The Globe reveals today that Romney’s restructuring plans for UMass drew upon a commissioned study by Bain Consulting (Romney’s former company). They summarize the report, though I’m left wanting more detail of what it says:
Romney aides point to Bain’s analysis of the University of Massachusetts at Boston as characteristically ‘’eye opening'’ for the governor and his education team. The school spends $7,600 on instructional costs for each full-time student — the second-highest amount among state schools, just behind UMass-Amherst — yet its academic reputation is well below Amherst’s. The Boston campus has an advantageous student-teacher ratio, of 15 to 1, yet it also has the worst student graduation rate in the state — only 28.3 percent of freshmen graduate after six years of study….If the 29 schools were restructured, financial and academic performance would improve and the state would save money on bureaucracy.
Now, I’m willing to concede (as I have before) that something needs to shake up a higher educational system that is lackluster and underperforming, and reforms and restructuring may be just what’s needed to achieve that. But something’s missing from the analysis here: the inputs into an educational institution and its outputs can not be understood without taking into account the cultural capital of the institution or of the students attending it. Unlike a company selling consumer goods or even services, a university is selling not only its services (instruction) but also the accumulated prestige that guarantees its credentials on the labor market. And unlike a typical consumer, the ability of a student to get use out of educational services depends upon her or his accumulated acumen in learning (ability, knowledge, willingness and the modes of intellectual apperception that are hard to quantify). Often these two aspects of cultural capital get amplified in a feedback loop, whereby prestigious schools attract better students, which then secure or increase the prestige of the institution. It doesn’t take a consultant’s report to figure out that the opposite has gone on at UMass Boston; an institution set up as a commuter school and geared toward serving a working-class consitutency then suffers a loss of prestige compared to a properly research university like UMass Amherst. The graduation numbers may be shocking, and they may be a sign that ultimately we’re not doing any favors pretending that a commuter school is a university. But that’s a judgment call as much in the political realm, about whom Massachusetts colleges are going to serve, as in the realm of organizational efficiency. And, ultimately, there’s no free lunch for the Massachusetts taxpayer here. If we “save” money in this restructuring, in the long run we’re starving the colleges of the chance to grow their cultural capital, a chance that we claim we want them to have.
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