Prioritizing Science in Higher Education: A Necessary Shift

One of my pet peeves is going to the drug store and seeing necessary items locked behind a plastic case. Whether it’s razor blades, Advil, or skin cream, drug store shelves have become pharma jail cells as chains like CVS and Walgreens take draconian measures to combat shoplifting. A recent Washington Post column showed I’m not alone in my drug store distress, but rather part of community of curmudgeonly customers. In CVS was so worried about shoplifting that it stole its own soul, Matt Bai makes a convincing case that “someone has turned the CVS I knew into a Museum of the American Pharmacy.”

When we encounter a necessary item locked away, we’re instructed to ring the service bell for assistance. So we ring and, after a minute or two, an employee shows up and opens the case. As Matt points out, the problem for infrequent shoppers is that most of the time we don’t know exactly what we want. In Matt’s case, his son asked for teeth whitening strips. So Matt’s in a pickle:

In the old CVS, I’d have happily spent five minutes idly breaking down the pros and cons. But now, this poor woman is standing there watching and waiting, and I’m self-conscious. She’s the only one working here. She has things to do. It’s not like the CVS has assigned me a personal shopper. I ask her for advice, and I can tell she wants to be helpful, but this is the CVS, and we all know that the employees are basically silent observers… “I think they’re pretty much the same,” she says hopefully… The pressure I’m feeling here is more than I can stand. I grab a random box, and the woman quickly locks the case before I can change my mind.

Then the same thing happens two aisles over:

When my new friend reappears and opens the case, I grab the first three bottles of bodywash I see. I cannot subject her to another round of anguished vacillation. We’re not picking out a puppy here.

Of course, he buys the wrong things. I’ve known Matt for 30 years since he worked with my (then future) wife at Newsweek. That’s back when Newsweek was a respected weekly magazine owned by the Washington Post’s Graham family – one where an old-school beverage cart provided libations to journalists working late Friday nights to “close the book.” And back when CVS was a needed respite from our under-air-conditioned New York apartment, not a locus of stress and frustration. Matt’s not a total crank – at least no more than me. And he’s clearly onto something about likely consequences for organizations that close themselves off to the world.

That’s certainly the case in higher education. Colleges have locked themselves behind a plastic case in the two most important ways imaginable.

First, programs of study haven’t been responsive to economic needs. Nearly all schools continue to offer the same degree programs they’ve run for generations. The list of most popular majors – starting with business, nursing, psychology, biology, and engineering – looks like it could be wearing a poodle skirt, love beads, or sideburns. (Or if shopping in a drug store, buying Lustre-Crème Shampoo, Dippity-Do Hair Gel, and a carton of Chesterfields.) Only computer science (#11) would have been out of place when our grandparents were college-age, and we’re merely missing classics and agricultural sciences. Unless forced by budgetary exigencies, colleges never discontinue programs in order to redirect teaching resources to more productive uses. In an economy that’s experienced radical changes in the last few decades, this level of movement is glacial.

Second, the people teaching at colleges and universities aren’t responsive to economic needs. Tenured faculty – the highest paid, permanent faculty – are required to have terminal degrees, almost always PhDs. And having a doctorate typically means a straight line from college to graduate school to employment at a postsecondary institution. It’s even true at community colleges. When full-time positions open up, competition is fierce and candidates without doctorates stand as little chance as cold symptoms after taking Nyquil, or heartburn post-TUMS. This means the people educating and preparing students for work in the real economy have never worked in the real economy. Just as CVS employees can’t help us choose, faculty without real-world experience can’t provide helpful career guidance. And because academic departments control curriculum and faculty control departments, the lack of real-world experience produces the museum-like quality of university offerings.

With college safely locked away, undergraduate majors rarely offer a straight line to good first jobs. Lightcast has documented the lack of direct pathways: a swirl from the most popular majors to the most popular jobs. The unemployment rate for the last five classes of college graduates is up 40% in the last two years and 12% of grads in their 20s are currently unemployed, particularly men. Meanwhile, underemployment for college grads one year out is at 52%. Between the Scylla of unemployment and the Charybdis of underemployment, two-thirds to three-quarters of the class of 2025 are struggling to launch. Like CVS customers, college graduates need to ring for assistance.

In response to these criticisms, colleges and universities have offered bromides – i.e., vague ideas intended to placate, not Bromo-Seltzer which is no longer available at CVS – about building industry or employer partnerships. But partnerships ebb and flow and nothing really changes. Sooner or later, higher education will need to meet the problem head-on by addressing the source of the economic change we’ve witnessed over the past half-century: scientific progress and digital transformation.

Prioritizing science worked for higher ed during the Cold War when, in search of solutions to military challenges, federal funding skyrocketed like CVS sales of Wegovy and other semaglutides. Today’s biggest problems are environmental, socioeconomic, and biological. But if and when they are solved, they’re more likely to be solved by science/tech than other disciplines.

