About 100 university faculty-members from all over the country plan to meet in January in New York under the umbrella of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a national movement that aims to “include the voices of the faculty, staff, students and our communities—not just administrators, politicians, foundations and think tanks—in the process of making change.”

The group says the push for more efficiency in higher education often leads to lower quality, and that reforms are being rushed into practice without convincing evidence of their effectiveness. Some of the association’s members point out that there has been little research into the effectiveness of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, for example, even as the number of students enrolled in them skyrockets. One of the first major studies of MOOCs, by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, found that only about four percent of those enrolled complete them.

Meanwhile, to save money, more conventional classrooms are filling up with part-time faculty, often hired two or three weeks before they’re due to begin teaching, according to research by another organization, the New Faculty Majority Foundation.

“We are creating Walmarts of higher education—convenient, cheap, and second-rate,” says Karen Arnold, associate professor at the Educational Leadership and Higher Education Department at Boston College.

Steven Ward, a sociology professor at Western Connecticut State University and the author of Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, likens the new world of higher education to another American business known for its low prices. Ward calls it the “McDonaldization” of universities and colleges, “where you produce more things, but they’re not as good,” Ward says, reviving a term first used in 1983 by the sociologist George Ritzer to describe a dehumanizing drive toward efficiency and control.

One of the biggest threats is the move in many states to allocate funding for public universities based on measures such as graduation rates, rather than simply enrollment, say Fichtenbaum and others. They say that will compel faculty to pass more students, including some who may not deserve to be passed.

“I have no doubt this is going to create a subtle pressure to pass students who wouldn’t otherwise,” says Fichtenbaum. He says the pressure may be even greater for part-time faculty, or those who don’t have the job security of tenure. Advocates for change say the faculty who resist it have an obvious stake in a status quo that doesn’t work.

Performance-based funding is only one of the efforts aimed at creating more college graduates, pushed by policymakers who are frustrated by this statistic: only 56.1 percent of college students graduate within even six years. Among those leading the charge are advocacy groups, philanthropic foundations, and President Barack Obama, who has called for the United States to retake the lead in the share of its population with university degrees.