The Progressive Case for Reforming Higher Ed

As we look back on an academic year featuring regular calls from conservative politicians to reform higher education, now seems like a good time to take a step back and consider the progressive case for reforming our broken system of higher education.

The conservative case for reforming higher education is well-known: Higher education is dominated by liberal faculty who are indoctrinating our children. To fight this threat, conservatives must create alternative universities and schools, pass laws limiting the ability of universities to teach identity politics or promote racial diversity, and ensure that conservative voices are equally represented on campuses.

Not surprisingly, many of my progressive colleagues roll their eyes at these efforts and worry about the problems a conservative reform would pose to our current system of higher education, which, after all, was constructed on a foundation of progressive ideals.

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What I fear my colleagues don’t realize is that there’s also a progressive case for reforming higher education—and it’s much stronger than the conservative one. Think for a moment about what progressives stand for. They want to advance justice, tackle systems of oppression and dismantle systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Great! But if those, rightly, are the goals that motivate progressives, then it’s more than fair to ask, are colleges and universities helping us achieve those goals?

I’m afraid that the answer is no. Why? There are all sorts of reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that in the past 50 years, college tuition has increased at nearly three times the rate of inflation. The result is that student loan debt has doubled since 2010, disproportionately harming low-income and minority students. Those numbers are terrifying, particularly for families on the low end of the income spectrum, who, according to one recent report, annually need to finance an average amount equal to 157 percent of their income to send a student to college, compared to just 14 percent for high-income families.

Consider, also, that the Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has found that children born into the top 1 percent of the income distribution in the United States are 77 times more likely to gain admission to an Ivy League university than students born into the bottom 20 percent. I’ll say that again: 77 times. That’s an absolutely astounding number, and one that should deeply trouble progressives.

There are plenty of other similarly troubling numbers. Thirty-eight elite colleges, for example, including five Ivy League institutions, have more students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than they do from families in the bottom 60 percent combined.

You might wonder if part of the explanation for this is that these affluent students on average had better grades or took harder classes. Nope. Maybe the difference is how they performed on standardized tests? Nope. At Ivy League colleges, Chetty and his co-authors found that even when applicants had the same SAT or ACT score, those from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to gain admittance.

It’s true that degrees from elite universities are still the best way for students to gain high-paying jobs. But if holding an elite university degree is key to gaining wealth, and wealth is key to gaining an elite university degree, then we’ve created a feedback loop that in effect is designed to privilege the wealthy and the powerful. Is that not exactly the kind of system that progressives should be eager to dismantle?

The painful reality is that we’ve known for decades that our system favors the well-to-do. All the way back in 1947, a commission created by President Harry Truman produced a report on the state of higher education and its relationship to democracy in the United States. The authors minced no words. “If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets,” they warned, “the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.”

I hear frequently from colleagues that the solution has to come from government—which is to say, from government money. Sure, this argument goes, college tuition has vastly outpaced inflation, but if we can just elect more Democrats, they’ll give us all the money we need to close this gap and create more opportunities for poor students to attend our pricey colleges.

I don’t buy that explanation. Higher education’s problems are systemic, and throwing more money at them is at best a short-term fix.

So what’s to be done?

Let’s pull back for a moment for some historical perspective. For the past 500 years, our system of higher education has been based on a model of scarcity. In particular, it has depended on three main scarcities: of access (class size, selectivity), of instruction (faculty experts, educational support) and of outcome (university degrees, university reputations). These scarcities long seemed inevitable. Colleges and universities, after all, only have room in their classrooms and on their campuses for a limited number of students, so we’ve had to make compromises: between inclusivity and selectivity in admissions, between personalization and efficiency in instruction, between accessibility and differentiation in credentialing. These compromises are so ingrained in our educational system that today we consider it a success when a prestigious college rejects nine out of 10 applicants, we take it for granted that impersonal 100-seat lecture halls are the norm for many of our freshman students and we shrug our shoulders when told that in 2024 our graduates carried more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

By those measures, surely, our current model of higher education is a failure. But here’s the thing: Even though we’ve been aware of these problems for at least half a century, we’ve also felt that on the whole the system is working. And if it’s not broken, then why fix it?

I find that logic profoundly misguided. From a progressive standpoint, our system of higher education is broken. It’s creating all sorts of systemic injustices that make it morally unsustainable, at least if you believe that affordable, good-quality higher education should be available to everybody.

That’s the bad news. But there’s good news, too. New digital technologies have arrived during the past decade for delivering instruction and evaluating individual student learning at scale. If we embrace them, they can make real reform possible and allow us to imagine a fairer, more accessible system of higher education—one that will enable us to better serve the many students who are left out of our existing scarcity-based model.

What could that look like? Consider Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master of science in computer science. When it launched in 2014 at a total cost to students of less than $7,000, it was decried by many in higher education as unsustainable, something that would cannibalize Georgia Tech’s residential degree programs, produce an inferior education, involve less interaction with faculty and cheapen Georgia Tech’s brand.

None of that has happened in the decade since it was launched. Instead, the program today enrolls thousands of students, charges substantially the same tuition price as a decade ago and has even eliminated one $194-per-semester fee, it attracts a different set of students than those who enroll in the residential program, produces graduates who test slightly higher than their residential counterparts and has arguably increased interaction with faculty—all while maintaining, if not enhancing, Georgia Tech’s reputation in computer science.

Examples abound of other institutions creating abundance of access for students who might otherwise have been left behind. One in three of Arizona State University’s undergraduate students are first-generation college students, for example and, since 2011, Southern New Hampshire University has held its online tuition steady, at less than $10,000 per year. The Boston-based nonprofit Duet even partners with Southern New Hampshire to offer individualized coaching and career services for students who might not thrive in a purely online degree program.

Why aren’t more colleges embracing these opportunities? When I talk to my colleagues across higher education, I worry it’s because we’re focused on conservatively clinging to a comfortable status quo rather than progressively seeking to improve equity in access. I was recently talking with a former dean of computer science at a top university about how Georgia Tech is able to use technology to keep its tuition price at about a 10th of what most other top computer science programs charge. “At that price,” the dean said to me, “they are leaving a lot of money on the table.”

That response makes sense if our goal is to maximize revenue, but it makes no sense if our goal is to maximize social good.

So what is our goal?

I think it should be to reform our educational system in ways that will benefit society. And with the advent of new digital technologies, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do just that. If we embrace those technologies now, we can democratize access to the knowledge that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds need to discover and develop their talents, and we can make it possible for them to earn the credentials they need to signal their knowledge to employers—all so that they can use their talents to make a difference in the world.

All of that sounds dreamy, I know. So let me be clear: I’m not saying that Princeton or Berkeley or the University of Virginia or Oberlin or Stanford is about to disappear. Elite, traditional institutions of higher education are here to stay, and they’re going to do just fine. If you have the money to pay for them, and they decide to let you in, you’ll still be able to get a fantastic education from them. But in the years ahead, thanks to these new technologies, the broader ecosystem that these institutions exist in is going to expand and change dramatically. Gradually, elite residential colleges and universities will lose their dominant place in that ecosystem, and customized digital learning will first disrupt and then come to dominate a new system of higher education—one that reaches more people, and generates greater benefits for society, than ever before.

That’s the progressive case for reforming higher education.