How did the American system of higher education come to be? David Labaree, the Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and author of A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education, joined GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In to discuss how we ended up with the “messy” college system we have today.

Listen to the full episode at the link below and find more episodes at Stanford Radio. School’s In airs weekends on SiriusXM Insight channel 121.

Interview highlights

A system without a plan

It’s a very strange system in that it is a system without a plan. Nobody designed it. It's fiendishly complex. Nobody could have designed something as complex as this.

It’s not like a political system, where everything operates according to some constitution that people set up. It's a system more like the solar system, which evolved over time. It has rules, it has structure, but unless you're a strong believer in intelligent design, it didn't have a prime mover—it just kind of evolved.

Colleges as golf course communities

Have you ever noticed American colleges are scattered around the countryside? They deliberately were not set up in major urban centers. One reason—not a very enlightened one—is that colleges were a primary mechanism for promoting land development. A way to sell your land was to set up a college in your place that you called a town, and you could claim that the land all around it was worth more than the town next door that didn't have a college. “We have a cultural center. They're just a dusty agricultural village.”

College communities were kind of like the golf course communities of today. If you had a lot of land, you might donate some right in the middle, set up a college, and then sell all the land around it at a premium.

A “collection of enterprises”

Look at the way a university works. The president's in charge, but, in some ways, every faculty member is an entrepreneur out there seeking research funding, pursuing a career, generating research projects, attracting students. It's like a whole collection of enterprises, and that's turned out to be a very powerful way of setting up an institution that's able to figure out answers to problems that people haven't come up with yet.

If you had planned it, you'd say, "We have a five-year plan. We need somebody to develop ideas about what we think is the coming thing." But what universities have been doing is generating huge amounts of capacity, and then later on finding something useful to apply it to. It turns out that's a really productive way of doing things.