Dr. Tierney Discusses “Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education”

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0:00:11.3 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Sally Amoruso is back on the podcast today, for a discussion with Dr. William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and founding Director of The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. Dr. Tierney has a new book out, comprised of 49 short, engaging essays on the top challenges facing higher education. He offers his thoughts on the issues, but his real goal is always to give readers the background and tools they need, to form their own opinions. He and Sally talk about the economic forces driving higher education today, as well as the political ones. Dr. Tierney states flat out, that writing the book was in some ways, a reaction to the damage he says, has been caused to higher education by the Trump administration. So buckle your seat belts, and welcome to Office Hours with EAB.

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0:01:12.6 Sally Amoruso: Hello and welcome to office hours with EAB. I’m Sally Amoruso, Chief Partner Officer with EAB, and today, I am joined by Dr. Bill Tierney, who is University Professor Emeritus and founding director of USC’s Pullias Center for higher ed. He is an expert on higher ed policy analysis, governance, administration, leadership and equity, as well as much more. He’s been researching and writing on higher ed for several decades and recently, published a book called Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Ed. Welcome, Dr. Tierney.

0:01:46.8 Dr. William Tierney: Thanks for inviting me.

0:01:48.5 SA: So let’s start by just exploring why you felt compelled to write this book.

0:01:55.4 DT: I started this before the pandemic, but I did start writing it with the Trump administration in place. And higher education is a complex social organization, and it’s a public organization, and I think there’s a need for us to be clear with the public, about the variety of different issues that we face. And really, my focus in this book was to try to get a sense of laying out the issue and then asking the reader, “What do you think?” I’m not agnostic, but I am agnostic in the sense that these are critical issues, and I want us as a public, to think through them and then we’ll be able to make more informed decisions.

0:02:41.6 SA: And so, tell me what you mean by a public institution or a public organization, because there are certainly private higher ed institutions, so you mean this in a larger sense.

0:02:52.1 DT: Yeah, let me talk about one issue right off the bat and go from there. One major problem right now, that we all agree on is that, students graduated from college with too much debt. I’ve got a young guy who I’ve mentored forever, and he’s now teaching eighth grade math. He went to UCSB, Santa Barbara, and now he’s getting his doctorate. But he’s 30 years old and he’s $70,000 in debt. Probably when he’s done, he’ll be $100,000 in debt. And that’s merely because he’s poor and had to pay tuition. I think the question is, we as a public, is that good for society, that we’ve got people graduating with enormous amounts of debt? One, is that fair to the individual? But two, for the larger society, is that really something that we think is acceptable?

0:04:00.2 DT: Its equivalent, to me is, if you think about healthcare, should people have to pay to get a physical? And basically, with ObamaCare, what we said is, “No, that’s not correct. Really, what we want is, we want as many people as possible, to be healthy.” I think, in a knowledge society, we’re at a point for myself, but I think that college, public institutions should largely be free. And if that’s the case, before we go into, “Oh my God, we can’t afford it,” or, “How do we make this happen?” We have to back up and say, “Do we want that or not?” And I think it’s fair for some people to read that chapter or those chapters and to say, “Absolutely not. I think everybody should have to pay his or her own way.” I disagree with that, but first, I want us to think through that and then we can go from there.

0:04:54.9 SA: Well, that’s a pretty large shift, and while funding for public institutions has been declining, they are still very mission-focused on access and on elevating their regions. And so I think that’s aligned to what they’re trying to achieve. But until the funding mechanisms change, and I think that’s what you’re getting at, you’re saying, as a public, we need to say, “We’re gonna fund these institutions to do what they need to do to educate the citizenry.”

0:05:24.1 DT: It’s only a large change today. When the first Governor Brown came in California and created the master plan, and let’s just use 1960 as a benchmark, the reason that it was called fees and not tuition, is that if you, as a citizen of California, wanted to go to college, you could go and you didn’t have to take out enormous loans. If you wanted extra things, then you would pay a fee. That was 1960. And we didn’t say, “Oh my God, that’s crazy.” And the master plan in California was looked on as a model and is still looked on as a model throughout the world.

0:06:09.2 SA: Sure. But when you’re talking about your student whom you mentor, and the fact that that student will likely end up with $100,000 in debt after getting their PhD, that really isn’t the typical for somebody getting a bachelor’s degree. So we’re talking about $25,000, $29,000 as a typical level of student debt, and then when you’re looking at the income premium across a lifetime, that seems to actually be a much more reasonable calculus to make. Is it a real issue that there are many students who take on that debt, but then don’t have a degree because they don’t graduate, and therefore don’t have the additional earning power?

0:06:54.3 DT: Well, there are two issues there. Let me deal with yours and then the other. Not finishing is unacceptable. And I think one of the issues, again, that we need, we as a society need to grapple with is, the numbers writ large, and granted that institutions vary from a small regional four-year to a large state university. But basically, what we’re looking at is, 40% of our students who started a four-year institution finish in six years. Personally, as a citizen, that’s unacceptable, and it’s particularly unacceptable as a society, if that’s not the fault of the student. We all know that each individual can make mistakes and can waste time and money, but this is not an issue that I think most of us would say, “Well, the vast majority of students are just sitting back and not paying attention.”

0:08:03.0 DT: So we need to make a better case. That’s the other reason I wrote this book. We in higher education, need to make a better case about the critical importance of higher education. But it’s hard to do that a number like 40% only get a degree in six years. It’s not four years. I’m an old guy, but when I went to college in the ’70s, nobody said to me, “Why, Bill, you’re gonna graduate in six years.” It was a four-year degree. We do call it a four-year degree. And again, there are always exceptions that somebody takes… Only can work half time because they’re married or what have you.

0:08:52.5 DT: And let me just raise the other question that’s, you said that it’s relatively a good deal over a lifetime. And it is true. Basically, as of today, and these comparisons are always difficult, but if a person graduates from high school A and it’s a four-year degree and his or her friend graduates and goes straight to work, they’re gonna make about a million and gets the degree. He’s gonna make about a million dollars. That’s pretty darn good. And we don’t say to that person, “Well, therefore, you’re gonna have to pay for healthcare,” or, “Therefore, when you go to the library, you have to pay for the library,” or, “If your house catches on fire, you have to pay for the fire truck to come.” That’s not the way we think about it. We think of it as a public good, that everybody, regardless, gets it. Now again, we can talk about, “Well, we can’t afford it,” or something like that, but first we have to say, “What do we want as a society? And then where do we go from here?”

0:10:03.2 SA: And how would you engage in that discussion differently? Because that discussion, that discourse has been happening for quite a while, in terms of at least raising those questions about how we feel about higher ed as a public good, and quite frankly, the narrative has not been positive, at least in the last four or five, six years. So how would you productively engage in that discussion to move this forward?

0:10:35.1 DT: Let’s look at two recent occurrences that have happened in society, in the United States. One is the Trump administration and the challenges that that administration presented to us. And the other is the pandemic. Now, we can look at individuals, and we’ve seen that applications to medical school are way up, and they’re attributing that to Dr. Fauci, that people have saw him and went, “That’s what I wanna be.” And more power to him. I think that’s great. If you think back to 9/11, after 9/11, I think as a society, we really looked on firemen or fire men and women as heroes. As a group, boy, they were admirable. Now, let’s think about higher education during Trump and the pandemic. And I don’t think we necessarily dipped in society’s views. I don’t think we went up anyway. I think people would say in terms of the pandemic, maybe there are some towns that are annoyed or bothered, there’s research or data coming out, that’s saying that those institutions that brought kids back to campus, that the town itself had a rise in infections. But I think by and large, if you were to say to the citizen, “What’s your impression of higher education, given the pandemic?” they go, “I don’t know. What do you say? I don’t know, I don’t have an impression.”

