Sometimes There’s a Wolf

In his 2023 book, “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Brian Rosenberg sums up higher education’s aversion to change. In making his case, the Macalester College president emeritus identifies institutional barriers, such as shared governance and insular cultures, that keep higher education from addressing uncomfortable truths, like a flawed economic model and plummeting public support. He warns that this head-in-the-sand strategy will leave higher education vulnerable to a political take-down, like the one it is currently experiencing. 

Now that external forces of change, led by the Trump administration, are threatening to upend higher education as we know it, Rosenberg is far from gloating. A visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rosenberg continues to advocate for strategies that will strengthen higher ed—those that will bend the cost curve, improve the student experience, and open up access for people who want to go to college but can’t afford it. He distinguishes this type of change from the unhelpful assaults on higher education he believes will have disastrous effects on the sector he both admires and admonishes. 

In this candid interview, Rosenberg explains how higher education got to where it is now and why this is not the time to stay neutral.  

LW: You have long advocated for change in higher education which, as you say, is very difficult to achieve. Do you think this point in time feels different?

Rosenberg: Higher education has been the most stable industry in the world for centuries. It hasn't really needed to change in more than incremental ways, and there have been some good things about that. But when you go years and years without change because you don't have to, you also fall into some really suboptimal practices, and sooner or later those are going to catch up with you. I think right now the pressures on higher education are so strong that incremental change just won't do it anymore. People have been saying this for a long time, and it's easy to think of someone like me as a boy crying wolf. But what I say to people all the time is, every once in a while, there's a wolf. And I think we're at that moment. 

LW: What would you say is driving the necessity for change?

Rosenberg: First, the economic model is unsustainable. The demographic trends are not on our side. And if it wasn't clear to people a year ago, it certainly should be clear right now: people don't like us. If there's anything that the far left and the far right agree upon right now, it’s that they're not particularly fans of higher education. They have different reasons, but what we're seeing is that public discontent translates into public policy and that public policy has the potential to be extremely damaging to higher education, whether it's an endowment tax or cuts to funding from the N.I.H. (National Institutes of Health) or limitations on what people can teach or services they can provide. 

If people liked us, it would be harder to implement those changes. But because the public regard for higher education has declined so much, we become a politically convenient punching bag, and that's going to have real impact. If you combine economics, demographics, and public sentiment—you can throw in technology and artificial intelligence—I really do think we are at an inflection point now where same old, same old is just not going to cut it for the next five, 10, 20, 25 years.

LW: Let’s start with the economics of higher education. What needs to change there?

Rosenberg: When people say, change isn't really necessary, the number that comes to mind for me is 56%—that is the average discount rate now at private colleges across the United States. Higher education in these places is  on sale for more than half off. If you walked into a store and you saw a sign that said everything is 60% off, you would assume it was a closeout sale.

That is the definition of an unsustainable model—when that discount is going up every year and every year you are marking down your product more and more. And sooner or later you're going to get to 100% and be giving it away for free. So the need to bend the cost curve seems to me inarguable. We cannot continue on this economic trajectory. More people are deciding not to go to college because it's too expensive, and more people who can afford it are still deciding not to pay it because it's too expensive. In Boston for instance, the percentage of students in public schools who choose to go directly to college has dropped over the last decade from almost 70% to a little over 50%. In a high education state like Massachusetts, that's staggering. 

LW: People tend to think of high tuition as the result of overspending or inefficiency. Is there truth to that? 

Rosenberg: The economic problem in higher education is not caused by climbing walls and lazy rivers, and it's not caused by extravagant residence halls. Sure, at some institutions those are wasteful expenditures, but that's not what is driving the increase in cost. What is driving the increase in cost overwhelmingly is personnel, which is about two-thirds of the budget. The majority of every college and university budget in the country goes toward paying people’s salaries and benefits because it has always been a very people-intensive industry. And the problem that higher education has faced is that the cost of hiring those people has gone up, but productivity hasn't changed. It's a fundamental economic problem called “cost disease,” where your costs of hiring people go up but you see no increased productivity.  Industries that have bent their cost curves have generally done it by increasing productivity. It's easier to do in manufacturing than in service. If you look at things like the cost of producing an automobile adjusted for inflation, that's actually gone down because you have so many fewer people. It's so automated. But in higher ed, that’s not the case. 

