AEI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“The transformation of the four years that we go through (in college) is far more than what I'm going to earn for the first five years on the back-end,” said Joshua Travis Brown, assistant professor of education at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the report.
For that reason, Brown said, higher education leaders “need to be better at capturing the transformation of learning and the personal transformation that occurs above and beyond salary.”
Brown also suggested that college and university leaders do a better job of aligning their values with the values of the communities that they serve.
“We, in higher education, do a very bad job at communicating to communities what happens inside the walls of academia … we're called the ‘Ivory Tower’ for a reason,” Brown said. “We need to do a better job of communicating what happens, the value that we bring to the table, and we need to align our values with those values that exist in our communities.
“And because we are a very diverse nation, those values are going to look radically different depending on the community that you live in,” Brown said.
Brown made his remarks Monday at an American Enterprise Institute forum in Washington, D.C., meant to offer insights for college and university leaders who are grappling with implications of the Trump administration’s “Returning Education to the States” policy agenda.
Brown touted the AEI’s new report on the topic as a “tool” that higher education leaders. Among other things, Brown said, the report calls for administrators and policymakers to pursue exemptions for various policies in order to get more flexibility and freedom in their respective quests for solutions.
“We have a plethora of regulations in higher education. In some instances, it’s a barrier to entry. In others, it raises the cost significantly of programs,” Brown said. “Can we not identify certain policies that we just can temporarily hit pause so that we can pilot ideas?”
He also suggested incentives instead of pursuing back-end solutions, such as taxing endowments thought to be too big, or forgiving student loans thought to be too high.
He said the incentives should be geared toward moving students into the “care economy,” where there are nearly two million job vacancies and demand for teachers, nurses, social workers, allied health professionals and other positions that “desperately need skilled qualified people.”
While Brown said students pushed back hard on using salary information to measure the college experience, other panelists said salary measures could still be useful but only if the out-of-control costs of college are reined in.
Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, President, Craft Education, said too much emphasis is placed on the numerator part of the ROI equation — that is, what students get out of college — versus the denominator, which is the cost.
“And we can have a lot of grace on saying ‘We can't quantify the entire numerator at top,’” Dwinal-Palisch said. “But if we really focus on getting that denominator tight, and not making people take on debt, and forgo opportunities that they don't need to, I think ROI becomes incredibly valuable again as a North Star.”
Monday’s discussion included spirited debate about the challenges that the prevalence of AI presents to educators as they seek to ensure the integrity of student work.
“Nothing gets me ready to fight faster than instructors at the higher ed level or the K-12 level talking about how we need to ban AI,” Dwinal-Palisch said. “The professors and instructors that I hear lament the loudest about ‘cognitive surrender’ of learners using AI for their tools, are the ones who've gotten intellectually laziest on how they're gonna teach those people and prepare them for the next generation.”
She placed AI in the same category as calculators, computers and other tools that people will be expected to use on their jobs. She recommended doing more to create better pathways in the age of AI into the care economy jobs that are projected to increase as the population grays.
Panelist Andy Smarick, secretary and member of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, said current student use of AI is corrosive because research shows students are constantly using AI to do their work — from editing to problem sets — for them.
“Pause. Take a deep breath. Ask, what is the purpose of a higher education?” Smarick said. “Is it offshoring, delegating your learning to a chat bot or an agent?
"Or is it doing the hard work of learning? … AI is gonna be corrosive unless we get a handle on it.”
