Over education?

The OECD's dangerous game.

The OECD seems to have committed to the idea that “too much” higher education is bad for society. The reported problem with too many people going to college is that many graduates are unemployed and have skills that are mismatched with labor market demands. Further, reformers note that concentrated advanced education into a few years in early adulthood is incongruent with the lifelong learning demands of contemporary society. On their own, each of these problems is worth considering. But prominent policy thinkers recently linked to the OECD have recently leveraged vague issues of misalignment between higher education and the economy to make the sweeping claim that higher education needs to be reined in.

Let’s start with comments that Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills, made to a UK policy group in March. Schiller attributed the slow development of career-oriented micro-credentials to recalcitrant universities that use their power to prevent change. Or, as Schleicher put it, the universities are “actually very comfortable. You bundle content, delivery, accreditation – you can get a quite nice monopoly rent.” He argued that university degrees were good for universities but not for society. Schleicher proposed that policymakers intervene and wrestle control of higher education credentials away from academic institutions. He said governments should not “leave the credentialling to the providers.”

Dirk Van Damme, an education consultant and the former head of
the Center for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD offers a more nuanced call for vocational credentialing in the recent issue of International Higher Education, which Boston College publishes. Van Damme says governments should focus on expansion and quality improvement in the sub-university vocational education sector. He also says links between vocational and higher education (universities) should be strengthened. Nothing wrong with either idea. It’s the justification that concerns me. Van Damme wants “over education” and notes that too much university training can harm society. It is not just that countries should do a better job of providing quality vocational training. Van Damme pairs that call with an implicit call to shrink the university sector and discourage at least some young people from pursuing a degree.

The strong implication of Schleicher’s remarks, and subtle suggestion in Van Damme’s, is that governments ought to use their anti-trust powers to break up the authority of universities. Schleicher spoke about universities the way one might talk about how Google and Microsoft bundle products to force out the competition.

Interestingly, this muscular rhetoric follows years of unrealized market disruption to higher education. In the 2010s, MOOCS were supposed to displace the social power of traditional higher education providers. It didn’t happen. Microcredits and boot camps have loomed in the distance for years and never seem to get any closer to disrupting higher education. Education market theorists don’t have to have sinister motivations to be wrong. Those who understand higher education as a market - even one substantially supported by the state - are perplexed by why the market forces have yet to revolutionize how higher education works in society. By failing to appreciate that higher education is a social and cultural institution and, therefore, unlikely to be moved quickly by market forces, education planners and reformers face dissidence when predicted outcomes never come true. To correct this distance, rather than adjust their theory, they tend to identify barriers to correct market functioning like monopoly power, leading to proposals for more aggressive policy interventions. All the get the free marking working as it should.

I see at least two potential problems from the reformer and planner’s resistance to updating their market-based theory.

Wasted energy.

By insisting that change in how higher education works is coming - that it MUST come - reformers and planners expend a great deal of energy and resources dedicated to theorizing and bringing the change into reality. Time-consuming meetings and conferences, expensive to-commission government reports, philanthropic-funded think tank operations, and capital investments in ed-tech start-ups that never profit are all the costs society realizes from higher-education-as-market-conceptualized reform movements.

Shifting the Overton window rightward.

I’ve also noticed a relationship between the market for vocational education rhetoric and reactionary views on higher education. For example, when I was working with colleagues on a paper that linked GOP support for higher education with the racial composition of state systems in the US, one of the comments we got from early readers and reviewers was that conservatives preferred vocational education. In a matter of years, however, Marco Rubio’s preference for vocational education over the liberal arts lead to Ron DeSantis’ all-out assault on academic freedom and university independence.

To be clear, I don’t think the OECD officials share DeSantis’ views. But I worry their rhetoric opens a space in public discourse and the policy window to advance populist, often racist, anti-intellectual politics.

How should we think about higher education?

Ok, enough from me. But how do you think higher education should be theorized, and what are the implications for policy and public debate? Leave a comment for me and others to see.