AS I LAY DYING, MY MIND TURNED, AS IT IS SUPPOSED TO AT SUCH a time, to what matters most: What happens if…
It was June of 2015, and Dr. Cho, the attending ER surgeon, explained he was going to put me under anesthesia immediately, despite potential risks.
Earlier that morning, without warning or symptoms, I’d collapsed. I was in my apartment, working from home, setting up an international conference call with colleagues. And then I was on the floor. My laptop beeped, indicating that it was time for the conference call. I texted, “Fainted. Will take nap. Won’t be on our call.”
I was delirious and didn’t realize something was drastically wrong, but, thankfully, my colleagues did. Because my husband, Ken, was away on business, they got me help. A friend and neighbor in our apartment building was suddenly at my door. In no time I was being wheeled into the Cadillac of rooms at New York University’s Langone Hospital.
“I’ve never seen such a luxurious emergency room,” I said drowsily to the admitting physician.
“It’s because you are in the worst shape of anyone in the entire hospital.”
They say things like that to you when you refuse to believe you are dying.
As I was being prepped and wheeled into the elevator that would take me to surgery, time slowed. I focused on essentials. What would I change in my life if I survived this emergency? Not much, in fact. I have a wonderful partner, a great family, so many loyal friends, and the best job in the world. Teaching at the nation’s largest public urban university has plenty of challenges, but I’ve never met more hardworking, inspiring students or faculty. City University of New York is New York City’s single most important engine of economic mobility—more important than Wall Street—and embodies the American dream of success through higher education. How lucky to be part of such a rich tradition, such a future!
The bustling, efficient team of eight or ten physicians, residents, interns, and nurses who surrounded me in surgery looked like my CUNY students. They were young, from different countries, international by birth or first-generation Americans.
I don’t remember anything after that.
The next morning, with Ken beside me, I wanly greeted the surgery team as they crowded into my hospital room.
“You’re going to be fine,” Dr. Cho said. They were beaming. I could see their pride. They saved my life. They went over the diagnosis, the treatment, the recovery time, the medications. “It will take a little while, but you’ll be able to return to everything that you do. You will be able to do your work again soon.”
“We Googled you,” another of the residents said, and the others nodded.
“Do you remember what you said to us last night, before surgery? How you talked about the tuition debt we all carry?”
I didn’t.
“You told us how sorry you were that we had $250,000 in debt. You said that was the average for medical school and it was a national crisis.”
Ken chuckled. “Was it before or after you asked her the questions about extreme measures?” he joked.
They all smiled.
“Actually, we talked about it later,” Dr. Ali said. “None of us owes $250,000.” She paused. “We all owe more. I owe over $400,000.”
“It is a crime,” I said.
Dr. Cho, the oldest of the group at maybe thirty-five, intervened, “Now, you really need to rest. We’ll be back. You will be fine, but you were in bad shape. Please don’t worry about us.”
“How can I not worry about you? You saved my life. You will save many, many lives. And we have failed you.” Apparently, in my pre-op delirium this was pretty much what I’d said. Ken stood up then, but he didn’t need to. They were already leaving. These were doctors. They were all telling me to rest, they would be back. They were glad I was okay.
When I asked my friend Dr. Eric Manheimer, former CEO of Bellevue Hospital in New York, about the enormous tuition burden carried by young interns and residents, he responded, “No problem. They’ll become cosmetic surgeons and pay that tuition back in a year.”
He paused. “Actually,” he said, “there is a problem. They can pay back their medical school debt by going into lucrative, specialized fields, but our society loses. We will soon have no general practitioners, no one in public health, no ER physicians, no one in OB/GYN, no gerontologists, no one in inner cities, no one in rural areas. So it’s not just their problem. It is all of our problem—our society’s very, very big problem.”
As was impressed upon me during my time in the hospital, we cannot talk about transforming higher education unless we address the issues of cost and student debt. If college costs so much that it governs your choice of career, it is not preparing you for the best possible life. It is preparing you to pay off your loans. It is forcing you to make choices, throughout your college career and after, to protect your financial future and material condition, not paving the way to a fulfilling career. With $400,000 in loans, is it even possible for an aspiring doctor to be idealistic anymore?
There are equivalents in nearly every other field. The most common major now is business. A student should work toward a business degree if a career in business is what she wants. But that track can be debilitating if she follows it because she feels she doesn’t have a choice as a result of her student loans. Burdened by debt, students narrow their choices. They do not explore and test options for a productive potential career that intersects with their passions and interests. Instead, the financial strain of tuition debt turns college from an aspiration for a better future, alive with possibility, into a cynical enterprise, a union card, as people used to say, on the way to the best-paying job they can wrangle, whether they like it or not.
High tuition costs not only force many students into fields and would-be career paths they wouldn’t otherwise choose but also prevent many students from completing their degree. Working several hours a week or even full-time while in college has an impact on time to degree, and on the likelihood of finishing a degree. Currently, the United States ranks number one in the world in the percentage of students it sends to college—a high rank it has held for decades. However, we hover somewhere between number seventeen and nineteen in college completion rates. As Adelphi University president emeritus Robert A. Scott explains, “Of 100 high school students, about 70 will graduate from high school; 49 will enter college; and 25 of these will graduate with a four-year baccalaureate degree in six years.” That low college graduation percentage makes debt even more devastating, because students must pay back tuition loans whether or not they earn a degree. The interest on student loans is also exploitative, currently 50 percent higher than on mortgages, and US student loans are structured such that they cannot be canceled through bankruptcy. There’s no escape. Dropping out of college without a degree is the worst choice of all because we know what a significant difference having a degree makes in future job possibilities. The 2015 figures from the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show that adults with a bachelor’s degree earned approximately $48,500 a year, while the earnings for those with only a high school diploma averaged $23,900.