0:12:18.0 DT: I think that’s a mistake, and I think it’s a mistake with regard to the Trump administration. I think that higher education as a unit, should have been much more aggressive in pressing the case about the importance of any number of issues that touch on higher education directly. You and I have spoken offline and there’s a violent question to ask. Where do you draw the line? I don’t think that whether or not California should get another professional football team is something that a university should necessarily weigh in on. But if we look back over the last four year, right out of the gate, the Trump administration put in his “Muslim ban”. Well, again, that not only impacted universities and the xenophobia that went with that, but it’s something that is inherently against the notion of what higher education is about. And that’s the thing is that, until the last 10, 15, 20 years, if you asked society, citizens, “What’s your impression of higher education?” Even if they didn’t go to college, even if their kids didn’t go to college, it was relatively positive, it was a thought that this is something that’s worth investing in.

0:13:47.3 DT: And the thing that I find, I’ve traveled a lot, and the thing that I find abroad is that, there’s still a great deal of admiration for American higher education. I was thinking this morning that I was in Taiwan not so long ago, when I was talking to the Minister of Education, and he laughed and he said, “You know, we don’t buy your cars, but we sure do like your higher education.”

0:14:15.7 SA: What an interesting comment.

0:14:18.3 DT: And again, it’s not that I don’t wanna sell higher education as a product, but what he was saying is something that I think we need to make the case much more vociferously than we’re doing today, about the value and benefit of higher education. And if I may, it’s not simply about jobs, or it’s not only about jobs.

0:14:44.1 SA: Well, so let’s touch on that, because one of the themes across the 49 challenges, and that’s a lot of challenges that you explore, is this premise that perhaps universities have become too focused on career preparation, versus preparing a curious and engaged citizenry. So can you share a little bit more, elaborate a bit more on why you think that is and what you would propose as an alternative?

0:15:13.0 DT: It’s not an alternative. It’s certainly true, that we need to enable students who go to college, to gain some type of employment. And again, we’re talking about a system that has 4000 institutions, so I also acknowledge that there’s a significant difference, if you’ve got someone who’s 25 and goes to a community college and wants to become a trades person, and somebody who’s 18 and goes to…

0:15:44.0 SA: USC.

0:15:46.7 DT: Yeah, USC or Stone. But again, most of us, not all, but most of us, I think, can make the case that in the last four years, democracy has been at risk in this country. And I think, when you look at different organizations, some held up better than others. I think that we all… It seems, from both sides of the aisle, we will acknowledge that Congress is not working the way we want it to, and there’s certainly scurrilous public media outlets out there now. But I also think that the fifth estate, the places like The New York Times trying to step up their game and tried to point out what’s truth and what’s fiction. Well, can you think of another organization, that its reason of being is trying to delineate the difference between truth and fiction?

0:16:56.6 DT: To me, this is so inherent about what academic life is about, that why would we not have been central to the discussion and argument in the last four years and going forward. I worry when I read now, about, I don’t know, the phrase Deep Fakes. And the Deep Fakes are the ability… And it’s not… The problem is, it’s not just Russians, the ability to put out information that appears true, and it’s not. And we could get to the point where someone would not like the conversation we are having, and totally change your dialogue and my dialogue and we wouldn’t be able to delineate the differences. Today, you can still do that. Well, again, these type of things, not only in terms of research, trying to figure out how do you tell truth from fact or fiction, but it’s central to what academic life is about, and that’s what I want. I want us to be more “us” higher education, to be more engaged in these conversations. I think, at times, we avoid them and we avoid them for largely for two reasons, I think. One, college presidents and boards have grown more cautious in speaking up, and they know that they are dependent, public institutions in particular are dependent on public dollars, they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.

