Constraints and Opportunities

Abstract

Liberal education has always proved a challenge to deliver systematically, if only because by its very nature it is difficult to specify. In the United States, institutions that seek to offer liberal education on the threshold of a new century operate under new or, at least, significantly more chafing constraints. This article examines some of these constraints and suggests ways in which they can be relieved or accommodated. The principle constraints discussed here are those of shrinking material resources, expanding and accelerating expectations, and increasing heterogeneity across the student body. In the face of these constraints, academic institutions from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities are no better able than other institutions to adapt themselves to changing circumstances—and perhaps a little bit less so. Resource constraints stem from internal and external causes. The internal causes, I will argue, are the result of an economic anomaly. It is not possible for the direct delivery of liberal education to become significantly more efficient in the same way that other economic processes do, at least in part because liberal education is not something that can be "delivered": thus, there is a productivity lag behind other sectors in the economy. The institution cannot fully compensate for this lag by making improvements in the efficiency of other activities (e.g., computing or building maintenance). The external causes, in the public sector, arise from the insistent demands for other uses of public funds, combined with continued popular resistance to tax levels comparable to those of other industrial democracies. In the private sector, the external cause is the declining capacity (or willingness) of families and individual payers to meet even a partial share of the cost of liberal education. Other constraints result from expanding and accelerating expectations as students and their families demand that they be prepared for specific jobs or get a leg up on specific postgraduate professional training. In a sense this is the other side of the coin of employers' broader demand for higher education. As the proportion of jobs requiring undergraduate and graduate degrees has increased, the vocational aspect of higher education has increased accordingly.