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Declining by Degrees
Higher Education at Risk
By Richard H. Hersh, John Merrow Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2005 Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9338-2
CHAPTER 1
The Media: Degrees of Coverage
Gene I. Maeroff
Professors who study news coverage are fond of content analysis. One approach calls for measuring articles by column inches. Or, in the case of broadcast journalism, counting the number of minutes devoted to a particular topic. This is a crude form of analysis, but it bears some connection to the real world. A comparison of the coverage of higher education and K–12 education, for example, would almost certainly conclude that the space and time that the media devote to colleges and universities pales by comparison with that lavished on elementary and secondary schools. This is so for five reasons.
1. More Americans have an active link to K–12 schools than to higher education and, presumably, have more interest in K–12.
2. Taxpayers plow much more money into elementary and secondary schools, and have soaring property tax bills to show for it.
3. The news media perceive the issues in K–12 as more compelling — and therefore more worthy of coverage.
4. The media fail to see higher education as a landscape rich in story ideas and instead tend to focus on a few predictable subjects, giving far less attention to issues of teaching and learning.
5. This is the way it has always been, and the status quo counts for a great deal in journalism.
These truths add up to a situation in which higher education, surely among society's most valued public goods, escapes scrutiny by the media, one of the few forces with the authority to question the quality of a college or university education. Given higher education's social and economic importance to individuals and to the nation, one hopes that journalism will begin to take its responsibility as an agent for accountability more seriously. Yet the reasons why this has not happened are abundantly clear.
When it comes to the size of the enterprise, it is not surprising that journalists deem precollegiate education worthy of more coverage than higher education. After all, the number of students (53.8 million vs. 15.9 million), institutions (100,000 vs. 3,500), and teachers (3.5 million vs. 1.9 million) in elementary and secondary classrooms dwarfs colleges and universities. Such factors help determine news coverage — the size of the potential audience in terms of those affected and those interested in a subject. News organizations simply do not think that colleges and universities warrant the degree of coverage given to elementary and secondary schools.
As for expenditures, the best advice comes from the film character Jerry Maguire: Follow the dollars. If you ran along the money trail, you would see that precollegiate education is a monstrous $500 billion-a-year enterprise. That is the major part of state and local government expenditures. In most locales, the largest portion of property tax supports K–12 education.
How do schools spend this money? Do they adhere to high standards? What do the taxpayers get for their investment? The pursuit of answers to such questions drives the coverage of elementary and secondary education. Journalists quickly conjure up a plethora of possible articles fraught with the tension and conflict so attractive to the media: Why don't students score higher on tests? Why don't teachers do a better job? Why are members of school boards always squabbling? Why aren't reading, math, and almost every other subject taught better?
Journalists could ask similar questions about higher education, but they usually do not. They act as if it were an article of faith that America's higher education is the best in the world — almost beyond criticism — while considering precollegiate education seriously flawed and, therefore, ripe for scrutiny. The image of a supposedly high-quality system of higher education, operating with the precision of a fine engine, seems to awe journalists. Like most Americans, journalists do not see past the ivy.
Higher education's weaknesses and shortcomings remain largely out of sight to reporters, many of whom are quick to seize on almost any foible at the elementary and secondary level. In other words, higher education is Teflon-coated, remarkably immune to criticism. It is easier to assume that when students do not succeed at colleges and universities, it is because high schools have not prepared them properly, not due to any deficiency on the part of institutions of higher education. Charles B. Reed of California State University and Edward B. Rust of the Business Higher Education Forum think that institutions of higher education can make themselves more accountable by defining their goals and providing evidence that they have met them. Surely such steps would lead to more transparency in judging quality.
The implementation of the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act, however flawed it may be, forced journalists who cover elementary and secondary schools to delve into achievement as never before. Higher education has no analog to that law, though the renewal of the Higher Education Act could contain language that may compel colleges and universities to divulge a great deal more information than they do now about various performance indicators.
Journalists have shied away from using their power to examine how well institutions of higher education discharge the responsibility of educating their students, particularly undergraduates. Instead, similar stories, repeated over and over, dominate the coverage. Not counting college athletics, which is in a class by itself, the big two are tuition and admissions.
