By Brian Rosenberg
“You can’t see the label from inside the bottle.”
Brian Rosenberg, self-identified five-decade higher education “bottle dweller,” now lives outside the long lauded but lately maligned American enterprise called higher education. His observation:
“This industry that ostensibly fosters growth and transformation in its students just cannot seem to change or transform itself in ways beyond the incremental.” ”
Rosenberg wants to help us understand WHY higher education, despite all the dire warnings of its imminent demise, remains resistant to change, when change is defined as “something that is truly transformational and affects the way we do our work on a deep level.” 3 His analysis is readable, insightful, and often humorous. This is no casual study.
The author describes the nature of today’s conflict in higher education as “the irresistible force of economics and demographics colliding with the immovable object of college governance and culture.”
About the author
Dr. Brian Rosenberg is a life-long educator and college administrator, including seventeen years as the president of the highly respected and well-funded Macalester College (the endowment was $500M when he arrived in 2003; today stands at $896M). Rosenberg earned his Ph.D. in English from Columbia. He has taught or led humanities-based higher education at Cooper Union, Allegheny College, and Lawrence University prior to his work at Macalester. He is currently a visiting professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
My QUICK TAKE on Whatever It Is, I’m Against It:
This book offers a careful analysis of why colleges and universities in the United States do not change and what to do about it.
His Contention
The higher education model (calendar, structure, pedagogy, delivery) has not substantively changed in decades, if not centuries. While a few top tier institutions can boast of large endowments and selective enrollment, most of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States cannot. Never mind that we are teetering on the edge of the demographic cliff, that the cost of college is up, enrollments down, and the American public has lost that loving feeling for higher education; most institutions soldier on with an attitude toward the necessity of change that is laissez-faire at best, hostile at worst. “No more,” says Rosenberg. We don’t have the luxury to forestall change because we have an unsustainable financial model:
When the service you provide costs more than people are willing and able to pay for it, when you are unable to lower the cost of that service, and when the number of your potential customers is shrinking, you have what one might describe as an unsustainable financial model. 6-7
His Approach
Rosenberg goes about his work combining careful research and hard facts with recollections of his own journey as a student, professor, college dean and long-time president of a prominent liberal arts college.
His conclusion
The days of “just getting by” are numbered. “There is simply more supply of than demand for colleges that are not name brands, and so the market [will] make the necessary adjustments.” 164. Change is necessary, but examples of substantive change are hard to find. Rosenberg lays out the path for change in his final chapter.
Opportunities for Application
Applications abound for boards and presidents, as well as faculty and staff of smaller institutions. While Rosenberg has served well-resourced institutions, lesser endowed institutions and those whose primary work is teaching rather than research should not be concerned that his words don’t apply. They do. The author’s experience may be on the Boardwalk side of the higher education monopoly board, but the application applies to all players.
Now for the deeper dive into this excellent work . . .
Why change in higher education is necessary:
A life-long academician and educational administrator, Rosenberg believes that resistance to anything that resembles serious change in higher education in the United States is profound. Rosenberg’s comments at the outset of his book bear repeating:
For years I have pondered the question of why an industry so widely populated by people who consider themselves politically liberal is so deeply conservative when it comes to its own work; why scholars whose disciplines are constantly evolving are so resistant to institutional evolution; why colleges and universities that almost always speak in their mission statements about the transformative power of education find it so difficult to transform themselves; why virtually no fundamental practice within higher education — calendar, tenure process, pedagogy, grading — has changed in meaningful ways for decades, if not centuries. 4
The cost is too high
For a select few (about 100 institutions), change is not necessary because their reputation is so high and their admission rate so low. Meanwhile, generous donors keep the endowment dollars at high tide. However, for the rest of the approximately 4,000 two-and-four-year institutions in the U.S., the financial model is struggling. Why? Rising costs and fewer students. Rosenberg writes, “on a systemic level, higher education has simply become too expensive: too expensive for institutions to provide and too expensive for consumers to afford.” This challenge is seen in the rising discount rate (from 42% in 2010-11 to 56.3% in 2024-25), and ballooning college debt. Many colleges Chief Financial Officers share this concern; studies of their peers revealing a gloomy outlook for the state of their institutions at future 5 and 10-year intervals. See page 11.
