Media coverage about the American perspective on higher education is making me a little itchy. For example, this week’s (April 4, 2008) issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has an above-the-fold front page story that reports a national split on government control of tuition. The sub-head talks about dealing with “college costs.” We have to understand that the words “price” and “cost” are not interchangeable.
When Harvard buys a book for its library, allowing for special circumstances, it pays more or less the same price to the publisher that a small community college pays. And this is true about all the stuff that universities need for their laboratories, their studios, and so on. Equipment and chemicals have a market price. In the case of Harvard the price, also known as tuition, doesn’t reflect the cost because there is a subvention from philanthropy, endowment income, overhead on grants, and other sources that allows the university to charge students less than it takes to provide the service. And this is probably true at the community college as well because taxpayers underwrite a significant portion of the operation through legislative appropriations.
But if we can get past the recent headlines about new scholarship programs inspired by Senator Grassley at the 20 or so best-endowed universities in the nation, the rest of the colleges and universities are more like movie theaters than most people realize. Think about cinemas: They sell you a ticket at the box office and you go in and see the show. They may have special price days when the tickets are cheaper than usual and they may give discounts to those over 65 (call them scholarships if you like), but basically the theater drives its economy by what people pay to see the show, otherwise called a fee for a service.
And that is the case at most universities. The truth is at most universities admissions are not all that selective. Yes, yes, I’ve read the articles about how hard it is to get into college this year, and of course, that is true at an elite group of institutions on the two coasts and at a few other locations around the country. But at most colleges and universities, the admission’s office recruits more than it selects and with the declining conventional college-age population coming up in the next few years, demography will become destiny. Competition for the very best students will surely heat up and we will come to understand another cause for the generous scholarship programs recently announced, one that can be perceived as preemptive behavior by those who have deep pockets and have begun to anticipate the future.
What are universities that don’t have the luxury of unlimited funds to do? If we are not going to introduce price controls we surely can’t retain the status quo ante. In any case, price controls — that is to say, capped tuition — don’t have much effect on the cost of providing an education.
It may be that most people outside of the academy don’t care. They want it cheap, not good. In fact, the saddest part of the coverage about tuition is that most of the people interviewed just wanted tuition lowered and they didn’t much care how that was accomplished. In fact, they were prepared to sacrifice quality and thought little about faculty compensation or improved libraries, studios, or laboratories.
Meanwhile, colleges look for ways to reduce the cost of operations. I read about consolidating the way they buy goods and services, all sorts of cost-containment efforts are introduced, and these are to be celebrated. Waste, particularly when it comes to health or education or similar endeavors, needs to be fought. For sure, if we can cut back on computer services, insurance, and supplies, let’s do it. And if we can contract out support activities, non-academic mission related parts of the university like food services or bookstores, let’s do that too. But these are marginal in the long run.
Whenever people use to lecture me on how the university had to be more efficient, I used to have two thoughts. First, we are simply not going to cost-cut and save our way to success, not with small economies in any case. A total reorganization of the enterprise, the way we manage ourselves, is going to be called for. Not now, maybe not tomorrow, but ultimately. But how should we do that?
Second, universities resemble string quartets. How does one make a string quartet more efficient? Cut it back to a trio? Get the musicians to play faster? At what point does the value engineering so impact on the sociology, the environment of the enterprise, as to be a substantive change? And why aren’t more people talking about this on campus?
As long as the very rich can buy their way out of looking this problem in the face, and a few others can duck it through infusions of support from external sources, then those institutions will be fine. But all those in the middle, who actually pay their bills the old-fashioned way by earning tuitions through service, need to start looking more aggressively toward the future. We’ve taken many of the short cuts, and I say this at the risk of encouraging Marc Bousquet, who may be offputting but is at least partly right about the melancholy situation of some adjunct faculty. The problem is not as simple as he makes it out to be, not black and white, not a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil, but it is a real problem nevertheless. One that people of good will who care about higher education need to thoughtfully address.
I’m teaching a course this semester on the American university and this has prompted me to reread much of the classic literature on the subject. I’m astonished at how little has changed in the last half-century. With the exception to references to the Vietnam War and related campus disruptions, many of the books written in the 1950s and 1960s address without resolving issues very much on the contemporary agenda. Just as the spiral grew out of control for dot.com stocks, real estate lending, and general credit needs, so too are the issues facing higher education causing costs to skyrocket to all time levels. Let ‘s try to tackle the roots of the issues from the inside before the education bubble bursts and the fall out is ugly and sad. Every year a few colleges close their doors — due to changing demographics, outdated missions, or any one of a number of causes — usually unique to the campus. Think Antioch. With 3,500 or so higher education institutions around the country, the annual percentage that fail is minute.
But if we don’t revamp the academic calendar, restructure the teaching loads, reorganize the services provided and reevaluate core missions, then the percentage of failure will rise to an unacceptable rate. And this will not only happen in the independent sector, though that is where it will be felt first and with the strongest force. State legislatures will soon demand accountability far beyond what is asked for today and the campus balance sheets — what is paid for services and what is delivered — must make economic sense. It is Senator Grassley today and 50 State senators tomorrow.
One school already looking ahead is the University of Rhode Island, where veteran faculty and staff are being encouraged to take early retirement. Using the foreseen savings, the new provost, Donald H. DeHayes, says the university will make some changes, planning for areas of growth and retrenchment. “We need to decide what our needs are in the new economy, new advances in research and new modes of learning that we find with contemporary students. … It might mean different kinds of faculty roles.”
As the higher education community gets its own house in order, it would be nice if in the next presidential administration lends us a hand. But we need to chart the direction or it may be “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
