The Toyota Corolla Theory of College

Over recent decades, the price of higher-education tuition has risen faster than costs in any other major consumer category, outpacing even medical care and housing. Despite that, for a while, applications kept flooding in—and for good reason: College was still worth it. As the MIT economist David Autor argued in 2014, “the real lifetime earnings premium to college education has likely never been higher.”

Yet today, the value of college is slipping in Americans’ eyes. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a recent survey said a four-year degree was a “bad bet.” Enrollment has been declining since its 2010 peak—a change explained partly by the shrinking pool of 18-year-olds but also by high-school students simply opting out. From 2018 to 2021, the proportion of high-school graduates entering college fell by 7 percentage points—a decline driven by falling enrollment in two-year programs in particular.

These numbers reflect only one dimension of the various threats now facing higher education. Academic departments across the country are hollowed out and underfunded; the personal finances of graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty members are precarious; and students are fearful of losing their high-stakes financial wager on a degree.

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One common response from industry observers and policy makers is to urge institutions to focus exclusively on the value students are getting for the money they’re spending: placing a priority on vocational and STEM education (preferably delivered online and at scale) while paring back amenities, student services, administration, and supposedly unremunerative humanities coursework. After all, the argument runs, if colleges refuse to rid themselves of their excesses, they may find that someone else will do it for them. The Bloomberg business columnist Adrian Wooldridge recently compared the United States’ higher-education sector to “the country’s car industry in the 1970s, just before it was taken apart by the Japanese—hampered by a giant bureaucracy, contemptuous of many of its workers, and congenitally inward-looking.”

The comparison works because Detroit’s mid-century offerings tended to be oversize, overloaded with features, and overpriced. By contrast, Japanese imports—Toyotas, in particular—were smaller, cheaper, and more fuel-efficient. When oil prices rose in the 1970s and the value proposition of large cars grew dicey, Japanese automakers were able to grab market share from American manufacturers. For U.S. colleges to avoid such decline, the thinking goes, schools must strip down to create an affordable and job-ready product.

The impulse to cut education to the bone is not new. A century ago, a wave of school reform swept the country, propelled by the psychologist Edward L. Thorndike’s reductionist theory of learning. Thorndike believed that learning was a solitary act readily quantifiable through testing, which was also, he and his allies believed, a sound measure of students’ innate intelligence.

Thorndike’s sometime-colleague and competitor, John Dewey, disagreed. Dewey argued that learning was a social, experimental process—too complex to be usefully pared down to its constituent parts. At his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, students worked together on interdisciplinary projects, motivated, according to his alternate theory, not by some distant reward but by curiosity about the subject.

By the 1910s and ’20s—the heyday of Taylorist scientific management—Dewey’s romantic, unquantifiable vision of learning didn’t stand a chance. A generation of reformers committed to efficiency and standardization used tools such as credit hours, common grading systems, and uniform curricula to square off schools’ idiosyncratic edges.

Students, too, underwent standardization. Thorndike believed that native intelligence was fixed and unimprovable, and so an important function of school was to winnow out supposedly undeserving students. “The one thing that the schools or any other educational forces can do least,” he wrote in 1903, was increase students’ “powers and capacities.” Lamentably, he connected this notion with race, arguing for separate vocational and technical training programs for Black Americans.

By the 1920s, administrative mandates were coming to dominate classrooms—even if the lessons were still run by teachers, in all their variety. Thorndike had dreamed of someday eliminating them. “If, by a miracle of mechanical ingenuity,” he mused in 1912, “a book could be so arranged that only to him who had done what was directed on page one would page two become visible, and so on, much that now requires personal instruction could be managed by print.”

Such a book is no longer so hard to imagine. Artificial intelligence could plausibly remove that last bastion of personal, “soft” influence from education. This possibility is alarming to those of us who believe in student-teacher relationships—particularly because, in an ironic twist, AI’s existence may place a premium on hard-to-automate problem-solving and interpersonal skills. Even if AI-powered instruction doesn’t displace existing colleges and universities, it might still create a tiered system: one with teachers, another without.

Already, educational standardization has brought unintended consequences. Especially harmful is the pervasive idea that learning—the fundamental objective of school—must serve double duty as the means to constantly sort adept students from those assumed to be inept. As we described in our 2020 book, Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, a cognitive price must be paid when courses are optimized to compare students with one another. Such sorting gets in the way of context-rich, curiosity-fueled learning that leads to lasting knowledge and potent skills.

In fact, if today’s higher-education sector and 1960s-era Detroit resemble each other, that’s because the same destructive degree of standardization found on the auto assembly line has been applied in teaching. Detroit’s workers performed simple, repetitive tasks, and when defects appeared, they weren’t empowered to act on the issue—only to flag it. This supposedly efficient practice produced tremendous waste: expensive repairs on completed cars, piles of defective parts, and a legacy of mechanical problems for motorists.

Toyota, by contrast, trusted its small teams of workers to stop the production line and work backward to root out the cause of any defects. Suppliers built new parts only upon request, which meant fewer faulty items. Instead of requiring individuals to perform a task over and over, Toyota assigned several jobs to its teams while seeking their insights into how to improve production. To the delight of Americans who took a chance on them, the resulting cars proved remarkably reliable. By 1987, the company’s Takaoka plant was producing cars at twice the speed of General Motors’s plant in Framingham, Massachusetts, with a defect rate a third of GM’s.

Read: Why is college in America so expensive?

Wooldridge’s point that U.S. higher education should be more like 1970s Toyota is well taken—but not because Toyota outdid Detroit in eliminating human complexity. Rather, it showed that the greatest efficiency can be achieved by putting that pesky human element to good use.

Higher-education institutions should consider pursuing a similar strategy: investing in students and teachers while stripping away obstacles in their path. Online instruction can be used to reduce costs, for instance, but instead of simply shunting classes onto Zoom, schools should confine lectures to prerecorded video and open up valuable class time for in-person work and discussion. Co-op programs that send students into the workforce can help them develop job-ready knowledge and industry relationships. Curricular programs that mingle STEM and humanities courses can establish a mixture of hard and soft skills that will have lasting value by enriching context and cultivating curiosity. More esoteric institutional measures—such as breaking the bachelor’s degree into portable “micro-credentials”—could provide flexibility for the students who have lately decided against even a two-year degree.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Americans could buy just two types of cars: a mass-produced one, which was affordable for most but of inferior quality, or a hand-built one, which made superior quality available to only a wealthy few. Japanese manufacturers soon debunked this trade-off, showing that efficiency and quality could coexist. In higher education, a thoughtless approach to efficiency could entrench the pre-Toyota dynamic, leading to a small set of elite schools offering a human-centered education while everyone else makes do with an algorithmic junk version. We don’t have to limit ourselves to such a choice. We can have the best of both worlds—if we have the audacity to build it.