The demographics show a declining base of students
Not only will there be fewer college-age students for the foreseeable future, Rosenberg shows how the income disparity between the “haves” and “have-less” is growing. His conclusion? “It is the height of fantasy to expect more underrepresented students to flock to a service that costs more than a luxury car to provide . . .” 11
Research Institutions Do Not Deliver Better Teaching
Rosenberg is not anti-research, but he does work hard to dispel the myth that faculty research produces better classroom teaching. There is no research correlation. He writes, “I dwell on this . . . not merely because the irony of defending the role of research by ignoring the research on the topic is exquisite, but because it is emblematic of a widespread problem within higher education in the United States.” 3
Deferred Maintenance is problematic
Costs to maintain college campuses are enormous. Two examples will suffice: the University of Minnesota Twin Cities ($4.2 billion); the California State University system ($5.8 billion). Rosenberg cites Gordian, a facilities consulting firm, which said, “the scale of deferred capital renewal at schools has reached a level that cannot be tolerated.” That said, few, if any, have a plan to address it.
The Lecture model is ineffective
Lecture, still the predominant college model for teaching, is ineffective; the research for this claim is “both voluminous and incontrovertible,” leading one proponent of the “flipped classroom” to quip, “it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have [the] data” about its weaknesses. Still, lecture dominates on college campuses where students have more information on their cell phones than their professor has amassed in a lifetime.
A few more points of interest:
Endowment wealth: 19% of institutions hold 84% of the endowment wealth in the country; 10 universities hold nearly 40% of total endowment wealth. 6
Few immune to challenges: Of the nearly 4200 two-and-four-year postsecondary institutions listed by the National Center for Educational Statistics, only about 100 are largely immune to current and future market pressures. 6
Demographics: The traditional college-going population will drop by about 15 percent between 2025 and 2029 and will not recover anytime soon. 9
Declining enrollment: Undergraduate enrollment dropped by 12.3% between fall 2011 and 2020. Community college enrollment dropped by 38% between 2009 and 2020. 9-10
CFOs of College Sustainability: In a 2022 survey: "28% of those surveyed (35% private institutions/19% public) did not believe that their institutions would be financially stable for five years. A different survey in the same year, 35% did not anticipate financial stability over the next decade.” 11
Why Colleges resist change:
Rosenberg devotes five chapters to the factors underlying higher education’s resistance to change.
One: Some colleges don’t change because Their Reputation is so strong they don’t have to change
Rosenberg makes the case that many institutions don’t change due to their reputational strength. The strongest brand in the U.S. is not Apple, Nike, or Mercedes Benz. It’s Harvard! And like Harvard, many institutions don’t change because they don’t have to change. He cites U.S. News and World Report college rankings, whose top tier has essentially remained the same for forty years. He writes,
“These rankings have no meaningful relationship to quality but, like it or not, are a reasonably good proxy for reputation: to some degree they establish it, but more often they simply reflect and confirm it.”
Few things can shake these rankings. Rosenberg notes the approximate $1 billion in settlements that Michigan and Michigan State paid out to victims of serial sex abuse, and “the impressive roster of scoundrels” USC has employed, with no weakening of national rankings. The top universities at the outset of rankings in 1983 were Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. More than forty years later, the “top universities” in the rankings are Princeton, Harvard, MIT (previously tenth), and Yale, with Stanford at fifth. A similar pattern exists for liberal arts colleges. See 35ff.
