Jan. 24

In Need of a Persuasive Story

Late last year I was in Washington, D.C., listening to government officials and policy analysts discuss the state of higher education in America. The tone of those conversations, as has been the case since the advent of the Spellings Commission, was troubling. I left with the clear impression that there is widespread distrust of colleges and universities in Washington on both sides of the political aisle.

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That means suspicion of higher education is not a partisan issue and that the era of accountability and cost sensitivity will not end when the Bush administration leaves town. Key public officials like Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and California Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon will probably continue to rail about rising college costs. And the higher education sector will probably continue to be hampered by its inability to tell a believable story about why tuitions keep increasing at rates higher than inflation.

To a certain degree, suspicion and distrust of colleges and universities are problems of the higher education sector’s own making. College and university leaders, most of whom were faculty members at some point, have the professor’s reflex against simplified explanations. Professorial skepticism toward neat, tidy, simple (but often inaccurate) answers is understandable and admirable. But politicians and reporters like to hear coherent and compelling narratives that are easy to understand and easy to retell to their constituents and readers. Higher education has often failed to grasp this. And it shows in the explanations higher education gives about the rising cost issue: They are all too often defensive or obfuscating — leaving the public scratching its head in perplexity.

The stories being told in Washington about higher education, as everyone working at a college or university knows, are not flattering. The dominant stories coming from the mouths of politicians and the pens of reporters portray America’s colleges and universities in an arms race to out-compete each other on rankings, wealth, prestige, student diversity, scholarships and financial aid, faculty compensation, teaching loads, and non-academic facilities. College professors are depicted as disinterested in students and eager to have decreased teaching responsibilities. College administrators are pilloried as overpaid, unnecessary bureaucrats — although, ironically, government intervention nearly always requires colleges to hire more administrators to comply with the reporting requirements imposed by legislators. And who hasn’t read or heard stories of dormitories overbuilt in the image of four-star luxury hotels or of million dollar-climbing walls? Tales of the latter have become the stuff of urban legend.

The dominant meme describes American colleges and universities as institutions driven by their own self-interest rather than by the interests of students or of society. Lost in the debate is any sense of the public’s interest in anything other than the politics of resentment, which builds its persuasive case through portrayals of colleges and universities as bloated, elitist, inefficient, unworthy of tax payer support, and lacking the ethical high ground. If only colleges and universities were run like a business goes a common critique that warms the hearts of the for-profit higher education sector and its key Congressional supporters like Ohio Rep. John Boehner. Applying business principles is the panacea according to this simplistic but seductive narrative that has put colleges and universities on the defensive since the beginning of the Reagan administration.

Magazine and newspaper articles increasingly depict a college education in business terms, as a consumer good to be purchased. Customers (students and their parents) are encouraged to seek the best deal, to bargain, to devise strategies to pay the lowest price for the highest quality. The ubiquitous so-called merit scholarship, which in most cases is nothing more than a price discount to lure another customer, makes it nearly impossible for any five parents with children at the same college to know how much the others are paying. The situation is akin to the airline industry where invariably no two seats on the same plane are sold for the same amount.

The emphasis on cost to the paying customer casts a college education squarely in the realm of commodity. And to be sure, there has always been an inherent commodity aspect to the experience of getting a college education. Most American colleges have never been free, and historically most students have entered college seeking upward economic and social mobility. But too much emphasis on college as commodity, voiced by students or by colleges, corrupts higher education, leading colleges and universities to be seen primarily as businesses churning out product rather than as places that inspire, enlighten, and uplift society. Even the colleges themselves have encouraged this kind of thinking to justify why students and parents should be willing to pay the rising cost of college—as institutions often cite studies showing a $1 million lifetime earnings advantage for college graduates over non-college graduates.

On the issue of rising tuitions, colleges and universities, as they have exuberantly embraced marketplace paradigms, have let themselves get defined as money-driven, price-gouging wealth-accumulating firms rather than as cathedrals of learning. This has happened because colleges and universities have not been bold in telling their collective story. Instead, colleges and universities have let themselves end up in the defensive position of rebutting the unflattering stories and simplistic caricatures about why college costs so much. Those stories and caricatures, when left unchecked, undermine the public’s trust in higher education.

There are potential opportunities for colleges and universities to begin shaping the story from within higher education rather than simply reacting to stories from without. But the first step is to craft accurate, uncomplicated, and believable narratives.

