For the greater part of the past decade, discourse — both learned and unlearned — on the state of American higher education has exhibited an obsession with the phenomenon of “political correctness.” Initially the intellectual property of conservatives who saw the ideological chickens of the 1960s coming home to roost on campus (and who, basking in the sunset of the Reagan-Bush dynasty, had little else to complain about), political correctness evolved into a thoroughly undefinable stock phrase for all that is wrong with academia.
So it comes as a shock to finish Anne Matthews’s Bright College Years and realize that the author has not once referred to political correctness. Matthews, who teaches journalism at New York University, liberates her readers from sexual and racial politics, and instead concentrates on the basics: What exactly is college for? Who should go to college? What does a campus do? Is education worth the price? In exploring — though never feigning to answer — these questions, the author takes a fascinating snapshot of the knowledge business in the United States today.
Structurally, Bright College Years focuses on the three-way tug of war between students, professors, and administrators, each wanting more than the other two are willing to give. At the root of these conflicts is, of course, money. Even though the average tuition for the nation’s 2,125 four-year campuses is rising at twice the rate of inflation, all but the most heavily endowed wallow in dire financial straits. The problem is not a lack of consumer interest. In what can be seen as a triumph of egalitarianism (though not, some would argue, common sense) two out of every three high school students in the United States will go on to higher education, compared with one out of ten in France and Japan.
The problem is that not enough of these students are both smart and rich.
Simply stated, campuses need to attract students who can pay full tuition and help defray the costs of students who cannot. A recent study at Trinity University in San Antonio shows that of those who take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, only 5 percent have both scores above 1050 (out of 1600) and a family income over $ 70,000. Competition among schools to enlist these students has thus become, in the words of one recruiter, an “arms race.” High- ability, low-need applicants are beginning to appreciate their own value, and to bargain for their services. This, in turn, has forced many colleges to discount in order to stay competitive. According to Matthews, some private liberal arts colleges will offer price reductions of up to 40 percent to attractive applicants. The American Council on Education estimates that some schools discount to such an extent that they keep only 10 percent of any yearly tuition increase, a situation likened to “chewing your own tail.”
For those high-need applicants who cannot wrangle concessions from their schools, the only alternative is to take out a loan. More than half the seniors graduating from American campuses have gone into debt in order to obtain their degree, with outstanding federal college loans closing in on $ 30 billion. Not that students don’t have good reasons for investing heavily in their education: A male college graduate earns 80 percent more than a male high school graduate. But nor does a degree provide any guarantee, the laws of market saturation being what they are. One third of the pizza deliverers in Washington, D.C. come equipped with a Bachelor of Arts.
Such monetary pressures seem to have had a dampening effect on the intellectual aspirations of American undergraduates. It is difficult to imagine many graduating seniors exclaiming, as an F. Scott Fitzgerald character once did, “God! Haven’t we raked the universe over the coals for four years?” Most students seem content to let the universe lie unraked and concentrate on the bottom line. “I love history,” notes one of Matthews’s subjects, “but fear majoring in it will limit my career options exceedingly. I need at least $ 80,000 a year to be happy.” Matthews cites a survey in which fewer than half of today’s students expect college to help them develop a philosophy of life, while 85 percent anticipated such an epiphany in 1968. ” At these prices,” comments the author, “speculating and exploring are not cost-efficient.”
And what of the professors, whose duty, one would assume, is to assist the student in the area of speculation and exploration? Despite, or perhaps because of, her own place in the profession, Matthews’s overall assessment of her peers is generally glum and at times cynical. Her thoughts on the incentive-killing side effects of the tenure system are sure to win her the enmity of some of her NYU colleagues, and her caustic appraisal of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants,” two-thirds of which go to tenured professors, assures she will never be considered for that prize. “Fifteen years after [its] launch, no great books have come out of this creativity experiment,” she notes. “Millions of fellows’ dollars have been mundanely spent, on patios and tuitions and silverware, on new cars and old debts.”
Treated more sympathetically are the administrators, the “designated grown- ups of higher education.” During the 1960s, students angrily insisted on being treated like adults; today, in loco parentis is flourishing. Brown University alone has offered Dean on Call, Chaplains on Call, Women on Call, and Psychologists on Call twenty-four-hour hotlines. One college president laments the frequency with which parents drop their child off at school, drive home, and immediately get divorced, leaving the freshman “a total wreck. ” In addition to these parental duties, administrators are faced with a more hostile legal environment: The president of William and Mary has been cited for serving sherry to staff members on state time, while Pace University has been successfully sued by several undergraduates who felt that a computer course was too difficult.
To her credit, Matthews refuses to hold the present hostage to the standards of the past, a staple of P.C.-based academic commentary. For example, she follows her description of modern campus nightlife — a Gomorrah of sex, violence, drunkenness, and hooliganism — with a historical overview of academia in which it becomes obvious that such behavior is not unique to our own era. During the 1300s, European undergraduates were given to excessive drinking and hazing, and student riots between ethnic groups lasted for days. In the late 18th century, a Harvard professor complained of being pelted with “tea cups, saucer, and knife,” while a Princeton colleague remarked at the stink caused by students emptying chamber pots out of dorm windows.
Stylistically, Bright College Years could easily serve as a textbook for Matthews’s journalism students. Speckled with interviews and exhaustively researched, the book provides its readers with enough ammunition to take their own shots at American higher education. The author provides a generous enough selection of targets.
Shawn Miller is co-author of Business and Society Today: Managing Social Issues (West).
