Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s first female president, is also an award-winning author and a historian of the Civil War and the American South. Her latest book — This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War — won the Bancroft Prize in 2009 and was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Faust will be attending the combined centennial celebration of the Harvard Clubs of Dallas and San Antonio, in Dallas Friday and Saturday, including a Friday evening gala where she is expected to share her vision for Harvard’s future.
In our email Q&A, she addressed today’s national challenge of providing affordable higher education.
With so many college graduates burdened by the weight of student loans, more people are asking whether higher education is worth the expense. Is that a fair question?
The student debt issue is real, and it is entirely understandable that students and families are asking: Is college the right path? What are the long-term benefits? Every family circumstance is different and different institutions approach financial support in different ways, but I’d encourage students and their families to be thoughtful and deliberate, both about the cost and the opportunities that college can provide. While there is no doubt that college graduates earn a great deal more money than those who didn’t attend college — roughly 15 percent per year, according to a recent study, or 60 percent over a lifetime — a host of other benefits must be considered.
College graduates, for instance, live longer, healthier, more active lives, on average. College graduates take away a set of experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking about the world that will enhance their lives immeasurably. And those experiences can help students not just for the jobs that they take right after graduating, but for jobs and even entire industries we’ve yet to imagine.
Why has the cost of college far outpaced the overall cost of living in recent decades?
Harvard is fortunate to have the benefit of a large endowment that enables us to make costs affordable for any undergraduate, regardless of his or her family’s financial circumstances. Unfortunately, that’s the exception to the rule. Across the country, college costs — and the student loan debt that too often results — continue to rise as average wages for low- and middle-income families stay flat.
There are many factors behind this trend, and we can’t pretend that there is any one easy fix, but we also must recognize that underinvestment in public higher education is a serious issue. Over a decade, state and local educational appropriations per full-time student have fallen by more than a quarter. When public colleges do not receive the funding they need from state government, they raise tuition costs instead. This process — which has played out over years — is a real threat to the strength of a number of great state university systems.
More policy leaders are looking for ways to keep public universities accountable for their spending, in light of higher costs borne by students. Do their metrics seem legitimate to you?
I strongly support the proposition that policymakers and others must rigorously analyze the value of the education that is being provided at colleges and universities. But we should be very thoughtful about the metrics, as some can be quite misleading. When we consider the value of a college education, we should think hard about what it is we value.
For instance, the federal government has proposed, among other things, to measure the value of college by the starting salary of a graduate during his or her first year in the workforce. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, I worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Based on my fairly paltry starting salary, one could have said that the money my family invested in my college education had been wasted. But I went on to attend graduate school, became a professor of American history and was ultimately appointed president of Harvard University. I’d argue that college prepared me for a lifetime of opportunity.
In fact, starting salaries for college graduates has been flat since the beginning of the Great Recession, according to a study by the San Francisco Fed. Do students pay attention to these trends, and how does that guide their career decisions?
Families in Texas and across the nation share significant concerns about choosing a college and thinking about a major. Particularly since the Great Recession, many families ask how a chosen field of study will help pay the bills. Employers are certainly looking for technical skills, but they also have broader concerns. Last year, Accenture conducted a survey with business leaders and asked them what their companies looked for in employees. More than two-thirds of respondents highlighted skills such as creative thinking, communication, leadership and problem solving.
Those strategies are at the heart of a broad liberal arts education. At Harvard College, for instance, engineering is one of our fastest growing majors — or concentrations, as we call them. We see engineering as embedded in the liberal arts and require engineering students to study the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. As a result, these students graduating from Harvard are ready to become first-class engineers. But they also have the broader intellectual framework to ask critical questions about their work.
“Just because we can do something, should we? And what will it mean? Is there a better way to do this?” That type of thinking will make them more attractive in the job marketplace, and can also empower them to go in different directions as new and unforeseen opportunities arise over their lifetimes.
As an information-delivery industry, higher education gets low marks from some people in taking advantage of the digital revolution. What’s your assessment?
Technology has the potential to positively transform access to education, and to shape how teachers teach and students learn, but there is still much we don’t know about how that transformation will take shape. In 2012, Harvard teamed up with MIT to launch edX, our first comprehensive online learning platform. Our goals were to enhance teaching and learning on our campus, to study effective educational techniques using the large data sets that edX makes available, and to share some of the richness of what occurs every day around Harvard Yard with people around the world. Already, Harvard faculty have produced 45 courses that have enrolled more than 1.5 million people.
But distance education can never fully replace the types of interactions that occur when teachers and learners are together in one physical location. Place-based and residential education will always have an irreplaceable role. But even on our campus, learning in classrooms is being transformed by digital tools. For instance, many Harvard faculty are “flipping” their classrooms by having students watch their lectures online and using traditional lecture time for more interactive learning. That is increasingly the case not just at Harvard, but in classrooms across America.
This Q&A was conducted by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rodger Jones. Reach him at rmjones@dallasnews.com . Reach President Faust at president@harvard.edu.
