A New Description of US Higher Education

A guiding objective of our project is to develop a new description of US higher education that will encourage better policy research on college performance and student learning, and will honor the rich organizational diversity of our national higher education system. Three intellectual tasks are essential to this new description:

1. Replace hierarchical conceptions of quality based on admissions selectivity with horizontal ones based on access.

The equation of quality with admissions selectivity is a problem for our understanding of broad-access schools. This equation should be set aside. Colleges are not more or less selective. They are more, less, and variably accessible. Accessibility should be regarded as a positive educational, institutional, and societal value.

A top priority for educational social scientists should be to describe broad-access colleges and universities to the same extent that they have described selective schools. To do this they will have to bracket many of their assumptions about what a "good" school is and look carefully at how schools vary in their structure, mission, personnel, governance, financing, student demographics and, of course, student performance.

2. Make the guiding images organizational and meta-organizational: College, market, ecology, field

The primary analytic strategy social scientists have used to apprise, understand, and measure higher education has been to model students as autonomous individuals, moving through schools in cohorts. While this analytic strategy has generated a great deal of useful knowledge and policy, it also limits our ability to think about colleges and universities as active players in the production of education. We believe that a renewal of research on colleges as organizations, and on the meta-organizational dynamics of higher-education markets, ecologies, and fields are useful starting points for a richer supply-side social science of US higher education.

Colleges as organizations

Classic studies of higher education from the mid-twentieth century are rich with insights about the virtues and pathologies of colleges as organizational wholes. However in recent decades the organizational approach has lost favor to analytic strategies built with individual-level data. We believe that the organizational approach has much to teach scholars and policymakers of broad-access schools. It should be revived with great zeal and used as a complement to individual-level approaches.

Markets

Economists have been the leaders here, appropriately conceiving of US higher education as a market within which schools compete for students, tuition, government and philanthropic funding, and prestige. While previous research has examined the national market in which elite schools compete for students, the local markets in which broad-access schools compete are not well understood. We need more research on these local markets: how students apprise them, how schools compete within them, and how new providers alter their composition and character.

It also is crucial to understand the supply-side aspects of higher education: how education is produced. This will require much richer data on organizational spending, productivity, and student trajectories than are currently available. It also will require creative theorizing on how to model the production of value in higher education – a sector currently characterized by elaborate cross-subsidies, plural and often poorly specified goals, and a widespread skepticism of the very notion of organizational efficiency.

Ecology

In this imagery the postsecondary sector comprises thousands of schools that are simultaneously cooperating and competing for scarce resources. Resources include students (of varying academic preparation), faculty, tuition, government and philanthropic financial support, visibility, evaluative authority, legitimacy, and prestige. Ecological imagery enables us to see how schools are interdependent. Schools do compete. Higher education is indeed a market. But schools also cooperate through accreditation and credit transfer systems, tuition exchange agreements, and athletic league affiliations, for example. They also enter into alliances to protect their interests and routinely exchange ideas and information. Ecological approaches emphasize that organizations have strong inertial properties: change is resisted, especially when change advocates are external to the organization or to the ecology as a whole. Change always is disruptive, and may undermine the survival of the system in its given form.

Fields

Field approaches reveal how higher education is comprised of multiple types of organizations and actors, governance systems, and cultural meanings that together comprise the US higher education sector. Colleges share broadly similar cultural beliefs and operate under a distinctive set of regulatory controls and cultural expectations. Current controversies surrounding the basic legitimacy of for-profit colleges suggest the distinctive meanings Americans associate with this field.


3. Develop a new framework for higher education scholarship that integrates currently disparate lines of inquiry

There is a great deal of useful higher education research and scholarship, but it is spread across several disciplines and subfields whose practitioners rarely make use of work elsewhere.  We propose a novel framework for organizing prior, current, and future scholarship so that researchers, policymakers, and students can better appreciate interconnections between diverse lines of inquiry.

See our 2011 project report for more detail.

