Conversations That Matter: Claudia Dreifus Talks About Why Colleges Are Failing U.S. Students

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Recently I spoke to author Claudia Dreifus about her new book. Here's what we discussed by phone (she's sympathetic to our cause, has Education Matters listed on her website, and so I urge you to buy this timely book):

CCJ: Claudia, thanks so much for agreeing to speak to me about your recent book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids - And What We Can Do About It. I know that you and your domestic partner Andrew Hacker put a lot of hard work into this book. How are people reacting to it? 

CD: The book is getting fantastic reviews—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg Business News, the Daily Beast, Worth, Kirkus, Library Journal, and more. But in certain circles, it is the most misunderstood book. So it's being well-received. But also misunderstood. But that's because we're attacking interests.

Interestingly, it was being attacked by one of the unions in this area. This book is pro-public higher education, pro-access for everyone, and yet we've been accused of being reactionary and anti-intellectual. It's odd, because it's the only book that is calling for unionization of adjuncts and graduate students.  I think it’s because we’re coming out against a culture of the professoriate, which we see as part of the problem, along with administrative growth and glut.

CCJ: I see. I read that Andrew stepped down from his full-time teaching position at Queens College, correct? Having been in academia myself and witnessing an alarming trend of professors who refuse to retire, even though there are so many people who are able to take their positions as freshly-minted PhDs, it's something I've discussed with fellow graduate students and recent faculty hires at the schools I attended. Tell us a little bit about Andrew's decision to retire. 

CD: Why should he hold a slot, when retirement with a TIAA-CREF pension wouldn't be much of a difference when it comes to his income? Andrew feels that more people should be doing this . . . in a lot of the state schools, the pensions are great. Now, I am against mandatory retirement, because of age discrimination, but because of tenure, this is different.  In the academy, no one with tenure need ever retire.  And a lot of people who may not even been all that productive when they were younger simply don’t.  Andrew now teaches as an adjunct—as I do.  It’s his 111th consecutive semester. Queens College is going to do a big “Andrew Hacker Day” next month to honor him.  We’re thrilled.
 

CCJ: I see. Tell us a little about yourself and your background.

CD: I come from the world of journalism which is very practical. But for both of us, who have been in academia for a long time, we've seen it change. The things that we valued in it have been devalued. We've been attacked for the belief that students should come first. Research, sports,  administrative stuff, all those bells and whistles that they’re adding onto the campus and which ends up in inflated tuition bills, all of that needs to be justified. The one thing that needs NEVER to be justified is money that goes for actually teaching young people. And that is the issue you're dealing with. I think it's very central to what's gone wrong. Most of this money has not gone into teaching. You, Cryn, are aware of the student loan situation, and I think the assumption that administrators have had for too long was  this: people could always afford these loans. I went to school in the '60s, and went to a private university (NYU), but at that time you could afford it. Expensive as it was, it wasn’t that sort of chunk out of a family’s income. And you didn't have to take out loans. 

Most of the people whom I went to HS with attended college for free - at what was then New York City’s public universities, which were very good. It was cheaper, but often just as good as any private place. As a result of this unshackled early life, my generation had a very different outlook on our lives. It's a great thing being 22 and being debt free. I mean . . . I feel terrible, you know, because a lot of young people at Columbia have asked me advice about going into the field of journalism. It's a tough field, but it's still something people want to do. Recently a woman who just completed a graduate degree in public health came to me with this question, but you know it's a terrible time to be leaving a graduate program in anything, since there are no jobs. Recently a woman who just completed a graduate degree in public health came to me with this question, but you know it's a terrible time to be leaving a graduate program in anything, since there are no jobs. She was asking me about the idea of going to journalism school. . . . 'you might as well—the job market is terrible,' I said to her, to which she replied, 'I already got 100k in debt.' She was near tears when she told me this. You see, her life choices are limited. When I was her age I had the freedom to live poor, and only do things I wanted to do. That allowed me to develop a career based on expressing myself and only taking work I felt morally comfortable with.
 

CCJ: I am afraid that is no longer an option, is it? The system, in my view, has been rigged in such a way that makes it impossible to pursue higher education and then pursue a type of career that allows you to flourish professionally. You trap these people by so much debt. It's degrading.

CD: I feel really bad for my students and Andrew's students. when I meet young students from Cooper Union with no debt, for instance, they are so much different than with those who do have debt.  The world is open to them.

CCJ: What are some of the schools that you thing are the worst and yet perceived by the public to be the best?
 