It’s not as though colleges and universities are simply gouging students. In most cases, particularly at public schools and private institutions lacking large endowments, tuition has gone up out of the necessity to meet a bottom line. At the same time that costs are being passed along to students in the form of tuition, faculty are experiencing extreme cutbacks, too. Over half of all courses taught on our campuses now are taught by adjunct, part-time instructors, with no benefits and no job security. That number has risen from approximately 30 percent in 1975. These highly educated instructors teach on a course-by-course basis for wages that, if calculated hourly, are below the minimum wage. This has a direct effect on students right now, setting aside the question of revolutionizing college in the future.
For the new education, the issue of faculty funding is particularly disastrous. If full-time faculty are carrying a greater burden of work resulting from higher student-to-faculty ratio and administration, they are less likely to spend time redesigning their classrooms and their institutions for active, student-centered learning. If junior faculty feel their jobs are threatened in a precarious market where there aren’t many options, they are less likely to be agents of change, agitating to make the university more relevant. In addition, part-time, adjunct faculty—typically the newest members of the profession—have almost no voice in institutional governance, so cannot be forces for change. They are paid to teach on a per class basis and typically do not attend faculty meetings; any ideas they have about transforming the institution are lost. Finally, without much hope for a future, why would anyone aspire to be a professor? If the brightest young minds are not entering the profession, there is little hope that it can be radically altered into something exciting and new.
Soaring tuition and falling funds for faculty are pernicious trends in their own right, making even a good traditional education harder to achieve. The problem is that, as we’ve seen, a traditional education is no longer adequate. So all of these factors compound: high tuition forces students onto narrow careerist paths, they are often taught by overworked professors, and their education does not equip them for the world beyond the academy. In other words, students today are paying more for less. It’s a vicious cycle. How to escape it is one of the most important questions our society can ask.
Those young interns who cared for me so well had aspirations to careers that would be meaningful both to themselves and to others and that would enable them to lead independent, comfortable lives. That is what most of my own students want, too. With the financial stresses that face students and their universities today, change becomes harder, and sometimes a meaningful career has to take second place to one that, literally, pays off the tuition debt.
CURRENTLY, 42 MILLION AMERICANS COLLECTIVELY OWE OVER $1.3 trillion in student debt. The average 2016 college graduate carries about $40,000 in debt. And, as Eric Manheimer portends, there are consequences for all students who have to begin their quest for a productive, responsible adult life worried about paying off substantial loans. It has an impact on what they major in, what career they choose, whether they go on to advanced study, what job they take, what job they stay—or are stuck—in to pay the bills. Leaving college substantially in debt does not prepare students for the challenges of the twenty-first-century economy; it leaves them disempowered and even more vulnerable to that economy from the start. College is no longer as good as it needs to be at preparing graduates to succeed in a complex world, and its high cost is one of the contributing factors in the equation that forces students to be conservative in their aspirations. Debt stymies one’s ability to soar.
If we are serious about the new education, we have to address this issue. We could revolutionize the university and succeed in providing students with the most innovative and relevant education imaginable, but if we can’t alleviate the burden of cost, we are still hobbling their future. I know a brilliant young multimedia artist and theorist who is enjoying a remarkable success right now, with three exhibits in three different European cities. Jack, who earned both a bachelor’s degree and a PhD from private universities, currently works as a beginning professor teaching introductory art classes at a public university in England. Older artists are urging him to do what great artists have always done—quit his job, find a cheap little studio in some tiny village in Greece or somewhere else inexpensive, and devote himself to making art while his career is hot. “Take the risk!” they admonish him. “Opportunities like this don’t come again.” They imply he’s not a “real” artist because he won’t do this. They do not understand that, having graduated from American universities, he has so much debt that he has to keep teaching to pay off steep student loans that come due each month, barely leave him enough money to pay his current bills, and prevent him from taking advantage of the chance of a lifetime.
Jack’s story is familiar to current graduates in the United States. Whereas most developed nations subsidize higher education such that students pay little or even no tuition, in America even our public universities charge significant tuition. According to the College Board, the average annual cost of tuition and fees for 2015–2016 was $32,405 at private colleges and universities, where room and board averaged an additional $11,516. That’s roughly $45,000 to $50,000 a year, not including books, fees, and incidental expenses. Given that the median family income in the United States is $51,000, those costs put private education out of the reach of all but the elite.
For in-state residents at public colleges and universities, the 2015–2016 average tuition was $9,410, and for out-of-state residents, $23,893. Room and board was typically $10,138 at public schools. That is a total of roughly $20,000 a year for in-state students living in dorms and $35,000 for out-of-state students. The latter number is not far off from the cost of private university tuition, which is one reason more and more public institutions look to meet their own bottom line by admitting greater numbers of high-paying out-of-state students. It’s a bit bizarre, each state’s public universities working to woo students from other states to meet their operating costs. One consequence is that it is often easier to be admitted to another state’s public institutions than to your own.
The situation is most egregious in Southern states where governors have made lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy and decreasing subsidies to higher education almost a litmus test for their conservative standing. Southern states top the list for greatest cutbacks to higher education, highest costs for lower-income students, highest costs for community college, lowest percentage of people with college degrees, and, not surprisingly, biggest declines in in-state university enrollment. To make up budget shortfalls, these universities charge significantly higher out-of-state tuition and recruit heavily from elsewhere. For all the talk of the importance of jobs in the poorest Southern states, these cutbacks ensure a future of poverty for the next generation of Southerners.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, tuition in the last thirty years has tripled at public universities and more than doubled at private universities. Most middle-class Americans, especially after the 2008 financial collapse, do not have the savings to front such a bill. Since the 1980s, two trend lines have been diverging: as tuitions have risen, wages and spending power for the formerly middle class have stagnated or fallen. It is likely, if you are a middle-class parent of a seventeen-year-old, that you simply do not have the ability to pay all the costs of your child’s higher education. That means your child will probably go to college on a combination of grants and loans.