The case for the small liberal arts college offers one starting point. Providing an education at a small liberal arts college is a highly individualized process. The liberal arts college classroom is more akin to an artisan’s workshop or an artist’s studio than to a factory floor or an assembly line. If higher education must be forced to adopt the language of the business transaction, then perhaps the small liberal arts college must make the case, as Reed College’s President Colin Diver often has, that consumers always pay higher prices for, and are more willing to make sacrifices to afford, handcrafted goods in comparison to mass-produced goods. Diver’s argument is compelling because it is self-evident to most consumers that craftsmanship is synonymous with quality.

Nor is it a stretch to claim that a liberal arts education is the product of craftsmanship, the result of a slow, labor-intensive process that produces individually unique student learners whose lives have been transformed for the better by four years at the institution. One enduring image of the small college education has the eminent 19th century Williams College professor Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other end. The Hopkins image came to symbolize the intimate small college transmission of knowledge from sage to student.

Colleges that Change Lives, by the former New York Times education editor Loren Pope, has garnered a following due to its message that small costly private colleges, like Earlham and Reed, perform a kind of educational alchemy not easily broken down into bottom-line terms but somehow able to deliver on the promise of the book’s title. Pope’s book has drawn attention to 40 colleges that are not the household names invoked by politicians trying to make hay out of critiques of higher education. Yet Pope’s 40 colleges are collectively one example of the kind of compelling story that, if told more often, might help private higher education regain the public’s trust.

When justifying the high cost of college, is it enough to assert, as countless presidents of private liberal arts colleges have, that the actual production costs of educating a student are sometimes double the tuition charge? I do not think so. In fact, I suspect that the public hears such arguments and imagines that higher education is wasteful. After all, what product costs twice as much to produce as its sale price? What firm survives producing such a product? Discerning consumers wonder how much of that double-the-sticker-price true cost pays for the hidden costs of fund raising, public relations, student recruiting, and athletic programs; that is, enterprises not regarded as being at the core of most colleges and universities, but precisely the areas that many people immediately associate with the runaway cost of higher education.

Rather than change the subject when politicians rail about the so-called non-academic costs that get passed on to students in the tuition bill, colleges need to hit the issue head on. Straight talk about non-core costs might be appealing to the public and disarming to higher education’s critics. There are potentially persuasive ways to justify the non-academic costs of running a college or university. For example, why not just assert that the expenses incurred by college fundraising and endowment management enterprises are examples of how colleges gather non-tuition revenues to keep their tuitions from rising even higher? College leaders can say with authority that those revenue-chasing expenditures, rather than being cited in the cost of educating a student, might more appropriately be charged off against the endowment and fund raising returns. The public might then understand that, without the marginal dollars netted through fund raising and endowment returns, tuitions would be much higher.

Similarly, colleges can justify their public relations and recruiting expenditures as the price of bringing in quality students and faculty as well as the price of enhancing the perceived value of the degree the student will earn. Finally, colleges can argue that they provide their students a unique lifetime affiliation that accrues benefit long after the last tuition check gets paid. How many firms can say that about their product?

And if none of those arguments work, colleges can do what they have been loath to; that is, point to the students and parents in the consuming public and say, in the words of an old Toyota commercial, “you asked for it, you got it.” That’s right. College tuitions have gone up because students and their parents expect more from the college experience than ever. Meeting those expectations does not happen when institutions run in place to hold down costs. To get less expensive colleges, the public will have to accept less expansive college degree programs and facilities. There is no evidence that the public is willing to do so; nor should it. In any case, both are points that higher education needs to make early and often.

Candor and transparency about the costs they charge is something colleges and universities will have to practice soon enough as Congressional interest in a “College Access and Affordability Act” has made it into the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The next HEA will call for colleges to provide students and their parents with more transparent and detailed explanations of the costs they charge. The emphasis on explaining and justifying costs will, in the hopes of some members of Congress, influence colleges to hold down future tuition increases.

Higher education has already taken notice of suggestions in Congress that massive college endowments ought to be taxed and that the nation’s wealthiest universities should draw upon their billion-dollar endowments to eliminate tuition altogether. Perhaps as a result of such rhetoric, Harvard and Yale have announced increased financial aid for families with incomes between $120,000 and $180,000. Expanding eligibility for generous grant aid to families with upper middle to upper class incomes, notwithstanding all the mostly good publicity it has brought to Harvard and Yale, raises as many concerns about college costs as it addresses.

For example, are Harvard and Yale’s expansive new financial aid policies just a veiled price discount (like merit scholarships elsewhere) for families that can afford to pay? And is it not obvious to Harvard and Yale that expanding financial aid eligibility to encompass families in the top 5% income bracket — based on the argument that if they need help everyone does — is the latest evidence that colleges and universities charge amounts beyond the reach of most American families? Many of us in higher education, while we applaud Harvard and Yale’s increasing interest in providing access, wonder how candid those universities will be about their motives as they defend the new initiatives going forward.

