Historical Nothingness/Part One: I would suggest that the landscape of American postsecondary education is littered with the skeletons and debris of exceptional experimental colleges and exciting educational programs that were initiated during the innovative years of the 1970s (following the Vietnam War) when major funding of innovative educational programs was provided by the federal government and private foundations. By late in the 20th Century every one of the experimental colleges had closed.
It is remarkable to review what occurred with programs that had offered fresh new ideas in the 1970s. They yielded value-added education. Furthermore, these colleges would be quite appropriate if reintroduced in the 2020s. For instance, experimental college programs blended liberal arts with career preparation or focused on the culture and history of marginalized groups. Even at the level of the collegiate classroom, many instructional innovations were engaged during the 1970s and 1980s that were value-added (Quehl, Bergquist, and Subbiando, 1999). Few of these successful instructional tools and strategies have been embraced by faculty members during more recent years.
Within the higher education community, new ideas are often dismissed as “fads” (Birnbaum, 2000) Arrogance and ignorance have reigned supreme in postsecondary education since this time—and is now experiencing much of the backlash against high tuition and low levels of effective learning (producing the capacity to get a job and be agile in adapting to the rapidly changing work setting). While COVID can provide some of the excuses for the current dysfunction in postsecondary education and the widespread dissatisfaction with the educational experiences at all levels, there was a failure to embrace new ideas that began long before the virus closed down the in-person classroom.
For instance, Models of accessible postsecondary education that are also of high quality have been widely disseminated and proven to be viable (e.g. Bergquist, 1995); yet most of these models have been ignored by the leaders of higher education institutions. Yet, the Pell Institute (2026) recently reported that:
“. . . higher education opportunity remains heavily shaped by family income, parental education, race, and geography. For example, only 17% of low-income students attain a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 47% of higher-income students. Similarly, first-generation students attain bachelor’s degrees at substantially lower rates than students whose parents hold bachelor’s degrees.”
In addition to this matter of faltering access and equity, there are also major problems associated with cost and financial aid limitations, outdated curricula, credentialism and job market mismatch, institutional and governance fragmentation and, most importantly, the loss of public trust and accountability.