In her exhaustive study of three thousand students entering the University of Wisconsin public higher education system in 2008, sociologist and expert on higher education policy Sara Goldrick-Rab shows how the burden of debt makes a dramatic difference to what subject area students study in college, whether or not they finish college, and what they do in their life beyond college. She notes that, in 1981, state appropriations for higher education began to decline—from $10.18 per $1,000 of state personal income (1981) to $9.24 (in 1990), $7.52 (in 2000), $6.32 (in 2010), and $5.00 (in 2016). “Just as Americans decided that college was essential,” Goldrick-Rab notes, “states began spending less on public higher education and the price of college rose.” Six years after starting college, only one in two students in the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study had graduated, with 58 percent of those who started at four-year colleges and 42 percent of those at community colleges achieving a bachelor’s degree.
These figures mirror the national trends. From interviews, Goldrick-Rab’s research team discovered that students faced food and housing insecurity; jobs with schedules or employer demands that had to take precedence over classes, exams, or papers and other assignments; and constant anxiety over money that added psychological burdens to the material ones. These conditions are now commonplace for many students in a way that they were not for their college-going parents or grandparents. As Goldrick-Rab poignantly explains, had the students in her study started college the year they were born (1990), they would not have had to borrow any money to go to college. A simple part-time job would have covered their expenses.
Here is a sobering example of change at one private university. In 1970 a Yale student paid $2,550 a year in tuition. Working a minimum-wage job at the 1970 rate of $1.45 an hour, the student could work 4.8 hours a day to pay college tuition costs. In 2014, Yale tuition is $45,800, and that same minimum-wage job on campus pays $7.25. The Yale student today would need to work 17 hours a day to cover tuition.
As a result of rising tuitions and stagnant or falling middle-class wages, this generation of students has aptly been dubbed “Generation Debt.” Although over the course of a lifetime, a person with a college education earns more than someone with no college degree—in some fields, as much as a million dollars more—starting wages in formerly middle-class occupations are lower, the jobs less plentiful, and the job insecurity greater. Not surprisingly, a third of all those with student debt are currently at least a month behind on loan payments.
Student loan debt is also the worst kind of debt to carry. Step-by-step, from 1993 to 2008, Congress passed laws that, in essence, exploited the tuition crisis by giving direct control of the student loan industry to Wall Street banks, private equity companies, and other corporations that quickly turn purchased debt over to collection agencies that are paid for bringing in the loans by any means necessary, including harassment at the workplace or through landlords. These collection agencies are profit-making ventures; they don’t serve students, the government, or universities. The reason student loan debt is virtually the only form of personal debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy is that corporate loan institutions have lobbied successfully to make it so. Abuse is rampant, horror stories abound. Student loans can be a curse, the form of debt with the most devastating consequences on people’s lives. Profiting off student suffering are many groups: bankers, private investors, and loan sharks.
And the government. Since 2009, the Obama administration worked to gain back control of this situation so that the government, not private firms, issues and recovers the debt. But this has its own problems: the Department of Education calculates that in some years the government earns an astonishing 20 percent on each loan. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others are currently working to eliminate what is, essentially, exploitation bordering on usury, but few believe that these efforts will be successful in the current administration.
WHY DOES COLLEGE COST SO MUCH TODAY? TO ANSWER THE question, we need to look back, not to 1875, but to 1975, roughly when our nation’s policymakers switched direction and began thinking of higher education as a luxury rather than a public good, an item to be cut from tax rosters whenever possible instead of publicly supported.
This was a significant retreat from what has been dubbed the golden age of quality mass public higher education, the period bounded by the GI Bill (1944), the increased spending on science during the Sputnik era, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. For over thirty years (roughly 1945–1975), Americans put faith in democracy as the way to fight both fascism and totalitarianism, in the middle class as a key to democracy, and in higher education as the best route from the working class to the middle class. Patriotism and support for higher education went hand in hand. The Higher Education Act of 1965 marked a pinnacle in higher education in the twentieth century, extending financial assistance to the general population, including students at regional public universities, community colleges, and historically black colleges and universities. Federal spending on higher education increased exponentially, from $655 million in 1956 to $3.5 billion in 1966.
Since then, the slope of the trend line has been mostly downward. The devaluation of higher education as a public good began with California governor Ronald Reagan, motivated by political and ideological factors, including a general opposition to corporate taxes and the graduated income tax, disdain for the radical student protests at California campuses like Berkeley, and a conviction that most college professors were “liberals.” He put the brakes on what was arguably the greatest boon to public education in California since the GI Bill, the California Master Plan, which was passed in 1960 and had supported the state’s free, three-tier educational system of research universities, comprehensive colleges, and community colleges. As president, Reagan continued his cost-cutting agenda. He famously branded students “freeloaders” and “tax eaters.” His secretary of education, William Bennett, insisted that students who defaulted on loans were “deadbeats” who spent their money on drugs, cars, and stereos. The myth of the “deadbeat welfare mother” morphed into a new post–baby boomer myth of the “deadbeat student.”
There remains a racial component to the debate over public funding of higher education. Under the GI Bill, a generation of ethnic European Americans prospered after previous decades of discrimination. Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish, and Slavic Americans, largely Catholic, as well as Jews of various national origins went to college in record numbers. However, because of racial segregation in American universities in the decade before Brown v. Board of Education, African American GIs benefited far less than other ethnicities. Although 43 percent of black GIs said they wanted to go to college, only 12 percent enjoyed the postwar educational benefit. Now, many argue that the conservative attack on public education and reluctance to fund it, especially higher education, are at least partly based on the increasing number of nonwhite students in our nation’s schools and a de facto resegregation of public education. White ethnic voters who prospered because of publicly funded higher education in the past now feel reluctant to support public education for a majority nonwhite ethnic student population. Fall 2014 became a benchmark when nonwhite students made up over 50 percent of the total population in K–12 public schools. Students of color are an increasingly large percentage of college students and are a majority at many public universities and community colleges. Whether racism is at the base of the declining funding for higher education or whether, as others argue, it really is a contest over competing social goods—higher education, Medicare, Social Security, prisons, and so on—is not easy to determine. What is easy to see is the disastrous impact this decline in support of public education has on future generations.
