Introducing “Finding Equilibrium”
Welcome! “Finding Equilibrium” is our effort to contribute data-driven, research-informed thoughts on the future of higher education from the perspectives of veteran academic leaders who happen to be economists. In the entries that follow, we aim to get beyond headlines and conventional wisdom to frame issues facing higher education from a fresh perspective, to bring informed insight on important questions, and to offer creative and actionable solutions to important problems.
We begin this venture at a precarious time for higher education. Public discourse increasingly challenges the wisdom of students attending college, and policy makers are increasingly skeptical about how universities are run and funded. Universities ignore these currents at their peril, and at the peril of future generations of students and society as a whole. In a knowledge-driven economy, we believe the university’s role in research and building human capital can (and must) have a profound and growing impact on innovation, technological progress, and ultimately economic prosperity.
As the name of our Substack suggests, higher education is in a search for equilibrium, looking to balance cost and student experience, perspectives of legislators and of faculty, focused preparation for the world of work and broadening student horizons.
Or to take a few topics du jour, balancing face to face and online instruction, and enabling freedom of expression while still valuing campus climate and safety. University leaders are called to navigate these choppy waters, finding the appropriate course for their institution that balances the many competing interests and delivers on the potential of their campus.
How will our approach be different from the deluge of commentary on higher education and its future that you may have seen in traditional media or from the political sphere? Our careful reading of public writing on higher education suggests much of it is surface deep and repeats ad-nauseum conventional wisdom that is rarely validated. Too often the headlines tell only a fragment of the full story when the most important insights are in the details, and critical nuance is never discussed. Much of this work is authored by those with vested interests in particular outcomes and/or those with little experience of the practical challenges faced by universities and the stakeholders (students, employers, research partners, local communities, and governments) they serve.
“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue. We have collectively served 25 years in higher education administration at Purdue University, repeatedly recognized as among the most innovative universities in America.
We were on the front lines of leadership as Purdue dramatically grew enrollments, created dynamic new degree programs and shuttered moribund offerings, expanded research and public engagement, consolidated old campuses and created new ones, maintained face to face instruction during COVID-19 and kept tuition frozen for 12 years...and counting. All that, along with trying more than a few experiments that didn’t quite work out as planned! But none of that was easy, and each of these accomplishments, and occasional failures, represented the culmination of a careful balancing act - a search for equilibrium.
Because we have lived academic leadership, we have witnessed first-hand what universities can be at their very best, but also seen the ways in which universities here and around the world fail in their critical mission.
Beyond that perspective, we are PhD-holding economists who know how to use careful research to go beyond the headlines. We won’t oversimplify complex issues, and we won’t make simple issues complex. Our training and our experience in academic leadership enable us to offer views that may seem contrarian because they collide with conventional wisdom. Because we aim to offer considered opinions, we will only say something when we have something to say. We expect to post once or perhaps twice a week, and to provide thematically linked posts that steadily examine an issue in-depth and from multiple perspectives. We intend to get to the essence of an argument, with short, pithy posts that respect our reader’s time. You of course will be the judge of how well we succeed.
To be clear, we are not disinterested observers. We believe deeply in the larger mission of higher education and its power to transform lives and society for the better. We want to put our leadership experience to work in a productive way, to help make higher education a stronger, more impactful, more responsive, and more respected institution. We aim to inform policy discussions and provide solutions that policymakers might consider as they look to improve higher education. We want to help students and their parents, as they make critical decisions about if or where to go to college and how to make the best of their investments in their education. And we want to be useful to university administrators as they make the key decisions that will move their institutions forward. We seek an audience in new administrators as they take up leadership roles, often without the benefit of a larger perspective on the issues and challenges of higher education or an understanding of what does and doesn’t work.
While we expect that Finding Equilibrium will cover a lot of ground, we will organize our discussion around a set of themes. As we build our content, we will tag and collect these themes to be available as ready-made primers providing background reading, data, arguments, and solutions. From the outset, some of these themes will include:
The value of a university education. What are the best arguments and data clearly articulating value, where do the critics have a point, where can value be improved, and how can we more effectively articulate this value to students, parents, and policymakers?
The university-industry interface. How can universities better make use of industry connections and opportunities to produce students who better serve unmet market needs, generate more value for the economy, and more successful careers for their graduates?
Globalization and technology. How are these forces reshaping labor markets and the value, content, and structure of a college degree and how should higher education respond?
The cost problem in higher education. What are the drivers of escalating costs in universities, and what tradeoffs will administrators and policy makers face as they work to increase access?
How to run a university. Practical advice on questions such as how to select a Dean/Department Head, should we care about rankings and reputation, the wisdom of starting new programs and partnerships, and methods for optimizing information flow within academic institutions, among others.
The system of higher education. Does a system of higher education institutions rooted in the needs of decades past still make sense for this century? What would dramatic changes such as campus consolidation mean for students of varying ability and interests, and communities where universities anchor local economies?
Explainers. Higher education is complicated! What are basic facts that a well-informed person interested in higher education should know?
Who do we think can benefit from reading “Finding Equilibrium”?
· Academic leaders and leaders-to-be
· Policy-makers charged with improving higher education
· Leaders of not-for-profit organizations with a focus on higher education
· Industry leaders concerned about availability and preparation of future talent
· Consumers of higher education: students, parents, and those who advise them
· Anyone who cares about the power of education to positively transform society
We hope you will go on this journey with us. We have set some lofty goals for ourselves and will do our best to share perspectives with you that you will find interesting, informative, and most of all useful. Again, welcome to Finding Equilibrium!