The news media convey the impression that nearly every college costs a potentate's fortune and that most institutions are so selective that only super-students need apply. "Reporters stalking and reporting on a handful of highly selective colleges have created serious anxiety that has incrementally escalated at the family dinner table and in high school corridors," according to two people who have served as admissions officers at elite colleges. They go on to say that students and parents "quite naturally (and mistakenly) infer that getting into any college, and paying for it, will be cause for frenzy."
Coverage of this sort helps feed the public's misconceptions. In a 2003 poll by the U.S. Department of Education, 65 percent of students and 58 percent of their parents could not estimate yearly tuition costs or overestimated tuition by at least 25 percent. Those from the poorest families were least likely to know the cost of going to college. The facts, according to College Board, are these: Average tuition and fees in the 2003–2004 academic year were $4,694 at four-year public institutions and $1,905 at community colleges. In the sector of the country with the lowest tuitions and fees, the West, the comparable figures were $3,737 at four-year institutions and $1,007 at two-year institutions. These amounts are not the formidable obstacles that the media lead the public to believe. Of course, it costs a lot to go to Harvard, Stanford, Sarah Lawrence, and Duke. But these institutions are private and not typical.
Yet newspapers perpetuate distortions with such articles as the one distributed in August 2004 by Associated Press, which reported that colleagues of Tom Ridge expected him to resign after the November election. His associates said he needed to find a higher-paying job so as to afford impending college tuitions for his two teenagers. Ridge's government salary as head of Homeland Security was $175,000. The article went on to deplore what it called the crisis in college costs.
As for admissions, a large number of postsecondary institutions admit virtually all applicants and exert no selectivity whatsoever. Only 8 percent of all four-year institutions accept fewer than 50 percent of their applicants. Half accept from 50 to 80 percent of their applicants, and the rest — fully 42 percent — accept at least four of every five applicants. Community colleges, which 40 percent of first-year undergraduates attend, have open admissions. Yet daily newspapers act as if the nation's more than one thousand community colleges barely exist, seldom noting their open admissions and low tuition policies, and barely mentioning their academic programs. Journalists find Brown University eminently more fascinating than Northern Virginia Community College.
In an essay on the editorial page of the New York Times in June 2004, one of the newspaper's editorial writers reflected on his conversations with classmates at the fiftieth reunion of his graduating class from the elite Exeter Academy. He described how much easier it was to get into Exeter in the 1950s and how the school's graduates at the time could almost assume they would win entry to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These thoughts led to the obligatory discussion of how difficult it has become to gain admission to Exeter and to highly selective colleges — yet the writer did not acknowledge that this kind of exclusivity does not figure in the experiences of the vast majority of Americans.
I mentioned sports coverage. The media are obsessed with sports and it is no wonder given that the American public — or at least the male portion — is consumed by sports. Editors think they give readers and viewers what they want with this gargantuan coverage, and perhaps they do. It would be grand, though, if only 10 percent of the space devoted to college and university athletics were converted to coverage of substantive academic issues at the institutions mentioned on the sports pages. Alas, this is not apt to happen.
It is hard to get newspapers to alter their ways. The industry is steeped in tradition. Of course, not everything has remained the same. Production methods for newspapers have changed vastly since the 1960s. Cold type has replaced hot type, banishing linotype machines to museums. Reporters use cell phones to communicate with the city desk from the field, and they write stories on laptops without returning to the office. Yet the news itself, or what constitutes news, has changed less than other parts of the business.
The issue therefore is how the media can foment a national discussion about quality in higher education, looking at more than whether colleges and universities adequately prepare legions of employees for business, industry, and the professions. How often do stories from the campuses overturn conventional wisdom to probe and challenge the very purposes of higher education?
Journalists — and, for reasons I will explain, basically I am talking about those who work for newspapers — need to focus more on questions of quality at colleges and universities, just as they are inclined to do in reporting on elementary and secondary schools. I submit that such a shift requires more sufficient coverage of higher education and better judgment by news organizations about which stories to cover.
