HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

Multiple Field Perspectives

W. Richard Scott

Many informed observers believe that the field of higher education is on the cusp of a major change if not a full-fledged revolution. The increased costs of attending college combined with steady reductions in public support have helped undermine confidence in and support for the status quo. Concerns for low completion rates and limited learning have grown (see Chapter 7). These developments have been accompanied by the rapid onset of the digital revolution, which commenced in scattered ways among peripheral players in the 1970s but has now invaded the major colleges and universities and spawned entirely new types of organizational providers (see Chapter 2). I attempt to place these developments in context—historical, structural, and cultural—by employing the concept of organization field. The field approach reminds us to take account of the full range of educational organizations, to realize the extent to which these organizations are supported and constrained by other types of actors, and to attend to sources of change, reactive mobilization by incumbents, and unanticipated effects following from these contending forces.

More importantly, viewing higher education as an organization field allows (forces?) us to recognize the extent to which existing structures and beliefs shape present and future developments. While we describe new initiatives intended to disrupt and renew, we also consider the inertial properties and interests vested in the current systems, emphasizing both their resilience and their capacity to resist and co-opt challenging groups. As DiMaggio (1991) reminds us, examining the origins of fields as well as periods of contestationand struggle reveal much about the underlying and often concealed power processes embedded within every field.

The field concept can be fruitfully employed at the local, regional, national, and even international level. This chapter concentrates on the national level, specifically, the case of the United States. During the forty or so years since the concept first emerged in organization studies, it has been elaborated and challenged by alternative formulations, each of which offers important, and different, insights. I organize this chapter around three competing field models: (1) higher education as an institutional field, (2) higher education as an arena of strategic action, and (3) higher education as a demand-generated outcome. I devote more attention to describing the first, foundational model because it is more fully developed and more widely employed as a guide to understanding our current system. However, the two later-developing models may provide more purchase in understanding recent developments and have more to teach us about the future of higher education.

Higher Education as an Institutional Field

This conception of the field of higher education seeks to explain why there exists a limited number of types of colleges, depict their origin and salient characteristics, and describe the diverse, complex collection of other types or organizations that has arisen to control and support them.

In their foundational formulation, DiMaggio and Powell define an organizational field as consisting of

those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products. (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148)

Like the concept of "industry," an organization field is constructed around a focal population of similar organizations—in our case, colleges and universities—but expanded to include other types of organizations that interact with this population, including exchange partners, clients, funding, and regulatory organizations. Fields incorporate both relational systems, as organizations and their participants create networks to exchange information and resources and enter into status and power relations, and symbolic systems, as these relations are grounded in and infused with shared cultural-cognitive and normative frameworks. In this view, organizations within a field "share a common meaning system and interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside of the field" (Scott, 1994, p. 208). Because these fields are defined by a set of commonly shared institutions, they are here termed institutional fields. Such "local social orders" are the building blocks around which modern societal systems are constructed (Fligstein, 2001, p. 107).

Diverse Providers

According to current accounts, higher education is among the most successful "industries" in the United States. A recent survey of the top universities in the world by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University reported that the top one hundred universities included fifty-three U.S. universities, while the top twenty included seventeen U.S. universities (Institute of Higher Education, 2011). While this view is heartening (if you are an American), it is fundamentally misleading. The top-tier universities are hardly representative of the thousands of colleges and universities in America—some forty-two hundred—that have emerged during the past half century and now account for most of the providers and enrollments in higher education. The elite schools and universities serve less than 15 percent of college students. A field perspective urges attention to the full range of organizational forms—including those programs educating the vast majority of students.

A crude but instructive classification identifies six types or populations of colleges:

1. baccalaureate colleges (liberal arts colleges)

2. comprehensive colleges (baccalaureate and advanced degrees)

3. research universities (focused more on advanced degrees and knowledge creation)

4. associate degree programs (community colleges)

5. special-focus institutions (e.g., theology, medicine, law, art)

6. for-profit entities (special-focus, baccalaureate, and associate degrees)

Each of these types is associated with a distinctive structure strongly influenced by the circumstances present at the time of its emergence.

Baccalaureate colleges, the prototypical college form, carry features based on their medieval European counterparts and remain the oldest and most familiar form. Their defining features include relatively small size, high ratios of teachers to students, and emphasis on undergraduate, residential education. Until recently, these organizations provided the basic structural template for colleges following in their wake, being organized as either public or nonprofit systems and employing a model in which professional academic participants are given considerable autonomy, working within collegially controlled departments, while managers oversee support structures (e.g., buildings, residential systems, student services).

Comprehensive colleges emerged in the late nineteenth century, as a collection of more advanced vocational and professional training programs were added to existing undergraduate colleges. These forms are typically public systems, supported by states and large cities. This model was substantially advanced by the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act, in 1862 and 1890, when the federal government commenced its partnership with the states to "promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life" (see http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/304). It was also fueled by the professionalizing efforts of many occupations during this period, who were attempting to elevate the status of their training programs by embedding them in colleges (Bledstein, 1976).

