March 29, 2024

The Values of Higher Education

southern maryland higher education center
Posted by Southern Maryland Higher Education CenterHigher Ed - Powell, Mel
Pax Leader II
by Mel Powell, Executive Director, SMHEC

From every boardroom, government agency, nonprofit organization and college campus, America’s leaders are calling for advancement of knowledge to address critical global and social and economic challenges.  They are supporting education for Americans from middle school to advanced graduate levels.

For employees in Southern Maryland’s technology economy, the value of higher education is demonstrated by a broad base of access to academic opportunities at the undergraduate and graduate levels.  A regional community college and a distinguished four-year liberal arts college provide access to higher education and opportunities for the development of analytical and creative careers.  In our knowledge based economy, graduate education in almost a hundred professional fields offered by 14 universities at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center provides value to the region’s employers and consequently to the continuing development of the community.

There are also other values that are part of the larger and complex picture of higher education.  External benefits spillover to advantage others in the community, and benefit future generations. These include lower health, welfare, and other social costs; strengthened democracy, political stability, and social capital; less crime and poverty; environmental benefits; better regional competitiveness; and creativity and the diffusion of technology.

These external benefits in turn set the stage for new initiatives within organizations, families and the service economy in the community. Research on the monetary value of the external benefits of higher education indicates that a region with substantial numbers of college graduates benefits from synergistic economic and social growth. Added to direct benefits of increased knowledge and advanced workforce skills, the external benefits of higher education are at least half the values of the visible direct benefits that contribute to synergistic growth of the region’s economic development.

Another level of benefits, beyond the preparation of knowledge workers for advancement in professional positions, is the research based education provided by some 60 research universities in America.  At these institutions (including the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland) the focus on education is the preparation of creative researchers in graduate programs that support a mission of research, innovation, and commercialization of new products and the launching of new companies.

While America’s higher education colleges and universities collectively are the envy of every other nation, it is the 60 research universities that have attracted the greatest attention, and whose graduate programs have attracted the largest number of foreign students (particularly in the sciences and technology fields).  However, the predominance of America’s research universities is being challenged by the creation of a large number of new research-based universities in other nations, challenging the predominance of America’s leadership in patents and the current broad-based approach to university research and encouraging greater specialization by America’s research universities.

 

WHAT KINDS OF HIGHER EDUCATION ARE BEST

Beyond the general agreement that higher education adds value to a civil and industrially developed society, to the development and well being of individuals with college backgrounds and to the economic and social growth of a community and nation, there is also the role of research universities in the predominance of America in technological advancements.  In addition, there are continuing and on-going discussions about the “best” goals of higher education, about what kinds of higher education provide competitive economic and social advantage to the nation.

Generally, there are two distinct theories of the “kind” of higher education that best meets the needs of a nation facing increasing global competition in the market place, and the needs of students who want to succeed, and to make a difference in a changing new century.

One theory supports the view that the liberal arts provide the intellectual skills needed by problem solvers who will also have advantages in continuing their learning and development, particularly at the undergraduate level.  A second theory argues that the high cost of higher education, together with the needs for specialized education in a technologically driven society, requires the development of highly focused skills and knowledge in college education, applied to the benefit of new employers immediately upon a graduate’s arrival in a new job.

Flexible Intellectual Tools or Specialized Training:  The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) champions the value of a liberal education and supports the view that in today’s changing economy, narrow specialization condemns America’s economy to inflexibility, and correspondingly, the liberal arts provide flexible intellectual tools to future problem solvers, who will be better equipped to continue learning over time.

When President Obama and the Secretary of the Department of Education Arne Duncan talk about how higher education is the key to the future of the American economy, one can argue that they are not talking about the liberal arts.  As work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with specialized training.  The need for specialization by employers also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland Security.

However, arguments about the kind of higher education needed is generally focused on undergraduate students rather on student’s in master’s programs.  But regardless of education level, in terms of numbers, the great majority of degree programs are in specialized fields.

Commitment to Both Theories: A lot of confusion in this discussion is caused by the fact that since the end of World War II, American higher education has been committed to both theories: higher education focusing on liberal arts, and higher education with a focus on professional fields. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (based on ability and achievement) and egalitarian (democratic and open). Graduate college programs and employers were left to depend on the growing complement of Post WW II colleges in America to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, while elected officials talk about the importance of college education for everyone. State higher education plans consistently focus on accessibility to college for all Americans.  But Society also wants students to study hard and deserve the grades they receive.

In 1948, through the exertions of people like James Bryant Conant, then President of Harvard, the Educational Testing Service went into business, and standardized testing (the S.A.T. and the A.C.T.) soon became the universal method for picking out the most intelligent students in the high-school population, regardless of their family wealth or education level, and getting them into college.

As work becomes more high-tech, more complex, more demanding of specific skills, the more employers demand and get more people with specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. As mentioned above, there are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available.   There are approximately 14 times as many master’s degrees awarded each year as doctorates.

The specialization phase that  began after World War II has lasted to today. Large new populations have been entering the higher education system: the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill (2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956 alone). Then the great expansion of the 1960’s when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then co-education, when virtually every all-male college began accepting women. Finally, in the 1980’s and 1990’s there was a period of racial diversification and an expansion of minority students in higher education.

Making it in America: The post-WWII students did not regard college as a finishing school.  In pre-WW II days, college may have been a gate through which only the favored could pass. Then the gates opened to veterans, to first generation college education students, to women, to non-whites who had either been segregated or under-represented, and to the Dream generation as in Maryland after the 2012 election where  children of immigrants who came to the United States can now afford to go to college while paying in-state tuition.   College to these students is the key to making it in America, not only financially, but socially.

A Seat for Virtually Everyone.  As access to college expanded, there was a tremendous expansion of the number of colleges in America, reaching over 4,495 four-and two-year institutions (2,774 4-year institutions and 1,721 2-year institutions).

Seven per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college (two or four year institutions) or in graduate school (21,016,126 in 2010). In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent of the population. About 14.6 million of these students are enrolled full-time.  There is now a seat for virtually any American with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college.

The City University of New York, by example, has 270,000 degree-credit students at 23 campuses, and another 273,000 continuing education and professional school students.  Another large system at a state level, The State of California, has 3.3 million undergraduate students in 23 state universities , 10 research universities (through doctorates and professional schools), and 120 community colleges.

College is Broadly Accessible: 68 percent of high-school graduates now enter a college program (in 1980, only 49 percent did), and employers continue to give preferences to graduates with a college credential.

College is Broadly Rewarding: In 2008, the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144.  In 2010, someone with a bachelor’s degree earned $58,613; and for someone with only a high-school education, $31,283.

Are “All” College Students Benefiting from Their Education?  Notwithstanding the social rewards of a college education, there is concern in the higher education community that perhaps half of the number of college graduates do not have sufficient skill levels or advanced knowledge that will permit them to obtain jobs requiring a college education.  According to several recent university surveys, unemployed or underemployed college graduates range from 44.4 percent to 54.6 percent of graduates.  Many may not have acquired analytical skills while in college, or simply were underperformers while in college, and consequently are unprepared for jobs in today’s competitive economy.

Increasing Numbers of International Students:  There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher education. Students all over the world want to come here, and some American universities are building campuses overseas. Higher education is widely regarded in developed and developing cultures as the route to a better life. In 2010-2012, international students in American colleges reached a new high, at 723,277, with China sending the largest number, 157,588, followed by India with 103,895.  While their numbers are only about 3 percent of students in American colleges, the more interesting fact is that many of these non-resident alien students are in STEM fields of education, particularly at the graduate level, and concurrently they are a growing percentage of graduates in graduate STEM research fields.

Declining Numbers of American Students in STEM Programs:  According to a recent report by the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the United States, in 1977 82 percent of doctoral degrees were awarded in the U.S. to U.S. citizens; however, this figure had fallen to 57 percent by 2007.  Also of possibly great significance, the proportion of engineering students has declined significantly (29 percent in 2007, down from 56 percent in 1977); and physical sciences is also in a downward trend (43 percent, down from 76 percent); and doctoral degrees awarded to citizens have shown even sharper declines.

Increasing Competition Internationally in STEM Fields:  The recent call for concern regarding international competition was the 2005 Report by the National Academies, Rising Above the Gathering Storm:Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, that indicated that the U.S. ranks 27th out of 29 wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with degrees in science or engineering.  The World Economic Forum ranked the United States 48th out of 133 developed and developing nations in the quality of mathematics and science instruction.

Declining Interest in STEM Degrees.  According to the National Science Board, fewer than 300,000 college students selected STEM majors in 2010, and only about 167,000 were expected to earn STEM degrees by 2011. Studies have found that approximately 40 percent of college freshman planning to pursue STEM majors will have changed their majors to non-STEM fields by their senior year.

WHY A LIBERAL EDUCATION MAY PRODUCE SMARTER GRADUATES:

The most interesting observation is that students majoring in liberal arts fields (social sciences, arts and humanities) do better on the College Learning Assessment (a strategy created to measure and facilitate learning outcomes, rather than simply identifying learning goals that should be addressed in a discipline) and show greater improvement in student learning than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health.

There are a number of possible explanations that can be offered . Liberal arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are business majors.

Business Majors Score Last But Number the Most:  The No. 1 undergraduate major in America is business. And close to 22 percent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Some 10 percent are awarded in education, and 7 percent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in recreation and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion.  Interestingly, since World War II, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

The Relative Decline in Liberal Arts Majors:  Some 46,953 “liberal arts and sciences, general studies and humanities” degrees were conferred in 2009-2010 out of a total of 1,650,014 degrees awarded in the same year, or less than 3 percent of American college bachelor degrees, according to the 2013 Report: The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac 2012-2013.

College students, and their parents, facing high costs for tuition, are now more concerned with the short-term outcomes of getting a job.   It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs.

In a possibly positive direction, several liberal arts schools are responding to declining students with a movement towards career-oriented courses within a liberal education, as in places like Dartmouth College, where a journalism course combines lessons on writing style with reading and analyzing historical journalism.

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES VIEWED AS AMERICA’S OUTSTANDING HIGHER EDUCATION

America’s economic dominance has been driven in large part by the countless scientific and commercial breakthroughs that have sprung from our research universities. The extraordinary return on investment provided by our research universities is one of the reasons that American higher education is widely considered to be the best in the world and why other countries are aggressively seeking to replicate the American research university model.

The transfer of new technology from university laboratories to the private sector has a long history and has taken many different forms. The current national emphasis on this activity, however, can be dated to the 1980 enactment of The Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, more commonly known as the Bayh-Dole Act.

Although a handful of American universities were moving science from the laboratory to industrial commercialization as early as the 1920s, academic technology transfer as a formal concept originated in a report entitled “Science – The Endless Frontier” that Vannevar Bush wrote for the President in 1945. It stimulated the formation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was much study and debate surrounding federal patent policies. A major concern was the lack of success by the federal government in promoting the adoption of new technologies by industry. There was no government-wide policy regarding ownership of inventions made by government contractors and grantees under federal funding.  NASA and the Defense Department had opposite policies regarding ownership of scientific developments.  In 1980, the federal government held title to approximately 28,000 patents. Fewer than 5% of these were licensed to industry for development of commercial products.

In 1980 the new policy permitted exclusive licensing when combined with diligent development and transfer of an invention to the marketplace for the public good. Universities immediately began to develop and strengthen the internal expertise needed to effectively engage in the patenting and licensing of inventions. In many cases, institutions that had not been active in this area began to establish entirely new technology transfer offices, building teams with legal, business, and scientific backgrounds.

University research is a vital building block of the nation’s R&D enterprise. Universities performed 56 percent of the nation’s basic research in 2008, or about $39 billion of the national total of $69 billion. For applied research, universities performed 12 percent of the nation’s total in 2008, or about $11 billion of the national total of $89 billion.

Universities receive research funding from many sources, including state and local governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations. By far the largest supporter of university research is the federal government. In 2009, the federal government provided $33 billion, or about 60 percent, of the $55 billion spent by universities on R&D. The next largest source was universities’ own funding at $11 billion, or 20 percent, followed by other nonprofit organizations at $4.3 billion, or eight percent.

MISSION OF RESEARCH TRUMPS PREPARING GRADUATES FOR THE WORKFORCE

There is an important issue regarding the research university’s lack of focus and interest in preparing graduates for the workforce. The issue is the nature of graduate education itself.  Research universities may not agree that they have a dual duty: to equip graduate students for the jobs in the workforce, while at the same time not sacrificing the quality of their exposure to basic research.  The reality is that research universities tend to not be involved in developing professional degrees in science with the goal of serving workforce needs.

There is also a question regarding the ability of the 60 research universities in America competing with the increasing number of emerging research universities in developed and developing nations.  A sharper focus, with a concentration of specializations in research may be the future.  University system of Maryland Chancellor Bret Kirwin commented on this trend in a speech in 2010:

I also believe we will see fewer research universities in the U.S. by 2020, and a narrower   portfolio of research activities at our major research universities. While there may be a   few exceptions, I don’t believe universities will be able to aspire to excellence across            the board in research. The funds simply won’t be there to maintain competitive          research programs in a wide swath of areas when the competition isn’t just 50 or 60 other U.S. universities, but three or four times that number spread around the globe.

IN SUMMARY

The Land-Grant Act of 1862 provided the means for states to create new universities dedicated to learning, discovery, and engagement — all for the public good. Within eight years, 37 states had initiated these institutions of higher learning. Today, there are more than 100 land-grant colleges and universities swept across the breadth of this great country offering promise and opportunity to all.  But by 1940 only two out of five Americans had been educated past the eighth grade. In 1940, only 16 percent of Americans 18 to 21 years of age were enrolled in universities. Today, almost 67 percent of U.S. high school graduates are enrolled in colleges and universities.

This dramatic change in higher education was sparked by the G.I. Bill at the end of WW II, providing funds making it possible to educate huge numbers of individuals who never before even considered attending college. The enormous economic growth and social advancements that fueled the 20th “American Century” took place predominantly after WW II. That is when the G.I. Bill prepared Americans for the emerging technologies of today.

Graduate degree programs in America are respected and emulated worldwide, and are an international magnet for talented students from around the globe. At a time when American leadership and prosperity depend increasingly on the creation and application of knowledge, graduate education provides an important competitive advantage.

The American system of higher education provides access through almost 2,000 two-year community colleges and another 2,000 plus four-year colleges, prepares America’s youth for a myriad of occupations, trades, endeavors, and professions, provides highly specialized master’s degree programs preparing individuals for advancements in industry and the arts, and supports research universities that also prepare researchers that are patenting and licensing innovative discoveries and technologies that have created new products, new companies, and entire industries in medicine, food and agriculture, new materials, semiconductor devices and communications.

What are the values of higher education?  The question is certainly broader than a graduate’s increased prospects for employment.  American higher education is a comprehensive process of educational and research opportunities that has helped to create American leadership in science and the arts, and serves as the model for all societies that are striving for growth and maturation as creative, exhilarating, confident and optimistic societies.

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