N.B. This is a long post, discussing both higher education futures and the economic challenges of STEM graduate education.
As Lewis Carroll wrote in The Walrus and the Carpenter,
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax -
Of cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings."
I speak, of course, of the complex, often eroding, and – to any outsider, seemingly nonsensical – financial models of most U.S. public higher education institutions. Some of this necessarily reflects their manifold and expanding mission, in varying parts social service agency, hospitality service operator, real estate developer, performing arts center, museum complex, sports franchise, and healthcare system, alongside the enduring and core missions of education, research, and community service.
Even as public colleges and universities struggle financially, the rising cost of higher education has put a college degree beyond the financial reach of an increasing fraction of students, with many increasingly questioning the value of a degree, as the post-World War II notion of the American Dream fades with it. Meanwhile, the U.S. leadership of the global academic research enterprise is slipping away.
What happened? How did college become unaffordable for so many? How did we lose touch with so many of society’s pressing needs? Where did we lose our way? More importantly, can we speak honestly and forthrightly about the problems and their solutions?
The Brave and Uncertain New World
Today’s colleges and universities are so much more than curricula and classrooms, social networks, and athletic teams. Universities all too often find themselves not just educating, but also helping impoverished students find a place to sleep overnight or even find a meal to eat. They may be providing essential mental health services for students in crisis or addressing intimate partner violence and sexual assault. With the public social safety net increasingly limited, universities are now often the helper of last resort, with resource demands and service expectations unknown a generation ago.
All of this is occurring amidst lagging state and federal support, and the limited backfill afforded by philanthropy. Consequently, university finances have become a byzantine web of cross-subsidies and interdependencies, with a surfeit of needs and a deficit of resources. In turn, this has created competing agendas and incentives, an expanding backlog of deferred building maintenance, and increasing and worrisome addictions to rising tuition and cheap labor. It’s a Faustian bargain at best, and the future of our public colleges and universities now hangs in the balance, measured in dreams deferred and opportunities lost.
At their best, U.S. public higher education institutions have been a transformative societal force, uplifting millions into higher socioeconomic classes via inculcated knowledge, skills, and acumen, and creating the new knowledge that has illuminated our world, transformed our economy, advanced our national security, and improved our health. The generational impact of the G.I. Bill in educationally and economically uplifting millions of returning veterans is undeniable, as have been the benefits of the National Defense and Education Act’s investments in higher education and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
Pointedly, the cracks in the façade of U.S. higher education excellence are increasingly obvious and concerning, even as global competition in the knowledge economy intensifies. Although U.S. higher education institutions remain the envy of the world, other global universities, notably in China, are increasingly rivaling or eclipsing the U.S. in research citations and impact, as those countries invest in higher education.
Make no mistake, an educated and empowered populace of a community, a state, a region, or a nation remains the only truly renewable resource, the key to public health, national security, and economic competitiveness. A clarion call for reckoning now echoes loudly throughout our society, as the past speaks urgently to the present about the exigencies of future. It whispers about what was, what is, and for better or for worse, what might be. (See Academia: Who We Are and Why It Matters and Innovation Imperiled: Golden Eggs No More.)
How Did This Happen?
Some of U.S. higher education’s challenges are a consequence of our fractured and litigious society, the pitched cultural battle between the left and right over perceived ideological purity, and, concomitantly, declining societal support for education as a universal public good rather than a perceived individual and private benefit. It’s been further exacerbated by the discordant, self-reinforcing echo chambers and ever shrinking sound bites that now pass for public debate. (See From Broadcast to Narrowcast: Finding Signal in the Noise and Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)
Nor are we in higher education without culpability, having been complicit in protecting the ivory tower, slow in responding to societal needs, and smug in our defense of often hidebound traditions and byzantine bureaucracy. There are also substantive ways to reduce costs judiciously and prune non-essential services, while retaining the core educational mission, and these should be pursued assiduously. However, such changes are unlikely to substantively change the cost structure of higher education. Even with automation and expanded online classes, education remains a labor-intensive endeavor.
