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By Louis Menand Font Size: A A A College: The End of the Golden Age Louis Menand OCTOBER 18, 2001 ISSUE 1. Except for a brief contraction in the early 1990s, the higher education system in the United States has been growing steadily since the late 1970s. Roughly half of all Americans now have attended college at some point in their lives, and roughly a quarter hold a postsecondary degree. (In the United Kingdom, by contrast, less than 15 percent of the population goes to university.) There are 14.5 million students in American colleges and universities today. In 1975 there were a little over 11 million; in 1965 there were fewer than 6 million. And yet when people in higher education talk about its condition and its prospects, doom is often in their voices. There are three matters these people tend to worry about: the future of the liberal arts college; the “collapse” (as it’s frequently termed) of the academic disciplines, particularly the humanities; and the seemingly intractable disparity between the supply of Ph.D.’s and the demand for new faculty. There are more college students than ever. Why does the system feel to many of the people who work in it as though it is struggling? The fate of the liberal arts college, the decay of the disciplines, and the tightening of the academic job market present, on one level, distinct issues. The problems at the liberal arts college are chiefly financial; the problems in the humanities disciplines are chiefly philosophical (what does it mean to study “English,” for example); the problems with the job market are chiefly administrative—at some point, it seems, graduate schools will simply have to stop admitting more students than they can hope to place in permanent teaching positions. (Despite the consumer warnings about the job market that are now routinely issued to applicants by graduate admissions committees, between 1985 and 1997 graduate student enrollment increased by 27 percent.) The issues are related, though, and the easiest way to see why is to look at the system as a whole. According to the Carnegie Foundation classification (the industry standard), there are 3,941 higher education institutions in the United States. Only 228 of these—5.8 percent of the total—are four­year liberal arts colleges that are not part of universities. Even in the major research universities (the schools categorized as Doctoral/ Research–Extensive in the Carnegie classification, including such schools as Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago), only half of the bachelor’s degrees are awarded in liberal arts fields (that is, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities). In fact, apart from a small rise between 1955 and 1970, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded annually in the liberal arts has been declining for a century. The expansion of American higher education has been centripetal, away from the traditional liberal arts core. The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty percent of all BAs are awarded in that field. Ten percent are in education. Seven percent are in the health professions. There are almost twice as many undergraduate degrees conferred every year in a field that calls itself “protective services”—and is largely concerned with training social workers—as there are in all foreign languages and literatures combined. This helps to explain the apparent anomaly of a declining job market in an expanding industry. In 1970, nearly 25,000 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics (about 3 percent of all BAs), and 1,621 received bachelor’s degrees in fields categorized as “parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies.” In 1997, 12,820 students graduated with degrees in mathematics (only 1 percent of all BAs) and 15,401 took degrees in parks, etc. This is why math Ph.D.’s who wish to teach and do work in pure mathematics cannot find tenure­track jobs. It is not that there is no demand for college math teachers; it’s that there is much less demand for specialists in pure mathematics. The same thing has happened in English language and literature. In 1970, English majors took 7.6 percent of all BAs; by 1997, the figure was down to 4.2 percent, a drop in absolute numbers from 64,342 to 49,345. Literature courses are still taught, but the market for specialists is much smaller, since fewer undergraduates take classes beyond an introductory level. The shrinking of the liberal arts sector (except in a few disciplines, notably psychology and the biological sciences, which produce more BAs now than they did twenty­five years ago) obviously has an effect on the disciplines themselves. Scholarship is, after all, largely a byproduct of the system designed to produce college teachers. People go to graduate school most often in order to acquire the credential they need to get a job teaching college students, and in order to acquire that credential, they are obliged to produce specialized scholarship under the direction of scholarly specialists. If (hypothetically) it were suddenly decided that the ability to produce specialized scholarship had no relevance to college teaching, and different requirements for the Ph.D. were instituted, academic scholarship would pretty much dry up. But that does not seem to be the anxiety that’s driving the so­ called “collapse of the disciplines.” In order to understand the real extent of the transformation of American higher education, we have to go back fifty years. 2. The history of higher education in the United States since World War II can be divided into two periods. The first period, from 1945 to 1975, was a period of expansion. The composition of the system remained more or less the same—in certain respects, the system became more uniform—but the size of the system increased dramatically. This is the period known in the literature on American education as the Golden Age. The second period, from 1975 to the present, has not been honored with a special name. It is a period not of expansion but of diversification. Since 1975 the size of the system has grown at a much more modest pace, but the composition—who is taught, who does the teaching, and what they teach—changed dramatically. This did not happen entirely by design. In the Golden Age, between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.1 In the 1960s alone enrollments more than doubled, from 3.5 million to just under 8 million; the number of doctorates awarded annually tripled; and more faculty were hired than had been hired in the entire 325­year history of American higher education to that point. At the height of the expansion, between 1965 and 1972, new community college campuses were opening in the United States at the rate of one every week. Three developments account for this expansion: the baby boom, the fairly sustained high domestic economic growth rate after 1948, and the cold war. The impact of the cold war on the growth of the university is well known. During the Second World War, educational leaders such as James Bryant Conant, of Harvard, and Vannevar Bush, formerly of MIT, instituted the system under which the federal government contracted its sci­entific research out to universities—the first time it had adopted this practice. Bush’s 1945 report, Science —The Endless Frontier, became the standard argument for government subvention of basic science in peacetime. Bush is also the godfather of the system known as contract overhead —the practice of billing granting agencies for indirect costs (plant, overhead, administrative personnel, etc.), an idea to which not only many scientists but also many humanists owe their careers. This was the start of the gravy train that produced the Golden Age.2 In 1958, as a response to Sputnik and concerns about a possible “technology gap,” Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which put the federal government into the business of subsidizing higher education directly, rather than through government contracts for specific research. The act singled out two fields in particular as targets of public investment—science and foreign languages—thus pumping up two distinct areas of the academic balloon. The act was passed just before the baby boom kicked in. Between 1955 and 1970, the number of eighteen­ to twenty­four­year­olds in America grew from fifteen million to twenty­five million. And the entire expansion got a late and unintentional boost from the military draft, which provided a deferment for college students until 1970. The result was that by 1968, 63.2 percent of male high school graduates were going on to college, a higher proportion than do today. This is the period when all those community college campuses were bursting up out of the ground. They were, among other things, government­subsidized draft havens. Then, around 1975, the Golden Age came to a halt. The student deferment was abolished and American involvement in the war ended; the college­age population stopped growing and leveled off; the country went into a recession; and the economic value of a college degree began to fall. In the 1970s the income differential between college graduates and high school graduates dropped from 61 percent to 48 percent. The percentage of people going on to college therefore began to drop as well, and a system that had quintupled, and more, in the span of a single generation suddenly found it­self with empty dormitory beds and a huge tenured faculty. This was the beginning of the long­term job crisis for American Ph.D.’s, and it was also the beginning of serious economic pressures on the liberal arts college.
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