By's Musings

Proprietary

By Leave a Comment

A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part II

Is the world of American Higher Education coming unraveled? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In my most recent post A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I, I introduced ten disturbances that rocked the world of American Higher Education in the 21st century. I concluded that post with the indication that my next post would continue the story with additional troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters. Here are ten more. In reality, I feel that the twenty features that I selected to spotlight in my two posts only touch the surface of the current problems plaguing American Higher Education. However, they definitely indicate the breadth and depth of the difficulties facing American Higher Education.

Numerous crises have hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There has been no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this post, I will follow the pattern as my previous one. I begin with a short explanation of the problem, followed by an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is again in chronological order according to the publication date of the article that I reference.

  • In 2003, Derek Bok offered a groundbreaking look at the Commercialization of Higher Education in his visionary book Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education.  This tour de force asks the question: “Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right?” Bok’s answer is that the answer is too often “yes.” In today’s economy, Bok suggests that too many American universities are attempting to profit financially not only from athletics but also from those areas that touch the heart of the academy, research, and educational content.

 

  • The April 2007 Inside Higher Ed Opinion Second Thoughts About Professionalism by Jeffrey Ross paints a dark and menacing picture of the Professionalization of Education, particularly at the community college level. The first sentence of the article by Ross screams skepticism: “I’m not sure what is meant by professionalism. I suppose it has something to do with knowing what you are supposed to know on the job.” Is Ross talking about students and their education or the faculty and administrators leading our community colleges? It’s not until his fourth paragraph that he finally states “I sense that professionalism at the community college has to do with a code of behavior, a belief system, which defines how instructors and administrators should act.” Here’s where Ross and professionalism part company. He admits that “the current educator-as-professional movement…has created a somewhat misfit work culture for educators…” To describe what’s wrong with the community college culture he invokes an 18th century Jonathan Swift metaphor: “Like the learned scientists at the grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Voyages, we are focused and employed. So focused we can’t be distracted–even by the day-to-day realities of those persons whose intellectual needs we are employed to meet. So many valuable student interactions displaced by urgent meetings!” Ross calls for a new voice to speak for and lead the community college community.

 

  • The concept of Academic Freedom is considered one of the foundational principles of modern academe. The origin of academic freedom can be traced back to at least 399 B.C. when Socrates defended himself at his trial before 500 fellow Athenians against a charge of impiety and corruption of youth. He vigorously argued that the gods had bestowed on him the freedom to think. With this freedom, he was entrusted with the responsibility of the freedom to teach his thoughts. It was a duty he owed to the gods and a benefit he must confer upon the state. This idea has never been universally accepted. Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death. The next appearance of academic freedom must wait until the 12th century when Frederick I Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued the writ Privilegium Scholasticum. One of its provisions protected faculty and students in their pursuit of knowledge from the intrusions of all political authorities. However, instead of creating a safe harbor for faculty and students within the halls of the University of Bologna, it fermented strife and turmoil amongst them and the Roman Catholic Church. The battles lasted for two centuries until the University formally established a School of Theology. For the next five centuries, the Church was a dominant force in the life of the University. For the first several centuries of higher education in the United States, many colleges were controlled by religious thought which limited what could be taught. In 1940 philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was denied a professorial position at the City University of New York because he was “morally unfit.” This charge was primarily due to his public views on extra-marital sex, marriage, divorce, and birth control. As soon as the announcement of his appointment to the CUNY faculty became public, William Manning, a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, sent a letter to the New York Times denouncing Russell as a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality. The Board withdrew its offer and the city withdrew funding for the faculty position. in 1988 Les Csorba of Accuracy in Academia claimed, “academic freedom on college campuses is nothing more than a useful device which gives license to some people and silences others”. In a December 2010 article Defining Academic Freedom in Inside Higher Ed, Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors, attempted to clear up confusion about academic freedom. He outlined a dozen points of What it does do and a dozen points of What it doesn’t do. In spite of Nelson’s article, arguments about academic freedom constantly rage both on and off campuses.    

