The University – A Total Institution
Students seek credentials, not knowledge; universities sell an experience, not education.
In his 1961 book Asylums, the sociologist Erving Goffman defined total institutions as places for people whom society deems in need of some fundamental change to the self. To effect this change, total institutions subject their clients to a highly regimented environment under the direction of specialized authorities, who decide when clients can be released back into normal society.
The American university has become a total institution par excellence. Originally conceived as a training ground for the next generation of the country’s elite, its role shifted after World War II to serving as an engine of socioeconomic mobility and an incubator of civic values for the masses. To accomplish these objectives, universities deployed an explosively expanding army of nonteaching bureaucrats, sophisticated student tracking systems, and an agglomeration of ancillary operations. Contrary to expectations, the transformation of the university into a total institution eventually rendered it incapable of achieving its stated mission, for several reasons.
First, total institutions prioritize service provision over service quality. Instead of focusing on increasing student learning, American universities turned college into an amenity-laden recreational experience composed of lavishly appointed apartment complexes, athletic facilities, dining establishments, wellness centers, and entertainment venues. These “conspicuous extensions of the ‘plant,’” as the economist Thorstein Veblen described them more than a century ago in his book Higher Learning in America, helped double college’s inflation-adjusted cost over the last thirty years. Yet less than half of first-time, full-time, bachelor’s degree-seeking students at four-year colleges and universities graduate within four years. More than three-fifths of American adults still lack a bachelor’s degree.
Second, the total institution’s obsession with measurement causes it to mistake the map for the territory. For college students, the GPA became the performance metric against which all else was measured, despite grade inflation that made the gentleman’s C an A- and complaints from employers that graduates lacked proficiency in basic skills. Similarly, universities continued to treat the credit hour, an accounting convenience established before World War I, as a proxy for knowledge. Meanwhile, decades of institutional outcomes assessment produced no quantifiably demonstrable benefit. And despite multiple studies showing that student teaching evaluations mostly reflect students’ pre-existing biases, universities still treat them as valid measures of professors’ classroom effectiveness.
Third, total institutions demand that their clients be complicit in their own objectification. Universities force students to plod through ridiculously complex sets of academic requirements while pushing them to participate in a relentless stream of officially endorsed events. Oversight over the most routine elements of students’ lives—typically framed as “campus engagement”—sends them the message that they need not take responsibility for their own education. As a result, they perceive learning as a meaningless box-checking exercise.
Last, the total institution inexorably expands in scope and complexity, until, as Goffman wrote, it only offers what its clients cannot accept while rejecting what its clients are able to offer. American universities are now in the business of selling an extended adolescence and perceptions of prestige at unaffordable prices. In terms of their inefficiencies, they now resemble Starbucks. As for students, they now see college as a purely self-serving means to an increasingly uncertain economic end.
How can universities “de-totalize”? First, they should abandon financial strategies that rely on auxiliary revenue streams that come with high opportunity costs. While demolishing underutilized buildings in need of repair is a start, long-term viability means directing a greater share of finite resources toward student learning to better demonstrate value.
Second, universities should adopt academic schedules and modes of instruction that benefit older working adults with families, not just the minority of 18- to 22-year-old, campus-residing, full-time undergraduates. The standard fall-spring academic calendar is a relic of the upper class’s annual summer migration to temperate climes during the Gilded Age. If they wanted to, universities could easily offer in-person and online instruction year-round and at times outside of normal business hours—something community colleges have been doing for decades. Bachelor’s degrees need not require four calendar years for completion given that five-year programs have cut the time to a master’s degree in half.
Finally, universities should make their curricula worth learning. Eliminate academic requirements that do nothing but bolster enrollments in extraneous filler courses. Ensure that students learn how to apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it. Hire faculty who use scientifically supported pedagogies centered on active, collaborative, and hands-on learning instead of low-yield passive instruction. Allow students to develop into intrinsically motivated problem-solvers with enough grit to respond productively to failure.
Dysfunctional systems fail like the character of Mike in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt—gradually, and then suddenly. Dozens of colleges and universities have closed in the last few years; many more are in deep financial trouble. American universities have reached the proverbial fork in the road—they can either remain pathologically resistant to change and suffer the consequences, or they can radically reinvent themselves into something other than a total institution.