially. Then just the political pressures from politicians, from alumni, from faculty, from students. It leaves traditional academics wondering why on earth would I do this other than the salary. Then it opens the door more for non-traditional academics who don't often get along well with the stakeholders.

AU: That's an interesting thought. So, is there upward pressure on wages because of this?

RK: There certainly is upward pressure on wages because if presidents either don't want the job or think they'll get fired, they're going to ask for large buyout packages or high annual salaries. We're not at football coach level salaries for presidents but leaders are taking on risk in doing these positions, and they want to be compensated for it.

AU: Number eight?

RK: Number eight, there's been a lot made in the U.S. about issues for state funding for public higher education. For the last eight to ten years, that hasn't really been the case. In the vast majority of states, funding has been fairly strong and it's not just a liberal versus conservative state thing either. Many of the conservative states have put a lot of money in public higher ed over the last several years.

AU: At the same time as they are, in many cases, practicing an assault on higher ed, or at least some of what higher education views as its values. This is interesting that you say this, because one book that came out this year called “Wrecked” which was about this whole notion of underfunding and attacks on higher education. I never bought that because it didn't seem to me that the defunding of higher education was actually lined up very well with the culture war attacks on higher education. They don't necessarily go hand in hand.

RK: The two have been separated in many states. The place where they've been the most closely intertwined is funding for anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, Wisconsin held back 32 million in state funding until they got a promise that it would not go toward diversity related issues. So, there hasn't been –

AU: Because there's none of those in Wisconsin.

RK: Oh no. So, there hasn't been mass defunding. But at the same time, colleges are in a tough spot revenue wise because in a majority of American states, colleges don't control their tuition levels. With inflation being what it has been, even these increases in state funding have not covered the increase in operating costs.

AU: Switching over to the question of culture wars, what's number seven?

RK: Number seven is New College of Florida. This formerly sleepy liberal arts college has been the center of political crossfire and just some ridiculously massive proposals for state funding. It's to a point where something about a third of the faculty have left. Students have been transferring out en masse. At the same time, enrollment's up because they've started incredibly large athletic programs for a 700-student institution. The new trustees have basically tried to rewrite the curriculum.

AU: So, these are our trustees and a chair who were appointed by Ron DeSantis partly as part of his “War on Woke,” and that was supposed to be his brand in the Republican primaries. Why did they choose this institution as opposed to one of the other ones? Because surely, I understand you get a one-time boost by having faculty retire and saying “Look, we show those liberals” but at the same time, you actually have to run the institution at some point. Surely, all those factors of leaving made that more difficult.

RK: It's the smallest institution by far in the public university landscape in Florida. I think it's also seen as being the most liberal. Everything has been unconventional, individualized education, and they had struggled with enrollment and efficiency. It's not clear that what's going on now will fix any of that, and we'll see if they're able to get competent leadership so they can provide the high-quality education that they're looking for.

AU: Perfect. Let's move on to number six.

RK: Let's take a swing away from the states and go talk about the federal government for a while. The federal governments tried to do a bunch of things through executive action this year. One that's farther along than others is gainful employment regulations which came up during the Obama era. Then were briefly in place, the Trump administration scrapped them, and the Biden administration is going back through the cumbersome regulatory process to get them in.

AU: Let me just be clear about this for non-Americans here, but gainful employment regulations is a set of rules which put performance requirements on graduate outcomes for the purpose of access to student aid. Is that correct?

RK: Correct. Programs have to essentially pass a debt to earnings ratio for students to be able to get federal funding. Now, that has not applied to all programs. It's primarily been programs at for-profit colleges and certificate programs at public and private non-profit institutions. That restriction is staying. But, what is also coming out is even more detailed data about all the programs that aren't tied to sanctions. This is really fascinating in the graduate and professional landscape, where it's something like 20 percent of the students and 50 percent of the federal student loan dollars. Because graduate students can borrow the entire cost of attendance, tuition fees, living expenses, while they can't do that in their own name as undergraduates. I'm really fascinated to see what happens when some really expensive prestigious master's programs, for example, the crystal football making program USC, when they get their failing grade from the Department of Education.

AU: Will there be pressure then to bring them into the policy?

RK: That’s the big question. Republicans have been pushing for that for years. Democrats haven't wanted it. But in 2017, when the Obama administration released data on the way out, Harvard had to end up closing a certificate program in theater at the graduate-level because their outcomes were exposed as being just so terrible.

AU: Robert, take us on to number five.

