The Rachel Maddow Show

I’ll be on Rachel Maddow’s Air America radio show today at 1:15 6:00 PM, talking about why college keeps getting more expensive. Rest assured, state legislatures will get their share of blame. But I’ll also be pointing the finger at people like SUNY-Buffalo president John Simpson, who apparently sees the current economic crisis as the perfect opportunity to raise student tuition in order to fund a grand agenda of local economic development and institutional status-promotion. “It’s easier to push a conversation about this kind of substantive change today than it was a year or two ago, because the world wasn’t in such crisis,” Simpson said earlier this week. Call it the “shock doctrine” theory of making college less affordable.
Some might say that SUNY would still be relatively cheap even if Simpson’s plan to raise tuition by 63 percent over the next decade were implemented. But that depends on the student. A new report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education includes the following statistics about how the net cost of attending a four-year public university has changed over time as a percentage of the median income of families in the lowest and highest income quintiles.
Lowest quintile 1999 – 00 : 39%Lowest quintile 2007 – 08 : 55%
Highest quintile 1999 – 00: 7%Highest quintile 2007 – 08: 9%
Over the last eight years — and for quite a while before that — the rich have gotten much richer in America at the same time that college has gotten much more expensive. The two trends roughly cancel out. And since people in the highest quintile run things, they don’t really see a huge problem. For low-income families, by contrast, college has always been a stretch, even after taking into account higher levels of financial aid. Middle- and upper-income families will probably be able to absorb tuition hikes. Low-income students at the margin, by contrast, will be increasingly priced out of the four-year sector, or have their studies compromised by the need to work, or be shouldered with unmanageable debt. I’m not saying there’s never cause to raise tuition, but it would be nice if students actually got something back in return — better support services and more well-paid instructors, for example. Instead they’re being asked to pay for research and other things that help everyone but those paying the bills. And I can’t imagine a worse time to do it then when unemployment is rising, family income is falling, and people are losing a huge chunk of the money they’ve saved in 529 plans.