 

  • Public Support for Higher Education Is Shrinking. Tell us something we don’t already know! Since 1980 state and local financial support of higher education has dramatically decreased in multiple ways. This shrinkage is happening both in terms of real dollars and the share of support received by public colleges and universities. In a Winter 2012 report State Funding: A Race to the Bottom from the American Council on Education, Thomas Mortenson claims that if states do not change their funding patterns, by 2059, they will not be providing any support for higher education. In 2010, state and local governments spent $103.7B. This was 34.1 percent of all expenditures in the United States on higher education. This was down from its 1975 peak of 60.3 percent. Since the tax revolts of 1980, only two states, Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent), have increased their share of higher education expenditures. Declining state support for higher education leads directly to tuition increases and a greater financial burden on students for the cost of their education.

 

  • We’ve known for years that the Cost of Regulatory Compliance is significant, but there was no real attempt to calculate it until 2014. In early 2014, Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos commissioned a study by the Boston Consulting Group to determine how much colleges and universities were spending to comply with federal regulations. On October 19, 2015, Melanie Moran published her preliminary summary of the results, Study estimates cost of regulatory compliance at 13 colleges and universities, online in Vanderbilt News. These results were the shot heard all around American higher education. Two of the most significant conclusions indicated that regulatory compliance represented 3 to 11 percent of higher education institutions’ nonhospital operating expenses, and that faculty and staff spend 4 to 15 percent of their time complying with federal regulations. The reaction was swift and nearly unanimous:  “…compliance with federal regulations results in a significant direct and indirect financial cost.” I was not surprised by the study’s findings. In the early 1980’s I was a one-person Institutional Research Office at a small liberal arts college. I did an inventory of all the reports that we were required to complete and submit each year for various federal, state, athletic oversight groups, and accreditation agencies. There were more than 90 required annual reports. In addition to those compliance reports, I also added up the number of requests for data from outside organizations such as the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges (CASC), American Association for University Professors (AAUP), Christian College Coalition (CCC), North American Council for Christian Admissions Professionals (NACCAP), The College Board, American College Testing (ACT), American Associations of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), Association of Institutional Research (AIR), American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Association of Governing Boards (AGB), and the American Council on Education (ACE). There were more than 100 such annual requests for data. The third group of reports handled by my office was data requests from advertisers such as Peterson’s Guides and Campus Life Magazine which publicized comparisons of colleges. If you didn’t comply with their data requests, they used data they “gathered” from various sources such as IPEDS and College Board. However, the institution had no control over how they interpreted or misinterpreted that data. There were at least ten such requests each year. Thus for a small college enrolling less than 800 students, to stay in “good standing” with governmental and accrediting agencies, the higher education community, and the general public, we were compelled to complete and submit more than 200 annual reports. Each of these reports easily averaged more than 10 hours of my time to verify and justify the consistency of the data. If you included the time of various offices required to compile the data, you are talking about another 20 hours each. This adds up to more than 6,000 hours of faculty, staff or administrators time per year. This is the equivalent of more than 3 full-time employees per year to handle unfunded “mandates.” Fortunately, this college was in the Middle States accrediting region. The “joke” among institutional research professionals in the early 1980s was that the proscribed accrediting and reporting requirements of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SACS) were the “institutional researchers full-employment act.”     

 

  • A matter of profound concern to many in American higher education for more than four decades is the Rise and Fall of Proprietary Higher Education. Prior to 1976 proprietary higher education was hardly a blip on the radar screens of higher education. That began to change in 1976 when John Sperling and John Murphy founded The University of Pheonix (UoP). The first class consisted of only eight students. By 1986 the enrollment had grown to more than 6,000. In 1994 Sperling took The Apollo Group public. By 2000 the enrollment was over 100,000 and growing by 25% per year. By 2010 proprietary institutions enrolled more than 2 million, 12 percent of all post-secondary students. Everything seemed to be coming up roses. The article The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools by James Surowiecki which appeared in the November 2, 2015 issue of THE NEW YORKER magazine paints a different picture. In those five years, UoP enrollment was cut in half. The Department of Defense removed it from its approved list for tuition payments for active duty troops. Regulatory agencies began investigating the recruitment and financial aid practices of proprietary institutions. The federal government looked closely at job-placement claims and ability of graduates to repay student loans. Proprietary institutions are now required to prove that on average, students’ loan payments will not exceed eight percent of their expected annual income. Schools that fail this test four years in a row will have their access to federal loans cut off. The implementation of this rule has effectively put a significant number of such schools out of business.

