Now is a Good Time to be at a “Third Tier” University

The New York Times ran an editorial a couple of weekends ago called “The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education,” where the first sentence was “When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability.” The editorial goes on to describe the hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts in grants, and while the cuts are especially large and newsworthy at Johns Hopkins ($800 million) and Columbia ($400 million), they’re happening in lots of smaller amounts at lots of research universities. Full disclosure: my son is a post-doc at Yale, and while his lab has not been severely impacted by these cuts (yet), it is and continues to be a looming problem for him and his colleagues.

The NYT’s editorial board is correct: Trump is following the playbook of other modern authoritarian leaders (Putin, Orban in Hungary, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, etc.) and is trying to weaken universities. Trump and shadow president Musk are cutting off the funding from the National Institute of Health (and other similar federal agencies) to research universities not so much because of waste and fraud and wanting to end DEI initiatives, and they’re destroying the rest of the federal government not because they want to save money. They’re doing it to consolidate power. They are trying to revamp the U.S. into an authoritarian system run by big tech and billionaires. I wish MSM would remind people more often that this is what is going on right now.

Then last week, Princeton President David A. Graham wrote a piece published in The Atlantic in which he insisted that now was the time for universities like Columbia to stand up to the Trump administration in the name of academic freedom. He quotes Joan Scott, the leader of the American Association of University Professors, who said “Even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” The day after The Atlantic ran Graham’s column, Columbia more or less caved in and appeared to be ready to give Trump what he wanted.

And of course, Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department of Education– which is not something that Trump can do without Congress, but never mind the details of the law.

This is all very bad for all kinds of reasons that go well beyond the impact on these institutions. This is grant money from agencies like the National Institutes of Health to fund research, typically the kind of basic research that the private sector doesn’t do– but of course, research that the private sector profits from greatly. Just about every medical breakthrough you can think of over the last 75 years has been a result of this partnership between the feds and research universities, but to use one example close to my own heart (and the rest of my body) right now: take Zepbound. One of the origins of these current weight loss drugs was basic research the NIH and other federal government agencies did back in the 80s and 90s about the venom of Gila monsters, the kind of research MSM and politicians frequently mock– “why are we spending so much money to research lizards?” Because that’s where discoveries are made that eventually lead us to all sorts of surprising benefits.

But there is one detail about the way this story is being reported that bothers me. MSM puts all universities into the same bucket when the reality is much more complicated than that. The universities most impacted by Trump’s actions are very different kinds of institutions than the ones where I’ve spent my career.

In my book about MOOCs (More Than A Moment), I wrote a bit about the disparity between different tiers of universities, and how MOOCs (potentially) made the distance between higher ed’s haves and have-nots even greater. I frequently referenced the book A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education by David F. Labaree. If you too are interested in the history of higher education (and who isn’t?), I’d highly recommend it. Among other things, Labaree describes the unofficial but well-understood hierarchy of different institutions. At the bottom fourth tier of this pyramid are community colleges, and I would also add proprietary schools and largely online universities. Roughly speaking, there are about 1,000 schools in this category. Labaree says that the third tier consists of universities that mostly began as “normal schools” in the 19th century, though I would add into that tier lots of small/private/often religious/not elite colleges, along with most other regional institutions. There are probably close to 1500 institutions in this category, and I think it’s fair to say most four-year colleges and universities in the US are in this group. EMU, which began as the Michigan State Normal School, is smack-dab in the middle of this tier.

The second tier and top tier are probably easiest for most non-academic types to understand because these are the only kinds of places that MSM routinely reports on as being “higher education.” Roughly speaking, these two tiers are comprised of about the top 150 or so national universities on the US News and World Report Rankings of Universities, with the top fifty or so in those rankings being the tippy-top 1 tier. By the way, EMU is “tied” as the 377th school on the list.

Now, those universities at the tippy-top that receive a lot of NIH and other federal grants– Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Yale, etc.– have a serious problem because those grants are a major revenue stream. But for the rest of us in higher ed, especially on the third tier? Well, I was in a meeting just the other day where one of my colleagues asked an administrator when EMU could expect to see a cut in federal funding. This administrator, who seemed a little surprised at the question, pointed out that about 25% of our funding comes from state appropriations, and the rest of it comes from tuition. The amount of direct federal funding we receive is negligible.

And herein lies the Trump administration’s challenge at taking over education in this country, thankfully. Unlike most other countries in the world where schooling is more centralized, public education in the United States is quite decentralized and is mostly controlled by states and localities. As this piece from Inside Higher Ed reminds us, the main role of the federal government in higher education (besides collecting data about higher education nationwide, working with accreditors, and overseeing students’ civil rights) is to run the student loan and Pell Grant programs. The Trump administration has repeatedly said they want these programs to continue even if they are successful at eliminating the Department of Education. Not that I completely believe that– Trump/Musk might want to cut Pell grants, and they are trying to roll back Biden’s moves on loan forgiveness. But given how many students (and their parents) depend on these programs, including MAGA voters, I don’t see these programs going away.

In other words, now is a good time to be at a third-tier university.

Now, that New York Times editorial does have one paragraph where they acknowledge this difference between the haves and have-nots:

We understand why many Americans don’t trust higher education and feel they have little stake in it. Elite universities can come off as privileged playgrounds for young people seeking advantages only for themselves. Less elite schools, including community colleges, often have high dropout rates, leaving their students with the onerous combination of debt and no degree. Throughout higher education, faculty members can seem out of touch, with political views that skew far to the left.

I don’t know how much Americans do or don’t “trust” higher education, but the main reason why EMU and similar universities have a much higher dropout rate is we admit students more selective universities don’t. I don’t remember the details, but I heard this story years ago about this administrator in charge of admissions at EMU. When he was asked why our graduation rate is around 50% while the University of Michigan’s rate is more like 93%, he responded “Why isn’t U of M’s graduation rate 100%? They only admit students they know will graduate.” In contrast, EMU (and most other universities in the third tier) takes a lot of chances and admits almost everyone who applies.

I’m biased of course, but I think a more accurate way to frame the role of third-tier/regional universities is as institutions of opportunity. We give folks a chance at a college degree who otherwise would have few options. We aren’t a school that helps upper-middle-class kids stay that way. We’re a school that helps working class/working poor students improve their lives, to be one of the first (if not the first) people in their families to graduate from college. Sure, a lot of the students we admit don’t make it for all kinds of different reasons. But I think the benefits we provide to the ones who succeed in graduating outweigh the problems of admitting students who are just not prepared to go to college. Though I’ll admit it’s a close call.

Anyway, I don’t know what those of us working on the lower levels of the pyramid can do to help those at the top, if there’s anything we can do. That’s the frustration of everyone against Trump right now, right? What can we do?