Such stability is not found in business, where in 1983, the top five companies were Exxon, General Motors, Mobil, Texaco, and Ford. At the time of the book’s writing, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Disney topped the list, “none of which made the top one hundred in 1983.” 38 His conclusion:
"An institution for which demand far outstrips supply and whose reputation is more or less untouchable has no need to change, and individuals within such an institution who nevertheless push for change are likely to [be] confronted by a wall of intransigence. If you are perceived by influential "‘experts” as the best and treated by the market as the best, it seems pretty safe to assume that you are, in fact, the best, and what could be better than that? If Apple could have run back the iPhone 7 year after year, increased the price, and seen a rise in demand, why would it have messed around with an iPhone 8? 43
“Branding,” writes Rosenberg, “is typically not the work of years or decades but of centuries.” 36 So where does that leave the vast majority of “lesser” colleges and universities? It leaves them in the wake — both for better and for worse — of the reputational impact of the select few colleges and universities. For example, the New York Times mentions Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton collectively about twice as often as the term community college even though the former group collectively enrolls only about sixty thousand students, while the latter between seven and eight million. Rosenberg writes, “If transformational change is unlikely to make our situation dramatically better, why take the risk that it will make it dramatically worse?” 44
Search, Experience, AND Credence goods
I appreciate Rosenberg’s treatment of search goods, experience goods, and credence goods.
Search goods: A product or service whose quality is easily verifiable prior to purchase. Think consumer electronics, paper towels, furniture.
Experience goods: A product or service whose price, quality, or some other attribute remains unknown until purchased. Think a recommended restaurant, wines, the work of an unknown author, an appliance repair service. Sampled enough, that product or service can move into the “search goods” category.
Credence goods: A product or service that a customer, even after purchase, may not yet be able to assess its quality. Think some forms of medical care, consulting services, higher education. “You pay the physician or consultant or professor without knowing precisely what you need, they provide what they decide you need, and you have in the end no sure way of knowing that you needed it.” 40
The application to higher education: Rosenberg states, “As one moves from search goods to experience goods to credence goods, the importance of prestige increases: in the absence of verifiable evidence of quality, reputation become supremely powerful. ‘Prestige,’ Dave Wieneke observes, ‘is the currency of credence goods.’” U.S. News Rankings help solidify credence. At the same time, those institutions without such brand recognition compete for a declining number of college-age students in a day when both the necessity and cost of college is questioned.
Application to today:
Rosenberg writes, “Boldness rather than incrementalism sounds good in theory, but in practice it is extraordinarily difficult. Even when a college is on its deathbed, important constituencies will push back, hard, against changing the very things that landed it there.” The times call for creativity and entrepreneurialism, but in most schools the “focus is more often on what the school has been than on what it should become.” 47
“We need to stop asking ‘Does this feel like us?’ ... and ask ‘What’s the right thing to do?’”
TWO: Many colleges don’t change because There are few incentives to change
Rosenberg, the president of a college gifted with financial health and a strong brand, had on one hand, few incentives to change. He writes, “Such presidents are ‘like the chief executive of Chanel or Rolex, burnishing brands that operate at the highest end of the higher ed market.’” 50 “My history,” he notes, “is a history of the problem and not the cure.” 51 He notes,
Most presidential job descriptions read like calls for a messiah: the 2022 search prospectus for the presidency of Drew University proclaimed that the university ‘seeks a bold visionary who is innovative, entrepreneurial, inspiring, and financially astute.’ Don’t we all? 53
While calls for visionary leadership abound, higher education’s shared governance model coupled with faculty tenure make such change incredibly difficult. When the decision-making power for changing curriculum or heaven forbid, the tenure system, is in the hands of the faculty, one can see why Rosenberg cites, “entrenched resistance to change” as a hallmark of many educational institutions.