The second largest cost driver is the physical plant. Institutions tend to have big, old physical plants that cost a fortune to maintain. They almost all have gigantic deferred maintenance budgets that they're not really addressing. The only way to make it cheaper—and people don't like to hear this, but it's true—the only way to make it cheaper is to do it with fewer people and fewer buildings. And that's very, very hard to accomplish in higher education because it's not wastefulness as much as it is things that we prize. Things like student faculty contact are exactly the things that drive our costs. We haven't found the right balance between doing things that we think are effective and doing things that we think are economically affordable. And so that's the situation that the vast majority of colleges that are not places like Harvard find themselves in right now.

LW: What is at stake here if higher education does not change?

Rosenberg: I think what's at stake is that you're likely to see high quality higher education become a luxury good reserved for the few and much lower quality, less expensive higher education become something that most people experience. At one extreme, you have places like Harvard and Williams and they're not going to go anywhere, but I think we run the risk of seeing a lot of very good, much less wealthy institutions go away and be replaced by institutions that are far less effective and consumer-focused. 

I'm someone who believes that essential public services are not best served when they are provided by for-profit entities because the profit motive and the motive of social good can come into conflict.  Worst case scenario is that higher education becomes taken over by for-profits and it stops being a public good and starts being a revenue source and a way to return money to shareholders. And I think that would be a disaster.

LW: The title of your book suggests you know something about resistance to change in higher education. You’ve lived it and studied it. What is your theory?

Rosenberg: If I had to boil it down to the simplest formulation, I’dborrow a phrase from Larry Bacow, who was the president at Tufts and then the president at Harvard for five years. He has said, “Virtually none of the internal actors within higher education have incentive to change it.” There's certainly a lot of incentive for people outside of higher education—families who want to pay for college, students who want to attend college, states that want to educate more people. But inside higher education, if you think about the key actors, you have college presidents, and any college president who wants to keep their job knows that if you push for dramatic change, you're likely looking at no-confidence votes and a short presidency.  If you want to keep your job as a college president, the easiest thing to do is not rock too many boats. Steer the boat, but don't sharply change direction because you're probably not going to survive. 

Boards of trustees certainly at private colleges are made up of alumni whose vision of the college is from the past more than it is the future. And so they hold on very tightly. And this is true of alumni in general. They hold on to the past version of the college that they experienced. Any college president you ask will tell you that any kind of change beyond what is very small is going to get pushback from alumni. If you're a tenured faculty member and you have a job for life and your institution isn't about to go under, why in the world would you change anything? You have a privilege that no other worker in the American workforce has, with the exception of federal judges. 

People often point to students, but when students push for change, it tends to be around things like political issues or better food in the dining hall. Most students don't want the college that they enrolled in to go through disruptive change while they're there. That's not comfortable. The only people within the system who I think are incentivized to change it are the people who have no power to change it. I would say that's staff, non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. They all know the system's broken, but they have no power in the governance instruction. And so you have power located with people with no incentive to change, and you have incentive to change located with people who have no power. And that is a recipe for stasis. And of course then there are all these structural impediments like shared governance.

Anyone who studies change will tell you that two of the conditions that are necessary to change an organization are the right incentives and alignment, and you don't have either in higher education. The desires and the priorities of a history department and the priorities of a college president are not necessarily going to be in any way aligned. And colleges, if you think of a metaphor, aren't like highways. They're like those bumper car rides that you used to go to at amusement parks, where everybody's driving into each other and nobody goes anywhere because everybody's driving in their own direction. That's kind of the way decision-making at a college happens. We prioritize participation over outcomes. And that has a history that goes back more than half a century now, and it's very hard to change when consensus and innovation don't sit easily together because innovation by its very nature is disruptive and consensus by its very nature is not.

LW: What other things about higher ed do you think need to change that may or may not be related to the economic model but may be contributing to the decline in public sentiment or the questioning of its value?

