The Status Of The American University

Boy-o-boy are we in trouble. We have some public universities and colleges performing as well, if not better, than the private Ivy League biggies, but the underlying processes in all of our colleges and universities are operating on greed and corruption of purpose.

Public Universities Chase Excellence, At A Price

If there is any goal that the University of Florida has pursued as fervently as a national football championship for the Gators, it is a place among the nation’s highest-ranked public universities.

“We need a top-10 university, so our kids can get the same education they would get at Harvard or Yale,” said J. Bernard Machen, the university president.

To upgrade the university, Dr. Machen is seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published annually by U.S. News & World Report. This year, that list ranked Florida 13th among public universities in the United States.

Like Florida, more leading public universities are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and increasingly affluent students, sometimes using financial aid to lure them. In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are seriously underrepresented on their campuses.

“Public universities were created to make excellence available to all qualified students,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an advocacy group, “but that commitment appears to have diminished over time, as they choose to use their resources to try to push up their rankings. It’s all about reputation, selectivity and ranking, instead of about the mission of finding and educating future leaders from their state.”

While a handful of public universities have long stood among the nation’s top institutions — the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan among them — many have only recently joined their ranks.

At some of the best public universities, selectivity is up: at the University of Florida, the average student high school grade point average now exceeds 4.0, a feat achievable only with high grades in honors or Advanced Placement classes. And student interest in these institutions is soaring. At the University of Vermont, where three quarters of the freshmen come from other states, applications have more than doubled since 2001.

The demands on such universities are growing, too, particularly with many states questioning their spending on higher education. Increasingly, these colleges are expected to bolster their states’ economies by attracting research grants and jobs. To do that, they say, they must compete with elite private universities.

Top Grades, Without The Classes

The House Ways and Means Committee sent shock waves through college sports when it asked the National Collegiate Athletic Association to justify its federal tax exemption by explaining how cash-consuming, win-at-all-cost athletics departments serve educational purposes.

The short answer is that they don’t. Indeed, they often undermine the mission of higher education by recruiting athletes who aren’t prepared, then encouraging grade-padding and preferential treatment to keep them eligible for sports.

That process has been on vivid display at Auburn University, which is embroiled in a scandal involving athletes who are said to have padded their grades and remained eligible to play by taking courses that required no attendance and little if any work. This summer, James Gundlach, an Auburn sociology professor, laid out the problem in startling detail, telling reporters that corruption at the university was pervasive.

An internal audit by the university, made public this month, has uncovered a new round of problems. It found that a grade for a scholarship athlete had been changed — from an incomplete to an A — without the professor’s knowledge. This conveniently raised the athlete’s grade point average in the final semester just above the minimum required for graduation. In addition, the athlete received three other A’s from so-called “directed reading” courses that required no classroom attendance. The professor who issued the initial incomplete in 2003 — and only recently learned it had been changed — suggested that someone in the university had guided the athlete through the scheduling process.

Auburn’s administration promised swift and decisive action to address the problem. But it has also taken pains to point out that the suspect courses were open not just to athletes, but to all students.

That’s no reason to feel relieved. The deeper and more alarming lesson is that the unethical behavior often associated with big-time college sports doesn’t always end with athletes. It can easily seep outward, undermining academic standards and corrupting behavior in the university as a whole.