March 5 Update, from the Chronicle of Higher Education on how the protests got violent and hindered education: 

"Behavior that degrades into violence, personal intimidation, and disrespect for the rights of others is reprehensible and does nothing to aid efforts to restore funding to the university," David S. Kliger, the provost [at UC Santa Cruz], said in a statement.

Large numbers of classes were canceled on several University of California campuses, causing some students who avoided the protest to complain that they were tired of having their education interrupted. Gina Mandraccia, a Berkeley sophomore, said she was suffering from protest fatigue.

"I wasn't really into the last six protests, because I thought they were repetitive and directed at the wrong people," Ms. Mandraccia said. 

As one who was a student during the days (really several years, I suppose) of student demonstrations during the Vietnam era, I cannot help thinking that student protests against declining support for higher education in California and elsewhere are a mixed bag, at best. I’d rather see student concern expressed about declining budgets than many other more silly issues that can arouse student outrage on campus, but those protests on the '60s left me feeling that there are more effective ways to raise and discuss issues as important as these.

But I was puzzled by the statement that

“Some of what is indispensable to a genuine liberal arts education depends on having a faculty that is full-time and fully dedicated to the students in its charge. The danger, however, doesn’t come from “managerial discretion and whim.” It comes from scaling up university enrollments past the point in which it is financially feasible to sustain the curriculum on the basis of a mostly full-time tenured faculty.”

If I understand this comment, it derives from the perfectly valid position expressed by Dr. Wood that colleges admit a higher percentage of high school graduates than they should in order to provide really meaningful education to the intelligent and talented student body that should be the focus of higher education. But the financial logic of the statement escapes me, and perhaps I can ask for clarification.

If student tuition in state university systems such as California’s really did go to the institutions in which students are enrolled, it would not necessarily be the scaling up of enrollments that would be the source of any budgetary problems, but the expansion of faculty and administration costs that exceed the income from tuition. Since tuition goes to the State, and only a portion is returned to university campuses, an economically rational response by universities is to increase enrollments – enrollment increases are in large measure an effect of State budgetary policies that use tuition as a source of revenue for other State costs.

Obviously, basic economics tells us that reducing enrollments would reduce operating costs (were universities willing to cut faculty and administrations), and could resolve university financial problems. But this nice fantasy is just that, and the reality is that higher and higher percentages of high school graduates are being seduced into colleges and this trend is going to continue for some time. Manipulating state budgets to nudge enrollments back down strikes me as a socialist response -- state control of the educational market at its most raw – and I would prefer a different approach, one that starts with a closer relationship between tuition and institutional budgets, just as the free market dictates in other economic realms. The arrow between supply and demand points in both directions; the state (California or any other) should not manipulate demand for education and then fail to adjust supply accordingly; that does turn students into victims.

I am concerned that the argument sounds much like some of the arguments that we hear about food saftey: for example, that the demand for beef has risen so rapidly that producers using traditional technologies for slaughtering cattle and processing their carcases now run high risk of bacterial contamination. Solution: lower demand; it's the fault of those damn consumers who think that they have a right to beef.

Also, here's a great article in Minding the Campus by Daniel Bennett on the protests: "Why the Student Protesters are Wrong"

My thanks to Dave Taylor for his cogent response and good question.  I should say first that my observation on the excessive scaling up of universities wasn’t meant to apply to California in particular, but to the situation across the country.  California, however, is the leading example of a public university system that has grown beyond its capacity to perform its mission competently.

Mr. Taylor asks me to clarify my statement, in which I agreed with the AAUP that the shift away from full-time faculty members to part-time and adjunct teachers erodes the quality of higher education.  The AAUP sees the danger arising from administrators who can hire and fire the part-timers at “whim.”   But I see the danger as arising from another quarter:  “It comes from scaling up university enrollments past the point in which it is financially feasible to sustain the curriculum on the basis of a mostly full-time tenured faculty.” 

That was a very terse way to summarize an argument that didn’t properly fit in a brief report on the March 4 protests.  Mr. Taylor correctly spots one of the unexpressed points:  colleges and universities that admit more students than they can properly teach compromise their educational programs.  But since each additional student brings an increase in tuition revenue, how does expanding its enrollment hurt a college or university financially?  Isn’t more revenue just more revenue?

My point—which is not especially novel—is that high-quality college instruction has few and limited economies of scale.  The largest single cost in higher education has long been faculty salaries.  (This may be changing, but more on that below.)   Higher education overall has achieved little of the enormous gains in “productivity” that most other sectors of the economy have achieved in recent decades.  A good writing class can seldom be larger than twenty students without a steep drop-off in the level of individual attention to each student and without reducing meaningful assignments to a handful a semester.  (Ideally a freshman writing class should require weekly original papers.  I doubt that there are any such courses in the California public system.) 

Ever since the post-World War II boom in college enrollments, administrators have struggled to find ways to increase faculty productivity.  The most famous step was the creation of mega-lectures, usually in introductory courses.  A few faculty members excel at this form of instruction, but it really doesn’t solve the larger problem.  Frequently the lecture course is married to “discussion sections” led by teaching assistants and adjuncts.  So the mega-lecture approach turns out just to be a backdoor to the same labor-intensive teaching that it was meant to ameliorate.  Moreover, students as a whole are less and less interested in attending lectures.  Posted course notes, the professor’s own Power Point summaries, and online versions of such courses proliferate. 