While recognizing the exceptional leader (e.g. Michael Crow of Arizona State), Rosenberg puts little confidence in the college president as a change agent. That’s not a commentary on a president’s desire, commitment, or expertise; rather it has to do with the nature of higher education as described above. “Changing a college takes time that most leaders are not permitted.” 57 Then there are alumni, governing boards, and increasingly, politicians and political pressure, each of whom hold sway with particular constituent groups. Rosenberg concludes:
The problem now is serious but simple. Those with the means to effect real change, financially secure colleges and universities, lack the incentive, while those with the incentive, financially endangered colleges and universities, lack the means. . . . The most likely result, if nothing changes, will be higher education’s version of the growing inequity that seems apparent in most aspects of our society: high-cost, high-touch education for the few and low-cost education of questionable quality for the many. 69
Three: Higher Education’s “disciplines” create more silos and less collaboration
Higher education is a fragmented social sector, leading Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, to describe the American university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Or as another lifelong educator has put it, a faculty member is “someone who thinks otherwise.” Given that faculty are separated by discipline and housed in departments, each semi-autonomous, it is not surprising that change, when it occurs, is incremental at best. Rosenberg notes that fragmentation “renders serious institutional changes almost impossible to achieve.” 85
At Lancaster Bible College we emphasize that we are a business family, meaning that we must have missional revenue to achieve missional outcome. While care for mission and the people who make the mission possible are both essential, fiscal and fiduciary integrity means we make difficult decisions when necessary. This simple concept is so antithetical to higher education, excepting possibly the for-profit sector, that is hard for us to grasp what a diversion from the norm we are striving to achieve.
FOUR: The Shared governance model makes colleges and universities impervious to change
Shared governance generally means three groups work (to some degree) collaboratively to lead the college: the governing board (the final authority), the president, and the faculty. This idea is hard-baked into most institutions given that it was formulated and endorsed in 1966 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Rosenberg notes that “shared governance” has become a “floating signifier,” meaning a term that has taken on a variety of meanings to suit a given context. That said, the initial idea is still the general operating principle in most colleges and universities. He writes:
The vulnerability of shared governance to dysfunction was built into its original definition. The board is responsible for mission and resources, the faculty for academic programs, and the president for innovating. These responsibilities are obviously interconnected and interdependent, and each party can only fulfill its responsibility effectively if their collective relationship is in fact built on a “community of interest” and “joint effort.” If they work independently or in opposition to one another, the system breaks down or, more often, freezes up.” 97
Rosenberg addresses the role of each, but stresses the unique challenges for a college president, who functions as the unique link between the board and the faculty. As CEO, “the president’s work is to plan, to organize, to direct, and to represent.” However, beyond that necessary function, “the president has a special obligation ‘to innovate and initiate’ and ‘to solve problems of obsolescence’.’” 96
Sounds easy enough, but given that such responsibility runs headlong into a faculty in control of the academic enterprise (most in need of innovation), the challenges are obvious. Rosenberg’s retelling of Macalester’s futile NINE-YEAR effort to remove one under-performing program (pages 91-95) speaks to the challenges many presidents face and one reason why higher education is in a tailspin. I have “insanity” written in the margin of his narrative.
APPLICATION TO Lancaster Bible College:
While LBC is blessed with a strong and committed faculty and recognizes the essential role faculty plays in the educational enterprise, it does not cede final authority for determining academic programming to the academic body. At the same time, the shadow of faculty ownership hangs over the mindsets of some, thus making change less challenging than many institutions, but still an uphill climb.
FIVE: Tenure adds complexity to the change process
Rosenberg is not anti-tenure. He does, however, recognize that tenure is a system without parallel anywhere else in the economy, except the federal judiciary. “If the goal, or even the necessity, is transformational change to a curriculum, a business model, or a way of thinking about the role of higher education, tenure is a nearly impenetrable barrier.” 133 He continues, “College faculties are among the most highly compartmentalized and specialized workforces found anywhere, and tenure is designed to lock those specialized pieces in place.” 133
Despite the recognition of the challenges tenure brings, tenure, i.e. higher education’s version of “lifetime employment”, remains a fixture in traditional colleges and universities.
The path to change
At this point, Rosenberg has supplied us with plenty of bad news.
College costs too much.
College takes too long.
Colleges are resistant to change.
College is not accessible to the millions of people who need it.
Is there hope? Yes. Examples of colleges that are forging a new path are few but do exist. The path to change begins with a question:
“If you could start a college or university from scratch, which current practices and structures would you keep, and which would you eliminate or change?”
