• Reading
• Essays 3 [due Monday at 5 pm]

Higher education in America is an endlessly complex industry. It has providers of all sizes and quality within a wide variety of organizational structures and ownership. It includes institutions of diverse mission operating in many differentiated markets. Due to a cultural peculiarity, Americans use the same words to describe all these institutions. They call them colleges, or schools, or universities. While everyone knows the difference between a trade school, a community college, a religious sectarian institution, a private elite undergraduate college, or a major public research university, nonetheless, when Americans talk about higher education they often use the words colleges, schools, and universities interchangeably. This device reflects the public confusion about the structure of American higher education, obscures the complexity of the academic environment, and denies the great American achievement of a diverse and adaptable higher education industry.

American higher education falls into various overlapping categories. Community colleges, derived from an extension of high school and once called junior colleges, provide the first two years of a liberal arts degree and the full two-years or more of various vocational certifications. Community colleges have a tremendous following. They provide remediation for college-bound but unprepared high school students, a low-cost entry into baccalaureate degree programs, and variable and adaptable vocational education to large numbers of students. These colleges, located in and directly serving their communities, enjoy high public esteem and strong political support. Most community colleges operate in the public sector although some proprietary for-profit and a number of private non-for-profit examples also exist although most proprietary institutions provide principally vocational training. Originally funded by local school districts, most public community colleges have become dependent on state tax-based support. Many now also charge tuition and a variety of fees, and distribute financial aid. In some states, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities compete for the same students and the same state dollars. The readings from the American Association of Community Colleges offer a profile of this sector of the higher education industry and gives a sense of its scale, variety, and purpose.

Liberal arts colleges deliver a relatively standardized four-year curriculum. Characterized for the most part by relatively small size (1,000 to 5,000 students), and modest to non-existent graduate education and research activity, the range of institutions in this category is large. Small private sectarian institutions provide religious instruction along with the liberal arts curriculum and offer an intellectually safe environment with predictable social, moral and ethical values. Prestigious and expensive liberal arts colleges serve elite constituencies in a highly secular and competitive mode. They often create innovative and experimental intellectual, academic, and cultural environments. The sectarian and most of the prestige liberal arts colleges exist in the private sector.

No single organization represents all of these institutions, but the web site of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) provides a perspective on the issues and core membership of this group.

In-between these institutions lie a wide range of generic 4-year institutions, both private and public, that serve primarily local or regional constituencies. They give liberal arts degrees and some applied undergraduate degrees in education, business, engineering or similar fields. They enroll anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 or sometimes more students. They have some masters and perhaps a doctoral program or two. They teach students at relatively low cost, and they usually have only modest participation in the research enterprise. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) provides a trade group for the public institutions in this category and expresses many of their concerns and values.

Major public and private research universities in the United States follow a narrow range of organizational models.  Although the internal details and relationships vary, the basic structures remain similar. They range in size from small elite graduate and undergraduate institutions of perhaps 5,000 students or even less to large public research universities reaching 50,000 students. Some divide the graduate and undergraduate missions into two organizational clusters, but most operate both levels of instruction with the same faculty. They have a major commitment to research and graduate education through the Ph.D. and post-doctoral levels. They have large contract and grant revenues, and many will include major enterprises in medicine and, in public universities, agriculture.

Most of the criticism of American universities focuses on these elite institutions not only because of their size and prestige but also because their standards apply in greater or lesser measure to all other institutions of higher education in America. Two organizations speak for these institutions. The Association of American Universities (AAU) self-selects using rather arbitrary criteria what its membership regards as the most prestigious private and public research universities and then represents these institutions and their interests in national forums. Many, but by no means all, of the nation's significant and productive research universities fall within this group's membership. In addition, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) serves as an umbrella organization for large powerful public research universities as well as much more modest state institutions. The public members of the AAU all belong to NASULGC. Obviously these associations overlap, and may institutions pay dues to two or more organizations.

Overall representation of higher education comes from the American Council on Education (ACE) which represents institutions of all sizes, organization, ownership, and mission. This does not exhaust the trade groups that represent university interests, but provides a sample of some of the most significant organizations in this category.

The universities that form the subject of this course are all non-profit, their formal organizational structure mirrors the industrial model. When university people speak to legislators in particular, as well as some others who control external resources, they organize themselves into trade groups with purposes and missions closely modeled after the trade associations of for-profit business and industrial enterprises.

Academics who manage universities must understand their institution's place in the national structure of higher education and recognize its competitive niche. Big public research universities cannot become liberal arts colleges, nor can a liberal arts college offer the range of services available at a major land grant institution. Major private research universities cannot provide the same services to the public as the public land-grant institutions. University competition is intense, and institutions compete with similar institutions for some things, and against much different institutions for others. To assume a simple model of higher education competition obscures these distinctions and misrepresents the challenges to institutional success.

As an example of the characteristics that define American universities, the readings include links to rankings of major American public research universities on a variety of characteristics to provide a sense of the range even within this relatively restricted group. In addition, the link in the readings to The Top American Research Universities offers a sense of the competitive context within which research universities operate. "The Context of Post Secondary Education," published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, offers a good snap shot portrait of all of American higher education at the end of the 20th century.

When thinking about managing research universities, it helps to consider some of the following issues: