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September 24, 2015

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

US education faces multiple challenges

By Ni Tao | September 24, 2015, Thursday | Print Edition

In his bestseller “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” acclaimed sociologist and author Robert Putnam examines the causes behind what he sees as a growing class gap among young Americans and the implications for upward mobility.

Putnam argues that unequal access to higher education is one of the major explanations for the yawning rich-poor gap in the US. He is not unique in believing that US higher education is in crisis and is to blame for jeopardizing the American Dream.

At a recent forum held by Fudan University’s School of Management, Paul Danos, Dean Emeritus of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, pointed out succinctly that US higher education is confronted with a series of crises.

Rich-poor gap

Crises, in his view, have manifested themselves in popular complaints about ever higher tuition fees, the long time spent in acquiring degrees, and the fact that many majors do not prep graduates for productive employment.

But what Danos sees as the most critical of all crises is that “rich schools are too rich and the poor schools are too poor.” Danos quipped that when he was a freshman studying at the University of Texas in the early 1970s, the tuition charged for a semester was only US$37. Today, some schools, both public and private, could charge over US$100,000 for annual tuition plus living expenses.

Compounding the situation is the fact that rich schools are even richer. Harvard, for example, can receive tens of billions of dollars in annual corporate and alumni donations, leaving the already rich university even more awash in funds. As a result, through a variety of fellowship grants, “at the richer private schools students with lower economic means do not pay a large percentage of tuition,” Danos told the forum.

Students studying at poorer schools are less fortunate, as there aren’t plenty of stipends or scholarships to go around to ease their financial burden, exacerbating unequal access to higher education.

Other than the poor-rich divide in higher education, Danos claimed that the advent of digital online teaching is posing a new challenge to traditional campus-based academic programs.

The recent popularity of massive open online course (MOOC) has seen prestigious colleges like Yale and Harvard to offer free online courses, sometimes with a certificate or degree conferred on students opting to take these courses.

These developments not only change the way we perceive higher education, but call its very existence into question: Is it still necessary for college courses to be administered on campus, when technology has made it so cheap for information to be disseminated online? Or as some have suggested, in a much more radical way, will this shift to the MOOC model displace campus-based programs completely?

Research-oriented

Not any time soon, claims Danos. Although he agreed that “every kind of (academic) program will have parts offered in a distance mode ... there is a very strong perceived value in being face-to-face on campus at least for now.”

A more likely scenario will be the creation of “many blended programs where a considerable number of courses will be offered to students in distance locations,” Danos claimed.

While business schools often radiate an aura of opulence, thanks to their high tuition fees, Danos claimed that many American business schools are managed in a way that runs counter to their purported role as purveyors of education.

According to him, the bulk of their funds are spent on financing research undertaken by faculty, rather than on teaching. In the case of Tuck, almost half of its funds go to research, and this is more or less the trend in the US. Many well-paid MBA instructors are obliged to teach only three courses a year.

Although teachers are occasionally encouraged to share their latest findings during class, the incentives for doing so are simply not there.

Instead of focusing on nurturing the next generation of capable managers, business school faculty too often are obsessed with the publish-or-perish mandate, or how to elevate their institutions’ global ranking.

Since few institutions can afford to hire faculty dedicated primarily to research, Danos predicted that the US model of business education will not be dominant, whether in the US, China or elsewhere in the world.

Demand for business education will remain strong as the global economy regains momentum. Danos thus envisioned a future where it is incumbent on business educators to impart such essential knowledge as leadership, ethics, social responsibility on their students, for the purpose of nurturing future leaders, instead of just case study researchers.

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