What Happened to the University of Everywhere?

When does a public institution stop being public?

Writing in The New York Times on May 5, Kevin Carey provides some key insights into the question, doing some calculations on what would happen to public institution budgets if cuts precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic are similar to those from the 2008 recession.

Carey also correctly points out that some of the moves that some institutions were able to pull off to realize additional revenue post-recession -- for example, recruiting international and out-of-state students -- appear to be nonstarters this time around. In fact, losing large percentages of these students will create even larger drops in revenue.

Carey is clearly concerned about what looks to be a very fraught period for our public institutions, saying, “Cutting universities loose to compete for customers in the free market could fundamentally alter the character of public institutions.”

Amen. I couldn’t agree more with this concern, though I would also say that it is merely an intensification of the forces that were already at work prior to the pandemic. After all, why else was the University of Alabama sending an army of recruiters across the nation, other than to bolster its percentage of out-of-state students?

In fact, Carey’s worries about how institutions may be forced to respond sound rather familiar: “Colleges chasing tuition dollars are more likely to spend scarce resources on marketing, amenities like luxury gymnasiums, and sports programs. They are less likely to prioritize need-based financial aid[1], student counseling and academic support.”

They also sound familiar because they are the sins that Kevin Carey catalogs in his 2015 book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.

The main thrust of The End of College is that in the future, students will not need traditional college because “The University of Everywhere will span the earth. The students will come from towns, cities and countries in all cultures and societies, members of a growing global middle class who will transform the experience of higher education.”

This will happen through the miracle of the internet, which will provide access to courses and experiences via providers such as Coursera and Udacity and Minerva.

Carey argues in the book that colleges and universities have been doing a lousy job helping students learn[2], and these other entities can and will do it better.

The Kevin Carey of The End of College is dismayed by the “chronic neglect of undergraduate education,” calling it “morally unsupportable and a detriment to society” in an interview with Inside Higher Ed’s Paul Fain in 2015.

In my view, the Kevin Carey of The End of College would be lamenting the sudden difficulties of public higher ed institutions, but he’d also be championing the potential of these alternative providers to fill the gaps. What better time to transition to “the university of everywhere”?

I would’ve thought that 2015 Kevin Carey would be aligned with these gentlemen writing in the Harvard Business Review who are questioning whether or not the proles really need four-year degrees, and wouldn’t it be groovy if we just offloaded the “commoditized” parts of the educational experience to Coursera?

Let the market decide!

At the time of the release of The End of College, I was sympathetic to much of Carey’s critique of the priorities of public higher ed institutions, while simultaneously being extremely skeptical of the promise of the “university of everywhere.” It struck me as relying on a kind of magical thinking about the promise of tech-mediated education and the ability of the “marketplace” to innovate. Audrey Watters and Sara Goldrick-Rab found those and even more reasons to be skeptical.

But here we are in 2020, and Kevin Carey is a champion for the public higher education institution in its competition with the university of everywhere, and as the kids probably don’t say anymore, I am here for it.

This is not about Kevin Carey the individual so much as him as a prominent avatar for a school of thinking that has been rather prominent over the last decade, that higher education both will and deserves to be disrupted.

Perhaps we are all chastened from seeing what happens when our institutions fail, as has been readily apparent in the federal government’s response to the pandemic. Perhaps the sheer scope of the threat is forcing a reckoning of what would happen if public institutions weren’t something we’re going to perpetually predict are going to fail, but actually do fail.

Perhaps in the intervening years since 2015, particularly during this past spring period of emergency remote learning, that there is something to be said for learning which is rooted in a physical community.

Perhaps we are seeing what’s already happening at Missouri Western State University, and wondering how one has a university without “English, history, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, Spanish, French and the arts.”

The crisis is real, as are some of the past failures of our institutions, but the future is not yet written.

I believe that places like Missouri Western State University, with its focus on first-generation students of the Kansas City region, have important roles to play in the lives of their students and the civic health of the community in which the institution resides.

I believe we are stronger when we are bundled, rather than the atomized, and public higher education institutions -- if properly oriented around the values we associate with education and learning, rather than competition and marketing -- are important to our success in bonding together.

Based on his recent writing and other output from New America, I think Kevin Carey agrees with me. The open question is how many others do as well, and whether or not we can muster the will to preserve something we will most certainly miss if it’s gone.

I share all of the criticisms of how public higher ed has operated over what is the entire course of my postcollege career, but this is a time not for abandonment or disruption, but renewal.