Ideology clearly plays a role in the cutbacks happening in many states, especially those where state government is now decisively led by those from the Tea Party and other conservative movements. Some states have not only reduced support for universities but also mandated where money should be spent in higher education—and where it should not—and often with clear ideological intent. The example of North Carolina is indicative and instructive in this regard. In 2015, the state’s conservative governor, Pat McCrory, backed by the ultra-conservative John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative legislative branch, and a largely conservative University of North Carolina board of governors, used “austerity” and “cutting taxes” as rationales for a unanimous decision to eliminate three programs from the University of North Carolina system: a poverty center at the UNC Law School, a program dedicated to civic engagement, and a program in biodiversity. The board insisted that these cuts were not politically motivated, even though all three programs were largely supported by external grant funding and their closure would save only $6,000 annually. Hannah Gage, a former chair of the North Carolina board of governors, is adamant that the closings were about politics, not economics: “It’s hard to examine the board’s February action through anything other than a political lens,” she insisted. Even though the governor claimed to be interested in boosting the state’s economy, the programs his government cut produced graduates prepared for careers in growth areas. Nonprofits, legal advocacy, and biodiversity, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, all continue to be areas with increasing numbers of jobs.
Since 2008, North Carolina has cut per student state spending by 25 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Public Priorities. Over the same period, tuition has increased by nearly 35 percent. North Carolina is but one case; similar movements—cutting taxes, raising tuition, and cutting programs that are relevant, that interest students, and that promise productive careers—are happening all over the United States. Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Florida are all notable examples.
In fact, nearly every state addressed the 2008 financial collapse by cutting social spending. Whereas most other cuts have been restored, state funding for higher education has not. In some states, including a few controlled by Democratic legislatures, higher education continues to receive less support than any other social program. Currently, forty-five of the fifty states spend less per student in 2016 than they did before the 2008 financial crisis.
The effects of cutbacks are dire. A few universities have been shuttered. At others, staff and faculty are being let go, even as tuitions rise to compensate for the retreat of state funding. Since 2008, the average state spending is now approximately 17 percent less per student, adjusting for inflation, than it was before the recession. That figure is higher than 30 percent in eight states: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Even though New York City and New York State enjoyed a $5 billion budget surplus in 2015, the underfunding of the City University of New York is so extreme that departments lack administrative assistants and advisers, and some courses are being cut. Dedicated faculty and staff throughout the system went seven years (2009–2016) without even cost-of-living increases. A 2016 New York Times exposé of CUNY described broken desk chairs, labs devoid of equipment, and plastic sheets being used to protect against leaking roofs—amid the biggest and most expensive real estate boom in the entire country. The headline read: “Dreams Stall as CUNY, New York City’s Engine of Mobility, Sputters.” Once again, we see how far we have fallen from the glory days of public higher education.
Elsewhere, at the University of Colorado only some 3 percent of the total operating budget is supported by the state. The rest is paid for by outside federal and nonprofit foundation grant funding, corporate deals, philanthropy, and (mostly) tuition. If you go to the fund-raising page on the University of Texas website, there is a plea to alums and supporters unambiguously labeled “Why We Need Your Support.” Whereas in the 1980s the state of Texas contributed nearly half of the money for the university’s operating budget, now that amount comes to only 12 percent. Increased tuition, external grants, and alumni donors have to make up the deficit.
Hand in hand with the STEM obsession goes the assumption that the sciences generate more money for universities and can make up for declining state support. Humanities, arts, and social sciences cutbacks are often justified on the grounds that the sciences “bring in” dollars through grants, corporate contracts, and other forms of what is known as “sponsored research.” However, higher education analyst Christopher Newfield has calculated that, if you account for investments a university must make to sustain ongoing scientific research—new buildings, equipment, cutting-edge technology, labs, expert faculty and nonfaculty researchers, and so forth—sponsored research loses approximately twenty-four cents on every dollar it attracts. The ongoing costs amount to a discount on R&D offered by universities to funders, many of whom no longer support their own research. Universities carry financial burdens with even the most prestigious science research awards. It’s another vicious cycle: the huge awards are announced with fanfare, they raise the reputation and rankings of a university, but they also add to the ongoing operating costs of that university, resulting in rising tuition costs for students. This is true at public universities as well as at major private institutions such as MIT and Stanford. Some advanced undergraduates might have opportunities to work in innovative new labs funded by sponsored research, but applying for outside funding and then working on grants mostly takes full-time faculty away from teaching. Running a lab is like owning your own small business. It typically means hiring an administrative staff to handle human resources, grants management, compliance, deliverables, and to manage the lab assistants, a changing cadre of graduate students or postdoctoral fellows who might stay in their low-paying lab jobs for six or eight years before peeling off to go into industry.
Pundits often claim “administrative bloat” is responsible for unmanageable costs at our universities. Forty years ago, there were twice as many faculty as administrators and staff at universities; today, faculty (both full-time and adjuncts) are outnumbered by administrators and staffers. One frequent claim is that, if universities were run like businesses, there would be far fewer of these administrative personnel. Yet the evidence shows that running universities more like corporations hasn’t reduced operating expenses. It may even do the opposite. According to a 2012 survey by the American Council on Education, some 20 percent of college presidents now come from outside of academe, almost twice the percentage from a decade ago. Typically, presidents and other administrators who move in from the private sector are paid significantly more than those who enter leadership roles from the ranks of academics. Bringing in executives from outside also seems to correlate with increasing (not decreasing) numbers of administrators. When university presidencies or chancellor positions are filled by people who come from the corporate world, government, foundations, and the military, they typically are paid as much as they made in their previous positions, and they bring large staffs, who are also well compensated. Upon arrival, they often realize how little they understand academic governance and quickly promote academic insiders into new administrative positions, doubling central administrative staff in size and in cost.
