Exactly how to make a college education more affordable is among the most intractable of the dilemmas facing higher education. Initially those who worried most about a college education’s affordability focused on public institutions and the fact that their increasing prices were directly related to per-student reductions in public appropriations by the nation’s 50 states. It seems unlikely, however, that the states will dramatically increase their support for higher education. What the states have discovered, in good times and bad, is that students and their families will pay more for their college educations, thus allowing the states to promote other spending priorities including the lowering of taxes.
More recently its has been the outrageousness of the tuitions of the nation’s most selective institutions that has drawn the media’s and policy makers’ ire. The problem is that these critics have no better answers to higher education’s 50-year cost-price spiral than do the college and university presidents whose inaction they so vociferously decry. Those who call for greater efficiency sooner or later stumble over the fact that most of the costs they find wasteful — climbing walls is one favorite target — are in fact responses to student and family demands for better service and additional amenities. Those who study the shifting allocation of funds within the academy regularly point out that instructional costs are already a shrinking proportion of the average college or university’s budget. Were calls for lower prices to succeed while the costs imposed by regulation and the need to supply ever more amenities increased, the result would be institutions less able to fulfill their educational missions. The alternative, of course, would be to pay the faculty and everyone else in the institution lower salaries which, ironically, is the strategy most often employed by underfunded elementary and secondary schools.
Sooner or later the price spiral in higher education will have to be addressed. My guess is that breaking the gridlock on costs will require some kind of dislodging event that leads to a substantial reduction in the going price of an undergraduate degree. What won’t reduce costs or lower prices are tough or inflammatory speeches demanding that colleges and universities cut out the frills, make their faculty work harder, and learn from businesses the discipline of outsourcing.