CD: We think the Arts and Sciences school in NYU is, well . . . everything is wrong with it. Huge over-crowded classes, science courses taught by indifferent professors and inexperienced graduate students and sometimes even college juniors.  Jam-packed facilities. It's so overrated. People are willing to pay for it, however, because they have a publicity machine that any major corporation would envy.  It’s one of the most expensive schools in the country, with one of the highest student loan rates. In my opinion they are not very invested in their undergraduates.  Now, the graduate schools they are good, and of course the Film School is fabulous. 

CCJ: Why do you think people are so intent on taking out loans and going to schools like NYU. Why can't people just say: 'the hell with an education. I'll be fine with my H.S. diploma in this market?' I have my own theories about how to answer that question, but I'd like to hear your take.

CD: Of course. The colleges and the universities have a lock on who will be middle-class and who won’t.  You can’t really be deemed middle-class without a bachelor’s, though there are some amazing exceptions to that rule like Bill Gates and some very affluent plumbers.

But the other thing you point out - I know - is that we all respect education so much that we don’t question what’s going on there enough. It's a quadrant of society that’s off our map until we get the tuition bills.  It used to be the same way when it came to medical care. But after 40 years of consumer action in health care, people do question their medical bills and their doctor's decisions much more. Even most private colleges are tax-deductible charitable institutions so they receive lots of public largesse.  That should be a wedge for the citizenry to question what goes on behind closed doors of the university. Instead, over the years, what goes on has become more and more invisible. How can Harvard lose perhaps a third of its endowment and even people at Harvard can’t quite figure out how it happened? The system needs a lot more transparency and consumers, yes, I use that word, need to act with a lot more interest in what will be the second largest purchase of their lives.

CCJ: Why now? Why did you write this book now?

CD: It's been germinating for a while. I happen to like where I teach right now. I’ve been treated quite well at Columbia and I probably do better than 98% of the adjuncts working in this country, though that’s just a guess. But in the 1990s, I did teach at New York  City College, in the Graduate English Department.  This was at time when the school was in grave crisis, attacked from all sides.  To be honest, I often saw things that made me think that some of the faculty there wasn’t  worthy of the students. The school was being demonized and in an attempt to de-fund public institutions. And the faculty, would say, 'ah . . . it's not MY City College anymore.' They were so indifferent in what their students were going through, and I thought these students were remarkably bright. At times they didn't have the greatest language skills, but some of them were really brilliant storytellers.  I was teaching writing non-fiction literature at the time.  Some of the faculty felt no connection, sadly, to these marvelous children of immigrants, these New Americans, the working class students, the blacks, the Hispanics. They were sleep walking through their jobs, biding their time till retirement and doing the minimum. One professor kept lecturing about the wonderful times he had as a student at Harvard—something of zero interest to our kids. And I found them wonderful and interesting.  As you can imagine, I didn’t last all that long in that environment.  Nor did my friend Barbara Probst Solomon, who recently won the King Carlos Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize of Spain.  They kind of booted her out too.  Being proactive really bothered the faculty there, being in the world.  As one of my students said to me, ' yeah get rid of the one who publishes.' So I saw a lot of things there that troubled me, and Andrew who had taught his 111th consecutive semester, he saw dramatic changes from the time he started teaching in the 1950s, too.  He began at Cornell and then left for Queens College, which is also part of the CUNY system. 

At both schools, it used to be that everybody taught the undergrads, and it bothered us that that was changing. We talked about it all the time and what we were seeing . . . the story we have in the book  about somebody who came to one of the city colleges for a job and, in essence asked, 'How much will I have to do this thing you’re hiring me for,' was something he witnessed. We kept assembling stories, not knowing where it was going, but we're both journalists. Oh, and we went to parties, and I remember going to a party that Tina Brown gave for one of Andrew’s ex-students and there was a man there who’d just started teaching at Brooklyn College. I asked him how his students were, and his answer was something like, 'they’re not really up to my level.' I thought, 'how awful. This guy should be fired.' That started getting me thinking, what kind of profession whose members blame the people they are supposed to be helping—it’s as if patients exist for the doctor’s pleasure and needs. ‘My patients are not up to my level.’ That was part of the beginning. Then we started looking into the economics.  Let me say we could have done three books because this is a very unexamined part of our society.

CCJ: I absolutely agree about the economic side of it. That's why I'm fighting to change the way in which higher education is financed!

CD. It's interesting. As I said, we've been accused of fueling a right-wing argument.  Anyone who says that anything is wrong on campus is a right-winger and an anti-intellectual. I don’t think this is a left/right issue. This is a right-wrong issue. But this is what I say to my brother and sister professors: there is a problem here, if you don't address it yourself, you will lose the ability to deal with it yourself. And the idea that people will always pay these insanely inflated and wasteful fees, is nonsense.