When they’re not faulting an excess of administrators for the rising costs of college, pundits often blame high faculty salaries. But this is simply, demonstrably wrong. Since 1990, faculty salaries have decreased by 3 percent when adjusted for inflation. The average faculty salary is currently a little over $100,000 for the university rank of full professor, $79,000 for associate professor, and $69,000 for assistant professor. These positions require professors to hold a PhD, typically a seven-year advanced degree, at a minimum. Faculty size has shrunk in proportion to the number of students, and the number of faculty on the tenure track has dwindled drastically. Only about one-third of all current professors at our colleges and universities are tenured, and less than 20 percent of new hires are even on a tenure track.
It is easy to understand why so many faculty today see the university in crisis, even in ruins—hardly the ideal position from which to dream the future of a visionary new education. Recently, Governor Scott Walker concurrently moved to minimize the guarantees to free speech of tenured professors at the University of Wisconsin, to implement a $250 million budget cut to the system, and to give that $250 million instead to a group of billionaire hedge fund managers to build a new basketball stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. This is hardly the way to support Wisconsin’s youth. He argued that the cuts to the University of Wisconsin would result in a free-market university that would save money and lead to more innovation. Instead, UW faculty became fair game, and many faculty were offered outside positions. Several left for other, less hostile climates. UW ended up paying $23.6 million in increased salaries to retain its star faculty members.
One other factor that is frequently blamed for the rising cost of tuition, especially at elite private institutions, is financial aid. In fact, financial aid does add to costs, but—as Charles Eliot knew when he instituted financial aid as a way to modernize Harvard—having the most diverse (in every way possible) cohort of students adds to the quality of the learning experience for everyone at the university and spurs innovation. This is why the nation’s most elite institutions with the largest endowments often support “need-blind” admissions policies, meaning the best students are accepted on merit regardless of whether they can pay, and financial aid makes up the difference. At the top universities, this is a choice made in favor of recruiting the best talent over lowering tuition for all. To ensure a student body that is intellectually exciting, and not simply affluent and well connected, ten of the nation’s top private institutions offer free tuition to all accepted students with family income of less than $60,000 or, in some cases, $125,000 a year. One negative consequence is that, increasingly, the top-ranked private universities are made up of notably wealthy students paying full tuition and then a much smaller cohort of extremely successful, competitive middle- or even working-class scholarship students.
As became palpably and, to some, shockingly evident with the release of findings from the exhaustive 2017 Equality of Opportunity Study of over 30 million college students, students today can no longer expect to earn more than their parents, a trend line that plummets deeper every year. One of the greatest contributing factors is the soaring tuition of our universities. Saving taxes, not supporting public higher education, and the rising costs of public higher education tuition mean that, in general, universities are no longer our society’s engines of social mobility. Rather, they are increasingly training grounds for the wealthy to become even wealthier. The eye-popping headline from the New York Times reads: “Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60.”
Students today are paying more for less—for fewer services, less innovation, less opportunity. The privatizing of the university over the last several decades has not brought down costs, streamlined administrations, eliminated bureaucracy, modernized programs, or raised the quality of the faculty. It has made tuitions soar, class sizes explode, the teaching profession shrink. And it has made shell-shocked faculty and administrators quake at the word innovation. Altogether, this makes it more difficult to remake Eliot’s university precisely during the period when that task has become so urgent.
OF LATE, SOME OF THE HIGHEST-PRICED ELITE UNIVERSITIES HAVE been accused of becoming expensive “luxury goods” for the economic 1 percent. Critics argue that private education now costs so much because its high price tag itself conveys status. The media loves to dote on expensive frivolities such as climbing walls as signs that universities are spending wildly and inappropriately—both Chris Christie and Elizabeth Warren have attacked “lazy rivers and climbing walls” and other extravagances as the cause of tuition increases at private universities. At $50,000 or $60,000 a year, college, like jewelry, sports cars, designer fashions, and real estate, seems to convey high quality—which is surely a large part of the reason why the number of applications to the most expensive universities soars every year.
Some have compared elite private education to a “Veblen good,” named for the late nineteenth-century economist Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class. The Veblen effect in microeconomics is based on the idea of “conspicuous consumption” and the reality that certain goods are desired and valued precisely because they are overpriced. These goods do not follow standard models of supply and demand; rather, a spike in price increases rather than decreases demand. It may seem cynical to compare a Harvard education to the coveted Hermès Birkin bag, the unofficial diploma (starting at 11K) of any aspiring socialite, yet it is certainly the case that elite institutions have no incentive to lower their advertised fees. Each year, they reject as many as twenty times more applicants than they accept. The more exclusive and selective they become, the more applicants clamor for this rarest of the rare luxury goods. At the same time, the value—for those lucky few who can afford it—is indisputable. The graduation rate at these institutions is well over 90 percent, courses are plentiful, as are advisers, extracurricular activities, study abroad experiences, branch campuses all over the world, internships at nonprofits and corporations, and unsurpassed networking opportunities. The students are hand-chosen by admissions officers and deans of students careful to offer each cohort the most exciting peers imaginable. As the costs increase, so do the baseline expectations of these students, many if not most of whom have been educated at exclusive private high schools or superb public ones. Prep schools like Phillips Exeter Academy (which cost $46,900 for boarding students in 2016) not only are as expensive as most Ivy League universities but also raise expectations about what “school” must offer. According to Veblen’s theory, if the escalating price of one luxury good is supported by the affluent, then the prices of other luxury goods of that social class also soar, even if they are not related to each other. Many of the goods and services of the 1 percent have seen these escalating costs—exclusive nursery schools and retirement communities, elective surgery and long-term health-care insurance, Michelin-starred restaurants and Manhattan apartments.