Table 1: New Framework for Higher Education Scholarship

The columns of the table below summarize the four primary lines of inquiry researchers have employed when examining US higher education. The rows summarize the five populations that higher education researchers and policymakers typically consider: students, staff, faculty, administrative leaders, and colleges and universities as organizations. The columns include markets, governance, learning, and careers. Descriptions of the content contained with the columns are provided below the table.
  Markets Governance Learning Careers
Organizations What is the nature of competition for students, employees, prestige, legitimacy among broad-access schools? What are the regulatory systems that shape access schools, and how do they overlap? How is governance tied to performance? What are the virtues and limitations of accreditation in its current form? How and to what extent are federal grant and loan programs a form of governance? How do schools learn from past success/mistakes, from their peers/competitors, and from signals in the larger environment? What is the role of systematic data in organizational learning? How do ecological positions of schools change over time? What constitutes enhancement/ diminishment of prestige among broad-access schools? Why do so few colleges close?
Leaders Who is drawn to leadership positions in broad-access schools? What are occupational priors? Is broad-access administration a fallback or destination occupation, and if so, from what? Are these local, regional, or national markets? What signals of quality do employers use? Are these signals valid/reliable? How much are leaders paid? How is pay tied to performance? To whom are leaders of broad-access college leaders accountable? To what extent is governance professional/ collegial? What are the limits of professional/collegial governance? Is there unionization among broad-access leaders? How do leaders learn from their own experience? From peers? How do they read signals from the larger environment? To what extent, and how, do they use systematic data to improve practice? What professional training is most effective, and how do we measure effectiveness? Is broad-access administration a fallback or a destination career? What constitutes career progress, regress, and lifelong success? What are the crucial moments in an administrative career? What are the fateful points of career entry/exit? How can recruitment/ retention be improved?
Faculty Who is drawn to broad-access teaching? Are these fallback jobs from tough competition in the selective sector? Are these local, regional, or national markets? What signals of quality do employers use? Are these signals valid/reliable? How much are faculty paid? How is pay tied to performance? To whom are broad-access college faculty accountable? To what extent is governance professional/collegial? What are the limits of professional/ collegial governance? What is the extent and impact of unionization among broad-access faculty? How do faculty learn from their own experience? From peers? How to they read signals from the larger environment? To what extent, and how, do they use systematic data to improve practice? What professional training is most effective, and how do we measure effectiveness? Is broad-access teaching a fallback or a destination career? What constitutes career progress, regress, and lifetime success? What are crucial moments in a teaching career? What are fateful points of career entry/exit? How can recruitment/retention be improved?
Staff Who is drawn to broad-access staff positions? What are comparable positions outside of academia? Are these local, regional, or national markets? How much are staff paid? How is pay tied to performance? What are typical authority systems in broad-access schools? What is the extent and impact of unionization among broad-access staff? What professional training is most effective for particular task areas, and how do we measure effectiveness? What are the salient career strands for broad-access college staff? What constitutes progress, regress, and lifetime success in these strands? What are fateful points of career entry/exit? How can recruitment/retention be improved?
Students How do students select among broad-access schools? How do they cognize their options and decisions? How much and in what way is cost a factor? Do students cognize a tradeoff between accessibility and prestige? How should we gauge student satisfaction? Are school selection and tuition payment individual or household-level processes? To what extent are students responsible for their own success/failure in broad access schools? What are legitimate bases for dismissal or withholding of financial support from students? Who should have the authority to make these decisions? What is the nature of learning in broad-access colleges (vs. 8-12 schooling and selective colleges)? What is a "classroom"? Is a "campus" important to learning in non-residential schools? How? How do online environments compare with classroom ones? Should we define "basic skills" for college students? What learning should we measure? What is the range of ways in which broad-access college attendance fits into the life course? Is there an "ideal" way or multiple ways? At what point(s) in the life course is college most beneficial, and does this vary by occupation, parental status, gender, or other dimensions of difference? How does college debt shape other occupational and life decisions?

Markets

Work on markets presumes and models competition among schools for students, public attention, and material resources. It encompasses most of the economics of higher education. The majority of prior research in this area has been on competition among elite schools for prestige, and among selective schools competing for students. The framework calls attention the vital need for research on labor markets for administrators, staff, and faculty at broad-access schools. Improved organizational performance will require a clear understanding of how the best employees find jobs, how their performance is assessed, and how they are rewarded for work well done.

Governance

Work on governance includes scholarship on how the post-secondary sector is regulated. It includes systems of self-regulation such as peer review and accreditation protocols, efforts by legislatures and government agencies to regulate schools, and the peculiar power of ranking schemes such as those produced by US News and World Report. Our framework reveals just how little is known about the regulatory systems governing staff, faculty, and administrators at broad-access schools.

Learning

To date the majority of work on college learning has been on student learning. Yet even here the research is thin in comparison with the growing wealth of knowledge on learning and its measurement in K-12 education. For decades US colleges have done their work with virtually no requirements that teaching and learning be systematically measured. Additionally, there is remarkably little work on organizational learning in broad-accesses schools – a crucial topic for any serious project of organizational improvement.

Careers

Work on careers examines how entities change as they move through time and space. Students, faculty, and organizational leaders all have careers. Colleges and universities also have careers, as they manage their identities and seek to optimize their positions in changing environments. Career approaches can inform the development of policies that honor the professional cultures of workers and reward improved worker performance over the entire life course.