Three Important Historical Events in Higher Education History

Andrew Hibel: In January of 2024, our producer, Mike Walker, and I had the pleasure of being in Louisville for a conference and taking a short drive over to Lexington to meet with my former PhD advisor, Dr. John Thelin. Dr. Thelin is a historian and currently an emeritus professor and still resides in Lexington where he taught at the University of Kentucky for many years. I had the pleasure of being with Dr. Thelin for one academic year in 1993 1994, and found myself having a bunch of questions for Dr. Thelin and what he thought about his career in higher education in general.

The time that Mike and I got to spend with Dr. Thelin, it really told a story of not only his career, but of higher education over the past 30 to 40 years. It also told a bit of my own story, that every career has its own story and its own path, including my own, and being able to tell Dr. Thelin's story with a little bit of my story is important. I actually came to Dr. Thelin in that academic year having just completed a master's in higher education and a law degree previous to that. I was kind of searching for my career path into becoming a plan giving officer. And being at Indiana University in that academic year really taught me a lot, not only about the history of higher education and the current state of higher education, but also gave me some thought about what higher education was about to become and what the path that I was going to take would look like.

Now in my path, what we didn't anticipate that year was when I finally found my position and started getting on my way in my career, another path opened up, and that was higher ed jobs. Seeing Dr. Thelin reminds me of the similarity of the paths that I followed. Most importantly, that academia has this unique place that transcends generations and transcend what society expects of it. What we really hope for is that listeners start learning a little bit more about where academia has been and where we are now and maybe thinking about where you want to push the needle in the future.

Dr. Thelin's perspective is unique and also amazingly thoughtful. I hope you'd enjoy these conversations as much as we enjoyed having them with him. Enjoy listening. The next topic I have, and I don't have a lot right here to, like, kind of prompt you, historians look back at his generation's history of higher education. In your career, what are the 3 most important events or trends that have happened in higher education?

Dr. John Thelin: Foremost, in my opinion and experience, was the quiet, related, and then blossoming of women in higher education. Girls in elementary school and then becoming young women and women always achieved well. But through counseling, outer fields, certain doors close or whatever. There's always this kind of pent up barriers. If you look at the difference in the composition of, let's say, medical schools, law schools, doctoral programs, doctoral programs in the sciences.

Name the most prestigious demanding advanced field of study. Women in the late 1960s probably represented some minuscule percentage, like 2, 3%. But women were doing very well in their bachelor's degrees in completing the grades, Phi Beta Kappa honors, cum laude, whatever. But then they were stopping. This started to change gradually, I think, around 1974.

So it's the kind of thing that I witnessed the subtle obstructions and barriers, but then also witnessed the kind of breaking down of those. So that today and you can test it out when you go down to the lobby. I'm sure you'll see that a plurality of the law students are women. It's also true in in medicine now. It's true in selected fields in the sciences.

It's certainly true in humanities. So the gains by women in all levels of education and then gradually and unevenly in terms of then professional careers. And I'm, I'm thinking of the Harvard professor who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. This is last year. She's the first woman to, I believe, gain tenure in Harvard Economics department.

She graduated from Cornell, I think, in 67, 68. So these these gains were slow to come but now they're blossoming full theory. So that's one. Certainly, civil rights. However, I think, for example, in terms of the gains by gender have surpassed the gains in terms of social class, race, and ethnicity.

And to me, the most sad disappointing feature of American education today are disparities of income and social class. I read an article a few days ago that in, Upper East Side of New York, there's a thriving business where a consulting firm charges families a $200,000 initiation fee and then $120,000 per year to counsel and coach one child to get ready to apply to college. I look in the New York Times and I see full page ads for summer in the city where a child pays something like $10,000 and they get an internship in the New York Times. It's a very hard stack deck. And I think those disparities were at one time diminishing.

I fear that they're increasing, and that saddens me a great deal. That's 2.

Andrew Hibel: And what do you have for a 3, or do you have a 3?

Dr. John Thelin: Number 3, and I'm I have to scold myself, is 10 years ago, I thought that intercollegiate athletics would gain some sanity and and some sense of, you know, come to to, its senses. Because I noticed I noticed, for example, even at, many of the southeast conference games and the big ten games and certainly at UCLA, student attendance was declining. I said, There's going to be a leveling and a tapering. It's not as we know with the, the television broadcast contracts, name image, likeness. Most sad to me was the front page New York Times article about a year and a half ago about some state universities endorsing Caesars Casino as a sponsor for their stadium of legalized sports gambling.

So I think that big time college sports, it's it found it its ship came in, but I think they've lost their gyroscope. And I I was wrong in my prediction on that.

