American higher education is adrift

From accommodations to admissions to grade inflation, colleges lack a sense of mission and purpose.

Students relax at the University of Alabama.

Last week, The Atlantic published an article about the growing share of students at elite college campuses who receive some form of disability accommodation.

A lot of these college campuses are quite old. For example, at Harvard, a student in a wheelchair or with some mobility impairment would find it challenging to complete a 100-percent-standard course load with zero special accommodation because of the built environment. My sophomore year, I was randomly assigned to live on the fourth floor of a dorm with no elevator, which was mildly annoying to me and my roommates but would’ve been totally unworkable for some of our fellow students.

The reason schools should make accommodations for these students is that being able to walk up four flights of stairs has nothing to do with the mission of the university. It’s just happenstance that the campus is full of old buildings. Some of the old buildings have been retrofitted to be accessible, which is good. And to the extent that retrofits are impossible (as is the case with the Kirkland House annex where I lived), provision is made so that the school doesn’t assign someone to live there who wouldn’t be able to do so.

These sorts of disability accommodations can have nontrivial financial costs, but Harvard is a wealthy university in a wealthy country, and the costs are a price worth paying to live in a decent and inclusive society.¹

But this is not the kind of accommodation The Atlantic is talking about.

There is no proliferation of students in wheelchairs. The issue is the proliferation of students making disability claims largely based on mental health, largely in order to get extra time on tests. And taking tests is very much part of the core mission of undergraduate education.

Time pressure is either not an important part of the assessment, in which case nobody should be subjected to it, or else it is an important part of the assessment, in which case everybody should be subjected to it.

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.

And that’s pretty important. These institutions play major roles in American society. They are nodes in our entire scientific-research enterprise and a major export industry. Employers rely on them to perform both screening and social capital functions. They are informal-but-significant authorities and sources of expertise and producers of knowledge.

They’re also adrift and unmoored to the point where something as banal as my observation that climbing stairs is not an important part of the educational mission but taking tests is seems alien to the whole ethos.

The disaggregated university

One issue here is that, while American society as a whole is pretty interested in the undergraduate-education function of universities, it seems to me that professors mostly aren’t.