In public higher education institutions, these pernicious realities have led to a decline in inflation-adjusted state support, compensated only in part by rising student tuition. The latter, of course, has made college increasingly unaffordable and precipitated a student debt crisis. Concurrently, colleges have found themselves in the crosshairs of the national political battle, critiqued by some for indoctrinating students with liberal values. It's a wicked problem, a catastrophe of potentially existential proportions. (See On Catastrophes and Rebooting the Planet.)
Not surprisingly, the result has been increased questioning of the cultural and economic value of higher education, even among those predisposed to believe its enduring importance. As an example, a recent survey by the Association of American Universities showed that roughly half the respondents felt a college degree from one of the leading research universities in the United States was valuable but not worth the cost. Without doubt, a college degree remains an economically and culturally wise choice for many, when coupled with appropriate career counseling, but we have not done nearly enough to address rising education costs, respond to market demands, meet students where they are, and prepare them for a lifetime of learning and periodic retraining. (See Higher Education in the 21st Century.)
Conventional wisdom says the first step in any addiction treatment and recovery program is personal honesty – admitting that one has a problem, then taking determined action. Alas, I fear we in higher education are still in denial. (See Pinball, War Games, and Universities.)
Our addiction takes many forms. On the staff side, it includes an increasing number of poorly paid adjunct lecturers, often euphemistically called career-line faculty, who teach a large fraction of our undergraduates. It includes the underpaid support staff who maintain our buildings and grounds, and others who advise and support students. It also includes many of our faculty outside the professional schools, particularly in the liberal arts. All struggle to afford housing and find child care, and some are forced to avail themselves of federal assistance programs. Even more troubling are those contract teachers whose work is spread across multiple institutions; many lack health insurance.
On the student side, it includes well-documented undergraduate tuition and affordability challenges, as well as mental health support, and food and housing insecurities. Convolved with these is an ugly truth – fewer than half of all college students will graduate within four years, leaving them saddled with debt, but lacking the intellectual “union card” – a college degree – that creates differential market value.
Even there, the near-term financial return on investment (ROI) differs markedly based on the type of degree earned and the institution from which it was received. Meanwhile, high paying, intellectually satisfying jobs in the skilled technical workforce go unfilled, ones for which training is much less expensive and time consuming than a college degree.
It also encompasses an issue little discussed outside academia, namely the sad financial state of graduate students and post-doctoral research associates (post-docs). Finally, it is reflected in our focus on academic rankings and prestige, often at the expense of the communities and states who need our help.
Before delving into these dynamics, it’s worth remembering how much the world of higher education has changed in my professional lifetime. Herewith is a personal story, which I will use to illustrate shifting academic finances and affordability.
A Personal Tale
Sometime after the K-T extinction, when mammals began filling the newly vacated ecological niches, I started college. The year was 1975, Saigon had just fallen, Nixon had resigned the year before, and platform shoes and polyester leisure suits were all the rage. I will begrudgingly admit to owning the former, but I vehemently deny ever owning or wearing the latter – I may have been poor, but I did have some sartorial principles.
As a first-generation college student and poor scholarship kid from the Arkansas Ozarks, I was able to attend and graduate from college without debt, thanks to a combination of academic scholarships (National Merit Scholarship Program and university), Basic Educational Opportunity Grants (now Pell) for low income students, and the small amount of money I could save working at summer jobs; my parents were unable to help me financially. I lived like a pauper, with a social life limited to free lectures and cultural events, and my wallet was empty, save for my student ID card and a driver’s license. The latter was of about the same practical value as a launch authorization for a Mars mission, as I lacked both a working heavy lift launch vehicle and an automobile.