Rosenberg: Higher education has tended to be extraordinarily insular. Just think about the typical college campus: it has sometimes literal walls between itself and the rest of the community, and it certainly has figurative walls. One of the things that needs to change is that higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?” People who teach at liberal arts colleges or research universities don't like to hear this, but we need to be asking, “How can students get jobs?” This is for most people the largest investment they're going to make other than maybe buying their house. Especially for first generation students, getting a job is not a luxury. It's kind of a requirement.

I'm not saying that it all needs to be vocational, but are we teaching the right skills? Are we teaching the right competencies so that the people we are sending into the workforce are the people that employers want? Right now, the message back from employers is you're not doing a very good job, that there's not a great alignment between what we're seeing in your graduates and what we want in our employees—things like creativity, being able to work in teams, resilience, adaptability. There are certain hard skills like being able to communicate well, work with numbers, work with data sets. I would describe it as a set of hard and soft skills that higher education has neglected in its focus on disciplinary expertise and on research. I mean, most college and university majors are still designed as if their graduates are going to become college professors, and that's not what they're doing. 

I also think about the method of instruction. There have been, at this point, countless studies that have shown that passive learning is not very effective. And yet higher education still relies very heavily on things like large lectures, when we know that students learn very little in that setting. You get a grade, you move out of the class, and then within a year, you don't remember anything that you learned, whereas learning through doing—experiential learning—teaches you a lot more. And higher education has been incredibly slow to embrace the importance of learning-through-doing rather than learning-through-listening ,so I think the pedagogy could be improved as well. And that means that faculty members like me who were trained in a certain way have to rethink how they teach. And it's hard to get people to do that. 

LW: Without those incentives, other than being a good person who cares about the post-graduate lives of your students, what is the motivation for professors to change their teaching? 

Rosenberg: I think the incentive is going to come from the bottom-up and not from the top-down. All of these schools now are facing incredible constraints and challenges, and you have a choice when you're in that situation. For most schools, the incentive is survival. If you're going to survive, then you're going to have to offer something different than what you're offering now. I have to believe that there are going to be some schools that take a look at a failing model and say, “All right, we have nothing to lose. We're going to try something different.” My old AP biology teacher used to say that the nature of change is adapt, migrate or die, and migration is not a real option for colleges. But adapt or die is going to be, I think, the thing that sparks change In higher education. 

LW: You mentioned experiential learning, working in teams, some of the other high-impact practices that have proven to lead to things like wellbeing, fulfillment, and flourishing. These outcomes are also important to employers. Do you think embracing these kinds of experiences would help improve how people view higher ed?

Rosenberg: I think they would. And again, even if you look within very well-resourced institutions, there are departments that are struggling. Everybody points to the humanities. And so if you're in a department where you're just bleeding students, it seems to me you should be incentivized to look at what you're doing and say, “All right, what can we do to make what we're doing, what we're teaching, more attractive to students?” And that would mean adopting some of those high-impact practices that we know work very well. 

We're not talking about the French Revolution here. I think that there are things that could be done without completely blowing up the system that would begin to incorporate some of these high impact practices and conceivably could help bend the cost curve a little bit. For example, if you have more students doing group work, then maybe you don't need quite as many TAs, or maybe you don't need quite as many instructors because students are working in groups. So certainly, it could improve the quality, and it might actually even help with the cost.

LW: As you say, the wolf is at the door. Is there anything positive about what we are witnessing from the Trump administration in regards to changes in higher ed?  

Rosenberg: Is there anything positive here?  Sometimes it takes a major jolt to the system to change something for the better. If you're in the habit of driving while intoxicated, and you get into an accident, and you narrowly escape with your life, maybe you say, “I'm not going to do that anymore.” And I would say higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?”

I don't know what's going to happen with this cut in indirect cost from the NIH, but if it stands, no university, even places like Harvard and MIT, is going to be immune. It's certainly a message that if you don't pay attention to the world outside the campus, sooner or later, that's going to come back and bite you. And so if we get through this without complete disaster, maybe colleges and universities will rethink how they engage with the world beyond their campuses, do a better job of making the case for their value, and actually provide more value.  I think it's waking people up to the fact that whether we like it or not, it's not going to look the same in 10 years as it looks now. The question is: to what extent do we want that forced upon us? And to what extent do we want to try to have some control over that?