 

  • The evidence and data are clear. There are Gender and Racial Disparities, Bias, and Discrimination Within the Academy. Unfortunately, these attitudes and behaviors have been present as long as higher education has existed. More unfortunately, for many centuries, they were accepted as the norm. However, that is no longer the case. Over the past half century, there have been many small and some large steps to expose and fix these problems. In the 21st century, the pace of restructuring higher education has increased. In the case of gender disparities, a complicated paradox has emerged. One part of that paradox is illustrated in Caroline Simon’s March 8, 2017, USA Today article There’s a double gender gap in higher education–and here’s why. Simon discusses the lack of women in top leadership positions in higher education and the fact that women earn less than men in similar positions. This discrepancy at the top is in stark contrast to the fact that since 1970, the number of women students and graduates have outpaced the number of men. With more women college graduates, the question is raised about the number of women in faculty and administrative positions. There are more men at the higher faculty ranks than women, even though there are more women at the lowest faculty ranks than men. When we add in the racial component, the contrasts are much more complicated.

  

  • A July 2017 Fortune Media commentary This Economic Bubble Is Going to Wreak Havoc When It Bursts on higher education by Jim Rogers and Robert Craig Baum highlights the economic distress that the Student Debt Bubble could cause individual higher education borrowers, American higher education, and the United States economy as a whole. Rogers and Baum begin their commentary with the claim that “An imminent economic crisis the likes of which this generation has never experienced is coming…The higher education bubble (one-sixth of the U.S. economy) will likely burst with the force of all precious catastrophes combined–a shock wave so sudden, so large, that it gathers the full force of the savings and loan, insurance, energy, tech, and mortgage crashes, creating a blockbuster-level perfect storm.” They paint a grim picture of the future of AHE, suggesting that AHE leaders have no grasp of economic reality.

 

  • Natural and Man-Made Disasters Leave Indelible Effects on Colleges and Universities. Every year since 2000 there has been at least one catastrophic event that had devastating effects on American colleges, universities, and their associated personnel. However, some stand out far beyond most. In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria pounded the island of Puerto Rica and the United States mainland. The August 28, 2018 Chronicle of Higher Education article Disaster-Stricken Colleges Will Get $63 Million in Aid From the Education Dept. by Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz and Lindsay Ellis spotlights the U.S. Department of Education response to the resultant damage to 47 American colleges and universities. Most of the Puerto Rican institutions lost an entire year of operations in addition to the physical damage to their buildings. None of them have fully recovered their enrollments since their students and faculty scattered all over the United States. Also fresh in our memories are the western U.S. wildfires of 2017 and 2018 which affected many colleges in California and other western states. Other hurricanes, namely Katrina (2005) and Sandy (2012), caused significant damage to colleges and universities. I would also dare say that everyone in American higher education remembers where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001. The world watched in utter disbelief the tragic events of that day as the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City. Some colleges in New York were directly affected, while many in neighboring states were indirectly affected. In every year of the 21st century, some catastrophic event has affected one or more American college or university.   

 

  • Jeff Selingo in his September 2018 article How the Great Recession Changed Higher Education Forever in The Washington Post recounts the Lasting Effect of the Great Recession of 2008 on American Higher Education. The waves of troubled financial waters which swept across the world almost swamped American Higher Education. A number of institutions sank, drowning many students and faculty. Many of the institutions which survived attempted to lure the dwindling supply of students through their doors with a “fire sale” and huge tuition discounts. For many students the primary reason they went to college changed. Since 2008, students now see college as a means to secure better jobs, rather than a source of general education in order to be more human. This has meant an uptick in the “practical majors” such as business and health care, and a significant downturn in the humanities. A third and more subtle change occurred at the presidential and board level of colleges. Their focus shifted to more short-term survival interests, rather than long-term sustainability issues. History predicts that there will be more economic downturns in the future. However, this time American colleges and universities are less prepared to deal with these periods of famine.
Is American higher education a DIY money pit which will require a complete gut job to fix? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

WHEW! The deeper I dug into the current difficulties and issues facing American higher education, the more problems I found, and the more complicated they became. Having done a number of extensive home remodeling or rehabilitation jobs as we moved around the country chasing new academic administrative positions, without any qualms I can say that American higher education is like a DIY money-pit. The job will always cost more than you budgeted and take longer than you first estimated. Another parallelism between American higher education concerns and DIY projects are hidden issues. When you remove a wall you are never sure what you will find beneath the plaster or the drywall. Even when you have blueprints of the house, you don’t know whether someone made previous alterations that were not documented. Are there hidden pipes and wires that will be extremely difficult to redirect? Is there mold or asbestos just waiting to catch you? Is that a load-bearing wall you want to tear out because you think it is unnecessary or undesirable? If that wall was designed to do a specific job and you don’t compensate for its removal, you run the risk of collapsing the whole building.

Trying to fix the American higher education mess is almost overwhelming. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Although I have found more than 10 additional problems in American higher education on which I could focus, I have decided to turn my attention to the 20 that I have already highlighted. I think you have gotten the point: American Higher Education is a Mess. My next post will look at the issue of the Adjunctification of the Faculty.

By Leave a Comment

A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I

Many in American Higher Education were looking forward to the 21st Century, hoping it would bring back the good old days. Unfortunately, after the cork was popped, the new drink fizzled. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In spite of the high hopes and great expectations of many in American Higher Education, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of a new millennium brought little relief to the beleaguered systems of AHE. In my previous post The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Education we left American higher education in a precarious situation. It was buried under numerous train wrecks brought on by many training storms or crises. Unfortunately, the incessant crises have not stopped during the first two decades of the 21st century. Not only have they continue unabated, but the frequency of their occurrences has also increased. 

The future outlook for American Higher Education is dire! Another scandal rocks AHE! The image is the author’s interpretation of current events in AHE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Instead of the period of recovery hoped for by the academy, the new millennium brought an unrelenting season of storms and turmoil to American Higher Education. A cursory examination of the reports and articles out of the general public and higher education media outlets during these first two decades of the 21st century yields an abundance of fuel for the argument that American Higher Education remains in deep trouble.

Just what I need – another project! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The following list highlights some of the various crises that have made headlines in the 21st century. I have labeled many of them using academic code words. The task of explaining all the academic jargon associated with these code words would fill a book which I may write (Just what I need another writing project! – Is there anyone out who wants to help me?). In the meantime, to bring the project within manageable limits for this blog, I will provide a reasonably short synopsis of my take on each crisis and its immediate effects on AHE in separate posts which will follow.

The crises hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There was no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

For those too anxious to wait for my follow up, I am providing an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is in chronological order according to the appearance of the media article that I reference. I have chosen to list the topics in this manner to show the rapidity and pervasiveness of crises in higher education which were occurring during these two decades.

I will have more to say on this topic later when I have time to reflect on the matter. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The particular article I have selected may not necessarily be the first time the topic is addressed in public. However, I believe the articles selected are repesentative examples of the treatment which the topic has received. In some cases, the article referenced reflects my views on the topic. In other cases, it doesn’t. I will reserve my comments until I have the time and space to more fully explicate them.