0:18:39.1 DT: And I think we do that at risk. And I think we are also concerned on campus that if we have these kind of conversations, they are difficult. And students of one persuasion or another are going to hit back and say, “Don’t do that.” Well, that students are going to be upset, I think is absolutely fine. What we need to do though is to say, “Look, we modeled the way to have difficult conversations.” Again, what I wish is, looking back in the last four years, I wish that President Biden would have been able to say in his inauguration, “We as a society need to be able to have difficult conversations just as they have been having on college campuses for the last four years, where people disagree with one another, but at the end of the day they’re able to talk with one another.” But you’ll notice, he didn’t say that. He didn’t even mention higher education.

0:19:51.4 SA: But you still shared with me when we came on that you were feeling optimistic. So let’s touch on that. The Biden Administration does have quite a bit of legislation that they are wanting to put through that will impact higher education, potentially, if it gets through. What makes you optimistic in this moment for higher education?

0:20:20.7 DT: In being optimistic, I’m not the opposite. There are folks like Clayton Christianson and others today. We have always had Jeremiahs that says, “The end is near.” And when thoughtful people say the end is near, it makes everybody nervous. And I think we need to take a breath and say, “4000 institutions shutting down in the next 10 years is not gonna happen.” Yes, we are going to see some institutions close, but why am I optimistic? Well, I think we are learning things from the pandemic. One of them is, I live in Los Angeles, and my doctor and I, or the different doctors I’ve seen and I, have tele-appointments just like we’re doing right now on Zoom. I think that’s fantastic. I would much rather sit in my office drinking a cup of coffee rather than have to race across town in LA traffic, sit in his office for 45 minutes because he’s never on time, and then drive home. So I really see that as we’ve learned something, and I don’t see us going back to that. When you look at restaurants, I think it’s tragic that a lot of restaurants are gonna go out of business. But I also think it’s pretty self-evident that people like to go to restaurants and we’re gonna see restaurants exist. Well, then think about higher education. The joke about faculty is that they can never change. And lo and behold, as a professoriate everybody changed within two weeks. They went from teaching courses in-person to online.

0:22:18.9 SA: It was pretty remarkable, actually.

0:22:20.8 DT: It was remarkable, and again, it’s something that we should celebrate and honor. But the other part of it that I find amazing is, lo and behold, one of the things we found out, is that students actually like classes, that they do wanna be in class. Now, again, we can change things, it’s not every person who teaches the greatest lecture every single time. But I think a takeaway is to say, “These places are places where people do like to congregate, and we need to reconfigure them.” Again, I think one thing in terms of cost savings for our colleges and universities is something else we learned, is that probably the manner in which our workforce goes to work needs to be rethought dramatically. In my center, my secretary lives about an hour and a half away. And again, fighting traffic in Los Angeles is horrible.

0:23:26.0 SA: Yes, it is.

0:23:27.0 DT: She’s been fantastic, and it would be strange, I think, for the university to say, “Well, the pandemic is over. Everybody needs to come back just the way it was.” So we’re going to have some empty buildings if we reconfigure things thoughtfully, and those buildings are worth something in terms of how do we rent them out and who do we make them available to. So it’s just, I think, is a social organization. One, it’s been proven during this pandemic that people like universities, those who use them, students and faculty and staff. The other is the case that I’m trying to make is that how essential they are for the future of a democracy. And to do that, it’s hard for me to envision that all we’re doing is online classes in a for-profit mode, and we as a society will benefit from that. We won’t.

0:24:30.2 SA: Now, for some students though, the online environment probably does make sense because they have life circumstances that makes that… What is flexible and works for them. Because your secretary, for example, is more time-poor in an in-person world. So it could be that this has given us an opportunity to understand across modalities and across different hybrid situations that we have some flexibility to meet our students where they need to be met.