How can we tell when and if higher education gets sufficient coverage? It's a tough call. Partisans in most fields do not feel that coverage is sufficient for the topic that they champion. Higher education is hardly sui generis in this respect. Consider issues in transportation, health, science, technology, labor, and the environment, to mention just a few subjects. Public discussion in all of these areas is woefully handicapped by the news media's scant coverage. It is a fact, for instance, that until 9/11, the news media had gradually reduced coverage of foreign affairs. Furthermore, news organizations assign far fewer reporters to cover the state government than in former years. Here are some questions, particular to higher education, that one might ask to determine if the public is sufficiently informed:
• Do people know enough to carry on cogent discussions of such topics as tenure, admissions standards, financial aid policies, affirmative action, academic pedagogy, and how students choose their majors?
• Can they evaluate the fiscal policies of their state legislatures in regard to allocations for higher education and the connection to quality of outcomes?
• How does the public make decisions about quality at colleges and universities?
• Can people pose solid questions about the worth and purpose of a college degree?
The other half of this equation involves the news judgment of reporters and editors and their ability to identify the most worthwhile story possibilities. Journalists on the beat ought to develop mental maps of the higher education terrain, recognizing where to situate their priorities. News people who parachute into a higher education story only occasionally are not apt to be able to make keen judgments about what to cover and how to cover it. Their coverage becomes largely reactive — dealing with ephemeral issues. Reporters and editors involved in higher education coverage should ensure that enough of the kinds of stories that the public needs to be sufficiently informed about issues of quality find their way into the paper or onto the tube. Supervising editors should be able to stand up and argue at the daily story conferences of their news organizations on behalf of such articles. Such a shift in approach would imply that those involved in higher education coverage have the confidence that comes from deep familiarity with a subject.
As I pointed out earlier, improved coverage of higher education, if it comes, will have to arise primarily from the print media. Commercial television, the source of news for most Americans, is addicted to the trivial and the inconsequential. Broadcasters dispense a surfeit of coverage about Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson (not to mention his sister Janet), Britney Spears, and other personalities posing for what Andy Warhol called their fifteen minutes of fame. Such stories, masquerading as news, consume space that news organizations might devote to matters of substance. Coverage of this sort insidiously undermines the ability of the public — especially younger viewers — to distinguish between real news and garbage.
Amusing viewers has grown more important than informing them. I like the way that David Shaw, the media critic of the Los Angeles Times, puts it when he casts his practiced eyes on this alarming phenomenon. He talks of the "four horsemen of the journalistic apocalypse: superficiality, sensationalism, preoccupation with celebrity, and obsession with the bottom line." These four horsemen trample over intelligent, informed coverage of higher education and other topics of consequence.
Even coverage of politics, once regarded as a matter of gravitas, has been rendered the stuff of amusement. Look at Jay Leno, David Letterman, Dennis Miller, Jon Stewart, Al Franken, and Bill Maher — comedians all. And now they are America's experts when it comes to politics — commanding audiences far larger than those who provide serious punditry. Comedy shows were a prime source of information about politics for tens of millions of Americans during the election campaign of 2004. Newsday 's television critic observes that "CNN covers the news and Fox puts on entertainment shows in which news is a component." Pity poor Jim Lehrer.
One must understand the inner workings of the news media and the pressures on reporters on the higher education beat to see how difficult it will be to get even the more serious print media to cover issues of quality in higher education. Consider the circumstances under which reporters, including those who cover colleges and universities, work. Many simply do not get enough time to produce articles. Moreover, some news organizations subject reporters to a quota system requiring them to turn in a specified number of stories a day, or a week. It is as if they are pressing pants at a dry cleaner's. How much time does such a journalist, however talented, have to explore questions of quality in higher education?
Think about the implications of these limitations: there isn't ample time to grasp the details of some of the more complicated stories. Journalists operating under such restrictions gravitate toward what they can comprehend and sum up easily and quickly. No wonder higher education coverage features articles about admissions and tuitions. These are relatively simple stories: Fill in the blanks, print the numbers, and shake up the reader.
One must also consider the turnover on the higher education beat, even at the leading news organizations, as a factor affecting coverage. The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media offers an annual seminar for those who cover higher education. Let us look back to 1999 and some of the reporters who were on the beat and attended the seminar that Hechinger, based at Teachers College, Columbia University, sponsored at that time: Many of them are no longer reporting on higher education. And, remember, most dailies do not even maintain a higher education beat, instead leaving the episodic coverage to general assignment reporters, the Jacks and Jills of all trades.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Declining by Degrees by Richard H. Hersh, John Merrow. Copyright © 2005 Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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