  • Adjunctification of the faculty threatens academic quality across all of AHE is a theme that began appearing in higher education circles in the 1980s. It has exploded with much force in the new millennium. Gabriela Montell begins her December 15, 2000 article A Forecast of the Job Market in English in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the conflicting statement: “It would be an overstatement to say the job market for faculty members in English is booming, but scholars have reason to be mildly optimistic…” Later in the article, defining the term adjunctification, she notes that “Many professors also say they are concerned about universities’ reliance on part-time and temporary faculty members…the great worry…is adjunctification, which could keep students from getting the proper tenure-track jobs they clearly deserve.”
  • Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities are subjects of internal and external heated debates. Three researchers, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, collaborated in the study Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. This paper “captures the sense of dreams deferred as well as the tension between ideals and reality that young scholars face as they move through graduate school and into faculty posts … if they move into faculty posts.” It appears in the May 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
  • The Academic Lattice is the seemingly constant expansion of administrative support structure to handle tasks and duties seen by many as not directly related to teaching and learning. It is very frequently blamed for unneeded increased costs. This phenomenon is often derogatorily called “administrative bloat”. The study The Cost of Prestige: Do New Research I Universities Incur Higher Administrative Costs? by Christopher C. Morphew and Bruce D. Baker seems to say it does apply to some institutions. However, it leaves the question open for others. The paper appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Review of Higher Education, Volume 27, Number 3.
  • Basic questions concerning College Admissions which have been around for hundreds of years remain tauntingly unanswered: “Who should go to college?” “How should a college decide to whom they offer admission?” Ross Douthat addresses one particularly sticky question in his article Does Meritocracy Work? His article concerns the fierce competition among prospective students to gain entrance into elite institutions, and the extensive pressure on elite institutions to enroll a more diverse student population. The article appears in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic.
  • Since the Reagan tax revolution, many public higher education officials and commentators have debated the issue of whether the privatization of the academy threatens public higher education. In 2005 Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published the white paper The Perfect Storm and the Privatization of Public Higher Education, a version of which appeared in the November 2005 issue of Change Magazine. Ehrenberg argued that the privatization of public higher education and the shrinkage of public support threatened to do irreparable damage to public higher education. In a November 2009 blog post Reality Check: The Privatization of Public Higher Education, Travis Reindl partially rebuffs the Ehrenberg arguments. In the decade since Reindl’s post, public support of public higher education in terms of government funds have continued to decline. So where are we?
  • Sweeping demographic changes are altering the face of AHE. These changes began in the last half of the 20th century with the entrance of women and some minority students into our colleges and universities. However, they have picked up steam heading into the new millennium. Rob Jenkins sketched the new “traditional student” in his October 2012 article The New ‘Traditional Student’  in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This new student is married, living at home, and working. Within a few years, the majority of students will be over 25 years of age and a person of color. 
  • Scandal after scandal rocks AHE and drags its reputation through the mud. Prior to the dawn of the new millennium, AHE was not immune from scandalous activities. However, as social media access has accelerated the news cycle, information about scandals has become more available, more quickly. A Google search for “college scandals” took less than 1 second to produce over 75 million results. One of those results was a Harvard Business School Working Paper The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications, which was published in 2016. The abstract of this study by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith begins with the provocative statement: “In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape.” In their paper, the authors attempted to answer the question “With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications?” The authors looked at the top 100 American universities ranked in the 2015 U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges.” They then constructed a database of reported scandals on these campuses between 2001 and 2013. They found that during these dozen years, 75% of the top American universities reported at least one major incident. Since their databased cut off in 2013, they didn’t include recent major scandals including the Michigan State gymnastics incident (2014), the Baylor football scandal (2016), University of North Caroline cheating scandal (2017), the fraternity hazing death of Timothy Piazza at Penn State (2017), the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal (2019), and the Varsity Blues Admissions fiasco (2019). It also doesn’t include the Louisville basketball scandal (2017), Temple falsification of USNWR data (2018), or the implosion and collapse of ITT (2016) since these schools were not in the top 100 universities on the USNWR rankings.
  • Are athletics taking over the academy? Many including Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, think so. He presents some ammunition for his opinion in the op-ed piece Athletic arms race hurts academics, which appeared in the December 31, 2013, edition of the Omaha World-Herald.
  • The Academic Ratchet tightens its grip on AHE. The automatic response of many within the academy to solve every budget or enrollment deficit is to seek new students via the addition of new programs and faculty, or an increased effort by the admission, recruitment, and fundraising offices. “To solve our problems all we need to do is rachet up our efforts, programming or personnel.” The obvious problem with this solution is that for most institutions it just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough funds, faculty, and students to satisfy all of AHE. In addition, institutional personnel doesn’t have the time nor expertise to do all of the necessary work. To help alleviate the academic rachet problem, in the late 1990s Robert C. Dickeson developed a process he called Program Prioritization. He outlined it in a 1994 book which was later updated in 2010. It is titled Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, 2nd edition. Over the next 25 years since Dickeson’s process was first released, more than 500 institutions attempted program prioritization. Some were successful in achieving a strategic balance. Many were not. In January 2014, Alex Usher, a consultant with Higher Education Strategy Associates, wrote a blog post Better Thinking About Program Prioritization critiquing the Dickeson plan.
  • As Academic Arms Races heat up in all segments of AHE, the burning question is “What is the price of prestige?” Kevin Iglesia attempted to answer that question in his 2014 Seton Hall University dissertation The Price of Presitge: A Study of the Impact of Striving Behavior on the Expenditure Patterns of American Colleges and Universities.
  • The question: “Is virtual teaching a replacement for the traditional classroom?“ has perplexed higher education since the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students in 1960. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. It evolved in the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system which at its height was operating on thousands of computers all over the world. By the time we entered the new millennium, millions of students were not only using computer-aided instruction for supplemental course work, but they were also taking entire courses and even degree programs online. Faculty members and universities were asking the question of whether these students were getting a quality education. Along the way, faculty began to worry about whether they were becoming viewed as superfluous. Universities became concerned about whether their brick-and-mortar palaces would be ghost towns replaced by a new costly virtual infrastructure. In a June 23, 2018, blog posted on the eLearning Industry website, Allistair Gross asked the direct question Is Virtual Teaching A Major Threat To Teachers?
For the past two decades, have educators been running from crisis to crisis trying to save American higher education? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Having reached 10 crises and running out of room in this post, I have decided to save another 10 crises for a Part II of A New Millennium – Same Old Story. Tune in next week for more troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters in 21st century American higher education.