Research universities were modeled on late-nineteenth-century German programs that emphasized the role of knowledge creation and research training as central to the mission of higher education, although in the United States these programs typically also include more traditional undergraduate and professional training programs. Although these forms are the most visible and prestigious (e.g., Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Yale), they are outliers and unrepresentative of U.S. educational providers.

Associate degree (community college) programs first emerged in the early twentieth century, but their most rapid growth occurred after the 1960s in response to a public sector political agenda to expand opportunity by increasing college capacity, allowing greater numbers of high school graduates to obtain access to college. In these forms, however, faculty autonomy is weakened and professional controls are subordinated to managerial and union- negotiated work arrangements. Community colleges serve a wide range of goals including preparation of transfer students, vocational, and adult education.

Special-focus institutions concentrate on specialized technical or professional training in multiple areas, but the bulk of these programs are concentrated in health, business, and the arts.

For-profit entities operated for many years on the margins of the field as special-focus institutions, but in the 1980s they began to provide generalized college training. They have grown rapidly. This subpopulation is not defined by its academic mission but by its distinctive form. Rather than the professional organization model embraced, in theory if not in practice, by other forms of college organizations, for-profits have adopted the corporate model of organization. Curricular decisions are highly centralized, and teaching staff are accorded much less autonomy than in traditional colleges.

Isomorphic Pressures

A core argument of the institutional field approach is that pressures—both competitive and symbolic—arise that foster structural and procedural isomorphism (similarity) (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). To be recognizable, acceptable, and legitimate, organizations performing the same functions within the field come, over time, to be strikingly similar in their ways of organizing and modes of acting. Consider the types of colleges just discussed. As noted, these colleges appear at differing times in history in response to changing circumstances, arising in "spurts" followed by periods of less rapid growth. The structural features adopted by the organizational population tend to be stable—the colleges are "imprinted" by features adopted at the time of their founding that are reproduced over time by succeeding organizations (Stinchcombe, 1965).

These tendencies toward isomorphism are enhanced by the development of category systems. The categories of colleges that we employed are informed by more detailed classification systems developed by organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. These systems both reflect reality—being based on observations of real differences in modes of organizing and ways of pursuing goals—and help reinforce and even reify these differences. If you find that you are in an organization considered to be a member of a class of other organizations, you begin to make comparisons and to seek models, both positive and negative, from this subpopulation. Such pressures have increased in recent decades with the widespread use of rating and ranking systems in the mass media. For example, U.S. News and World Report began to introduce rankings of colleges in the 1980s based on college characteristics, such as student selectivity, faculty-student ratios, and performance indicators, later including student and alumni surveys—data that have encouraged colleges to adopt the structures and practices of their more successful competitors (Bastedo & Bowman, 2009).

More broadly, isomorphic pressures, which do much to provide coherence and order in a field, stem from many sources, including regulatory and coercive pressures from oversight agencies, normative pressures stemming from professional and administrative associations, and mimetic pressures of the type just described, which encourage organizations to imitate those whom they believe to be more successful (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2013).

Supporting Systems

Colleges are the focal organizational populations in a field, but they are surrounded and supported by many other types of actors, including associations of organizations whose members are organizations—and associations of individuals. Many associations of organizations link colleges of the same type (e.g., Catholic colleges, research universities) who, although competitors, come together to create mechanisms for advancing their common interests. In a parallel fashion, there are many associations whose members are individuals, including professional associations for both faculty and staff members; unions composed of teachers, staff, or graduate students; and alumni associations for former students. Of primary importance, however, are the disciplinary associations among faculty, because they serve as central components of the overarching governance structure of higher education.

As B. R. Clark reminds us, in addition to being a network of varying enterprises (colleges), "a national system of higher education is also a set of disciplines and professions" (1983, p. 29). Disciplinary associations are especially salient for schools in the upper tiers of the field: the elite colleges, comprehensive colleges, research universities, and special-focus institutions. For faculty members in these settings, discipline typically trumps enterprise. Abbott argues that the resilience of the academic disciplines within higher education rests on their "dual institutionalization":

On the one hand, the disciplines constitute the macrostructure of the labor market for faculty. Careers remain within discipline much more than within university. On the other hand, the system constitutes the microstructure of each individual university. All arts and sciences faculties contain more or less the same list of departments. (Abbott, 2002, pp. 208–209)

In addition, these associations and their members help colleges oversee the quality of their faculty appointments as well as help assess the overall performance of their departmental programs. (These comments apply much less to broad-access institutions, including comprehensive and community colleges, in part because such a high proportion of the faculty in these colleges has adjunct status, as discussed shortly.) Professionals also staff accreditation agencies that provide certification for colleges. Whereas in most countries, these functions are carried out by public ministries of higher education, in the United States they are assigned to a collection of six regional accreditation agencies. A favorable assessment, while not required for a college to operate, is a significant marker of legitimacy and also a condition for students enrolled to be eligible for federal loans to finance their education. Accreditation programs for special-focus institutions and for professional schools in comprehensive colleges and universities are carried out by the relevant professional associations. It is hard to overstate the extent to which normative controls exercised by professional associations and their members provide structure for the field of higher education: meaning, coherence, standards, templates for organizing, and protocols for guiding the educational activities of college participants.