When it comes to education, all the way from pre-kindergarten to Ph.D., data is important.
But so is lore.
We want our institutions of higher learning to meet the needs of our students and our larger culture and economy. To provide the skills and understanding students need to make their way in the job market is crucial.
But it is essential that those same students also be schooled in art and literature and history and science and languages, the cultural wisdom that must be handed down so that the next generation is more than just corporate cannon fodder, but well-rounded human beings, parents and citizens.
A recent legislative audit of the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) and its 16 colleges, universities and technical schools rightly called on the state board and the leaders of the various institutions to get a better handle on their numbers. How many students are enrolled in each program, how many graduate in a reasonable time, how many are employed — in their field of study or at all — in the state or elsewhere.
It is sad to learn that university presidents and provosts don’t already have such information to hand. If they did, they could make better decisions, better use of taxpayer money and student tuition and be more responsive to the wants and needs of students and society.
(The same is true of our K-12 schools. According to another state audit, school districts that had more real-time data on student progress were better able to make up the achievement gap left by pandemic school shutdowns.)
And, perhaps most important, having that information will be key to fending off repeated attempts from the state’s political class to slash spending, interfere with decisions that educators should be making and stoke divisive and wasteful culture war battles that can only harm any true educational institution.
If the universities don’t reform themselves, and soon, the leaders of the Utah Legislature are fully prepared to do it for them. And nobody who values education should want that.
It is all too easy for politicians to rile up their base by making up stories about how our colleges are rife with white-guilt inducing programs or are pushing undergraduates to major in 14th Century French Literature when they should be studying finance or computer science.
It is also true that higher education in America is, as an old and large institution, hidebound in so many ways and resistant to any suggestion of change.
The audit’s repeated use of the term “efficiency” in reference to higher education is troubling. Learning, real learning, is just not efficient. It is a long and sometimes circuitous process that properly begins early and never really ends.
It involves an ever-expanding grasp of how to read and write — great literature and technical manuals, history and balance sheets, musical scores and AI code.
It’s OK if, as lawmakers say they want, more students seek career-building majors such as business or engineering and fewer earn degrees in art history or literature. But everyone who passes through halls of anything worthy of the name of higher education should be well exposed to the humanities, arts and sciences.
We really do not want to live in a culture where our powerful tech innovators, captains of industry, high-finance wizards and corporate lobbyists enter the real world without knowing Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby, James Madison and Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Don’t forget that one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last century, Apple computer creator Steve Jobs, never graduated from college, but credited a calligraphy course he took at Portland’s Reed College with informing the unique sense of artistic style that made his products unique.
Not every low-enrollment major, no matter how high-minded, needs to be offered at every institution. USHE could allocate some of them to, say, the University of Utah, others to Utah State University, others to Utah Valley University. That would save everyone money while creating, at the selected universities, a critical mass of students and faculty that will make the programs better.
Universities also need to take a hard look at how many courses their tenured faculty members are teaching. Freshmen are cheated if their schools’ best brains are squirreled away in the ivory tower, inaccessible to all but other academics.
And there is no doubt that Utah needs more people with specific skills, particularly degrees in nursing and other health professions.
Talk of subjecting Utah public colleges to a 10% across-the-board cut is silly. Tuition costs at our schools are a bargain, compared to those in other states.
Our university administrators are best placed to juggle the demands of students, faculty and politicians and decide how to best allocate their resources. They can trim some of the fat that every large institution has without cutting the bone.
Once, that is, everyone has the facts before them.