In the process, I became intimately acquainted with student dormitory housing and the culinary delights of fixed menu cafeteria food – eat what was served or go hungry. Finally armed with an aging and cantankerous Ford Galaxie 500 – the green monster – I lived in a trailer park mobile home for a bit, where I learned to appreciate a variety of nutritional price performers, including “four for a dollar” Kraft mac-and-cheese (Pro tip: It’s better with milk, even powered milk, but it’s edible even with water). Nevertheless, in my mind, I was rich beyond imagining. (See Transforming Lives via Public Higher Education.)
With an undergraduate degree in computer science now within reach, I told my father that I had higher ambitions. I planned to attend graduate school, rather than get a job, one that would have paid substantially more than my father earned as a sawmill laborer. In response, he looked at me sadly and said, “Son, you know we can’t ever afford that.” I just smiled and said, “Dad, here’s the amazing thing. It won’t cost anything. In fact, they will pay me to go to graduate school!” Already poor, I did not fully realize how many more years of deferred financial reward I had unknowingly embraced. Free can prove extraordinarily expensive.
When I began graduate school in January 1979, annual inflation in the U.S. was hovering near 14 percent, proving the truth of the hoary guns versus butter economic adage and highlighting the hidden costs of the Vietnam War, which begat the failed Whip Inflation Now campaign. Because I completed college early, I began graduate school “off cycle” in January, with a fellowship that did not start until September. That spring, I was a teaching assistant (TA), lecturing on the joys of FORTRAN programming to engineering students at 7:30AM as I watched the sun rise over the snow-covered Purdue campus.
As a TA, my monthly stipend was a princely $368/month, which covered food and a room in a graduate student residence hall, with perhaps ~$20/month of discretionary money. I felt rich when my graduate fellowship began that fall, for it was a munificent $400/month, about $1,400/month in today’s inflation adjusted dollars. Alas, with no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), the $400/month stipend was quickly eroded by inflation, moving me from poor to poorer. Then my old car died, leaving me an involuntary pedestrian, constrained to live in on-campus graduate student housing until I completed my Ph.D. in 1983.
Graduate school now behind me, I drove away to my new academic job in a cheap, subcompact car, financed on the strength of my future income, all my worldly possessions inside – some old clothes, a battered popcorn popper, a cheap guitar, some books and graduate school notes, and a bicycle. After my arrival at my new home, I began my career as an assistant professor, living in a one bedroom apartment.
Lest the de minimis nature of my material state remain in any doubt, my little apartment was soon burglarized and ransacked, but nothing taken, for I lacked anything worth stealing. I’d have been annoyed if my bicycle has been stolen, but outraged if my graduate school books and notes had been pillaged. The only other, potentially more devastating insult would have been if the burglar had left a $20 bill and a note, saying “You need this more than I do.”
Shifting Student Economics
What is the moral of my little story? First, the 1970s and 1980s economics of higher education afforded me an opportunity to realize my dreams. It was not easy, but like thousands of other students, I completed both undergraduate and graduate degrees and emerged with no debt. For that, I will be forever grateful.
Alas, it is increasingly clear that my path is no longer easily replicable. Undergraduate tuition at a state university in the 1970s was just a few hundred dollars per year, an amount covered by any reasonable combination of an academic scholarship, BEOG/Pell grant, summer job savings from a minimum wage job, and for families wealthier than mine, some parental contributions.
Today, undergraduate tuition at most public institutions exceeds $10,000, with comparable student room and board costs. Put another way, a four-year college degree at a public university can cost substantially more than $100,000, while the maximum Pell grant is under $7,000, and just recently increased by $500. Further confounding the economics, four years was once the nominal time to complete a college degree. Today, we most often report six year graduation rates, as students work full or part-time jobs, delaying graduation as they struggle to cover college costs.
As for graduate school, I never paid graduate student tuition – I had no idea what it even was. It was once common to waive tuition for students employed as TAs or research assistants (RAs), and it was included in fellowship awards. Such graduate tuition waivers are now less common, particularly in STEM disciplines, as universities seek to recover tuition from federal research grants and contracts. In turn, this has exacerbated pressures on the federal research enterprise – more on that later.
