ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 characterizes the major issues higher education faces today: rising costs, declining resources, and rising concerns about the quality of undergraduate education. The current state of the higher education sector appears to be at or near a tipping point. However, in the absence of a compelling argument for objective tools of analysis, Pasteur’s Quadrant is only an academic exercise. Based on a collective-goods approach, I attempt to demonstrate why new objective tools of analysis are requisites for any strategy aimed at relieving the costs, funding, and quality of student learning. The chapter then develops a new approach to deal with the problems called use-inspired research (UIR), borrowing from D. Stokes’ s Pasteur’s Quadrant: The Relationship Between Basic Research and Technological Innovation (1997). Barriers to the application of the same scientific premises of research faculty use, to enormous effect for extending the frontiers of knowledge, appear to thwart use of these scientific premises on higher education itself. An analysis of why outside, third-party research is resisted by departments is presented, followed by a discussion of the most serious barrier that appears to be hindering innovations that might improve quality while cutting costs: the debate over whether higher education is a public or private good.
The debate appears to be stalemated with adherents of the private good position and supporters of the public good position talking past each other. This situation appears to be coalescing into what might be characterized as a permanent common pool problem that may become a tragedy of the commons. This situation makes the case for a new approach to research on higher education urgent. Higher education leaders and policymakers need new objective tools of analysis they can use to more effectively set academic and nonacademic priorities to cut costs while improving the quality of undergraduate education.
