Introduction

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION is widely praised for its accessibility, scale, and diversity. In recent years this acclaim has been tempered by concerns over rising costs, cutbacks in support of public education, low degree completion rates, and skepticism about higher education's ability to contribute to the clear need for upward mobility in America, all of which raise troubling questions about the nation's capacity to lead a global economy. Almost every contemporary issue facing higher education—from broadening student access, to achieving better learning outcomes (especially higher completion rates and reduced time-to-degree), to increasing productivity and lowering costs—is impeded and frustrated by a hundred-year-old system of governance practices that desperately needs modification. Perhaps most worrisome is the uncertainty one senses about higher education's resolve to reform from within.

The question of why anyone should care about a subject as arcane as the practices governing colleges and universities is a reasonable one. Contrary to the adage that academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low, today there is little doubt that the societal consequences of not addressing college and university governance are greater and more serious than they have ever been. Our country faces the transcendent challenges of raising the overall level of educational attainment and reestablishing the principle that higher education is the pathway to social mobility. This latter principle, which began to be enunciated forcefully only in the postwar years, is much more fragile and impermanent than we care to admit. If we are going to increase the fraction of the population with college degrees to as much as 60 or 70 percent (as President Obama has urged us to do), and provide meaningful opportunities for upward mobility, the heaviest lifting will have to be done by the less privileged and less well-resourced institutions that serve so many of our students.

Obviously, the quality of the education delivered is of great importance, but we do not deal with that tricky issue in this study because of its complexity. We concentrate instead on three other crucial aspects of educational outcomes—attainment, degree completion, and disparities in outcomes related to socioeconomic status—that are, in at least some respects, more amenable to analysis.

First, as is well known, overall completion rates (measured for present purposes by the percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds with BAs) had been stuck on a plateau since the late 1970s.2 More recently, there has been an uptick in educational attainment, with the percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds holding BAs or higher degrees increasing from 30 percent in 2007 to 34 percent in 2013. But the changing demographics of America warn us that elements of the population with below-average attainment rates (especially Hispanics) are growing relative to the main group with above-average rates (the white population). A second reason for caution in extrapolating progress is that we do not know how much of the recent uptick in attainment rates is due to the timing of the 2007 recession—or to what extent more recent improvements in labor markets will lead to decreases in enrollment and attainment (full-time undergraduate enrollment was 3 percent lower in 2012 than in 2010). Moreover, the absolute level of the current educational attainment rate remains unacceptably low if the United States is to compete effectively in an increasingly knowledge-driven world—a world in which other countries have been improving their attainment rates much more rapidly than we have.

Second, overall time-to-degree is long and has increased rapidly. The percentage of students completing their studies in four years fell from 58 percent for the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1972 (NELS-72) cohort to 44 percent for the NELS-88 cohort—the putative high school class of 1992.

Third, another very troubling "fact of life" is that in America today there are serious disparities in both completion rates and time-to-degree associated with socioeconomic status—and that, once again, the problem appears to be getting worse. Disparities in completion rates between those in the top and bottom income quintiles are appreciably greater in the 1979–83 birth cohort than they were in the 1961–64 birth cohort. Compounding the problem of growing differences in graduation rates are increased disparities in time-to-degree.

Fourth, there is widespread concern about the affordability of higher education (some of it exaggerated and misplaced, to be sure, but these concerns are real, and perceptions matter almost as much as realities). Worries about the rising net costs of higher education for many students and their families are exacerbated by what David Leonhardt calls "the great wage slowdown of the 21st century"—the fact that "the typical American family [today] makes less than the typical family did 15 years ago, a statement that hadn't been true since the Great Depression."

We must ask whether it is reasonable to expect a century-old structure of faculty governance to enable colleges and universities of all kinds to respond to new demands for more cost-effective student learning. Will institutions that educate growing numbers of students from first-generation, under-represented, and disadvantaged backgrounds be able to make the organizational and pedagogical changes that preserve higher education as an engine of social progress? And can those institutions regarded as pacesetters in both the public and private sectors do more than maintain their positions in the higher education hierarchy? Can they provide both examples of successful uses of new approaches and leadership for higher education generally?

We believe it would be wise to heed the cautions of Clark Kerr, one of the twentieth century's wisest, most thoughtful, and innovative higher education leaders:

The professoriate is not well organized to consider issues of efficient use of resources. Many decisions with heavy cost consequences, including faculty teaching loads and size of classes, are made at levels far removed from direct contact with the necessity to secure resources. Departments usually operate on the basis of consensus and it is difficult to get a consensus to cut costs.

At this point in time, we are dealing with deeply entrenched cultural expectations that are a century old and system-wide and cannot be changed easily. As Kerr presciently observed in 1963:

Faculty members are properly partners in the [higher education] enterprise with areas reserved for their exclusive control. Yet when change comes it is rarely at the instigation of this group of partners as a collective body. The group is more likely to accept or reject or comment, than to devise and propose.

Both of these observations by...