By Leave a Comment

KPI – Part XI: Era of Expansion and Disruption in American Higher Education

Some historians of American Higher Education call the era between the American Civil War and WWII the Gilded Age of American Higher Education. When I look at it, I see a period of unparalleled expansion, confusing disruptions, and bewildering rearrangements. It is also a period rife with widespread uncertainties and inescapable paradoxes. It is a period of unprecedented diversification.

A schematic view of the American Higher Education Family Tree, with the four main branches (University, College, Institute, and Faith-Based Schools), and their many intertwined connections. This schematic was created by the blog’s author using ClickChart Software.

During the Civil War, much of American higher education shut down. Many colleges were forced to cease operations due to a lack of students. In both the North and the South, many young men of military age either enlisted or were drafted. Since this group formed the overwhelming majority of college students, the potential student population was almost completely depleted.

Photograph of Rev. John M.P. Atkinson, 10th President of Hampden-Sydney College, and Captain of the Hampden-Sydney boys, part of the Virginia Militia. Image is in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image courtesy of Alfred Morrison, Hampden-Sydney College, and Wikimedia Commons

The stories of what four institutions. Hampden-Sydney (with its sister school Union Theological Seminary), the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, went through during the Civil War Period are so interesting I will address them in a separate, future post.

Since much of the actual fighting in the Civil War occurred in the territory of the Confederacy, a large number of colleges in the South found themselves in battle zones. A few colleges in the North, like Pennsylvania College (since 1921, known as Gettysburg College) and its sister institution Lutheran Theological Seminary, were also put in dangerous situations. This placed students and faculty at severe risk. Travel was treacherous at best. Students from the Confederate States who were studying in the Union States, and vice versa, were prohibited from crossing territorial or battlelines and were forced to withdraw from their colleges.

During the eight decades between the Civil War and WWII, the current structure of American higher education began to take shape. Prior to the Revolutionary War, all colonial colleges were begun with a religious emphasis by individual clergy or denominations. These schools were founded to provide an educated clergy for the church.  Studying the early days of these institutions, we also see that they were not in the business of changing the social stratification of the colonies.

Most of the colleges established between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were built to maintain the status quo. They only enrolled white, males. They were expensive, residential institutions, which meant that the “lower class” families could not afford the luxury of doing without the income supplied by the family sons. Entrance requirements of many were rigorous and only within the reach of the wealthy few who had the advantage of a demanding secondary education.

The few female colleges were also expensive, residential colleges that trained girls to be “ladies”. These schools were beyond the reach of most families and didn’t fit the long-term goals of most girls in America.

Prior to the Civil War, there were very few coed colleges. There were also very few female applicants who could meet the admissions requirements. There were only a handful of colleges open to African-Americans. Colleges prior to the Civil War were the great sustainers of an elite hierarchy with white males at the top of the ladder. Many obstacles were placed in the paths of others trying to ascend the ladder of social mobility.

The cover of the catalog of Pennsylvania Female College (now known as Chatham University) in 1886. Since it was published before 1924, it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Chatham University and Wikimedia Commons.

Immediately after the Civil War, the dams of restrictive access were leaking a little, before they finally burst. In those early post-war days, a number of changes occurred. It became more acceptable for women to attend college. More women colleges were opened, and more colleges permitted men and women to sit in the same classrooms.

A second new stream of students consisted of the returning soldiers. Their war experience awakened new dreams. They saw that the only difference between them and many of their “educated” officers was formal education. The rank and file soldiers found that they were just as smart as their officers. They began to question why had they been deprived of an opportunity to advance themselves. They demanded the right to go to college, and some colleges opened their doors to these new students. However, more than college for themselves, they demanded college for their children so that they could better themselves and not be limited to the status of a lackey or foot soldier in the future.