Meanwhile, as data from the National Science Board and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) show, the percentage of graduate STEM degrees awarded to international students continues to rise. The fact that the U.S. is a magnet for global talent is a tremendous competitive advantage.
Not only do many of those international students pay tuition, many remain in the U.S. after school and contribute greatly to the vitality and economic competitiveness of the country. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study highlighted the disproportionate positive contributions of immigrants on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But this begs an important question – where did the domestic STEM graduate students go?
Graduate School: Yes, It Is Different
If one is pursuing a terminal professional degree (e.g., an MS or MBA), graduate school may seem like an in-depth continuation of the undergraduate experience, filled with classes and projects, albeit focused on one’s chosen discipline. For those aspiring to a research Ph.D., the experience is strikingly different. (See Research: When There Are No Answers in the Back of the Book.)
Many Ph.D. students serve as teaching assistants (TA), research assistants (RA), or graduate fellows (i.e., they are supported by the university, either with institutional funds (TAs) or research grant or contract funds (RAs)). In STEM fields, RA support is common, though rare in the humanities. One is not quite staff, and certainly not faculty, but neither is one fully a student.
TAs assist faculty, hold office hours, grade homework sets, lead discussion sessions, and, in some cases, as I did, even have full responsibility for a class. RAs and fellows are research apprentices, working in faculty-led research laboratories, often, but not always on projects related to their research, hoping to collect the requisite data and experimental validation needed to craft a Ph.D. dissertation. Post-docs labor in a different netherworld, hoping to build a resume worthy of an academic faculty position.
In a perfect world, all of these young scholars would be mentored, nurtured, supported, and treated as future members of the profession, whether as future faculty, industry or laboratory technical staff, or government experts. In many cases, they are, but all too often they are treated – implicitly or explicitly – as cheap labor whose primary function is to further the career ambitions of the faculty advisor or to satisfy the institutional needs for inexpensive instructors. Amidst this class system, TAs and RAs battle the existential angst of graduate school, uncertain when – or if – they will graduate, dependent on the continuing good will of their supervisor and advisor for intellectual and emotional support, letters of recommendation, and certifications of academic progress.
Graduate school will always be intellectually challenging – pushing the boundaries of the known is never easy. As Jimmy Dugan said in A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
However, intellectually difficult, graduate education can and should be a nurturing and supportive environment. Indeed, there are very good ideas for how to improve this process, reemphasizing the role of mentorship and respect, reducing the power inequities between advisor and advisee, and better educating students to translate their knowledge into practical impact. (See, for example, the recent NAESM study, Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century.) Sadly, there can be strong faculty resistance and institutional disincentives to implement these changes.
More Than Genteel Poverty
The stress of graduate school is made more difficult by the vow of poverty taken by graduate students. Yes, one is paid to be a TA, RA, or fellow, but the compensation is low, and increasingly inadequate to meet the basic cost of living needs in many American communities. For graduate students with dependents, those from traditionally under-represented groups, and those with little intergenerational wealth, the financial challenges can seem bleak, especially with annual inflation in the U.S. now above six percent. (See Missing Talent, Missing Opportunities, and Losing Ground.)
In response, graduate students are increasingly turning to strikes and unionization to increase their bargaining power. The recent strike by University of California graduate students and post-docs – the largest in U.S. history – brought salary and working environment issues into stark relief. The newly negotiated contract raises the minimum salary for nine months to just over $34.5K, with a slightly higher rate of $36.5K at UC-Berkeley, UCSF, and UCLA, in recognition of the high cost of living there. Contrast that with MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, which estimates a “living wage” for one adult without children at $50,463 in Alameda County, the home of UC-Berkeley.
Why has it been so challenging to raise graduate student salaries? In part, it is related to the financial exigencies facing universities, but there is a complicating factor related to federally-funded research. Federal research grant sizes have also not kept pace with inflation, and raising RA stipends would necessarily reduce the number of funded RAs. Moreover, it would create strong equity pressures to raise TA salaries, which are funded directly by universities, to comparable levels.