LW: What would you offer as suggestions to people like Vice President JD Vance who have called higher education the enemy?

Rosenberg: If in some alternative universe, someone like JD Vance were reasonable enough to actually listen to how to improve higher education, my response would be pretty simple and that is to double the Pell Grant—double the size. That is one tool that could make a major difference tomorrow. The Pell Grant has been stuck in the $6,000 to $7,000 range for decades. When it was first designed, it mostly covered the cost of college. Now, it doesn't even come close, unless you're talking about a community college. If you dramatically increased the Pell Grant, a) the money would be going to people who need it—lower income students and families—and b) it would make college much more accessible. I don't believe everybody should go to college. What I believe is anyone who wants to go to college should be able to, shouldn't be prevented by economics from not being able to. As with our infrastructure, we’ve neglected these kinds of investments because we're so fixated in this country on low taxes.

I would also acknowledge that one major weakness is that higher education has become too ideologically uniform and that that's not helping students. We need to figure out a way to make sure that people with all reasonable views can express them on college campuses without fear of reprisal or being shouted down. And that's on colleges and universities. We haven't done as good a job as we might have. That said, the answer to one form of censorship is not another form of censorship. And what we're seeing now, in response to the soft power of students shouting down a speaker, is the hard power of the government telling you what you can and cannot teach and what you can and cannot do. That's exactly the wrong thing. People like JD Vance and Musk talk about all the woke things that they're rooting out. What we're seeing now is that if you're not on board with that particular ideology, then the law's going to come after you. And that's a lot scarier. 

You can say all you want about student protestors or about student demonstrators, but their power compared to the power of the state is minuscule. And right now, we're seeing the enormous power of the state being brought to bear to shut down the open exchange of ideas on college campuses. And that is infinitely more dangerous than anything that's come from within colleges. So I would acknowledge the failures, but I would also say that this prescription for correcting it is worse than the disease.

LW: I am guessing this is not the kind of change you talked about in your book.

Rosenberg: That Dear Colleague letter from the DOE, I've never seen anything like that come from any agency of any government in my entire life -- state, local, federal. It read like an editorial in the New York Post. I mean, it was crazy—not just in terms of  its language, but its interpretation of the law was also just completely wacky. In some ways, it was directly inconsistent with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, where Justice Roberts said, for example, that schools could use the students' essays to make judgments about their life experiences. It went way beyond what was a fairly narrow ruling about affirmative action and admissions. I have yet to see a legal expert, right or left wing, that says this is actually supported by the law. There's nothing about it that's helpful. It's just a standard playbook: overreach and scare people. And it's a standard authoritarian playbook. What you get is a lot of what historians have called anticipatory obedience. People obey without you having to force them to do it because they’re scared. We're seeing a lot of that right now. It's a very effective way of exerting control when you can't actually do what you're threatening to do, but just the threat causes people to cower and to change what they're doing. 

LW: Are you disappointed in the way that higher ed leadership has responded?

Rosenberg: The short answer is yes, I'm disappointed. But I do understand. I'm sympathetic to the notion that we should become more neutral. It's probably true that higher education over the last decade has gotten too embroiled in political issues. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable because I think it coincided with the rise of Trump and so many actual or proposed policies that go against everything that higher education is supposed to stand for. That led higher education to get much more politically active and opened it up to a lot of these attacks.

I'm also sympathetic to the fear of reprisal. If you're a college president and you're dependent upon the legislature for funding, you don't want to do harm to your institution. But having said all that, we need to have a different response. This goes back to something called the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago in 1967, which talks about institutional neutrality. It says the exception to that is when society or some segments of society propose or do things that threaten the mission of the university. In these instances, you have an obligation to speak—not an option, an obligation. And I really believe that we're at that point now. I believe that more leaders have an obligation to speak about what parts of the university we will not compromise on and we will fight for and what things being done to our students in particular are unjust.  

I am sympathetic to the caution, but I'm also somewhat disappointed in it. I think that one of the things you learn when you're in a schoolyard is if you keep getting punched in the nose by a bully, they're going to keep punching you until you punch back. If you think that someone like Donald Trump or Elon Musk is going to stop punching you because you hide behind neutrality, you haven't been paying attention.