As college costs rise, the higher-education system has become granting on some professors, too.
Oliver Lee, a tenure-track assistant professor of history at the University of Texas in Arlington, wrote a personal essay for Vox on why he’s leaving academia.
Office politics, uninterested students, and an unsustainable, dysfunctional university system pushed Lee to his decision.
“After spending four years working in higher education, trying to effect piecemeal improvements, I’m convinced that the picture is more dire than most people realize: There’s no one single problem to fix or villain to defeat, no buzzword-y panacea that will get things back to normal,” he wrote.
The big plan that people want doesn’t exist. Free college tuition won’t fix the problem, nor will focusing on one aspect of higher education to fix. Higher education isn’t a car with an engine problem so much as an underground pipe with dozens of leaks.
Government intervention has intensified the problems. “Our federally backed approach to subsidizing higher education through low-interest loans has created perverse incentives with disastrous consequences. This system must be reformed,” Lee wrote.
In effect, colleges and universities sell themselves as necessary paths to gain a job, but once tuition is paid and the degree given, they balk at any responsibility to students in the job search.
Lee doesn’t care for alternatives because, by definition, an alternative avoids the root problems in higher education. However, without viable alternatives, the momentum from reform must come from the university system itself. More competition for prospective students could do a world of good.
Lee advocates cutting off the lifeblood of the university: access to government-backed student loans that aren’t erased by bankruptcy.
“The quickest and most painful solution to the crisis would involve greatly reducing the amount of money that students can borrow to attend college … to force underperforming private and public universities out of business,” he wrote.
Prospective students have started to respond to a few issues Lee mentioned. Overall enrollments have hit a three-year low and continue to fall. Traditional four-year colleges and universities haven’t seen their enrollments so damaged, but community colleges and for-profit colleges have had dramatic declines. Those students tend to respond to economic realities and are more price sensitive. When they get a raw deal from higher education, they leave.
Higher education is as diverse as its problems. Improvements, by the nature of its problems, must be piecemeal and flexible to conditions at different institutions. Lee represents an academic who has lost the motivation to ignore academic faults in favor of its benefits. If his mindset becomes common, a “revolt of the intellectuals” could be on its way.