Andrew Hibel: Let's try to find a little bit of hope because we can't stop here from a historical analysis. Let's talk about admissions and enrollment management. The pricing model for higher education is one that the entire world agrees that college is too expensive. Marketing of it, the amount of marketing that goes to 18 year olds trying to make a decision is also huge. And having 1 child in college and one child about to go to college, I can say the societal expectations of an 18 year old that the jury verdict at 18 comes out whether or not your first 18 years was a success by how you land in college even though we know for a fact not everybody's going to, a, land in college.

And even where you do land in the high school that we're at, there's less than a 50% chance that you're going to graduate from that college within 6 years

Dr. John Thelin: Yes. 6 years. Notice you said 6 years, not 4. What a change.

Andrew Hibel: Yes.

Dr. John Thelin: Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Hibel: From that point not saying that you don't graduate college, but kids don't always make the first choice that fits them. Sure. And transferring is something that's done quite frequently. Where do you see where academia has changed? And as a historian, are we at a blip right now with all of this, and are we going to come through?

And I know historians talk about history, not necessarily predictions, but what can we learn about are we just going in a different direction now, or is there going to be another plateau and equilibrium for American higher education?

Dr. John Thelin: I'm going to go out on a limb and probably forfeit any number of consulting jobs or honorary degrees. But I think in many ways, changes come slowest to the most favored institutions. If an institution has 20 applicants per slot and probably 18 of those are well qualified, They're going to be able to more likely and if they have a good endowment or whatever to have full time residential liberal arts program with the expectation then that most of their graduates will go on to either prestigious professional school, medicine, law, dentistry, business. But if you look below that and this goes back to my earlier comments about looking off to the margins away from the pinnacles. And in fact, what I think that demographers and sociologists find is that there always had been more exceptions to the rule of the traditional 4 to 6 year full time study.

But it's kind of went under the radar. It was not noticed. And it was also maybe taking place at institutions that received less publicity or coverage. So that model, the perfect model that your children will fulfill was not as pervasive and watertight as a lot of the college advocates would have had us believe. And so if you look off to the margins, you'll see more exceptions.

And I think that I'm trying to think of Cliff Adelman who died a few years ago. University of Chicago PhD in humanities, yet he was the best statistical researcher in Washington DC. He wrote a study that's called Higher Education's Toolbox. His contribution and observation was that there was far more transferring, stopping in, stopping out at all levels than anyone had documented. And so now I think we're absorbing that.

Does that does that make sense?

Andrew Hibel: That makes perfect sense. Good. I think to kinda go from there, we talked about public perception a little bit ago in our conversation. But what absolutely changed between our 2 children, and that's a mere 4 years, is the real questioning of the value of higher education. We never had to before convince people that there was value to put your time into it.

It was just known there was. And I would say back in 2020, there was a good deal of that still there. You're right. Today in 2024, it's diminished. Empirically, as a historian, you're asked.

Academia comes to you and says, Dr. Thelin, could you please put together the case statement of why today still everybody should consider college a worthy investment?

Dr. John Thelin: Let me answer with a specific example. By chance, I happen to be working on a project with City University of New York System. And it was with their archivist and they would put out a wonderful calendar every year. And their theme for the year I was working on was the legacy of public higher education broadly understood. So I go over to LaGuardia Community College which is right on the edge of before you catch the ferry or whatever the train to go into New York City.

And the campus was built over what had been the Cheez Its factory. And they said that, with all the residue from the dough and baking, they had the world's happiest, healthiest rats. It was nothing like a campus that you had ever seen. But I have never seen such an admirable group of students, many of whom were first gen, actual immigrants, the number of languages. They had no green space except that there was a small atrium where on weekends, the custodians and the gardeners and the students of their own time gathered and cultivated and created.

You would walk into the foyer of the student union and you would see the most intense study groups and you would hear about a dozen different languages. Their biggest concern was that if subway fares rose, they would not be able to afford to go to college. That is a different world. It was also a world that I really liked. The students were great.

Interesting. At LaGuardia, even though the press of almost all the students was to be gainfully employed eventually, They had a thriving philosophy major. And the professor took on the wonderful pursuit of persuading a group that would traditionally not major in philosophy or take philosophy courses. And he tried to persuade them gently but firmly that this was pertinent to your full life. And it was pertinent to the very pragmatic hard decisions eventually you would make about family, career path or whatever.

And that was so refreshing to me because it broke the lockstep of presuming that general studies or liberal education was a luxury. That actually, in fact, it was central because as as you know, in working with the economy and job markets, we cannot predict with certainty what the economy is holding. And I think one thing that that's very defining in the American character, almost every young American, I don't care whether poor, wealthy, middle, whatever, 1st gen, whatever, almost all young adult Americans know and understand that they they must find their way in a profession or work that that is never far from their thoughts. However, it can be, I think, thoughtfully integrated that in many ways, some of the useless arts are among the most useful. And that's my kind of gentle hope for the liberal arts, regardless of program of or of your long term, let's say, professional goal.

