Reform or revolution? I’m thinking ways of making colleges more effective and sustainable, not Rosa Luxemburg and the end of capitalism. Some writers believe that technology or funding changes will reshape the education landscape quickly and dramatically, while others see ongoing change at a more moderate pace. In the latter camp, for an outline for thoughtful reform, I recommend Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education, by William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson.
Bowen is the late great wise man of higher ed, the former president of Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation. Much of his career was dedicated to questions of access and quality. McPherson is president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College. Together they crafted a short, clear, and well-organized overview of what needs to be changed in higher education. It is informative and moderate. The aim of the book is to how to make higher education more effective.
The authors start from a framework of human capital: higher education is a way of helping people to improve. The investment will pay off, but it takes time. Consequently, at a very high level, issues of higher education are about what is the right level of investment, who pays for higher education (and when), and who reaps the benefits.
The challenges are significant and interrelated. They include student success rates, decreased government investment in higher education, decreasing social mobility, limited affordability, increased student debt, and leadership unwilling or incapable of effective addressing these issues.
The responses the authors promote include increased government investment (not just student aid), reforms in financial aid policy and practice, greater institutional efficiencies, smarter investments (graduate education, research, etc.), control of big-time college athletics, sustainable and effective teaching, better use of enabling technologies, and empowering new leadership.
It all makes sense. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there is a call to make it happen. Or even that many understand or appreciate these clusters of problems and solutions. Lesson Plan provides an exceptionally cogent high level map that prioritizes the problems and solutions to reform American higher education. Indirectly, the work also underscores the wide gap, in theory and practice, from what we do and what we really should be doing.
Lesson Plan does not propose means of organizing stakeholders to make these changes possible. It is indifferent to wider political trends. The book, is silent, too, about how small-scale attempts might be organized. It is, in essence, just one important piece of a much larger question. If lessons plans and primers are to be effective, the have to be read and studied and put into practice.
David Potash