0:25:04.9 DT: I think, in particular, Sally, it’s not an either or. You’re absolutely right, that there are some students who for one reason or another… In another life, I used to work on a tribal reservation. The distances are remarkably far, so the thought that we had to have students drive three hours for one class because it was a three-hour class, and then drive home three hours is… You’re not going to succeed that way. So for some students, that’s absolutely true. But the real opportunity I think we have now is that, although the bulk of students’ classes can occur online. Let me come back to that point of 40% of our students are graduating in six years. How can we change that? Part of the way we change that is the way we think about online learning, the way we think about watching TV or watching shows. Is it possible that a student can take something online that is valid and reliable, and not just something to get credits than dollars for us, but it’s worthwhile? And the truth is, absolutely. Absolutely, we can do that. I wanna see the opposite, actually. Rather than 40% graduate in six years, I wanna see 40% graduate in three years. And I think we can do that in a positive way. I think this is a great time if all of us come together and try to figure out, “How can we reconfigure the university and make it vital for the 21st century?”

0:26:41.4 SA: So let’s talk about the role of faculty in that endeavor. Because certainly shared governance is something that is held up as well important to the culture of the institution, often a slowing mechanism to bold change. And yet it’s very clear in your writing that you feel that faculty and tenure and faculty involvement in the decision-making is critical to a solution that’s going to be abiding and successful. Can you talk about that a little bit?

0:27:15.7 DT: Sure. Let’s recognize first off, and this is really to my friends on the faculty, that there’s not a plot, a coordinated plot out to eliminate tenure. That’s not the way a system of 4000 institutions work. It’s not that every president gets on some secret Zoom call to don’t hire tenure-track faculty. It’s actually the opposite. It’s you have deans in colleges, at institutions and they’re trying to make their budget, balance their budget, and they go, “I can’t afford this, what do I do?”

0:27:57.5 SA: That’s exactly right.

0:27:58.5 DT: And the easy solution is, “Well, we’re not gonna hire the replacement for Bill Tierney, and we’ll save that line and we’ll put the money somewhere else.” The point is you can cut off fat and then you’re just hitting bone. That we have been seeing a decrease in tenure-track faculty across the board for 20 years. I think that’s harmful, and we need to think about ways to reconstruct that. And you’re going to ask, “Well, how do we do that? How do we pay for that?” Let’s recognize that tenure is a structure, but how we define that structure is up to the faculty and administration. What I mean by that is, it changes in different places, but I would think top tier four-year universities, semester-driven, we would probably say that most faculty have a 2-2 teaching load, two courses in the fall, two courses in the spring. And that’s what I got. And that’s the way that I think about it. And nothing’s gonna change that.

0:29:26.2 DT: Well, we can change that. There’s no reason that we can’t change that. It takes the will of the administration and faculty to come together and talk about changing things in a particular way. We know that the life career of a faculty member changes over time. You would hope that I’m a different person today other than when I started out when I was 30, other than I have less hair. But I’m not sure that all faculty are as productive in every single domain throughout their career. So why is it that we can’t create broad strokes and say in honest conversations with individuals, and say, “Look, Sally, you came here as a 2-2 faculty member, but if you look at your research productivity over the last couple of years, over the last two years, it has dropped dramatically. Why don’t we make it better for you and better for us in terms of what you’re going to do to get promoted, and a raise, if there are such things as raises ever again, and you’ll teach six classes a year?” Why do we do that? We do that because tenure allows faculty and the institution to speak out, to raise difficult questions and speak on difficult topics across the board, inside and outside the university.

0:31:01.0 DT: If I’m at a for-profit institution where there is no such thing as tenure, I can be dismissed tomorrow. And really, what a for-profit institution is saying is, “Your voice is not important to us.” Well, we can’t have it both ways in our public and private non-profit institutions. We can’t say your voice is important to us, we just don’t have that structure that enables you to be protected with that voice.

0:31:30.9 SA: Great, thank you. Lots of thought-provoking ideas and suggestions. That is Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education. We didn’t even scratch the surface of the many topics that you address in this really intriguing book, so thank you very much, Dr. Tierney. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.

0:31:51.7 DT: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it.

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0:31:58.5 Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Please join us next week when we talk about a new fellowship program that’s helping to fill the void caused by shrinking university investment in things like professional development for faculty. Until then, thanks again for listening to Office Hours with EAB.

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