The search for greater faculty “productivity” in teaching always hits the wall that traditional teaching, done right, is essentially a small group undertaking.  How small the group depends on the subject and the ability of the teacher.  Some subjects require intensive instruction; others can be scaled to groups of 50 or 75 students, perhaps with the help of a T.A.  But scaling even at that modest level almost always entails some erosion of quality.  The number of graded assignments dwindles; tests become mostly multiple choice and short answer; safeguards against cheating and plagiarism weaken; students who should be pushed are allowed to slack; professors fail to learn the names of every student, let alone every student’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. 

The latest way to achieve the economies of increased instructional productivity in higher education, of course, is online curricula.  Online course are increasingly popular with students and they do, to some extent, bypass some of the stringencies of small-group teaching.  My guess is that, in time, a large percentage of high school graduates will opt for online-only or online-mostly college instruction.  If that were to happen, the deeper problems that lay behind the March 4 protests would become irrelevant.  The public will have chosen a “good-enough” substitute for the relatively expensive, too-often-mediocre, and sometimes spottily delivered public university offerings of today. 

Can an online curriculum provide a really top-drawer liberal arts education?  Maybe not, but that isn’t really the issue.  The issue is that if our society—or California in particular—continues to stick with the idea that nearly every high school graduate should go to college, the only financially feasible way to achieve that consistent with maintaining any worthwhile level of academic quality will be for a large percentage of those students to study online.  There is simply not enough money that can be taxed out of taxpayers or borrowed against the supposed future earnings of college graduates to send these students to colleges run on the basis of full-time professors teaching moderately-sized classes.

I said above that the largest single cost in higher education has traditionally been faculty salaries.  But that may no longer be the case.  Two years ago the Department of Education reported that what it classes as “administrative” positions had finally edged past the number of teaching positions in higher education overall.  We have surely seen an extraordinary expansion of the non-teaching side of the university.  Mr. Taylor suggests that I am unrealistic (it is a “nice fantasy”) to think that colleges and universities would “cut faculty and administrators.”  Perhaps.  Maybe California has not yet reached that existential moment when it has to decide whether maintaining thousands of positions for quasi-therapeutic counselors, identity politics factotums, sustainability officers, and the like is so important that it is willing to suffer a decline in the quality of its academic programs to a derisory level. 

To be clear, I don’t have a “socialist” response and Mr. Taylor’s remark on that score in turn perplexes me.  How is it “socialist” for California—or any state—to say, in effect, “We cannot afford to pay for a traditional college education for everyone?”  I am not in favor of “manipulating” anyone to lower “demand” for higher education.  Lowering state incentives that stimulate demand isn’t manipulation.  It is just good sense.  

Peter Wood

Thanks so much to Peter Wood for his reply to my question(s); as a simple cardiologist I am perhaps overly naïve about higher education, or that part of it that takes place in undergraduate settings, and Dr. Wood’s perspective is always refreshing, enlightening, and profound.

My confusion lies partly in the assumption that higher productivity and efficiency are the inevitable responses to increases in student numbers. One might be forgiven for assuming that, rather than pumping up class sizes, increases in tuition revenues could be used to hire more faculty, and thus retain smaller class sizes. This has, in fact, been the case in the smaller, private schools with which I am familiar and have attended. Indeed, they advertize their small class sizes and student/faculty ratios in their promotional literature. Or, if there are too many well-qualified applicants, tuition can be raised in a perfectly legitimate supply-and-demand response. On the other hand – and this is where I raised a question – it appears that an endemic property of state university systems is that only a fraction of tuition is returned to the colleges/universities that comprise the system, and worse, a small enough portion is returned to require exactly those kinds of increased “productivity” that Dr. Wood so aptly describes. And the irony is that too many of those increased numbers of students shouldn't be in college at all.

We have the same situation in medicine, of course. I receive only a fraction of my ‘usual and customary’ charges from the health insurance companies that my patients use – and even less from federal programs such as Medicare – and so I must find economies of ‘productivity’ in my practice. No one wants to think that their physicians are seeing patients for briefer periods of time in order to pack in more patient visits in a day, or (a classic response from my specialty, cardiology), that I order more tests and procedures of minimal clinical value to make up for the loss of income from managed care insurers that won’t pay more than a few dollars for a 30 minute patient visit. Perhaps I am somewhat more sympathetic to the plight of universities that suffer from the same reductions in revenue from state governments that mirror the actions of insurance companies.

My allusion to socialist solutions was not completely a teasing one, but it was not a serious charge as much as an invitation to consider the role of governments in higher education. As universities increasingly are managed like corporations, state government administration of universities may look exactly like government management of businesses and markets: what exactly is NOT socialist about that? There seemed to me to be free market solutions to these problems, and I hoped that by couching the issues in economic terms we could see the relationships among the players a little differently.