Andrew Hibel: I think that one of the big changes for the positive over the past few decades is I think colleges who were very much focused on, it's about academics, it's about rigorous study, it's about research, started to understand that the part of the house that the student affairs colleagues were serving is also a big part of it.

Dr. John Thelin: Yes, it is.

Andrew Hibel: Yeah. How these students have an experience on campus, how they grow as individuals, how we as a community assist them in that process by encouraging them to pursue studies in in those arts that more traditional, that make their lives have texture and meaning in a way that just straight up rigorous academic study does not necessarily always require, that's important.

Dr. John Thelin: And I I think that also I would reinforce that is that in our extracurricular activities that we offer, the variety with living on campus, there are some of the most fulfilling pursuits. And they do draw from what you have studied eventually, but they also cultivate a range of organizational and human skills or whatever. And what's interesting is to spend time in other nations that probably were less committed to the full student experience. And we sometimes, I think, take for granted what is actually a very distinctive approach that we have in the United States, and it's it's much more comprehensive and broad than we give credit. Let me switch to the other extreme.

I heard an interview a few years ago. It was one of the most disturbing. Let's say, for example, conventional wisdom is that, one path to a good fulfilling and reasonably prosperous professional life is in STEM research. Talk to postdoc students today in the sciences. They are trapped often in a very, very hard situation.

For example, on NPR, I had an interview with a woman whose background, I believe, was in biochemistry. Her stipends from her postdoc was something like $35,000 a year in New York City. Postdocs used to have the implicit compact, if not promise, that if you did well in your postdoc or you've got your PhD in biochemistry in your postdoc, that this would soon lead to a full time tenure track faculty position. And, of course, with your postdoc in this experience, you then would be landing NSF grants and NIH grants. That model is broken.

It works sometimes, but there's a a large number of highly educated, highly skilled younger scholars, including in fields where there had been traditionally external funding in the sciences, that it's very uncertain. And so, therefore, one thing that I think is important about, liberal education is that it does make you give pause and reflect when you face adversity or uncertainty, and we know that every educated person is going to face that. Now I know you probably plan your professional career at the age of 12. What I always liked was, let's say, I'm sure you experienced this at University of Illinois, is there would always be some classmate who pronounced that, he was pre med. So then you have the midterm exam in organic chemistry on October 12th, and, that same person gets his grades back and says, you know, I've always felt that the behavioral sciences were my strength.

So these uncertainties, these curve balls, that is where I think general education and these seemingly, frivolous or, less pragmatic sides of college education are in fact very essential.

Andrew Hibel: Very essential. And I think we can also glean from that analysis that any sort of medical staff shortage we have, we can clearly blame on organic chemistry. And I just want to quickly come back to it. Can for somebody who's out there who's listening who works in higher education, who has a child, who's considering a community college, I love the story about LaGuardia Community College. I don't think they're the exception to the rule.

I think there's a lot of amazing community colleges out there. Historically, tell us the importance of community colleges and the American higher education system.

Dr. John Thelin: Well, first of all, I have to pander to your Illinois roots and that I believe the part of the law that the 1st junior college was established in Illinois. The second one was not for another century, but that's besides the point. No. But no. Here was an interesting development is that in those states that had some population growth, and I think of, like, for example, New York, California, between World War I and World War II, what we call junior colleges, in many ways, were extensions of the local high school system.

Often, the head administrator for a junior college was often called a principal rather than a president. So in a variety of functions, with the crowding and overcrowding in the 4 year colleges, particularly your flagship state universities, the transfer function developed. And what was interesting because much of my life I grew up in California where I ended up having, like, a 119 junior colleges, which became community colleges, is that in the 1950s and early 1960s, the transfer students from junior colleges to the University of California actually did better in grade point average than did those who had entered this flagship like UCLA or UC Berkeley than those who had entered as freshmen. The higher grade point averages, higher graduation rate. So the transfer system was working very well.

At some point in the 1970s, that broke down and the transfer function tended to get melded into other things, going back to an earlier thing you had when colleges try to be all things. When junior colleges became community colleges, they ended up having so many different constituencies that the transfer function actually just became one of many and it tended to wither on the vine. But I think that as more states have added community colleges, they've gained, a pulse. But the nature of it is because it is not going to have the spectacular flamboyance of a big ten university. It's probably not going to have intercollegiate athletics.

It will be low profile. But I think because it's useful and it has patterns of in and out, allowing people in and out for any number of reasons, it has a deceptive, quiet, gentle strength in American life. And I know of no other nation comes even close to offering that.

Andrew Hibel: Not to mention affordability. Yes. If you're looking to attend college and you have limited resources

Dr. John Thelin: Yep.

Andrew Hibel: Going to your local community college.

Dr. John Thelin: Yeah. So I think it's an under praised, under celebrated, under acknowledged institution.

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