Given how much these schools cost, the amount of attention they receive, and their high-profile faculties, one would assume that, as in Eliot’s day, they are at the leading edge of classroom innovation and modeling change for other universities. Yet this is not entirely the case. In fact, the eminence of Harvard, Stanford, and the like is precisely what can keep them in a more traditional mind-set. If you are highly ranked by US News & World Report and your acceptance rate hovers at 5 percent, your mandate is neither to cut costs nor to change. It would be an exceptionally brave and courageous leader who would radically alter a university so richly rewarded for doing exactly what it is doing—garnering the best students, the highest tuitions, the most distinguished faculty, and the biggest alumni donations year after year. At Stanford, that mission faces toward Silicon Valley, and nearly 40 percent of Stanford students now major in computer science. Stanford keeps saying it wants to correct this lopsided student body, and it has tried to launch some exciting interdisciplinary “CS+” majors (Computer Science + English, Computer Science + Music, and so on), but those remain small programs that do not dampen the Silicon Valley effect. At Harvard, bold presidents, year after year, try to ensure that graduates from the world’s wealthiest university go into professions other than those geared to generating more wealth for the wealthy.
Yet, as the renowned Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker notes, his lecture halls are typically only half full, despite the fact that he’s thought to be a rock star lecturer; Harvard students know that meeting other Harvard students is the most important reason to be there. A large percentage of them will go on to be wealth managers (financial advisers and fund managers) in corporations run or owned by other Harvard graduates. As Pinker notes, so many of Harvard grads “get snatched up by the big consulting and investment firms, helping to explain that 20 percent boost in their expected earnings” that comes just from graduating from Harvard. This matters for reasons aside from the obvious. If Harvard were to undergo visionary systemic change today, every other college and university in America would begin to follow suit. After all, though Harvard may no longer be the revolutionary leader of the new education that it was in Eliot’s day, it remains a model for most other institutions of higher education.
And not only when it comes to thinking (or not thinking) about how to prepare graduates for the world outside the academy. The wealth of Harvard and other top private schools does drive change at other colleges, including excellent public universities—but it’s not the sort of change that helps students themselves. In this regard, there is perhaps no clearer example of what has happened to public higher education than at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Like all professional schools, it depends on tuition, donations, grants, external funding, and business contracts for ancillary activities (such as executive training for corporations) to make its budget. Reputation is all, and the Anderson School has to compete for its top five ranking with private institutions, in this case, with Harvard, Stanford, and Penn, elite private universities with enormous endowments. To retain its top-ranked faculty, to be competitive, to attract the best students and the best faculty and therefore the best contracts, the Anderson School went private in 2012, turning down its public support from the state, an approximately $8 million annual appropriation. The public funds come with restrictions on how much this business school can pay its faculty, how much tuition it can charge, and how and from whom it can raise funds, engage in partnerships, cut admissions deals, and so forth. The school simply could not afford to take the $8 million a year from the state and maintain its standing.
This move to become a privatized business school has been applauded in the business press as if Anderson should be a model for other public universities. Yet the idea has problematic implications: Is the only way to maintain a great business school to become an expensive private, or quasi-private, school? Anderson maintains all of the reputational, historical, cultural, intellectual, and sociodemographic advantages of being part of a major public school, and its faculty still engage in research with other faculty in other fields, from psychology to statistics, from all over the university. Yet, if there are no restrictions on corporate support for this public university, what will happen to independent research? Can you present objective research results about the effects of climate change on the global economy, for instance, if the study is funded by British Petroleum? Can you criticize your funders if necessary, or have we entered an endless cycle of corporate-sponsored university research findings supporting corporate interests? A public university that can maintain its reputation only by giving up its public status risks jeopardizing its commitment to the public good.
As always, when institutional and extra-institutional interests are served first, students suffer. At Anderson, one nonfaculty administrator is charged with grant or private fund-raising for every three faculty members at the school. Administrative bloat, it turns out, is the working model of this premier public business school. Privatization comes with a high price tag.
Recently, in a TSA line at the airport, I happened to overhear a well-dressed man, perhaps a businessman of some sort, say to his friend, “He got into Stanford. It’s going to cost me a bundle, but he’s going to be set for life.” I could hear the pride in his voice; he was clearly speaking about his son.
That old expression: set for life. I thought about what this father thought his son would get from Stanford that would ensure a lifetime of success. It’s highly unlikely Stanford would give him lifetime employment or even specific job training. What this father knew was that, at Stanford, his son would be well cared for and would enjoy an excellent general education. He would work closely with his teachers if he chose to take advantage of the student-faculty ratio of 4:1. And behind every faculty member at Stanford are postdoctoral and doctoral students as well as academic advisers, counselors, library and IT professionals, and on and on. The support for the young man’s learning, his independent research opportunities, his curricular and extracurricular activities, his networks of alumni—all are designed to help him find his passion and define his life path. Factoring all of that in, it is surprising that Stanford costs only $45,729 a year.
Fifty miles away at Berkeley, the official student-to-faculty ratio is 17:1. Some say that the ratio doesn’t matter, but, as a friend of mine who teaches at one of the California State University campuses likes to say, she’s never seen an elite university stay silent about its small class sizes. At the publics, there are fewer ancillary advisers dedicated to ensuring students’ success. Because of the defunding of higher education, acceptance to one of the top public universities in the country no longer ensures that you are “set for life.” It may be almost as difficult to get into Berkeley as into an Ivy League, but it’s harder to get out.
THE TASK INNOVATORS FACE TODAY IS TWOFOLD: TO KEEP COSTS down and, at the same time, to realize the new education. On the former, there have been many proposals. Most, however, simply make cuts around the edges and compromise many necessary features in the struggle to manage expenses. Or they rely on technologies like MOOCs as a solution even though, as we’ve seen, online learning at massive scale often costs as much as or more than face-to-face learning, with less successful results. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity offers a laundry list of some two dozen ways to cut costs. Each has benefits and drawbacks, and many institutions have tried or are working on several of these. None will result in anything approaching a return to 1980s tuitions subsidized at 1980s levels.
Some universities have tried to shorten the degree time to three years to eliminate one-quarter of the costs. Three years might work fine for some students in some programs; others might realistically require five years. Clearly, lopping off a year of study arbitrarily is unwise; it is exactly the wrong reductionist, one-size-fits-all solution to the interesting problem of how much education is sufficient in a given field or for a given student. Relaxing credit-hour limits so those who wish, including community college transfer students, can take extra courses to accelerate their time to graduation and minimize their costs seems a useful solution for those energetic students able to carry the extra load, although it also inevitably limits the cocurricular and other opportunities for those students. Similarly, dual-enrollment programs (allowing students to take a first year of college while finishing the last year of high school or permitting undergraduates to simultaneously work toward master’s degrees) are great in the right circumstances, self-defeating in others. Some reformers advocate jettisoning general education and heading directly into the major. Others suggest that skills-based certification based on mastery or competency tests can replace a year or even two of courses. Once again, managed thoughtfully and strategically, these might be useful ways to reduce costs, or they can turn out to seriously diminish a student’s future career possibilities. As we’ve seen, innovative general education programs can provide exactly the analytical and crosscutting interdisciplinary thinking and communication skills that are most in demand in a complex workplace.
Technology can help reduce costs in some situations. The ever resourceful Arizona State University president Michael Crow has repeatedly experimented with new money-saving methods in the face of constant state cutbacks. Some technologies have worked, others have faltered. He is currently enthusiastic about eAdvisor, an online advising system that is less expensive than face-to-face advising and that turns out to appeal to this generation of students, who would rather gain advice from online software than by going to office hours with the advising staff. President Crow even credits eAdvisor with helping to increase graduation rates because it offers students suggestions for courses and majors, with clear pathways to careers, that factor in students’ interests, skills, and personalities. “I just took it, pretending I was my daughter,” Crow jokes. “It said I needed to run things and maybe should be a movie producer.”
Community college remains the most economical way to go to college, and more and more middle-class Americans are taking advantage of this affordable solution. There, expenses are managed by being largely nonresidential, with none of the million-dollar costs of Division I collegiate athletics, and without extensive research facilities. Community colleges emphasize teaching over research and tend to hire dedicated faculty who teach many courses for lower wages than at research universities. Indeed, some argue that faculty salaries at four-year institutions could be controlled by following this model of increased teaching loads and diminished research responsibilities, a solution that works only if faculty-reward structures and university-ranking criteria change as well—and only if industry and government take up the mission of basic research that is now primarily the province of higher education. For community college students, the tuition savings only pertains if four-year colleges readily accept transfer credits.
Other ways of lowering expenses and cutting costs include eliminating regulation and red tape (estimated to potentially save as much as 3 to 11 percent of current university operating costs) and combining programs to minimize duplication of faculty and administration. Again, there are wise and foolish ways of making such cuts. And some can even lead to innovation. A few years ago, for example, New York University sought to minimize administrative costs by combining a number of small programs on the language, history, and cultures of different ancient civilizations into one Study of the Ancient World program. Faculty were rightly angered at the top-down approach. However, when the next year came around and program applications not only increased but proved to be intellectually exciting, including applications from international students who brought entirely new non-Western areas of expertise beyond the usual Greek and Roman, the faculty began to reconsider. The program is too new to tell whether graduates from this new global ancient world program will be successful at obtaining jobs as professors, curators, translators, or in other occupations, but there are examples in every field where bold new ideas can also lead to economic efficiencies.
All of these are useful efforts, if modest in scope. In the end, though, remedying the problem of high costs at our public universities requires championing public higher education at the level that was commonplace in America between 1945 and 1975. We need to focus on our values, reconsider shortsighted policy decisions that affect public education, and rethink the decisions made over the past decades about how the public money should be spent—for instance, as tax rebates to huge corporations or as subsidies, at a fraction of the cost, that support public higher education. We, as a society, made different decisions during the golden age of public education.
We all know that college has never mattered more. It also has never cost more. Tragically, our public universities today cost as much as our elite private universities cost a generation or two ago. Despite frantic fund-raising by administrators and faculty, the decline in per student state support for higher education has been passed along to the individual, tuition-paying student. The situation grows worse every year and will continue to disintegrate unless the public understands how much higher costs hurt us all, not just the next generation on whom we force the tremendous debt burden.
The United States has ended its era of strategic investment in its youth. Not to put too fine a point on it, we have given up on the one national business that has worked best for us for 150 years: higher education. Despite the system’s unparalleled success, we are no longer investing in our human capital. This is in contrast to Sweden, Brazil, Germany, Finland, France, Norway, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Iceland, where higher education is radically subsidized to the extent that tuition is free.
Short of free tuition, we could work on improving the terms of debt disbursal. One of the most interesting income-based student loan repayment ideas comes from Australia. It was enacted in 1989 partly to address the outcry when the country began charging tuition for its public universities. In this plan, students pay differential tuitions: those entering high-paying fields pay higher tuition than those entering the arts, nursing, elementary education, philosophy, or theoretical math (to give a few examples). Students can then opt to pay the tuition up-front at a 10 percent discount rate or to borrow tuition at the full rate on an income-based repayment plan under the Australian government’s Higher Education Loan Program (which goes by the not too subtle acronym HELP). Those who earn more than the equivalent of about $40,000 a year have approximately 4 to 8 percent of their income (depending on their take-home pay) deducted automatically by the Australian Taxation Office to repay their loans. If a graduate runs into unemployment or illness, payments cease until they start earning an income again. At the same time, if a student has a windfall, he or she can pay the whole debt back earlier. The United States government offers a version of income-based student loans but at higher interest and repayment rates and with a number of requirements that make these loans far less attractive as an alternative.
