Why “One Size Fits All” Policies Don’t Work for Higher Ed

If the only version of college that existed was the kind portrayed in pop culture, you might think all colleges feature stately academic buildings and residential halls arranged in ordered quadrangles, with 18- to 22-year-olds involved in athletics, Greek life and general campus hijinks. With the notable exception of the TV series “Community,” these tropes remain remarkably stable over time, from the 1970 preppy Harvard of “Love Story” to the fictional historically black college of Spike Lee’s “School Daze” to the fantasy universe of Pixar’s “Monsters University.” 

And yet, persistent as the image may be, the college of popular imagination does not represent reality for most students.

We know this by looking at the data — specifically, the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education. These reports, issued triennially, are the closest thing to a census for the higher education sector: a simple count and categorization of institutions, with enough historical data to be able to identify interesting trends.

The 2018 report counts 4,324 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the U.S., with a total enrollment of just over 20 million students. Only about 13% of these institutions are highly residential, with at least half of their students living on campus. A third of all institutions are two-year colleges. More than half of the institutions have open admissions, and only a third of students attend institutions characterized as having “more selective” admissions criteria. And 21% of the institutions are privately run for-profit colleges.

The truth is, a relatively small number of very large institutions serve a disproportionately large number of students: 65 two-year institutions (only about 1.5% of the total number of postsecondary institutions in the U.S.) enroll about 1.7 million students (8.5% of the total). To put it another way: Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions in the country, currently enrolls about 100,000 students, which is well over twice the total number of students that my institution, Kenyon College, has enrolled over its 194-year history. Yet schools like Kenyon are closer to the popular image of college.

Why does this matter? Because the popular image of college plays an outsized role in guiding public opinion and policy decisions. As economics reporter Ben Casselman highlights in his piece “Shut Up About Harvard,” media focus on elite colleges distorts debates on affordability, student debt and campus politics. Pundits and politicians have made the image of out-of-touch college campuses, overrun with politically correct ideology, a convenient target for criticism. Setting aside the question of whether that depiction is accurate, the institutions targeted, such as Yale, the University of California-Berkeley, and Middlebury — all highly selective and residential — are far from representative of the higher education sector.

This distortion leads to the conflation of “college” with “elite,” which has rhetorical consequences in current policy debates. In one recent example, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri called for legislation reforming the financing of higher education in a speech deriding the “elites” of colleges and universities. If reform is what we are after, we must first recognize that “elite” institutions are a small fraction of colleges and universities overall, and serve an even smaller fraction of students.

Even policymakers who generally support higher education frame proposals to expand postsecondary education in opposition to the current system. This rhetorical stance leads to problematic policies, including pitting funding for job training against funding for Pell grants. The principles of the proposed policy are sensible and have bipartisan support; yet the proposal ignores the fact that a significant number of institutions serving Pell-eligible students — two-thirds of all two-year colleges, in fact — provide career and technical training as a central part of their mission. Pitting the two programs against one another reinforces false images of higher education and contributes to an erosion of confidence in the higher education sector — not to mention misguided policy. 

The diversity of the U.S. higher education landscape is one of its great strengths; our nation has not opted for a one-size-fits-all model of postsecondary education but rather cultivated a broad range of institutions to meet the diverse needs of the population. Understanding this diversity is key to building public confidence and devising real solutions to pressing problems in our higher education system.

Sean Decatur is the 19th president of Kenyon College. Follow his writing here and on Kenyon’s website.