Speaking before an audience at the University of Michigan, President Obama said it was time to rein in the cost of a college degree. The president even went so far as to suggest tying federal aid to universities, such as Pell Grants, to a school’s ability to keep its costs down. Needless to say, if I may mix religious and rural metaphors, once you tip the sacred cow, people get panicked.
It is impossible not to raise tuition, we are told, especially with states cutting back on what they’re giving to higher ed. Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. I would suggest we look at the schools not dependent on state funding (but still often very dependent on various forms of federal monies for higher ed, whether in the form of research funding or student grants and loans) to see whether or not it is possible to re-imagine higher ed. Indeed, it is time for all colleges and universities to consider whether or not such a thing as a sustainable budget is possible.
Anyone who has spent more than a second thinking about the financial bubble that is higher education knows that the entire model is unsustainable. And I’m not talking about for-profit universities (although those too are unsustainable, with first-generation college goers taking out huge loans with few chances for actually obtaining a degree). I’m talking about supposedly nonprofit universities and colleges where tuition has continued to rise far faster than inflation, let alone actual incomes. This rise in tuition was made possible because of the opening up of credit. Families, facing $55,000-a-year costs, took out second mortgages on their homes. Students took on commercial loans (student debt is now larger than credit card debt in the U.S.). And everyone used their credit cards, made available to students for the first time in the 1980s, for living expenses.
But if the increased tuition was fueled by relaxed credit, it was also fueled by a delusional sense that higher ed can get bigger and bigger and that the bubble will never burst. Based on what I’ve seen, most of this increase has happened in a couple of areas: executive salaries, student life, and the physical plant.
1. The truth is, most presidents, provosts, and assorted deans are making way too much money. If we traced just how quickly their salaries have risen in comparison to other university employees, we would see a model that is more indicative of Wall Street than the Ivory Tower. Why should a president of a college make more than six times the lowest paid employee? Let’s say there is a full time employee earning $30,000 a year. $180,000 a year is plenty of money to live on, even in large urban areas. And yet, many college and university presidents earn much closer to a million dollars (and this doesn’t count all the extras like golden parachutes when they retire, free housing, huge subsidies for their families, and all the other goodies that come to the people at the top).
The justification for this is “no one worthwhile will be president for less than $500,000.” But that’s ridiculous. A lot of committed faculty members who have a real vision for creating an institution with a sustainable budget would happily take over the leadership of their schools.
2. Student-life services are too big to fail. They are, to paraphrase Matt Taibbi on Wall Street, a huge vampire squid sucking all the money from the students and their families and spending it instead on a system of regulation and control that could fairly be compared to the growth of the for profit prison industrial complex. After all, do we really need “experts” to regulate everything from whether a student can drop a class to how much he drinks on weekends to whether or not a professor is allowed to fail said student? The answer is no. These are legal adults who ought to be treated as such. If you don’t show up for your class or do a crappy job, then your professor ought to give you a big fat F. Instead, the professor must contact a bureaucrat of some sort, who issues a warning and attempts to steer the student into counseling or alcohol treatment or whatever will “help” him. But why not assume that if people are smart enough to get a college degree, then they’re smart enough to make good decisions, like not drinking so much they flunk out? And here’s a radical idea: Rather than paying people to help them, we just let people flunk out and leave the system without our help. Because colleges and universities ought to be in the business of education, not therapeutic intervention.
3. And then there’s the physical plant of universities. It seems that enough is never as good as a feast. Perfectly usable buildings are remade into perfect buildings. Landscaping is never anything but just so. Student dorms are updated to look like condos. Squash courts are built. And ski lodges and climbing walls and the list goes on and on and on. In the same way that the American home became bigger and bigger and middle class Americans began to pursue the dream of the “perfect” domicile, we also decided that our children should go to the “perfect” college. But again, we are not in the business of making picture-perfect spaces worthy of a habitat magazine.
It’s time to return to the basics of educating young minds as best we can with the money we have. I say let the higher ups go find jobs in the for-profit world that they have tried to impose on academe. Let the student-life folks go work in social services outside the university. Let the weeds grow and the paint peel. And let’s make higher ed about educating young minds with the money we have and not the money they borrow.
