The Return of Hope: Thinking About a Future of Higher Ed as a Public Good

I have gone and done a foolish thing. 

In the aftermath of Elizabeth Warren’s announcement of her plan to cancel a significant amount of student loan debt, fund free public post-secondary education and redress historical imbalances in resourcing minority-serving institutions, I have apparently allowed hope that it or something like it could possibly come to pass.

I am normally much more careful with my hope, but once I started imaging the good something like this could do for students, for graduates whose lives are constrained by debt, and for public post-secondary education institutions themselves, I started to want it to happen, which sent me back to imagining more possible good outcomes – state institutions oriented around serving the citizens of the state – which sent me back to the wanting and now I’m in a terrible cycle of hope.

The last time I allowed myself to hope this fervently for something was when I applied for a tenure track position at College of Charleston where I had been visiting. Regular readers will know I was rather crushed when that didn’t turn out well.[1]

I was crushed because I had allowed myself to long for a future deep down I knew was unlikely. There’s something about knowing the odds are long, but still possible that can make the disappointment even greater. 

The same is true of my feelings for Warren’s plan. I like Warren plenty, but it is her plan I am most invested in. There’s quite a few hurdles to clear, a Democratic primary, a general election, a Congress that even if her party holds the legislative branch that may not be wholly receptive to the plan. Is the plan tied to Warren’s political fate, or could it prove popular enough to become a plank for any democrat?

I worry about that.

But then I read something like Christopher Newfield’s post on “Why Elizabeth Warren’s Free College Plan Is So Important” and I fantasize about a world in which once again public post-secondary education is seen as a public good best underwritten with public funds and my heart swells a little. 

When I read an editorial from the Chicago Tribuneattacking the proposal that is so tendentious in its reasoning, including the truly risible “putting a safety rail around our zoo’s tiger pit would be a slap in the face to all the people who previously fell into the pit and got mauled” argument, my hope glimmers even more brightly, because if this is the best opponents can do, they can be vanquished with good messaging and sound argumentation.

My hope fades a bit when I see comments from Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, a large public institution that has been steadily starved by its legislature use a Glenn Beck talking point to assail it, saying that under Warren’s plan colleges would be “government schools.”

Crow’s comments remind us that there are business models to protect, even for ostensibly public institutions like ASU, and so there will be some powerful forces aligned against it. 

To turn up the flame of my hope I go back to the Levy Institute’s analysis of the salutary macroeconomic effects of cancelling student debt and think, yes, someday when I need to go into the old folks home there may be a younger person who can afford to buy my house that holds so much of my retirement money in its equity.

There are some big hurdles to overcome in terms of broad public skepticism and in Tweeting out my enthusiasm I have been subject to hearing it from some of those skeptics. Those of us who support Warren’s plan should be careful not to view all of that skepticism as coming from hardened ideological enemies. In some cases, a little bit of context and information can help turn the tide.

As shown in a recent Harris poll, when respondents are given a full description of the plan, it’s supported by 64%. A Quinnipiac poll that merely asks, “Do you support or oppose making all public colleges in the United States free to attend?” shows a lower 45% support. (Still not too terrible for leaving the gate, though.)

This suggests that messaging and communication will indeed be very very important.

For example, when people express concern about the inefficiency of government bureaucracies I counter with studies that have demonstrated that forcing public institutions to compete with each other as they chase out-of-state tuition dollars in order to stay afloat, in reality cause much greater inefficiency. 

Or when people insist that they worked their way through college, so today’s students can do the same, I ask them to try the following math problem.

1.Find tuition from year they started college.

2.Divide that amount by minimum wage from same year to determine total number of work hours needed to pay for a year’s tuition and fees.

3.Divide the number of hours by 40. This will get the number of full-time weeks of work one would have needed to pay for a year of college tuition and fees.

4.Repeat steps one through three for present day at the same institution.
 
5. Compare results.

When I do the math for my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Illinois, in 1988, the year I started, I could’ve paid the $2070 annual tuition and fees with about 15 weeks of minimum wage work. 

Today, the annual tuition and fees ranges from $16,210 to $21,214, depending on major. Fortunately, as a liberal arts guy, I’d get to pay the lowest “base rate.” Using Illinois’ current minimum wage of $8.25/hour[2]I would need to work 49 weeks in order to pay for a single year of tuition and fees. If I had the misfortune of majoring in Engineering or Agricultural Sciences it would take 64 weeks of minimum wage work for a year’s tuition and fees.

For more fun, do the math what tuition at the year of your matriculation would be today if it had increased at the rate of inflation. That $2200 I had to pay in 1988 translates to $4727.34 today.

So yeah, there’s going to be some pushback and tough sledding, and I’m not so delusional to think that by itself, even if adopted, that Warren’s plan will solve structural problems, adjunctification, for instance.

But what I do know is that if adopted and we can get beyond a mindset rooted in corporatized university austerity there’s more room to address those problems. What if the necessity of competing for prestige was removed by this stable base of funding? What kind of strings could be attached to the funding that would enhance instruction? For example, what if the Federal money came coupled with requirements for budgets to dedicate a certain percentage to instruction?

There’s lots of issues that would need to be sorted out and still more issues if implemented, but it’s a shot at a reset, a reframing that’s necessary. 

I’d given up hope that such a thing was possible. I still think it’s unlikely, but it’s the only thing that will even provide a shot at staving off eventual ruin. 

That I’m confident in.