Today's Colleges Must Be Market Smart and Mission Centered By ROBERT ZEMSKY, GREGORY R. WEGNER, and WILLIAM F. MASSY American colleges and universities have been sliding down an increasingly slippery slope over the last two decades. As more people have viewed higher education as offering mainly personal advantages, institutions have been able to charge higher prices to provide those advantages. Thus many public institutions have become less dependent on state appropriations, to the point that they now behave like private ones. At the same time, many private colleges -- especially those that because of small endowments must rely more than ever on tuition and research-grant revenues -- have virtually given up defining themselves in terms of their social and economic contributions to the community, state, or nation. Much is lost when higher-education institutions are shaped almost exclusively by the desires of students pursuing educational credentials or businesses and government agencies seeking research outcomes. When a college or university is wholly dominated by market interests, it sacrifices much of its capacity to serve its public purposes and sometimes even its fundamental mission. Yet, at this point, the question we must ask is not whether the growing importance of markets is detrimental to institutions, but whether anything can be done about it. It's clear that there will be no return to a simpler era when market forces played a less dominant role in American higher education. Nor is there any likelihood that colleges will become less costly or complex enterprises. The conversion of institutions into market enterprises will proceed apace, if for no other reason than that market income will continue to substitute for public appropriations. Given that reality, the key to making the academy more publicly relevant and mission centered lies in making it, ironically, even more market sensitive -- or, to use the term that we have come to favor, more market smart. Markets have, in fact, been part of the academic scene since the beginning. Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California, once described the tension between the acropolis, with its focus on values and mission, and the agora, the Greek word for marketplace. Arguing that colleges always have served the market, Kerr went on to observe: "The cherished academic view that higher education started out on the acropolis and was desecrated by descent into the agora led by ungodly commercial interests and scheming public officials and venal academic leaders is just not true. If anything, higher education started in the agora, the market, at the bottom of the hill and ascended to the acropolis at the top of the hill. ... Mostly it has lived in tension, at one and the same time at the bottom of the hill, at the top of the hill, and on the many pathways in between." To stay safely within the acropolis means losing the financial support and opportunities that the market brings. However, dwelling too much in the market exposes an institution to influences outside its control that may or may not align well with its values or mission. Then again, colleges sometimes have no choice: Public policy or their own lack of resources may force them into the market.