If more colleges and universities led with science, they’d launch more economically relevant programs. According to one study of new programs, only 15% were STEM; 75% were in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. And schools would be more likely to discontinue unproductive programs. Science tends to move on faster than other fields of study. After all, no college still offers programs in phrenology or alchemy.

They’d also focus more resources on higher value programs. One of higher education’s unsung scandals is enrollment caps for the most remunerative majors, namely the most technical and scientific. While student demand for quantitative programs – computer science, engineering, data science, and now machine learning/AI – doubles and doubles again, colleges and universities have added faculty slower than it now takes to shop at CVS. The result: not nearly enough seats, particularly at public institutions. Many publics play a bait-and-switch game, admitting students as freshmen then rejecting them from higher value technical programs as sophomores and juniors – ostensibly via use of outdated prerequisites, weed-out courses, and GPA requirements, but actually due to lack of capacity. So nearly half of all students who say they want to complete these programs never do.

What would it mean to make science primus inter pares in American higher education? Here’s a modest proposal:

1. Recognize that not all programs and faculty are created equal.
2. Increase spending on STEM programs – expanding capacity in high-demand programs, adding new programs – and necessarily less on others.
   1. New programs could include:
      1. Machine learning/AI
      2. Cybersecurity
      3. Biotech
      4. Advanced manufacturing
      5. Robotics
      6. Computational neuroscience
      7. Nanotechnology
   2. As well as hybrid programs like:
      1. Digital health
      2. Climate tech
      3. Digital forensics
      4. Fashion tech (wearables)
      5. Tech ethics
      6. Engineering + AI
      7. Data science + any other field of study e.g., Bioinformatics, Urban informatics
3. At far too many colleges and universities, CS and engineering have been the only career-oriented STEM options. Meanwhile, CS and engineering are no longer the surefire winners they once were. Of course, launching even some of these new programs means no longer treating historic budget allocations as sacrosanct, or even as a baseline from which to modulate.
4. Take a different approach to recruiting faculty. Target industry practitioners passionate about teaching real skills and preparing students for career launch. Which requires competing with companies for talent and paying more.
5. At the same time, rebuild STEM courses to prioritize transformative learning over knowledge transmission. While helpful, it’s insufficient for industry practitioners to simply cover everything in the textbook – if there’s a textbook – or disseminate what students need to know to get a good entry-level job. Rather than racing through content, by focusing on perspective transformation – where students change their frames of reference by critically reflecting on assumptions –– science/tech can be as effective as other disciplines at building critical thinking, communication, and creative capabilities.
6. If necessary, price these programs differently, recognizing that an expensive data science program is more likely to have a higher return on investment for students than a discount psychology degree.

The education and labor market challenges we’re facing are not unique to the U.S. As they’re a byproduct of digital transformation of the economy and education’s failure (so far) to keep up, everyone is in the same boat. A recent OECD survey of high school students across 80 countries found “high levels of career uncertainty and confusion” because “job expectations… bear little relationship to actual patterns of labor market demand.” Career-launch confrères in Canada and the UK are struggling like never before to land good first jobs. But all the more reason to build new educational models to keep up with economic change. New STEM programs delivered by faculty with industry experience are likely to provide straighter lines to more good first jobs. As America leads the world in digital transformation, we should lead in our response to digital transformation.

A science-first system of higher education would also give us a better shot at preserving our AI lead because universities would attract more research funding. The federal government – at least this Administration – is more likely to provide Cold War-era levels of research support to universities that privilege and prioritize science. Although STEM faculty and researchers are the primary victims of Trump Administration attempts to cut federal research funding by a third, higher education’s political and public funding challenges have hardly stemmed from STEM.

Prioritizing science anew doesn’t mean no room for arts, humanities, and social sciences. We need them not only to graduate well-rounded students, but also to push back when science yields inhumane outcomes (like locking up the pharamaceutical products you need). But that doesn’t mean that 70% of students should concentrate in these fields, certainly not without a hybrid-tech component. The recent increase in double majors indicates that many students already intuit as much. And note that our economic rival, China, isn’t putting humanities professors in charge of universities. The vast majority of Chinese university presidents are scientists, engineers, or economists. Not surprisingly, China is pulling ahead of us across a panoply of scientific metrics. If this isn’t another Sputnik moment, I don’t know what is.

The alternative is to remain closed off from our changed world. Matt Bai notes one survey showed that “less than 1 in 3 shoppers are willing to hang around once they realize that the item they want is behind glass.” So let’s make CVS stand for Colleges Value Science rather than a Museum of the American University. Unless and until we begin putting science and technology first, colleges and universities will have a problem that neither teeth whitening strips nor body wash will fix.