Rosenberg cites two schools, the African Leadership University (ALU) and Sterling College in Vermont, both of which put a premium on affordability, are more student centered, more experiential, and more holistic. They turn many long-standing tenets of higher education on their head:
Faculty: Moving from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.
Meritocracy: Moving from “weeding out” to “welcoming in”; from gatekeepers of a “premier education for the few” to gate-openers of a lower cost, more flexible education.
Context: Moving from the metaphor of the Ivory Tower to Main Street; from separating from the surrounding world to an engaged encounter with a broad range of wise practitioners found on any Main Street USA.
Pedagogical Model: Moving from “learning by being spoken to” to “learning by doing”.
Structure: Moving from shared governance to a business model more friendly to and adept at change.
Focus: Moving from “What is your major?” to “What is your mission?”
Rosenberg cautions colleges and universities about trying to be all things to all prospective students. “Most are so worried about whom they won’t attract that they never ask whom they are best situated to attract.” 152
I appreciated this critique. He notes that the mission at the African Leadership University is to educate “ethical and entrepreneurial leaders.” For Sterling College, their unique focus is “to advance ecological thinking and action through affordable experiential learning that prepares people to be knowledgeable, skilled, and responsible leaders in the communities in which they live.”
An essential question the author poses is this, “What is your institution uniquely positioned to do?”
“What problem are you as an institution trying to solve? “Staying in business” is not a compelling answer.”
Clarifying focus is only half the battle. Rosenberg cites the ALU’s commitment to evaluate every employee to determine their suitability for the model they chose. Given all he has said about shared governance and tenure, one can easily guess how well that idea would fly in most colleges and universities he has described. However, the opportunity for those institutions who are willing to do the hard work of disruption is there for the taking. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the barriers to that change are deeply entrenched and carefully guarded.
CONCLUSION:
My doctoral work taught me to “challenge the presuppositions.” If they are strong, they will hold up. Rosenberg makes the case that the one place (or sector) that should be ready and willing to do just that — Higher Education — is the discipline least receptive to the idea it promotes.
Reading and pondering these pages shook me out of our day-to-day challenge of keeping our college viable and directed me to the author’s more fundamental question: What problem are you as an institution trying to solve? To solve it, the educational model must be holistic, which Rosenberg says includes:
the knowledge piece
the relationship piece
the experiential piece
Despite missing the spiritual piece (“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” Proverbs 1:7), Rosenberg’s focus — on a “narrowly focused institution” with an education geared toward specialized instruction that is career-focused as opposed to issue-focused, student-centered, experiential, and problem-oriented — is helpful . . . and necessary as the days of “just getting by” are numbered.
Rosenberg reminds us of Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” As he notes, when the supply of colleges outpaces the demand for colleges that are not name brands, … the market [will] make the necessary adjustments. 164
Pennsylvania should beware. As the fourth most collegiately populated state teetering on the edge of a national demographic cliff and with a declining state population relative to the rest of the country, the challenges only compound. As a smaller college within that formidable context, LBC is not immune; immune to the challenges facing higher education as described or the challenges of a change-resistant organization.
Stepping back from these pages, it seems wholesale change is unlikely and incremental change is too slow. According to Steve Andriole of Villanova, “Companies fail to innovate because their business models, organizational structures and leadership teams find it ‘difficult’ to adjust to new ways of thinking and doing.” 112
The answer for many may come from leveraging the concept of the ambidextrous organization, that is, a start-up within a mainstay organization, operating on its own until its proof of concept makes it worthwhile to bring to the larger group for consideration, or more likely to continue on as a self-governing offshoot of the former organization. Happily, our institution has demonstrated the gumption to attempt and achieve significant change. That’s a good thing, for the efforts we have achieved are only a precursor to the work still to be accomplished; a work much of higher education is still reluctant or resistant to pursue.
I highly recommend Whatever It Is, I’m Against It. It has challenged my thinking; more so it has provided necessary critique and offered suggestions to improve and models to consider.
Notes:
“Branding,” writes Rosenberg,