If nothing else, the enemies of public education and proponents of privatization need to understand that public education is a good investment. Every economic study of higher education shows it is the best investment a country can make, both for its own collective productivity and for the individual productivity of its graduates. It’s penny-wise and pound-foolish to cut taxes by cutting higher education. A college degree confers a mean $365,000 lifetime benefit for the average American man (after subtracting all its direct and indirect costs over a lifetime) and an average $185,000 for women. Federal, state, and municipal governments all make a profit of $231,000 on each American who graduates from college, mostly through higher income taxes and lower unemployment benefits paid over the course of a lifetime.
There are signs that the public in general is coming to understand that the cost of higher education is a social problem and one not just for students but for all of society. We may even be at a tipping point, coming to see that the forty-year defunding of higher education is robbing American society of its greatest asset: an educated younger generation prepared to tackle the problems of a turbulent future. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders’s passionate advocacy of free tuition captured national attention, especially from youth. His campaign platform was then taken up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidency. Subsequently, the states of Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon, and Tennessee announced plans to offer free or subsidized tuitions at community colleges, and, in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee announced a partnership with the City College of San Francisco, a community college, to offer free tuition to any city resident.
An ambitious proposal was announced in January 2017 by New York governor Andrew Cuomo in a press conference with Senator Sanders. The governor announced a proposed Excelsior Scholarship that would make all the two-year and four-year colleges in the City University of New York and the State University of New York systems tuition-free for all New York residents whose families earn less than $125,000 a year. Governor Cuomo argued that over 70 percent of all new jobs in the state now require a college degree and that it hampers our students if, in order to attend college, they must graduate with tuition debt. “It’s like starting a race with an anchor tied to your leg,” Cuomo said.
Of course, to prepare our students for their future, we need to make college not only free but also better. It makes no sense to offer free tuition to students in a system that has been hamstrung by decades of state-level funding cuts. In order for Governor Cuomo’s plan to reach its full potential and move beyond politics to a true enhancement of our students’ futures, it needs to be supported with concrete measures for increasing support to the state’s impoverished college and university system. New York’s public universities already have one of the lowest tuition rates in the United States. In 2016, six schools in the CUNY system were in the top ten on the collegiate “social mobility index,” which charts the disparity between the low family income level of entering students and their higher level of earned income when they graduate. At some of the city’s community colleges, over half of the students come from families that earn less than $25,000 a year (not $125,000 a year), and they attend college for free through a combination of federal, state, and city grants. The Excelsior Scholarship would extend that same benefit of free tuition to middle-class families in the state.
It’s a thrilling proposal—but only if it were to be matched with increased public investment in CUNY and SUNY. Free or reduced tuition means nothing if the system is so starved for funding that it cannot offer even the most basic courses required for graduation, has decaying facilities, and uses technology from the last century. Over the last decades, CUNY’s full-time faculty has decreased by 33 percent at the same time that its student body has increased by 15 percent. That said, the governor’s proposal, if accompanied by significant reinvestment in public education, could mark the beginning of the new education and set an example for other states to consider. “Here’s my prediction,” Senator Sanders said. “If New York State does it this year, mark my words, state after state will follow.”
Such a statement would have been a pipe dream only a few years ago, but there are other signs, too, of a changing attitude toward refunding higher education. In the November 2016 election, California voters reversed a “tax revolt” that began with the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, an amendment to the California constitution that decreased property taxes and included language that required a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses to increase future income or state sales taxes. Instead, voters supported all three education-related initiatives on the ballot, including one that increased taxes on high-income earners to fund a variety of initiatives supporting public education, from preschool to higher education.
The cost of ensuring excellence in public higher education, if shared by all, is within reach. According to Keep California’s Promise, a data and advocacy project run by two University of California professors, the state of California could cut tuition in half for every student in the University of California and California State University systems (over 700,000 students) if only it resumed state contributions equal to the 2000–2001 per capita student spending levels. How much would that cost the median California taxpayer each year? Thirty-one dollars per person. Thirty-one more dollars each would make a tremendous difference: the public contributing to higher education as a public good, the commonweal growing richer, and students starting their future without debt—set for life.
AS I DISCOVERED AS I LAY DYING, DEBT SHAPES EVERYTHING. THE interns who owed $400,000 on their medical education faced a choice between the kind of medicine they wanted to practice and the more lucrative specializations that would pay off those towering loans. Their decisions would be driven by necessity, contingent on the consequences of a society that has abdicated its responsibility to its youth.
Many people reading this book grew up knowing that if they studied hard, they had a good shot at going to college. If they worked for it, college was within their grasp because an older generation had made a collective contribution to their education, to their future. Middle-class parents had enough money to save for their kids’ college education and knew that they would be helped along by their own tax contributions being spent by their states on college.
The dream of affordable higher education for all (or, at least, most) Americans was once the American dream, a dream of the middle class, a dream of democracy. Such a dream prompted the creation of the land-grant universities and inspired Charles Eliot’s vision of innovative university transformation, not just at Harvard but throughout higher education. It continued to motivate America in the era of the GI Bill and the Great Society. It may seem idealistic to think we are on the verge of such renewal again given the downward trend line in so many states. But we are also, elsewhere, seeing a different trend in response to the growing debt crisis our students and higher education face.
The problems of traditional education and cost compound each other. Renewed support for higher education is needed and a new vision is required, one that remakes the university of 1865—and the university of 1965—for our time. The world is more complex and terrifying than ever before. We must reinvest in education, our main bulwark against the forces of disorder and ruin. It’s the best investment we can make as a nation, not only for the sake of younger generations of students but also for all of us facing an unsettling and unsettled future.