With apologies for a long preface, I’ll share the bottom line up front: Access for students motivated to pursue higher education has been a topic for years.  However, due to anti-DEI actions, pushed by the GOP in Texas and elsewhere, access may become more challenging and, unless we’re careful, the student resources needed to ensure successful outcomes may disappear.

As for preliminaries, I’ve shared this Venn diagram many times over the years.  In an online design community conversation, I saw the good, fast, cheap diagram that I’ve recreated below: 

In the conversation I was involved with, we were talking about the outcomes associated with working with a client on a particular design project.  As a design development and production model, this concept map reflects the amount of work, energy and creativity required to satisfy a client within reasonable cost and time constraints.  The essential idea is simple: you can have two of the three options, but not all three.  Picking any two would automatically eliminate the third.  In other words, good and fast would not be cheap; fast and cheap would not be good; and cheap and good would not be fast. 

It occurred to me the other day that a similar tension exists between the ideas of relevance, affordability, and efficiency in higher education.  I’ve fleshed out the idea below in a similar Venn diagram:

With some changes to the nomenclature that are now consistent with the intent of a higher education model, the same problem faces faculty when they embark on the design and delivery of a curriculum: picking two would automatically eliminate the third.  In other words, relevant and efficient would not be cheap; efficient and affordable might suffer from quality issues; and affordable and relevant would not likely be very fast.  And, like the design version, this concept map reflects the amount of work, energy and creativity required to have students meet the outcomes needed to align with their professional goals within reasonable cost and time constraints.

Schools that meet outcomes are thought of as being of high quality, as program relevance prepares the student to enter and successfully compete with others in a professional setting.  But the efficiency of a program is also important, not just for the sake of allowing students to complete quickly so that they can meet their professional aspirations, but also for the sake of ensuring that the curriculum is minimally redundant.  This balance of relevance and efficiency is indeed more costly but, in the long term, it’s the most viable option to ensure good results.

While costs have recently plateaued, the cost for higher education has outstripped inflation for the last two decades. And cost is still the primary hurdle for most students. Affordability in the Venn diagram is the one that gets the most attention, but it’s more complicated.  In fact, as costs are often the only factor that drives decisions, there is an increasing risk for creating a negative feedback loop, especially when economic circumstances alone drive school choice decisions.  In short, when those schools that are affordable are often the only choice, they may not be a good choice.  This is true especially if the schools lack the resources that more wealthy systems have, and then the chance of at-risk student attrition increases dramatically.

Again, it is a multi-faceted issue and requires attention to each facet to make progress. After the financial issues, the most obvious hurdles are organized around a general category called preparedness, and yet others are clustered around students’ personal issues that can both directly and indirectly create barriers.  All these issues – financial, academic, and personal – don’t end when the prospective student is admitted.  They continue to be attrition categories after enrollment. Student support for these at-risk areas provides a set of vital lifelines for students who are managing complicated lives in addition to their efforts in the classroom.  The clear connection between support and the success of students has been demonstrated at multiple levels in a variety of settings and school types, including both private and public institutions.  Intentional interventions around these three risk categories work, and the numbers are there to prove it.

So, we have clearly defined the issues and we know how to address them, but there is one other element that is foundational to all these risk categories.  Certain racial groups, including Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, face other barriers to higher education.  Some of these barriers are cultural and are often thought of as internal (unique to the student), and others are structural and generally considered external (systemic in nature).  Not surprisingly, these ideas are opposite sides in a long-simmering argument about racial outcomes in higher education.  As usual, things get polarized, and so most of what are in the current political conversations are missing substantive non-partisan attention to both. But to ignore them is not an option as these challenges and the positions people take around them have history that could merit consideration for both how we structure any continued support and who is entitled to receive it.

As noted by Linda Darling-Hammond in her Brookings Institution article, Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education, one side posits that outcome gaps for non-white students are about the internal factors; i.e., lack of will (laziness), indifference to aspirational economic goals, or at the very worst, racist and supremacist assertions that deficiencies in genetics are manifesting themselves in a lack of ability.  On the other side, external factors reflect the generations of non-white students as being “educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and [which] were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely,” Darling- Hammond’s assertion is that this has created significant structural deprivations that feed future expectations. 

What’s interesting to me is that both groups cling to the same data points that reflect substantive yet irregular improvements by non-whites in standardized testing and the closing of the so-called achievement gap.  This gap, particularly with Black students, has varied over the years since the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, but as Jill Barshay notes in her article PROOF POINTS: Tracing Black-white achievement gaps since the Brown decision, Black achievement is intertwined with poverty, concluding that “so many Black students are concentrated in high-poverty schools, where teacher turnover is high, and students are less likely to be taught by excellent, veteran teachers. Meanwhile administrators are struggling with non-academic challenges, such as high rates of homelessness, foster care, violence and absenteeism that interfere with learning. None of these are problems that schools alone can fix.”

While there are no answers here, my worry (and the challenge) is that we keep an eye on the elimination of DEI on college campuses to ensure that they don’t eventually cascade into a withdrawal of support for the very programs that have been working to close the gaps in tests and real student outcomes. 

Under the guise of eliminating DEI, funding for programs that address the needs of risk categories (financial, preparedness, and personal) are at risk of being eliminated, not because they are ineffective, but because of who they serve.

Some may consider this blog post hyperbolic, and if that’s the lens you use to make a judgement, that’s your prerogative. However, these thoughts are about the business of higher education and, in particular, about how that business may be at risk.

Education as a product is something I’ve written about before (see my LinkedIn articles On the Disruption of Higher Education, and a follow up called Dad Weighs In . . . ). Some of what I have discussed in both politics and purpose, and especially cost of higher education, continues to unfold as expected.  What has changed since prior writing is the speed of the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education, combined with a rather turbulent political landscape that’s eroding the very foundation of a true liberal arts education.

These two ideas, AI and politics, are not as unrelated as they may seem, especially within a commodified version of higher education towards which we are drifting.  With large language models now capable of holding massive amounts of data, it’s tempting to think that everything can be loaded into the machine and the ghosts therein will first learn to speak for us and eventually learn to think for us.  If that’s true, then the value for access to AI as a tool might seem to beg the question about the value of a liberal arts education as an idea.

This becomes even more concerning when the word “liberal” is willfully misinterpreted to serve political goals rather than communicating its purpose in developing within human beings the sentient intellectual capacities like reason and judgment.  The real political objection to “liberal arts” has never really been about the word liberal, but instead about its heterodoxic challenges to various conventions. Such challenges are uncomfortable for those who wish to control various constructs (including content) for profit or other reasons. Suspension of the aforementioned intellectual capacities is therefore convenient politically, and maybe even economically; but it ultimately creates a closed loop system of orthodoxy from which we may not recover.

Such is the backdrop for a new administration. It’s always been worrisome that the party that supports the current President has had a long history of anti-intellectualism, and as Julian Zelizer notes in his recent post in FP (Foreign Policy Magazine), “attacks on expertise have been an essential element of Republican politics for decades”, going back to George W. Bush, and even as far as Richard Nixon.  But this newest version of Republican anti-intellectualism, spearheaded by Trump, is particularly troublesome in that basic facts are now beings surrendered to alternative ones in order to maintain popular, if not factually challenged, political support.

This last part is the most concerning, especially within the context of the transition of higher education’s purpose that I’ve written about in past articles.  As we continue to wrestle with the concept of basic human rights in an increasingly commodified world, where our very existence seems to be more and more dependent on some external financial agency (think about “too big to fail”), we are at the limits of what we had heretofore assumed was a foundation of our democracy – that is, the idea that education was a public good that serves our long-term interests as a country. 

The barrier to the erosion of this idea of education as a public good has often been the faculty of various institutions, holding fast to the idea that a liberal arts education was the best way to prepare future generations for their roles and their leadership.  Now, we are at a crossroads of a sort, where students are being encouraged (mostly at the administrative level) to use AI in their studies as part of a “competitive” or “productivity” push, and faculty expertise is being supplanted.  As we continue to trade a variety of privacy and other basic human needs for the sake of various electronic conveniences, the real worry that we should be considering is the advancement of AI. 

So, for me, it’s not so much the worrisome Terminator scenario, where machines are becoming sentient and taking over; it’s that we’re gradually surrendering generational sentience and giving up without a fight.