Calls for Public Accountability Leads to Both-and-Nothing Outcomes

Contemporary calls for public colleges and universities to be more “accountable” to “taxpayers” are clarion; even the President of the United States has blown the trumpet with his directive to the Department of Education to develop a grading system for postsecondary institutions. Since the 1980's, public colleges and universities have watched their publicly- appropriated budgets decline as its public places increasingly hard to accommodate strains on capacity. Simultaneously, as Tim Larabee discussed in “Public Goods, Private Goods”, the discursive framing of just what exactly an institution of postsecondary education was supposed to do shifted. While higher education was long thought to be a site for training the vanguard of the citizenry, changes in both the US and global economy and demographics dictated a shift from an older version of the university as a site for preparing a nation’s elites and leaders, to a version conceiving of higher education as a training ground for jobs and careers — particularly those thought to be safe from mechanization (e.g. those associated with the knowledge economy, etc.). The confluence of changes in higher education, and particularly its ability to affect socioeconomic class changes, signaled the shift that remade higher education into primarily a private, as opposed to a public good.

In my view, this shift from a public to private good view of higher education, coupled with other changes in American social, political, and economic milieux signaled state legislatures to reduce funding for postsecondary institutions; at the same time, as Americans began to reshape the purpose of a college education into a springboard into a higher social class position, families increasingly sent their children to some form of college or university. At this confluence, postsecondary institutions were presented with the challenge of educating more people, for fewer “safe”, and more emergent and nebulous careers, with less support from their states. As a consequence, we have witnessed a polarizing effect in higher education, with elite colleges and universities producing graduates with higher earning potentials and more-or-less secure job prospects on one end; while on the other end, less-selective four-year, and some community colleges have seen their added value decline (to be sure, some career training opportunities offered by community colleges have experienced an increase in job market value, so this trend is not universal.) Unfortunately, as the public has become aware of effects of an over-inflated view of the ROI for a college education, and the fact that their tax money supports these institutions, demands for increased accountability have surfaced. As Jay Dee explained using the familiar-to-higher-ed concept of loosely coupled systems, calls for sensible accountability regimes have been met with significant resistance on behalf of colleges and universities, and overreach on behalf of elected officials looking to curry favor with the electorate. As a result we have witnessed polarized thinking over what an accountability regime should be: either no public accountability on one end, or total scrutiny and sunshine on the other. I am unsure if in the current era of political polarization and gridlock, a common ground “both-and” solution may be easily found; particularly as Dee’s suggestions include finding a common ground between the public accountability hawks and the higher education ostriches with their heads in the sand. The result? The hawks continue to circle and make threatening calls, and the ostriches pretend they can’t hear because their heads are in the sand — and nothing changes.