Again, let me illustrate the challenges with a personal example. My very first National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in 1984 was for ~$55K (~$155K in current dollars), enough to cover two months of summer salary for me for three years, fund travel and supplies, and cover the salary of one graduate student for three years, the standard NSF grant period. Mind you, my nine-month academic salary was $30K, the then common starting salary for assistant professors in computer science. Moreover, the university waived tuition for funded research students, meaning tuition was not charged to the grant, and the cost of health benefits was much lower.
If one examines the history of NSF funding from the Merit Review Digest,, the median award size in 2020 was ~$150K, and it has remained largely stagnant since 2011. Any simple analysis shows that this number is now inadequate to support activities similar to those I pursued in 1984. The stipend, benefits, and tuition for a single graduate student over three years easily exceed this amount, leaving no funds for summer faculty salary, supplies, or research travel. This means faculty must scramble to write more proposals – to multiple funding agencies – to create a portfolio of awards with differing objectives, timescales, and funding levels to maintain a research laboratory.
To be sure, money – current or deferred – has never been – nor should it be – the primary reason to attend graduate school or become an academic. However, a stark and growing financial disparity between private sector remuneration and graduate student compensation can be an insurmountable social and economic barrier to many.
Houston, We Have a Problem
We’ve now talked of many things. The sea, though not boiling hot, is experiencing global warming due to climate change. As for pigs, absent a lower gravity environment and deeply unethical genetic engineering that substantially exceeds our current capabilities, they really can’t fly. But, U.S. higher education and its research enterprise face very real problems. Let’s summarize the challenging calculus.
Public Higher Education Dynamics
- Society is increasingly questioning the value proposition of public higher education, both as a valuable return on family investment in undergraduate education and as a force for good – culturally and practically – in our cities, our states, and our country.
- The upcoming (2025) demographic cliff – a decline in the number of U.S. high school graduates – will create even greater competition for students and their tuition dollars. Some smaller institutions, particularly private ones, will be forced to close their doors, and many public institutions will be forced to retrench and eliminate programs.
- The student debt crisis is real, with the burden falling disproportionately on lower income, first generation, and traditionally under-represented students.
- We have made a college degree the default social objective for all high school graduates, even as high paying jobs in the technical trades go unfilled.
- Public colleges and universities continue to raise undergraduate tuition to offset declining state support. In most states, these form an “x curve,” with tuition now a larger contributor to college and university budgets than state appropriations.
- Financial pressures have triggered a shift toward lower paid, contingent faculty, who are hired only to teach, rather than conduct a mixture of teaching, research, and service.
- Aspirations are good, but mission creep has led many of our community colleges to aspire to become four-year institutions, our four-year institutions aspire to become research universities, and our research universities to aspire to flagship leader status. An appropriately differentiated — and interconnected — educational system serves different educational niches.
I believe it is time for us to collaboratively and thoughtfully rethink the social compact surrounding public higher education. This includes defining the 21st century knowledge economy version of the public land-grant university, which was originally charged to
… teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanics arts, … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.
It means admitting that we in higher education do not have all the answers, or even know all the right questions. It means a true conversation – of give and take and mutual respect – where all parties put aside preconceived notions about the best path forward. Concomitantly, it means using our intellectual expertise to deliver perceived and real value to our communities, regions, and states, addressing the social, economic, technical, and cultural issues that now bedevil our society.
It also means embracing differentiated higher education roles, recognizing that each type of institution is a critical part of our higher education ecosystem. Finally, it means better career counseling about expected outcomes from differing courses of study, including celebrating the skilled technical workforce (aka, the skilled technical trades) and importance of preparing graduate students for non-academic careers. Only by doing so will we change the rhetoric about higher education’s utility and the importance of investing in our children’s and our country’s futures.