Jubilee Hall, oldest permanent building on the campus of Fisk University (an HBCU in Nashville, TN). It was opened in 1876. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image courtesy of Fisk University, National Park Services and Wikimedia Commons.

A third stream formed with the opening of colleges for African-Americans. At first, this was a small stream because these students had many deficits to fill in from their lack of education prior to the Civil War.

In 1860, there were less than 10 institutions of higher education which were open to African-American students. By 1900, there more than 100 institutions that were dedicated primarily to the education of African-American individuals. These schools became known as Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).

First-year students in cadaver lab of Univ. of Penn Medical School in 1890. The image is in the Public Domain since it was first published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Amy Hutchens, University of Pennsylvania and Wikimedia Commons.

A fourth stream formed with the demand for specialized training and education. Career colleges, business schools, technical and engineering institutions, art schools, research universities, Bible colleges and seminaries, agricultural schools, medical specialty colleges, nursing schools, and law schools began popping up in every corner of the growing country.

Another new strand of higher education emerged in the first decade of the 20th century, the community or junior college. These colleges were designed to offer the first two years of a general college education and permit their graduates to then transfer to the four-year colleges and universities. Joliet Junior College in Illinois was the first public junior college. It opened in 1901.

A publicity card depicting the two founders, Sam Knight and William Baine, of Central City Commercial College in Waco, Texas. Image courtesy of the William Baines Papers of the Texas Collection at Baylor University.

Previously, colleges were primarily residential and located in rural or semi-rural settings. But now urban students demanded and got schools in the middle of cities. These students didn’t want the residential experience, so a new type of commuter college was invented.

Schools like Central City Commercial College (4C), which opened in Waco, Texas, in 1924, met the need of urban residents for training in employable skills or retraining in new skills. In 1935, 4C expanded its evening programs in order to accommodate shift workers who wanted to learn new skills.

Prior to the Civil War, most colleges were founded under the flag of religion. By the time the Civil War began, many of these institutions had drifted from their religious moorings. Some had become secular institutions, while others had their ownership assumed by governmental agencies and had become public institutions.

The Honorable Justin Smith Morrill, Senate sponsor of the Morrill Act of 1862. The photograph was taken between 1865 and 1880. The image is courtesy of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). It is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cwpbh.04981.

After the Civil War, three separate strands of institutional control were formally recognized. The first strand was public institutions, which were primarily funded by governmental agencies such as states, counties, or cities. These institutions were kick-started by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, also known as the Land-Grant Acts. These pieces of legislation provided grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in Agriculture, Home Economics, the Mechanical Arts, and other useful professions. Public institutions began to dominate higher education with their seemingly untouchable advantage of an apparently unending supply of tax revenue.

The second strand consisted of private, non-profit institutions. These were chartered by states, but controlled by independent boards. Some of these were sectarian in nature. They were founded by, controlled by denominations or churches, and funded through the religious founders. Others were non-sectarian, without any particular religious bent.

The third strand was the proprietary schools. These consisted of schools typically founded by an entrepreneur who viewed the institution as a profit-making venture. They were chartered by states, but controlled by the founder or a board of trustees, similar to a corporation. These three strands still dominate the higher education scene of the 21st century.

Diversity in these colleges was not just limited to the type of control, students, programs offered, or geographic location. Students began choosing colleges for more reasons than particular academic programs. They began including in their selection processes non-academic programs like athletics, debate teams, musical opportunities, both vocal and instrumental, and social organizations.

In the opening game at Michigan Stadium, Michigan beat Ohio State in October 1927 before a crowd of 84,000. This image is courtesy of Kaufmann & Fabry Co. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pan.6a28995. See Commons: Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2348814

Rutgers University defeated Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game on November 6, 1869. The University of Michigan’s football stadium, Michigan Stadium (known as the Big House), was built in 1927 with a capacity of 72,000. It soon outgrew it and added 10,000 more seats within five years. The stadium was formally dedicated on October 22, 1927,  when Michigan beat Ohio State before a standing-room-only crowd that exceeded 84,400 people. College sports had become a big-time business. Colleges began recruiting athletes to attend their school in order to play for them.