But the idea has always been, students will pay . . . no matter what. But the universities are actually causing a social problem, rather than solving some; if hundreds of thousands of young Americans are indebting themselves to a crippling degree, we have a moral and policy problem.

CCJ: That's why I am raising money to get people thinking about the insanity of paying for these types of degrees. So far I've raised $1000 to put an ad up on Yahoo! warning people about the situation. But could you elaborate more on this idea of faculty being at fault?

CD: When it comes to fees, it’s the administrators who set them. But the professoriate, at least the senior professoriate hasn’t stopped this. And they do have shared governance so they did have the mechanism in some situations to have an impact.   In a sense, they’re bad cops  . . . if you have bad cops who can't keep every day moral standards in order, soon you have a corrupt culture.

For instance, the universities are creating far too many PhDs. And for graduate students, it’s not just the ten years of study that is at stake for them, but 10 years of an emotional investment. Why are they creating probably 60% more doctorates than there are jobs for them?  Why are graduate schools expanding and why are ordinary colleges upgrading and building more graduate schools? Well, it's a very complicated system—based on growth.  Everyone in the academy wants to do more, get bigger, grow.  That’s how an administrator makes a reputation. And then, a department chair gets money from grants, and professors get brownie points for their graduate students. In the end, a graduate student should only do that for intellectual value studying because the odds are that he or she may well end up adjuncting.

Even worse, all kinds of graduate schools keep popping up - it's this unheard of expansionism, and nobody asks if it's really needed. There is almost no need for many of these new graduate schools, I mean, maybe in a few areas, it is worthwhile, but there’s tremendous duplication, faddishness, and prestige seeking.  The problem is no university makes a reputation for itself by refusing to expand.
 

CCJ: There is therefore this problem relating to regulation. As you and I both know, higher education has never been regulated like other industries. I mean that in all sense of the term. What are your thoughts on that?

CD: Well, I mention no regulations precisely because there are a lot of problems with non-profits and charitable institutions. You see, they've been exempt from many of the laws that almost all other businesses had to abide by . . .They don’t have that many people looking over the shoulders and examining their decisions.  Even the companies on the stock market have to report to the SEC, malfunctioning as that’s been.  When someone in the university creates a disaster, there’s little accountability.  Often these mistakes are made up by tuition and the feeling with So, you ask about regulation? Well, it is hugely complex. The fact is they are not subject to the same rules, and that's part of the problem. For instance, when they make disastrous decisions when it comes to their own financing, who is held accountable?  Who’s paying for the mistakes that Harvard made with its endowment?
 

CCJ: There is therefore this problem relating to regulation. As you and I both know, higher education has never been regulated like other industries. I mean that in all sense of the term. What are your thoughts on that?

CD: Well, I mention no regulations precisely because there are a lot of problems with non-profits and charitable institutions. You see, they've been exempt from many of the laws that almost all other businesses had to abide by . . . They don’t have that many people looking over the shoulders and examining their decisions.  Even the companies on the stock market have to report to the SEC, malfunctioning as that’s been. When someone in the university creates a disaster, there’s little accountability. Often these mistakes are made up by tuition and the feeling with So, you ask about regulation? Well, it is hugely complex. The fact is they are not subject to the same rules, and that's part of the problem. For instance, when they make disastrous decisions when it comes to their own financing, who is held accountable?  Who’s paying for the mistakes that Harvard made with its endowment? 

CCJ: Oh, yes. I am all too familiar, as I had been an exchange scholar there while I was working on my PhD (which I did not complete) at Brown. Plus, I have friends who are working on their PhDs there and a few friends who teach there now, too.

CD: Well, yes, then you know that they lost a huge amount of their endowment because of speculation. There was not enough transparency. We're talking about huge catastrophic mistakes in terms of investments errors, and yet  no one is really held accountable for it. And while many who go to Harvard can afford their tuition fees and some would gladly pay double just to be there, Harvard leads the system.  So when fees go up at Harvard, they have a ripple effect over the entire system.  The inflationary effect is disastrous . . . at institutions where the students can’t afford me, the cost of tuition goes up too.

CCJ: So, is it all doom and gloom, Claudia? Are there places you applaud in the book?

CD: Oh, yes. Public universities do educate at a much more efficient rate per dollar, per student and with much less bells and whistles and much more basics. In the book we show how it is possible to go to school and do 4 years at a cheaper rate, and in some cases at a third of the cost.  To do that, you must be willing to forgo prestige. But in the long run, what’s that gonna buy you anyway? You do not need to go to an Ivy.
 

CCJ: Thanks so much, Claudia. I look forward to receiving a copy of your book!

CD: My pleasure, Cryn.