Now, let’s turn to the other issue – the challenges facing our STEM domains. (N.B. Equally important, partially overlapping but also partially orthogonal, issues face the liberal arts and humanities. Both are important, as transdisciplinary education is critical to addressing our societal challenges.) (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.)
STEM Research Dynamics
- Completing a STEM Ph.D. can take five to seven years, sometimes more, at low pay and long hours, with continued support dependent on the research supervisor’s ability to secure competitive research funding.
- In many STEM disciplines, four or more years of post-doctoral study are then expected, also at low pay and with long hours, if one intends to seek an academic position. During this process, all too often we fail to provide adequate mentoring and career development, as most post-docs take industry positions, rather than academic ones.
- Academic faculty salaries are often not competitive with those in the private sector, and one may never recoup the five to ten years of “lost income” during one’s graduate and post-graduate education.
- Except in growing STEM disciplines (e.g., computing), the competition for tenure track faculty positions is increasingly intense. Moreover, with few universities growing, the availability of such positions depends on faculty retirements and domain fit. This is exacerbated by current faculty deferring retirement and many tenure track positions being replaced with lower paid adjunct instructional faculty.
- U.S. leadership in STEM, once unquestioned, is increasingly in doubt as China builds world-class research universities and develops critical technologies such as AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology.
- Because the growth in federal research funding has not kept pace with workforce growth and inflationary pressures, the probability that a research proposal will be funded is now lower than in the past. Many NSF programs now have proposal success rates in the teens, and median award sizes have been stagnant for a decade. Similarly, the mean age to receive a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant (the academic gold standard in biomedicine) is now well over 40 years.
- Universities conduct research to build prestige, attract high-quality faculty, and explore the future. However, in a narrow sense, research loses money, as the direct and indirect costs (overhead) from federal grants and contracts rarely cover the true costs of research facilities, libraries and serials, research computing, pre-award and post-award services, research compliance, and a host of other services. The deficit is paid by institutional funds.
The career opportunities enabled by graduate degrees vary widely across disciplines. In some, a Ph.D. is de rigueur; in others, it is optional, though the value is intellectually and economically demonstrable; and in some cases, it may not be worth the opportunity cost of delaying entry to the workforce. In all cases, the personal financial costs of graduate education continue to grow.
In my own discipline, computer science, the opportunities and the resources available in industry often make it more attractive for domestic students to either skip graduate school entirely, or leave with an M.S. rather than a Ph.D. In part, these opportunities explain the relative dearth of domestic Ph.D. students in computing. Conversely, graduate school provides an intellectual, cultural, and visa entry point (via optional practical training and H-1B visas) for international students.
Finally, we must never forget that humans pursue science and engineering research for the joy it brings, just as do artists and musicians. Discovery illuminates the great unknown and satisfies the human curiosity older than history. (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder and The (Scientific) Good News.) In so doing, it provides the insights and ideas that advance our society, improve human health, and secure our economic future.
It’s not always about the money, but neither should the lack of money close the door on talent. Nevertheless, the invisible hand of economics is real, tempered by market realities, career ambitions, and credential expectations. We must recognize and address the economic challenges that bedevil our domestic graduate students and our faculty, which limit both their numbers and their diversity. It’s ethically and practically important.
Coda
There can be no doubt that our current higher education and research enterprise has both great strengths, but also deep flaws. Higher education is too expensive for too many, and too many of our public colleges and universities are struggling financially. Simultaneously, our research ecosystem is stressed and falling behind our global competitors.
As a country, I believe we must put aside our differences – at least long enough to recognize our shared fears, hopes, and dreams – and rethink our approaches and renew the social compact. Only then can we build the social consensus needed to invest in the future appropriately. In so doing, we can create an environment that not only redresses current university funding deficits and academic dynamics, but also responds to societal needs and expectations. In the process, we can and must build a culture shaped by what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” (See For Science and Society, the Future Begins with Better Dreams.)
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