Intracollegiate debating on college campuses seems to have originated in literary societies as early as 1830. The first recorded intercollegiate debate may have been between Wake Forest University and Trinity College (later known as Duke University) in 1897. Soon debate teams were touring the country, holding matches and tournaments. The movie “The Great Debaters” memorializes a 1935 debate team of African-American students from Wiley College (Marshall, TX) which supposedly traveled to Harvard University, and defeated the reigning national championship debating team. In reality, the debaters from Wiley did not debate Harvard. They debated and defeated the reigning national debate team from the University of Southern California. However, the Wiley team could not declare themselves victors because African-Americans were not permitted to join the Debate Society until after WWII.

James Farmer, Jr., was recruited as a 14-year old freshman by Melvin Tolson, the founder, and coach of the Wiley College Debate Team to become a valuable member of this formidable debating powerhouse. He went on to a have distinguished career in civil rights work in the United States in the middle of the 20th century.

Civil Right Activists including Martin Luther King Jr, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer Jr in the White House on January 18, 1964. The picture is in the public domain because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image is courtesy of the LBJ Presidential Library and Wikimedia.Commons

James Farmer Jr. was considered one of the “Big 4” in the civil rights world. The first of the other three was Martin Luther King Jr. (1948 graduate of Morehouse College an HBCU institution in Atlanta, GA), and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The second was Whitney M. Young Jr. (1941 graduate of Kentucky State University and HBCU institution in Frankfort KY) who served as the Executive Director of the National Urban League, transforming it from a passive organization into an aggressive force working to give socioeconomic access to all individuals who had been historically disenfranchised. The third member of the group was Roy Wilkins (1923 graduate of the University of Minnesota which had a long history of accepting African-American scholars and students), who was Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1955 to 1977. Roy Wilkins was one of the primary organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1967, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian decoration.

Postcard publicizing the Carlton College Glee Club itinerary for the 1913 season. The image is in the public domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Carlton College and Wikimedia Commons.

Glee Clubs were small choral groups dedicated to singing glees, short secular choral songs, which were written or arranged for several vocal parts.   These clubs originated in London in the late 18th century and made their way to the American college campuses in the mid-19th century. The first documented American collegiate glee club was founded at Harvard University in 1858.

By 1910, there were more than 100 colleges hosting Glee Clubs. Many of these co-curricular clubs were replaced on campuses by larger choral groups and formal choirs which performed under the auspices of the music department or school. Many of the colleges would sponsor the Glee Club tours for fundraising and student recruiting purposes.

The Purdue Marching Band “Block P” formation from 1922 football game. Image in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Purdue University and Wikimedia Commons

Historically marching bands were associated with military ventures. They consisted primarily of wind, brass, and percussion instruments. By the middle of the 19th century, they found their way onto college campuses. The first official collegiate marching band was the University of Notre Dame Band of the Fighting Irish, founded in 1845. It first performed at a football game in 1887. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds of American colleges and universities hosted marching bands and orchestras. In 1907, the Purdue All-American Marching Band unveiled the first pictorial formation on a football field with their rendition of the Purdue “Block P.” Not to be outdone, later that year, the University of Illinois Marching Illini band performed the first full halftime show at the football game between the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.

Colleges and universities began recruiting students to perform in their vocal and instrumental musical groups. Other performing arts, like drama and dance, soon followed. Colleges and universities became cultural centers, not only for students but for the communities in which they were located.

Fraternities, sororities, and other social clubs dated their beginning on American campuses from December 5, 1776, with the founding of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the College of William and Mary. Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, fraternities and sororities developed slowly. They were primarily centered in the Northeast quadrant of the United States.

A photograph of the monument in Lexington, VA commemorating the founding of three Panhellenic fraternities in that town. SuperNova at the English Wikipedia, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Super Nova and Wikimedia Commons.

After the Civil War, with the great expansion of colleges and universities, fraternities and sororities also flourished. The American higher education system began encountering racial, religious, and gender diversity and new colleges were founded or reformed throughout the south and west. Growth in the fraternity system overall during this period would lead some to label the last third of the 19th century as “The Golden Age of Fraternities.”

However, the diversity of institutions which engendered a diversity of students also had a darker, hidden side. Students looked to the fraternities and sororities not as vehicles to encourage diversity, but as avenues of escape and as a way to avoid associating with large numbers of particular types of students. They became vehicles of discrimination.

Thus the period between the Civil War and WWII was an era of growth in terms of the number of students and the diversity of types of institutions, types of campus activities, and diversity of students within the system as a whole. Paradoxically, it was also an era of rampant discrimination and exclusion. WWII produced another pause in the development of the American higher education system. We pick up that story in the next post.