well lot of bubbles will burst for sure.

Next time you hear someone criticizing postmodernists for challenging the integrity of the subject or the sublimity of free will, just remember this sentence: "But there is no reason to think that higher ed will be immune to the shakeouts and reorganizations that have affected so many other institutions in this age of globalization, which has wrought a heightened level of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called 'creative destruction.'"

Otherwise, I agree with Erin: colleges should get out of the human services game, provided government steps in. Penn's housing is disgusting, but to leave students to the vagaries of urban rent flux is disgusting as well. Parents without health care wind up relying on colleges to provide health services for college-age students. And decaying urban areas, along with isolated exurban wastelands, simply don't provide students with safe and reliable market-driven products and services.

My suspicion is that the talk of educational austerity will simply lead to a bipolar system, in which those rich enough to enjoy the "privilege" of college will thrive.

A couple thoughts..

1)In finance, a bubble occurs when people value assets for the circular reason that they are valued by others, rather than because of their intrinsic worth. Something similar has occurred in education: for the last couple of decades, at least, the meme has been "get a college/grad school degree so you can get a better job," which is something very different from "go to college/ grad school so you can learn the skills necessary for a better job." This emphasis on credentialism is, I think, at the root of many of our problems both in education and in society. If students are mainly after the piece of paper, they really don't care that much about what's being taught...and it has to be very difficult for professors to focus energies on teaching when confronted day after day with classrooms of students many of whom are just filling their time-in-seat requirements.

2)Re the comment about low-level jobs at Target & McDonald's--one may not need college to be a McDonald's store manager or a Target front-end manager, but hopefully, the individual's career doesn't end there. To the extent that these organizations promote from within, there may be an opportunity to eventually be a region manager, or a national merchandise manager, or any of a number of things for which the knowledge and abstract thinking skills purportedly developed by college should be of considerable use. I would rather see at least some of the executive management positions in these companies filled by people who have started working on the front lines rather than going direct from MBA school to corporate HQ without ever meeting any actual customers on the way, and I think education policy, as well as corporate mentality, has an impact on this outcome.

To be sure, a liberal education is a precious thing in its own right. But its preciousness has a way of declining when its costs put middle class citizens in a vise.

Hey, that precious liberal arts education is available right here at my institution for a mere $1,200 per full-time semester. Student-teacher ratio is 18:1. Tenured profs with terminal degrees teach most intro classes (as part of their 4-4 loads). We have comparatively few adjuncts. Teaching counts here, not research.

We're just about everything Erin could want in a public college. (How about throwing a little love our way sometime, Erin, instead of always talking about higher ed as if we don't exist, or as if we're some sort of freakish exception?) Yet oddly enough we constantly struggle for students because we can't offer nonacademic amenities like a great location or Division I sports. Maybe we'll benefit from a bursting of the higher-ed bubble, though somehow I doubt it.

Eveningsun...To what extent is your need to struggle for students based on amenities vs the desire of students & parents for certain college brand-names? (Obviously, if your school is already a great & famous name, the answer must be either "amenities" or bad problems in the admissions department.) But in general, I think brand preferences too often replace a serious attempt to think through the pros & cons of a particular college..on the part of students, parents, and also employers. Not obvious how this can be fixed.

David, I think parents and students privilege Big Name Universities because employers -- especially in professions like law, medicine, engineering, and business -- privilege those Big Names.

I agree, though, that especially for undergraduate education, a well-motivated student can get a top-notch education at small state universities for much less money. (I went to a tiny state school in NJ -- not Rutgers! -- and was accepted to excellent graduate programs upon graduation. I actually *made* $4000 overall in college due to excess scholarship money, the tuition being so low. I spent the money on books.)

Still, most states have cut their funding of state schools. The current economic crisis is giving administrators the opportunity to cut untenured faculty, to cut tenure-track lines, and to cut department budgets. Meanwhile, our local Big State School is building a new stadium for its terrible football team.

Currently, I teach at a highly competitive private school. Students there are increasingly considering Big State U for financial reasons. When they get there, they will be taught by overextended adjuncts and novice graduate students. The most highly motivated will continue to excel, but others will no doubt get turned off.

So, if cheaper public institutions are the way, let's consider why their public funding has declined, why their labor pool is severely circumscribed, why austerity isn't spread to sports and administration.

And if the Big Names are simply brand names, let's consider why those with tons of power still come from Big Name U.

I have a suggestion for the dorms. Keep them but let the hotel industry run them.

Let several hotel firms compete on each campus on price, amenities or whatever else they choose.

Students get a choice, prices become competitive, and "loco parentis" issues are resolved.

True, the "student life" bureaucracies will have to go but the hotel industry has many openings suitable to people with their skill level.

LB..."And if the Big Names are simply brand names, let's consider why those with tons of power still come from Big Name U"...probably three reasons: first, filtering: the tougher admissions criteria mean that many of those attending BigName are smarter and/or harder working, and these atributes would have stayed with them even if they had attended Cheap&Basic U. Second, actual quality: as you point out, they are less likely to be taught by overextended adjuncts and in very large lecture sections if they go to Cheap&Basic U. Finally, the branding issue is very real: I doubt if even 5% of the employers who give preference to BigName are doing so based on a serious analysis of the quality of teachning in the various universities; rather, they are acting on received knowledge/prejudice.

