...There are many ways that American higher education is unique—for good and ill. I have no illusions that most faculty members will ever read extensively about the history of American higher education. But there are certain facts that I think they should know. Let me offer a few examples of the ways that American colleges and universities differ from their international counterparts.
First of all, American higher education is distinctive in the sheer number of colleges and universities—over 4,000. It’s also unique in the variety of institutions. It encompasses two- and four-year schools, public and private institutions, secular and religious colleges, residential and commuter institutions, research and liberal arts campuses, technical institutes, military academies, tribal colleges, HBCUs, fully online institutions, and more.
The United States is also distinguished by the share of the population that attends college, which now exceeds 70 percent of recent high school graduates, and who transfer from one institution to another—over 40 percent. But the country is also striking in the share of college goers who drop out, a figure exceeding 30 percent and at many institutions exceeding 40 percent. Then there’s the variety of students who seek higher education, including many working adults and family caregivers.
Then there’s cost. Even public colleges and universities generally cost at least twice as much as their international counterparts. A big reason: the size, scope and scale of campuses’ administrative and nonteaching staff, the multiplicity of functions these institutions serve and the range of services they offer, and the number of subunits they encompass. It’s hard to imagine a brick-and-mortar campus with the extensive services that American colleges and universities provide: career services, disability services, health services, psychological services, technology services, transportation services, housing, dining, tutoring, food pantries, student life office and much more—all of which seek to fill gaps in this country’s social services net or make the student experience more immersive and supportive.
Nor can one easily envisage a serious university without centers for basic and applied research, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship acceleration, functions that, in many countries outside the United States, are assigned to specialized research centers and institutes that exist independently of universities.
The distinctiveness of American higher education also extends to the curriculum, with its staunch commitment to a lower-division liberal arts core and its extensive electives intended to maximize student options.
Then there’s the distinctive American emphasis on student life: on dorms and dining halls, fraternities and sororities, intercollegiate athletics, and campus-sponsored extracurriculars, including a host of clubs and student organizations. These are elements that generally have no counterpart elsewhere, but that greatly contribute to a college’s popularity.
Also, I should add, the United States differs from many other countries in its faculty-hiring practices and especially in the belief that faculty should be hired in a highly competitive search process involving a nationwide (or even broader) pool of applicants.
Especially noteworthy is the ever-increasing breadth of the college curriculum, as colleges add new majors and fields of study, now encompassing cannabis studies, computer security, game design, health informatics, human-computer interaction and nanotechnology. Whereas the colonial colleges, like their English counterparts of the time, sought to educate gentlemen and leaders in various realms of life, and the Humboldt-inspired German universities sought to train civil servants, administrators and scholars, American institutions’ purpose has long been quite diffuse. In addition to training those aspiring to enter the learned professions, from early on these schools also trained businesspeople, the new professionals needed by an industrial society (like accountants, architects, chemists, engineers and managers) and those who would enter the helping professions and the arts.
Then there’s one other distinctive feature of American higher education that mustn’t be ignored: its highly stratified, hierarchical nature, which has grown increasingly important as talented students have grown more willing to travel long distances to attend a more prestigious college or university. It’s not just that the American higher ed landscape is more status conscious, but that the institutions with the highest reputation have limited admission rather than growing in response to population growth and an increase in applications.
It’s also a tiered system that is highly inequitable in its allocation of resources and in the composition of the student body. Those students with the greatest financial need are concentrated in the least-resourced institutions, which are all too often unable to provide the academic and nonacademic supports that these students need to graduate...
Full essay at https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/2023/06/09/what-faculty-needs-know-about-history-american-higher.
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