Just what might it take to reform higher education?

In his commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Zemsky ponders just what it would take to create change in American higher education. He suggests that the kind of reform being seen in Europe could not happen here. He notes that various reform efforts in the United States have not been fruitful – that we should learn from those efforts that strong rhetoric changes nothing, reform must come internally, cannot be externally prescribed, and there is a need for systemic change. He poses several “dislodging events” that might drive change.

One would be the removal of federal student financial aid as we know it. A new system would be put in place to give funds directly to students and/or rewards the saving of money for college. Zemsky thinks this would make students more demanding consumers, and colleges would rethink prices, services, and how they do business.

A second dislodging event would be the taxation of college endowments that currently operate like hedge funds. He envisions a possible “drastic consolidation” of the industry as a result.

A third dislodging event would be to make the senior year of high school more useful and productive by providing learning currently done in the freshman year of college, and the conversion of bachelor’s degrees from an assumed 4 years to 3. He thinks that this would force major questions about teaching and learning as faculty and administrators wrestle with “how to teach what.”

Essentially what Zemsky has laid out is that changes, in the way higher education is currently financed or structured, could force higher education reform. The disruptions he suggests would certainly have impacts and create change. The problem is that Zemsky offers no insight into how these disruptions and resulting changes would make higher education better or more affordable. He seems to assume that reform is important for its own sake, saying that “we must create conditions that foster change—even change for changes sake.”

What do you think? Is reform necessary? To what end? How might it be accomplished? Do these disruptions seem plausible? Desirable? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike