The Obama Administration will “…announce a set of ambitious proposals…” today, according to an article in today’s New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/education/obamas-plan-aims-to-lower-cost-of-college.html?pagewanted=1&ref=tamarlewin Here is my view, which I put in a comment to the article.
“No one could have addressed the need for government regulation than did David Riesman, our deepest thinker ever on higher education. In his 1980 classic “On Higher Education – The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”, he wrote that
“…Since students are so often misled in their choices, I have long encouraged federal as well as regional and state efforts to protect their rights…advantage can…be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..Like any other interest group, the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends…Our task…is to strike a balance between the need for consumer protection…and the need to limit student power so as to minimize the impact of Gresham’s law on higher education as a whole…” (Gresham’s Law states, in its simplest form, that “Bad money drives out good money.”)
We need to see the details of the Obama Administration’s proposals in order to judge them. In my view, though, after a few decades of observing a general loss among faculty of any civic responsibility (though they vigorously encourage it in others outside of academe); and, an almost total “please the market (i.e. student)” approach among administrators, it is critical to start imposing accountability and transparency on higher education. Given the power, money and influence of higher education, this will be a difficult task, but it must be done.”
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