The hiring preference for BigName vs Cheap&Basic varies considerably from industry to industry..it is particularly strong in law, investment banking, and consulting.

[I]n general...brand preferences too often replace a serious attempt to think through the pros & cons of a particular college, on the part of students, parents, and also employers. Yep--it's consumerism all the way down. And I agree that it's "not obvious how this can be fixed." Hard to expect students, parents, and employers to think about college in anything other than consumerist terms, when the culture as a whole doesn't teach them any other way to think. (Even many of our churches are essentially consumerist--service providers, basically.)

And of course most of the solutions batted around on conservative blogs (not to mention state legislatures) are market-oriented and hence miss this fundamental aspect of the problem. Market-oriented solutions might be fine when it comes to increasing access to training in the manual arts and even preprofessional programs, but I don't see how they're going to help liberal arts education qua liberal arts education.

Of course, cultural conservatives know they'll never get anywhere by scolding the masses. Much more money to be made scapegoating the intellectuals.

Doubtless my thinking here is shaped by my own experience--by the fact that, like Luther, I'm a product of inexpensive (and definitely non-prestigious) state schools. I think I got an excellent education, but I would never attribute the excellence of my education to the excellence of the schools I attended. I attribute it to my own desire and work ethic.

In a sense, once a school provides a decent library and faculty sufficient to meet the truly educational needs of the undergraduate student who truly wants to learn, it is already an "excellent college" as a college (as opposed to a Club Med, a high-class marriage mart, and a dispenser of social prestige).

In this sense, the nation is chock full of excellent colleges. An undergraduate can get just as good an education at my own little second-tier state college as at Harvard, and for about a twentieth the cost. I mean that literally: just as good as Harvard. Efficient, low-cost, affordable, accessible, high-quality higher-education is already here. In fact it's already everywhere in this country. It does not wait upon the implementation of this or that "higher education reform." The higher-ed reform crowd is barking up the wrong tree. We don't need to reform higher education--we need to reform people's consumerist attitudes. And I doubt that's going to be accomplished the ideology of the "reformers" works more generally to harden those consumerist attitudes. I can't remember who it is, but one of these so-called reformers is fond of telling students that today's "politically correct" university is "cheating" them out of a quality education, as if the students were the passive victims of some slick con game. Well, at some schools definitely do get conned. But every con artist knows that the surest way to cheat someone is to play on their existing greed, to offer them something for nothing.

What to do, then? It might help to stop demonizing higher ed generally. Erin does this all the time, painting with far too broad a brush, though she's certainly not as big a part of the problem as most of the pseudo-reformers. It might help if we started framing higher ed as an opportunity (of which students can avail themselves or not, as they choose) rather than a product (which, having paid for, students and parents expect to be of "high quality"). In the latter frame, a dumb graduate indicates a lousy college with a lousy faculty. In the former, a dumb graduate indicates a foolish student who paid good money for an opportunity he never availed himself of, an idiot who went to an honest car dealership, paid good money for a quality car, and then left it sitting for four years on the lot--not a professoriate that needs to be whipped into shape by the right-wing scoldetariat.

Yes, some fresh analogies.... Maybe we should think of a college not as a factory but as a gym. You can't buy higher education any more than you can buy weight loss and big muscles at Gold's. Or, if we must think in consumerist terms, maybe we should take a hint from the dieticians. It's true that most Americans pay too much for unhealthy food. But it's not because healthy, inexpensive food is no longer available. It's sitting right there in the produce aisle. And it's not because the PC farmers are slothful and the liberal food industry inefficient. No amount of agricultural reform will solve the nation's dietary problem as long as consumer attitudes remain the same. Ditto higher ed.

Like Erin, I'm just thinking out loud here....

[T]hose attending BigName...are less likely to be taught by overextended adjuncts and in very large lecture sections if they go to Cheap&Basic U. Well, yes and no. At Flagship State University, yes: crowded lectures and exploited adjuncts. But at many a second-tier, rural Southwest Northeast State Teacher's College, no.

I teach at one of the latter. Our student-faculty ratio is about 18:1, and our use of adjuncts is modest, mainly because we have no high-powered research faculty to subsidize. A halfways motivated student really can get a great undergraduate education at schools like mine--and not just book learning, either. They can also get great mentoring and experience doing modest but genuine research of the non-capital-intensive variety.

A few more thoughts;

1)Lots of people other than academics & intellectuals get verbally beaten up in our society. Imagine being an oil company exec, or head of the United Auto Workers, not to mention a government employee or an elected official. Academics may feel that they are coming in for a disproportionate share of criticism, but it's not clear that they get more than any other highly-visible social group.

2)It's worthwhile to distinguish between "academics" and "intellectuals." There are lots of non-academics who have intellectual interests, and more than a few academics who are pretty narrow.

3)Much of hostility toward academis and "elitists" is directed toward the gatekeeper role played by the universities. Imagine an experienced bank branch manager who has been passed over for promotion to region manager--in favor of an Ivy League MBA with a purely theoretical knowledge of banking. Her likely resentment is not precisely against intellectuals (and our newly-minted MBA is probably not one in any sense that most academics would like to claim) nor against elitism in the sense of *respect for excellence* (she probably considers *herself* pretty excellent) but rather against the excessive emphasis on credentials and purely theory-based knowledge as opposed to the kind of experience-based knowledge that she has developed.