RK: Number five is basically any conversation on a college campus is heated and politicized right now. We can think about three different strands of this. There's been a long-standing strand going back probably eight to ten years at this point, fighting about diversity, equity, and inclusion. We alluded to this a little bit already in this conversation. But it's to the point where many states, including my state of Tennessee, are trying to discourage the use of the word diversity. We just changed our university's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office to be the Access and Engagement office. It's still doing the same work, but not using the terms that upset people so trigger warning on that one a little bit late. The second gets into the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. That was a pretty limited decision affecting a pretty limited number of mainly wealthy selective institutions. But, where it's hitting more of higher ed is in questions like can you have scholarships or services that focus on a particular racial or ethnic group? The Supreme Court hasn't actually decided that yet, but politicians are certainly trying to influence whether colleges still have those.

AU: When it comes to free speech, on issues like what we've been seeing for the last seven or eight weeks in the Middle East, is that again one of those issues that is overblown? We focus on a couple of institutions too much and like how heated is it really on American campuses?

RK: I don't think it's that heated on the majority of campuses. Obviously, the wealthier, more selective, more politically liberal, then the more heated it's been about the war in the Middle East. But politicians and trustees, I think, have the sense that it's much more heated on every college campus. That's where a small number of institutions are really driving public conversation, which tends to happen in the US. I would not want to be a college leader right now just dealing with the pushback on both sides about the war in the Middle East. I think they almost welcome the return just to regular fights over DEI issues.

AU: Story number four. What do you got for us?

RK: Number four is the rapid changing/collapsing of the online program management market. It was a big deal a number of years ago when companies like 2U were starting and really marketing large online, primarily graduate programs to help institutions boost their bottom lines.

AU: 2U was big enough that it bought edX.

RK: Yeah, and there have been several substantial players in this space, but two things have happened. One is colleges have gotten either a lot better or a lot more comfortable running our online programs. They have more experience, plus the pandemic helped out with that. Second is there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny in the U. S., especially from senators like Elizabeth Warren on the left, who aren't too happy with these for-profit companies getting in the market. Just as competition gets fiercer and fiercer, especially in the graduate space, there just wasn't as much of a market for these OPM companies and they've gone the way of the MOOC. They're still there. They're not the game changer that people thought they would be. Is there still a market for the services? Yes. Can they still be useful? Yeah.

AU: Got it. Moving on to number three.

RK: Number three is college closures. If you look at the news, people think there have been a lot of closures. There were famous predictions, including the late Clay Christensen, that half of colleges would close in ten years. We are nowhere near that. However, we have seen a slight uptick in the number of closures of private non-profit colleges. But in the U. S., we're talking about 10 to 15 closures per year out of a base of, depending on what you count as a college, between 1000 and 2000 institutions. It has ticked up. There are colleges that I have no idea how they keep operating. But somehow, someway, they're stubborn, they're resilient, they find a way. But what is happening is, basically, every college in the country is looking at questions like should we be cutting programs? There's been a lot made about the demographic cliff in the US. That the number of high school graduates is peaking and has peaked in parts of the country and the non-traditional students, they come back when the economy sour, and right now the economy is good enough. So, people are reading the trade publications, they're reading the Chronicle, they're reading inside higher ed. They're seeing, “oh, everyone else is talking about program cuts” and the consultants are out talking about it. So, everyone is rushing to think about program cuts. And it's so different than it was seven, eight years ago, where everyone was thinking about how we expand and how do we grow? With the change in media coverage and people getting scared during the pandemic, I think that really changed the direction.

AU: I don't get the sense that there is a consultant way or maybe it's just hidden. It's not 15 years ago like after the great financial crisis when there was a whole movement around program prioritization, right? So, Robert Dickinson, all that kind of stuff. I remember being shocked. I was in Argentina, and I could see like Spanish copies of Robert Dickinson in bookstores. It was very odd. But I don't see that kind of same, “hey, here's a way to figure out how to how to downsize this time round.” Is that fair or is it just the playbooks are being held closer by consultants like RPK that are working in these areas?

RK: My sense is the playbooks are being held a little bit closer because it is so contentious. When the playbook a decade ago was start new programs, I think people were much more willing to talk about it. But, program prioritization is just brutal to talk about because we don't have a long history of doing that at many institutions.

AU: It was an odd process, I found at West Virginia, a remarkably public process actually compared to most of the others. Yet it was the one that drew most of the eye or most of the attention over the fall.

RK: It's gotten to the point now where the trade publications are just doing a weekly roundup of talk of program cuts. I think West Virginia helped normalize the conversation to where everyone's asking if they're looking at it, why shouldn't we?

AU: We're getting very close to the top here. Robert, what's your number two story?

