For some time, I have felt that there has been the beginning of a decline in American public universities. It is not a sharp obvious decline, but more of a slow genteel one, much like the decline of the British Empire in the first half of the 20th century.
Many indicators are revealing: First, four-year public universities’ share of enrollment is starting to decline as a proportion of total higher-education enrollments. Also, public universities’ per-student funding is declining relative to that at not-for-profit private institutions. Applications are soaring at elite private institutions, but rising far less robustly, if at all, at most public institutions.
The latest AAUP salary data confirm this trend with respect to faculty compensation. At doctoral-level universities, average pay runs 22 to 33 percent higher (depending on rank) at the private institutions relative to public ones—this was certainly not true when I began teaching two score and six years ago. At least 10 private liberal-arts colleges pay their full professors more than $129,000 a year on average—more than most public universities with large graduate programs. On a personal note: I was once offered an endowed full professorship at Claremont McKenna College, which now pays full professors an average of over $145,000, compared with less than $101,000 at Ohio University, where I stayed and from which I recently fully retired. Perhaps I should have heeded Horace Greeley’s 19th-century advice to “go west, young man, go west.”
In the past three years, far more faculty jobs have been added at private institutions than public ones, if the AAUP data are to be believed (and they have a good reputation for accuracy). None of the top 40 institutions in the Forbes student-centered college rankings is a traditional state university, and likewise the public schools are absent from the top institutions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, an evaluation system that is more reputational and input-oriented in nature.
While several campuses of the University of California, the University of Michigan, and several other institutions still have sterling reputations for academic research and graduate education, it is clear that the public institutions are in relative decline, particularly with respect to undergraduate study. The two important questions are: Why? and What, if anything, should be done about it?
The conventional answer to the first question is that in recent years state governments have given higher education a lower priority in budget allocations than during the Golden Era of public universities in the first generation after World War II. An aging population and an abysmally costly and inefficient health-care system are leading to health-related costs crowding out other things in state budgets. The K-12 lobby on the whole is stronger than that for higher education as well, and increasingly people look at college as a private good that the generally fairly affluent students who dominate colleges should finance themselves. Soaring salaries for university presidents and other top officials in recent times has not helped the political climate for public institutions either.
That brings me to the unconventional part of the answer: I think federal student financial-aid programs on balance have hurt state universities. Student loans have allowed many middle-class students who would have attended the local state school to apply to more expensive private institutions, contributing to a relative decline in the prestige of state schools. The rise in federal aid has reduced the pressure on politicians to generously increase funding of state institutions, since kids can now borrow needed funds relatively cheaply. This has added to the perceived need by state schools to raise tuition rates, reducing somewhat the tuition premium associated with attending private schools. Also, some federal funding, notably Pell Grants, may have increased student attendance at college, but also tended to increase dropout rates and raise issues of the quality of students and academic programs.
Many state schools have lost their way, straying from the original mission laid out for them in the Morrill Act a century and a half ago and in other state legislation. Research aside, too much money goes to fund bloated bureaucracies and rather opulent country-club-like entertainment for students (rec centers, student-union buildings, subsidies for intercollegiate athletics).
Should we worry about all of this? I am not too concerned, because to me the issue is whether we adequately provide opportunities for well qualified students to attend some college, and it seems to be that is far more important than the type of institution attended. We are gradually breaking down the distinction between public and private institutions−most so-called private schools already indirectly get much government funding, and most public schools are increasingly reliant on private funding. So the distinctions are blurring and may fade in time. I suspect the time will come when state funds are disbursed more to students and less to schools anyhow, which would further destroy the increasingly artificial distinction between public and private institutions.
