If you follow the media coverage of campuses from day to day, you find two alternative realities in conflict. We want it cheap. We want it gold-plated.
On one side, the students and their families appear to be overwhelmed with tuitions and the student-loan crisis. Who can blame them for expressing their concern? Lenders are tightening up the cash, tuition and fees for next fall are due to the bursars in only a couple of months, and the students have no place to turn. The Chronicle tells us that we are experiencing the highest level of anxiety over college prices in the past 35 years. Even with the relief offered by a handful of the wealthiest colleges to families earning six figures a year, the middle class is clearly caught in a vise. Congress is in the midst of trying to pass loan-guarantee legislation to protect lenders who in turn will assist students. But it is not over until it is over.
By contrast, students and their families are increasing their demands that colleges deliver more and better, near-luxury services and accommodation over and above anything required for a “quality college experience.” Universities are being driven to provide an extraordinary level of material support — campus food approaching Michelin standards. It won’t surprise me if we soon see a star and knife and fork rating system listed on the front page of college catalogs — following the lead of the Princeton Review. According to The New York Times, incoming students are requesting such things as organic vegetarian alternatives, farmer’s market produce, and spa waters with flavorings from mint to watermelon when they tour prospective colleges. The daily choices available in many college cafeterias show a diversity of cuisines that rival many restaurants. Apparently at one night’s dinner, Bowdoin College offered Dijon-crusted chicken, Vietnamese noodle soup, and spicy orange beef as three of the five entrée choices. How many students eat like that at home? I remember a one-dollar Sunday night dinner at a little restaurant down the street from Columbia: a bowl of rice covered with brown sauce and a little mystery meat, a slice of toast, a cup of coffee.
Today gymnasiums are approaching beauty-spa status, with masseuse and personal trainers offered, as well as state-of-the-art equipment to tone every part of the body. Classroom activities hone the mind, and during after-school hours, the body is pampered. We see a world that compares favorably to gated communities in Palm Beach.
If you are a student paying a high tuition — figures that reaches into the stratosphere — then it follows that, like Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, you ask for “more”: more choices in the dining room, better work-out equipment, and larger and better dorm rooms. And if you’re the college, and prospective students tell you they will only enroll in your classes if you give them more and more — then you feel compelled to accommodate while raising tuition in order to have funds to pay for all the customer demands.
What’s wrong with this picture?