RK: Number two is student debt in the United States. It's been an interesting year in that. In that the Supreme Court said, “no, Biden administration, you cannot do across the board debt forgiveness,” but the Biden administration is taking several substantial steps toward sizable debt forgiveness. They're going through the regulatory process to try to get across the board forgiveness while also implementing a new income driven repayment program that is incredibly generous, especially for undergraduate students. To where, I think a majority of borrowers won't end up paying anything.

AU: I've not seen this in the American press yet, but it seems to me the Biden program ends up looking an awful lot like the UK student aid system, which is you give students a lot of debt but you then give it at such a concessionary rate that almost nothing gets paid back. I get the sense that the Biden administration thinks that this is going to make them popular. They should check with the UK because I don't think there's very many students who are particularly fond of the British system. It strikes me as a little bit of wishful thinking. Is that fair? Is that or no?

RK: It's a very technocratic system where people have to have faith that if they take on, say $30,000 in debt for a bachelor's degree, that most of it will end up being forgiven at some point down the line. There's not a history of the student loan system working tremendously well on the back end of the United States. I think there's a lot of skepticism of public institutions. So, I don't think that borrowers are tremendously happy about it. There are a lot of people who are frankly just upset that they didn't get 10 or 20k canceled across the board. At the same time, we've got the resumption of student loan repayment this fall.

AU: Which you didn't think would happen. You were skeptical that Democrats would ever restart repayment and yet it's happened or is happening.

RK: It's happening because the Republican Congress basically put the Biden administration in a box on this. It was one of their biggest conditions toward getting a budget, because Republicans are so upset about forgiveness. Now, it's still a little early to tell how much is actually being repaid, because all the consequences for default have basically been pushed out past the 2024 presidential election. We have this crazy web of student loan servicers that are private companies in the U. S. that go out and collect the money. They've been beaten down, abused, had to go through multiple last second pauses on payments. They're struggling to manage all this. The professionals at the U. S. Department of Education are stretched way too thin to handle anything. So, it's all a mess. I think this mess is going to continue on as the Biden administration tries to go through the regulatory process to forgive more student debt, which the Supreme Court may still go back and strike down.

AU: We've reached the top of the list, Robert. What's your number one story for the year?

RK: The number 1 is just the growing separation between the haves and have nots in American higher ed. The US system has always been stratified by international standards. Where we have a small number of institutions that are insanely wealthy and then we have institutions that are struggling to keep their doors open. What we've seen since the pandemic is just a growing stratification in where students want to go. A number of the flagship state universities are up 10, 15, 20 percent in enrollment over the last five years. Overall enrollment is down. The super selective private colleges, they're doing great. Their endowments are doing well, and they have all the students they want. It's really been a shift from more regionally focused institutions and from community colleges toward the bigger name institutions. Then also a shift from the for-profit sector and community colleges toward just being in the workforce.

AU: Or shift away from enrollment altogether.

RK: Correct.

AU: The way you made it sound, and maybe I'm misunderstanding it here, is that you're seeing shifts within both the private non-profit and public sector. So, within the public sector. It's the shift towards flagships and within the private market, it's not necessarily shift, but certainly a preference in applications towards the wealthier institutions. Is there a shift between public and private not-for-profit going on?

RK: It doesn't seem like there's that much of a shift at this point. It really is students seeming to prefer more selective, better resourced institutions. It really seems like this has accelerated since the beginning of the pandemic. Especially for the big public flagship universities, they are happy to try to accommodate more students. But, they're cannibalizing this from other public institutions within their state.

AU: What do you think the end result is? Do your story number three was about program closures versus college closures. Do you think we see more program closures as smaller institutions struggle? Or are we actually going to see some institutional consolidation going on?

RK: In the private non-profit space, I think we'll see a little bit more consolidation. That rate just has to tick up a little bit more, but it's nowhere near Armageddon for the sector. For publics, it's trickier because closing is a political decision but I think that's where downsizing and program consolidation become much more important. There's also going to be fierce behind the scenes lobbying from the more regionally focused institutions to try to cap enrollment at the flagships. Because if they can only do that, if they can win out over their most politically favored institution in the state, they have a shot at getting more students.

AU: Fantastic. Robert, that's all the time we have for today. You've gotten through all 10 in just under our normal podcast time. Thank you so much for being with us. I love your top 10s. I'm glad you could read them with us today.

RK: Thank you.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and of course, you, our listeners for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please don't hesitate to contact us at podcasts@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week for the final podcast of 2023 when our guest will be Philip Altbach, professor emeritus and distinguished fellow at the center for international higher education at Boston College. He'll be joining us to talk about a new book that he co-edited along with Maria Yudkevich and Jamil Salmi called Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective. Bye for now.