The Financial Crisis in Higher Education

Over the last few months, conversations about the financial stability of higher education have intensified. Many universities now face structural deficits that deepen year after year. There are several reasons for these deficits, including declining enrollments driven by demographic shifts and rising tuition costs, federal visa and immigration policies that have reduced the number of international students entering the U.S., shrinking research funding, and administrative bloat.

As a result, universities are making difficult decisions, cutting programs that are not financially sustainable and reducing redundancies where possible. Some of these changes may have been overdue, as administrative and professional staff positions have grown much faster than either enrollment or tenure-track faculty lines in many institutions. At the same time, faculty have increasingly relied on external research grants to buy out teaching obligations, yet those funding sources are becoming scarcer.

Although restrictions on international student enrollment and reductions in research funding have intensified the problem, these are not its only causes. Even without such external pressures, higher education would likely be under financial strain due to long-term structural inefficiencies. Recent federal and institutional policies have simply exacerbated pre-existing weaknesses.

With so much attention on budgets, it is worth asking: what exactly does a university produce, and how does it profit from that production? At its core, a university trains students and generates knowledge. Most of its direct revenue comes from tuition, its teaching mission. Faculty are also paid to produce knowledge through books, journal articles, and presentations, but universities themselves rarely earn direct income from these activities. In fact, they often pay for them.

Universities fund faculty travel to conferences, pay publishing companies for access to the very journals their professors write for, and sometimes provide course releases so that professors can serve as editors. In some cases, they even subsidize publication fees for books or articles.

Ironically, academic publishing is a highly profitable, multibillion-dollar global industry valued at roughly US $19–27 billion annually. Major publishing companies rely on unpaid academic labor at every step: faculty submit manuscripts without compensation, review peers’ submissions without compensation, and increasingly perform their own formatting and editing. Publishers then sell those same articles and books, often for $30–$50 per article or $100 or more per book—with profit margins exceeding 30 to 40 percent for some firms.

While universities bear much of the cost of producing this research, they receive almost no direct revenue from it. To be clear, some universities have their own presses or licensing operations, but the vast majority of research output enriches commercial publishers rather than the institutions that make the work possible.

If universities are serious about addressing their financial challenges, they must reconsider how they value and manage the knowledge they produce. The intellectual labor of faculty is one of higher education’s most significant, and most underutilized, sources of value.

The Interdisciplinary Language Educator

Back in 2014 when I first started entertaining the idea of a getting a PhD I met with several professors to get advice about how to proceed. One consistent theme was that I need a research topic that I was passionate about and that I could see myself studying for the next ten years. At the time I thought that doing something with technology and language learning would be interesting. I was told that this was too broad and lacked a theoretical rationale to guide my research. Later, in the process of getting a PhD in instructional technology and learning sciences I was  reminded that I needed to carve out my niche in the field. I needed to focus on an area of research in which I could become an expert in and eventually contribute to the field in a meaningful way. To be fair, at this time I had multiple research projects in a variety of fields. I was exploring the integration of games into Chinese language classrooms, digital reading environments in Spanish literature courses, computer science education in middle school , sense making on an eSports team, and the impact of gamification in an undergraduate sociology course. My advisors were rightfully worried about the direction, or lack thereof, that all of these projects would take me.

I understand, appreciate, and mostly agree with the logic behind having a specific focus as one's research agenda. There are several advantages to this approach. First, it becomes much easier to write manuscripts . I have noticed this with my research on games. For about two years, I was solely focused on gaming literature. Because of this I had read a large percentage of research on games, which had largely cited much of the same studies and as a result I came to have a strong understanding of how the field viewed games. Likewise I had read several models/templates for writing a manuscript on games for learning. Thus, when it came time to actually write up a study, I had a mental template for the structure of the paper, I knew who to cite and how, and I knew the expectations the field had. Essentially I knew how to talk to my people. Still to this day writing up a paper on games is much easier for me than other topics. 

Another advantage to focusing on one project, is that you become recognized as an expert in that area and will likely reap the benefits of such recognition. As an expert in a particular area you'll likely get cited more. When writing a paper on games there are a few names that I know should be in the paper somewhere. Now, I don't always include those 'big names' because some times there work just isn't' relevant, but I do double check to make sure that I didn't leave them out by mistake. This type of consideration doesn't happen if you are not recognized as a major contributor to a particular field. Additionally, being recognized as an expert means that you'll be more likely to be invited to write book chapters, contribute to special journal editions, and give talks on your expertise. All of these lead to more recognition. 

Finally, and most importantly, by focusing on one specific topic and continually engaging with the problems or unknowns associated with the topic, and further engaging with other top scholars in the area, you are more likely to find solutions and/or answers to the unknowns in your field. 

While I clearly acknowledge the benefits of having a specific area of research focus, the title of this blog and this post would suggest that I did not take this path, and so I now will highlight some of the benefits of not being specifically focused in one area, and instead being eclectic in one's research endeavors.

One of the issues that I have noticed over the years with scholars who are focused on only one area, is that they tend to get tunnel vision. By only viewing one's topic through the lens of the recycled literature and theoretical frameworks in your field, it becomes difficult to see outside of the metaphorical box. It is too easy to remain within the literature that one's already read and that is already known. This can have implications at every level of the research process. Research designs start to look very familiar within fields, what counts as data and what does not count becomes unified and ossified, even how we interpret findings. When one engages in research across multiple disciplines they are able to see research through multiple different lenses. What appears to be a failure from a linguistic standpoint, may be a triumph from a sociological perspective; a new phenomenon in one field may hold multiple frameworks in another. Scholars who work across disciplines must constantly check their assumptions at the door.

This leads to the next advantage of taking an eclectic approach. By not having tunnel visions, by exploring research and perspectives in multiple disciplines, by constantly second guessing one's assumptions, you expand what is possible within a particular field. This can lead to new avenues of inquiry and promote growth in the field as a whole. In other words, eclectic scholars can often by the catalyst of innovation.

Finally, and for me most importantly, being eclectic is more interesting. One of the reasons I continue to love and enjoy working in the academy (despite its many flaws) is that I get to continue to learn and grow as a person. This is especially true when you are not constrained to one particular area of inquiry. 

In this blog I hope to share some of the lessons that I have learned over the years, some of the connections that I've made as a result of working multiple projects, ideas for future research, and general thoughts on the fiend of language learning and teaching. In some of my posts I will take a more formal approach and cite article, but most of these posts will be quite informal opinion pieces. I wanted to start this blog to both a) write down some of my thoughts and ideas, and b) work on my writing skills.