When I was a graduate student, I studied in the USSR as Gorbachev was beginning his first reforms, and I had the opportunity to witness first-hand the shortcomings of the command economy. This was the top-down model by which Soviet planners tried to provide for the needs of everyone equitably and without waste. It worked relatively well for large things (concrete for the construction of dams, steel for making tanks and ships) but dismally for consumer goods. As a result, there were shortages of just about everything, as Soviet planners tried to anticipate, for instance, how many pairs of children’s shoes in various sizes they would need in the next year, and all the myriad other things (toothpaste, pantyhose, underwear, pens, baby formula, etc.) that are part of people’s everyday lives. One of my favorite jokes of the time was about a guy who goes into a fish store, looks around, and asks, “Don’t you have any fish?” To which the clerk responds, “No. This is the meat store. Here we don’t have meat. No fish is next door.”
The alternative was, of course, the market economy of the West. It suffered from the two problems the Soviets were trying to avoid, waste and inequitable distribution, but it produced like crazy and as a result knew almost no shortages. (This, by the way, was why I was not at all concerned about the brief toilet paper shortage at the beginning of the recent pandemic. Capitalism will make stuff quickly when there’s a market of it. And it did.) The deficit economy of the USSR clearly lost out in the eyes of ordinary people, as the many stories of immigrants to the US from the late 1980s breaking down in tears at the sight of the abundance of an ordinary grocery shelf in their new country attest.
It’s the sort of example that legislators toying with the educational system could learn from. The US degree system exists within a global market and has developed on that basis for many generations, with ebbs and flows in degree programs over time, as people’s interests and needs have changed. Some concentrations have stuck around for 100 years or more, others are much more recent, and still others will likely appear in the future—this is the way markets work. When areas of study grow, universities have tended to increase their size and resources, and when they shrink, they get less attention and fewer resources, sometimes merging with other programs, sometimes disappearing altogether.
It’s obviously not a pure market. Entities outside universities have at times provided funds, and post-graduation jobs, to encourage the study of certain fields. After September 11, 2001, when it became clear that the US wasn’t training enough people with expertise in Arabic language and related fields, there was quickly more support for such study from a variety of sources, including the US military. Such market incentives have existed for many fields over time. My own discipline of Slavic languages and literatures was born in the immediate WWII years, as the US and the USSR became Cold War adversaries. The partnership between US institutions of higher ed and the US government was, in fact, why I was able to observe first-hand the ways Soviet attempts to engineer their entire society from above were failing their people.
It’s also why I immediately recognized the equivalent attempt by the Indiana legislature currently underway to engineer the public institutions of higher education in Indiana into producing specific numbers of graduates in specific fields with an eye towards their acquiring specific jobs. They do not, of course, say which fields and which jobs they have in mind. But it is not hard to catch sight of the scheme beneath the rhetoric. They are, in effect, attempting an analogue of the Soviets’ setting up of quotas for concrete and steel production, all while letting the equivalent of the shoe sizes that Indiana’s children might need fall by the wayside, and this not just for the coming year but for the next decade and more.
But let’s say we shift to this new model (“shift” is the wrong word, I know; it makes it sound like a nimble business move, and there’s rarely anything like that in training people with extensive expertise, but fine), we “shift,” and we start hitting our mandated quotas, what does this look like in practice?
Here another lesson from command economies might be helpful: producers can shift their metrics to hit their quotas (in perfect compliance with the letter of the law, of course). So if the light bulb factory is given a wattage quota, it makes huge bulbs to hit the right number; given a bulb quantity quota, it makes tiny bulbs—the factory meets its quota either way. As a result, to borrow from Mikhail Zoshchenko, you’re sitting in the john and either being blinded and sweating like a pig because of a bulb that’s too big for the space, or you can’t see a thing because of a woefully inadequate little bulb overhead. Could this be the future of higher education in Indiana?
Or, put more concretely, will we, collectively, a few years from now, the new legislation having been thoroughly accepted and implemented, be sitting in an analogous higher education shitter—apologies: water closet, WC, half-bath, powder room—either thoroughly blinded and sweating like pigs, or not able to make out anything in the darkness?
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Russell Scott Valentino 