Joel Eissenberg, who is one of several writers for the Angry Bear blog, posted today on the end of the golden age of academia. The trigger for the post was undoubtedly an article on academic layoffs at colleges and universities that appeared in the Boston Globe (Joel links to that article if you are interested - I usually don't bother with the Boston Globe due to paywall, and my own paycheck can only sustain a small handful of subscriptions).
Joel is a professor emeritus, and his experiences are worth reading about. To an extent, what he experienced as a student tracks with my own. Going to Cal State Fullerton was dirt cheap when I was an undergraduate. In-state students paid some nominal fees, but no tuition, although those fees got steeper around the time I graduated with my BA. Funding for public colleges and universities began to dry up as the 1980s progressed. In California, part of the problem was the passage of a series of initiatives that limited the state's ability to collect revenue, which meant that public education took a hit. You could say that by the time I became a college student, the golden age of academia in the US was already in the rear view mirror. Many of us would not have noticed at the time as facilities were still being maintained, a wide variety of courses and degrees were still being offered - including in the traditional liberal arts that are often derided here in the US. If the student government wanted to fund a Henry Rollins band concert, it could without a problem. Heck, Cal State Fullerton had Olympic-quality men's and women's fencing teams (I was friends with a few members of the women's team).
Austerity took its toll, and into the 1990s (I stuck around to get my MA in Experimental Psychology) I noticed a decline in maintenance and upkeep (overflowing trash cans became the norm for my last couple years) and a decline in cultural, sports, and academic offerings began. My own funding for my MA degree came from a grant awarded to Ron Riggio, Tom Mayes, and Carolyn Kubiak to study the role of internship experience on managerial skills (individual and group decision-making, interview skills, etc.) above and beyond classroom education. At the time the grant began, there was an understanding that the PIs could apply for an extension beyond the three years they were awarded. That made sense as many of the students that made up Cal State Fullerton's population were non-traditional students who may only have been going to school part-time. In the middle of my second and last year of my MA, we got the bad news that the pot of federal money that made that particular grant possible was going away and that we would have to wrap up sooner than the PIs had hoped. If nothing else, that did motivate me to work around the clock to get my thesis successfully defended. I had good reason to believe there might not be enough money to fund my position much beyond that second year. I managed to get full funding at Mizzou for my PhD, but as we ended the 1990s, the vibe I was getting was that the days of funding students beyond year five were over. Thankfully, I was done with my dissertation before I could find out what no funding looked like. Increasingly, it became difficult to fund doctoral students unless there was grant money to fund them. The US government was no longer interested in funding the land grant institutions and the states weren't necessarily motivated either. We've seen what that means for tuition (my youngest daughter is living that dream right now). But those who advised me were optimistic about higher ed's prospects as the new century approached: surely a boom in student enrollment (which did happen) would lead to an increase in state and federal support. Yeah, that never really happened.
I've spent my entire career as a full-time professor witnessing the decline of the university as a viable place to study and work. Even the small universities where I've made my living once upon a time offered a full range of degree offerings and handled all custodial and maintenance of the physical plant in-house. Budget cuts led to outsourcing, and layoffs of those staff members, even as student enrollment increased or at least remained steady. I get the feeling that at least on the surface the flagship public universities and elite private universities were able to maintain some semblance of "the golden age" as long as the grant money flowed enough and as long as there were plenty of international students who viewed our graduate and professional degree programs as the gold standard. I'd say those days are truly over. And in reality, the financial pressure for grad students in an era where full funding could not be assured as tuition continued to increase to a greater degree than the inflation rate was taking a toll. Grant funding was getting harder to come by, especially as the Tea Party era took hold in the 2010s. And then came Trump. Now the rule is that funding is only given contingent on being sufficiently "non-woke" (whatever that might mean), and international students are no longer welcome in the eyes of the current federal government. Losing international students will end not only individual research programs, but likely whole degree offerings and the careers those degree offerings sustained.
I am not optimistic about the prospects for higher ed going forward. Even if the US survives the next few years, the damage to the reputation of our education system will be done. We are already seeing the beginning of a brain drain in the US, and that will likely continue. As someone in the sciences (social sciences specifically), I am still optimistic about how the sciences will progress. The US government can end a lot of the scientific work that universities once did without interference, but there are universities in other nations that will no doubt pick up the slack. It just means that aspiring scientists in the US will want to do their graduate training outside the US and will want to look for career opportunities outside the US. And depending on one's ideological perspective, the response might be "who cares?" By relinquishing its role as a leader in scientific research, US citizens will no longer get to benefit directly from new advances. Their counterparts in China, India, and the EU (which seem well-positioned to hire the very scholars the US no longer wants) are already swooping in to hire scholars who would have otherwise remained in the US. Americans will get used to no longer being first in line. They have no choice.
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