Guest Columnist Martin Hackworth: Higher Education’s Solution to Solving Its Many Problems? Less Higher Education.

North Dakota is the latest state to approve a limited number of baccalaureate degrees requiring far fewer than the traditional 120 minimum credit hours. There are movements like this afoot in state-funded higher education systems across the country—all driven by discontent over outrageous tuition costs, which have far outpaced inflation for decades.

North Dakota’s program actually has some merit. But the general concept of requiring fewer credits for graduation and allowing high schools to offer courses for college credit are solutions that administrators in higher education and state legislatures have come up with to address the tuition issue across the country. While the tuition issue is serious, these solutions often leave something to be desired.

Only among those from the cloistered world of administrators in higher education and their frenemies in state legislatures will you find people who think that the best way to fix problems with education is to provide less of it.

Almost a decade has passed since I retired from higher education. But efforts to cut tuition costs by requiring less of students were alive and on the front burner for much of my academic career. Faculty members generally fought these types of tuition cost-cutting measures tooth and nail. And we were damned well right to do so. Of the approximately 10,000 students with whom I dealt in various classes during my time in the academic barrel, exactly zero of them would have benefited from less education.

Less tuition and fees? Absolutely. Less education? Not so much. Don’t even get me started on dual-enrollment courses. Only twice in 25 years was a student who’d taken physics in high school able to test out of my Engineering Physics course—and both of these kids took graduate courses from me before they were 15.

Lowering tuition costs by requiring fewer credit hours and allowing high schools to offer college-level courses are ideas popular only among people who don’t deal with a lot of college students in classrooms. The last thing that we need to be doing right now is requiring less of most college students in terms of breadth, depth, or rigor. That’s been true for some time.

Indeed, the results of the initial wave of such efforts are already in the books and not encouraging. Far too many students are receiving bachelor’s degrees without basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills, let alone any useful exposure to history, geography, language, science, or any of the rest of humanity’s vast intellectual accomplishments.

You know—the things that college is supposed to be about; what makes a university different from a trade school.

A narrow focus is entirely appropriate for a two-year technical degree or a vocational certificate, but it’s not, at least in my opinion, acceptable for anyone who desires to enter the professional class with a baccalaureate degree and all that it traditionally implies about the bearer.

I have ranted and raved here at Howlin’ about higher education, ad infinitum, ad nauseum for years. The last installment of this continuing series was Bait and Switch at the Academy, in which I posited that never, in the entire history of humanity, has a concept so wonderfully noble and egalitarian as promoting swaths of the working class to the professional class through higher education fallen so utterly short of its ideals.

Every year that I was a faculty member, we fought some effort to lower tuition costs by cutting back on content—sometimes even from within. Administrators in many pre-med programs thought that physics was unnecessary for their students. Even the engineering department at one place that I taught thought that two semesters of physics were too much for many engineering fields. This is, of course, absurd, but it’s what you get when administrators run departments instead of teaching faculty.

There were constant efforts to either eliminate or, barring that, reduce the rigor of basic science requirements like geology, astronomy, or football physics for non-majors. Why should an English major, as I was often asked, be required to take a course in astronomy, a foreign language, or history? How is that going to help them in their hopeless quest for a job at an English factory somewhere?

I’ll tell you why—because a four-year college degree isn’t merely a job training certificate. You get those over at Vo-Tech. A baccalaureate degree is supposed to guarantee that its bearer has been at least exposed to some of the vast treasure of knowledge that humans have painstakingly acquired over several millennia. Believe it or not, that’s a helpful part of being well-educated.

Being well-educated has been considered a good thing for most people since the Enlightenment. Ignoring all of that is why we have so many minimally competent professionals these days.

I think that the ultimate plan in higher education is worse than just reducing breadth, depth, and rigor; it’s to wait for AI to take all the effort out of learning. Why struggle, for instance, with all of those rotations during a medical residency if you can just ask AI to diagnose your patients and use robots to perform surgery?

An additional benefit to this scheme is that administrators may finally rid themselves of pesky faculty and generate enough tuition to pay their salary with pure AI instruction. Since most administrators already don’t much care that their graduates often can’t demonstrate that they learned much, and faculty are a pain in the ass, why not achieve the same outcomes without the hassles on the cheap?

Again, I’ll tell you why. Because I’d sure like for my surgeon to be better than Dr. Lexus in Idiocracy. So would you. We are already closer to this than I’d like. My last visit to an optometrist involved me explaining to him why the human eye is diffraction limited (which depends on pupil dilation, which depends on ambient lighting) in terms of resolving the bottom line on the eye chart. Medicare paid a lot for this guy’s questionable services. AI is unlikely to make this type of situation any better.

Look—not everyone who pursues an education beyond high school needs a baccalaureate degree. I’m very much an advocate of education in the trades. More emphasis there would be nothing but a good thing. The world needs more mechanics than it does English majors (and physicists) anyway. Even two-year technical degrees should be very focused. There’s nothing preventing anyone in these programs from pursuing an education beyond the minimum standards if they so desire. That should be encouraged, perhaps, but not required.

But if one wants to pursue a baccalaureate degree, they should be prepared to accept the responsibility that goes along with a credential that is supposed to guarantee that the bearer actually possesses some breadth and depth of knowledge.

There are better ways to lower costs in higher education than reducing breadth, depth or rigor anyway. First, to paraphrase Dick the Butcher: The first thing we do, let’s get rid of all the administrators.

Well, maybe not all, but a lot of them. Administrative bloat is such a well-documented feature of contemporary higher education that hardly anyone even bothers to dispute it anymore. Between the mid-1970s and today, the number of full-time administrators at colleges and universities in this country increased, on average, by an estimated 200%, while the number of faculty increased by only 92%. That is a threefold increase in the number of non-instructional staff per student, which occurred over the same period of time that tuition skyrocketed while every reliable indicator of student success declined.

Good administrators are worth their weight in gold. They solve problems and make life better for everyone. The problem is that they are few and far between. As higher ed sinks like the Titanic, which it is as we speak, students and faculty get the first shot at lifeboats. I’d throw some deans and provosts of my acquaintance overboard myself. Let’s see if they swim as well as they posed and preened.

The next thing would be to eliminate degrees in almost any program that contains the word “studies” in its title—or, alternatively, make these programs ineligible for federally guaranteed student financial aid. These low-enrollment, low-ROI (for everyone) programs are black holes in budgets whose worth is always calculated in terms of ephemeral and difficult-to-quantify things like virtue and diversity since their actuarial value is nil. Bin them.

Finally, I think that degrees are too important to be awarded by those with a vested interest in awarding them whether the recipients are deserving or not. In order to be awarded any college degree or certificate, one should be required to pass a standardized exam in that field. The exam does not have to be difficult, just a guarantor of minimum competency, which does not exist in the present system. Test anxiety? I don’t care. If you can’t operate under stress, go find something to do that is less stressful.

I would, by the way, allow anyone to take these exams. I worked with many students who were sufficiently far ahead of their contemporaries that placing them with average students in a classroom was like pitting a naked man against a freight train. If you can gain competency without spending as much as a day in a classroom, why should anyone hold you back? It’s sure not going to be me.

But solving the many problems in higher education by requiring less of it for the masses? Nah, I’m not down with it.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.