Making a candid case regarding college costs is an approach I have seen work for Reed College. In information sessions, when I have justified Reed’s tuition charges using images of artisans and craftsmen to describe what goes into a Reed education, I have seen the description resonate with audiences. I believe that those audiences have responded positively because they understand that they usually pay more for individually tailored and handcrafted items that have an inherent quality advantage built into them. Just as most people recognize the value of seeing or being part of a live, rather than a recorded, performance or of getting a poem or artwork created specifically for them, rather than receiving a mass-produced card, they understand the value of a handcrafted education.

The students and parents I speak to seem to appreciate that Reed addresses the high cost issue directly and offers an explanation that sounds consistent with the values and the day-to-day academic life of the college. They also seem to understand that a small college like Reed provides a highly personalized education — where every student has the apprentice scholar experience of a thesis — that cannot easily be replicated at a lower cost. The idea that life changing goes on in addition to degree acquisition is a powerful closer — to use sales parlance — for Reed.

In the midst of brick throwing at colleges over rising costs, Reed has chosen to make its here-is-why-we-cost-so-much case by citing the value of its handcrafted education. The approach works for Reed because it reflects the college’s mission and communicates institutional values. But the approach also works because Reed has constructed a narrative about college costs that makes sense and sounds believable rather than like defensive back pedaling or dissembling. Perhaps by tying their explanations of rising college costs to their distinctive missions and identities other colleges and universities can craft similar persuasive narratives.

Paul Marthers is dean of admission at Reed College.

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Comments

legitimacy meltdown

“The dominant meme describes American colleges and universities as institutions driven by their own self-interest rather than by the interests of students or of society.”

Marthers ignores several of the causes for these problems, causes for which coming up with a plausible “cover story” will not suffice.

Take credential inflation, for instance (see link), which is steadily eating away at the value of a college education, so much so that only advanced degrees are now keeping up with monetary inflation.

Tuition hikes, crushing student loan debt, grade inflation, rampant educational expansion, culture wars, all these undercut the legitimacy of higher education.

The really sad thing about this is that it so clearly lies beyond the ability of higher ed institutions to do anything about the credential spiral, loans, etc.

Is it too much to suggest that the legitimacy meltdown in progress only worsens with each subsequent remedial intervention?

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 8:30 am EST on January 24, 2008

Free association

Having spent many years in higher education, what descriptors come to mind when thinking about university leaders I have seen?

Self-serving, spineless, mendacious, hypocritical, condescending, bullying, and over-privileged.

And by the way, we deserve more money.

Insider, at 9:15 am EST on January 24, 2008

Get Rid of College Sports

If students want to do competitive sports, have them join sports clubs off campus.

Thomas, at 10:15 am EST on January 24, 2008

I agree with Dr. Marther that higher education’s various sectors have to have an effective narrative. And the narrative of private, career oriented higher education is that we are giving working class adults and others who are career oriented a clear path to their chosen profession—a narrative that happens to be true, as we have seen dramatic increases in students choosing to attend our schools. But it is not true, as Dr. Marther suggests, that we enjoy the attacks on other sectors of higher education. On the contrary, CCA believes higher education is a big tent, and when public officials perceive shortcomings in any sector, that harms all of us. As one obvious example, the medium term failure to have Federal grants and loans keep pace with inflation, in part because the overall value proposition of higher education has not been as well articulated as it could have been, disadvantages students who want to pursue higher education, whatever venue they choose. Harris N. Miller

Harris Miller, CEO/President at Career College Association, at 11:45 am EST on January 24, 2008

One conclusion is clear: This is all a consequence of the fabled “market” at work!! I don’t notice anyone in Congress attacking Tiffany’s because its prices are higher than Wallmart’s.

David Macey, at 2:10 pm EST on January 24, 2008

Not persuasive

Doubletalk.

“The product we produce is handcrafted by artisans” is an explanation for why something is expensive relative to other goods, not an explanation for why its price is increasing far faster than inflation.

Tuition has been, and continues to (at most institutions) rise considerably faster than the inflation rate. A “handcrafted” education has nothing to do with this.

Bill M., at 9:55 am EST on January 25, 2008

So let’s hear that believable story already1

And the higher education sector will probably continue to be hampered by its inability to tell a believable story about why tuitions keep increasing at rates higher than inflation.

And this article fails to do so.

“Candor and transparency” would suggest that rather than waiting until And if none of those arguments work,one should start with this, if it is indeed true:

colleges can do what they have been loath to; that is, point to the students and parents in the consuming public and say, in the words of an old Toyota commercial, “you asked for it, you got it.” That’s right. College tuitions have gone up because students and their parents expect more from the college experience than ever. Meeting those expectations does not happen when institutions run in place to hold down costs.

If our inflation-adjusted tuition bill is larger than it was twenty years ago because we’re getting more, say so!

But you’d better also tell us what the “more” is already! Yeah, the engineering department is always needing new gear, but that the stuff that looks obsolete now wasn’t cheap when it was new, either.

And why is a bachelors in history more expensive? The price of chairs, chalk and heat hasn’t risen faster than inflation.So what is it? Is it, in fact, the luxusry dorms, climbing walls, and ever-increasing swarms of student-life deans, diversity trainers, etc., etc.?

If not, if there’s some major obvious factor I’m missing as to why it now takes more hours of skilled labor to lecture a classroom three times a week than it did thiryyears ago, please tell me what it is.

To get less expensive colleges, the public will have to accept less expansive college degree programs and facilities. There is no evidence that the public is willing to do so; nor should it.

If the taxpayer is being asked to support it for the public good (as we do in so many ways, of which Pell grants are just the tip of the iceberg) they’re gonna want a detailed expanation of just what that greater expansiveness is, and will rightly question the climbing wall and the multicultural counselor are giving them their tax money’s worth.

Ralph Phelan, at 5:30 pm EST on January 25, 2008

Restore standard consumer protections for Student Loans

The real tragedy here is that this massive increase in cost is shifted directly onto the backs of students who will sign any loan papers put in front of them in order to get registered for classes.

Should it surprise anyone that the default rates are now so high? A 10.6% average default rate after only 5 years out of school is atrocious. Combined with the fact that nearly all standard consumer protections have been removed from student loans, and one can see how this massive overspending is ruining the lives of those that were supposed to benefit from college...the students.

And who’s looking out for these students? The Department of Education. No, they actually make a tidy 20% return on defaulted loans, according to the Wall Street Journal.The lenders? Give me a break, no. The Universities? Please...once they leave school, the only connection the university has with these students is to solicit alumni contributions. The financial Aid offices obviously can’t be counted on either, so No, and No.

So who, then is looking out for the interests of the borrowers? Grassroots organizations like StudentLoanJustice.Org, with no funding, little political clout, and members so deep in debt they can’t see straight?

I’m all for million dollar climbing walls, through-the-roof administrative spending and the like...as long as there are standard consumer protections for students on their loans when they leave school, enter the real world,and realize that they were sold down the river.

The university organizations (i.e. NASFAA, etc)need to break their embrace with the lenders, and start lobbying for the interests of the students. They need to strongly advocate for the return of standard consumer protections for student loans.

Anything short of this will not suffice.Anyone listening?

Alan Collinge, Founder at Studentloanjustice.Org, at 7:40 am EST on January 26, 2008

Avoiding the obvious

Dr. Marthers fails to address three areas that are the primary reasons taxpayers and parents are becoming increasing restless and even hostile. He and the rest of the education establishment can continue to make excuses until revolutionary reform comes to higher education or they can stop ignoring the real reasons that costs are out of hand,

First, institutions of higher education spend hugh amounts on junk education while spending as little as possible on education that actually helps students earn a living. Every dollar investing in ethnic, gender or tribal studies is wasted. A degree in Black Studies, Women’s Studies or such is worthless outside academia. But it makes professional educators feel good about themselves. Inflated trade school majors like journalism or communications are probably best reserved for student athletes who can’t handle academics. Eliminate the junk and costs go down.

Academic tenure is increasingly seen as job insurance for elitist snobs who continue to demand that the rest of us support their opulent lifestyles. Let the professors compete for their jobs like anyone else.

Finally, as the mess at Duke shows, academics couldn’t care less about students or parents. Unless perhaps those students could be used to promote the professors’ political views. The gang of 88, fully supported by the university administration, acted like a lynch mob. At some point our patience, as well as our funds, will be exhausted.

In the end, universities and colleges have demanded more and more money while at the same time resisting any attempt to hold them accountable. What are they going to do when we stop subsidizing failure?

Ken Hahn, at 3:55 pm EST on January 26, 2008

A ready-made excuse for jacking-up tuition.

Dude, if you’re looking for a ready-made “academic” excuse to hike tuition at rates higher than inflatioon, visit the Economic Dept once and a while and look-up Baumol’s Cost Disease. It has the added advantage of making you sound intelligent too!

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Baumol’s cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect)... involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are always closely tied to labor productivity changes.

The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is caused by the necessity to compete for employees with jobs that did experience gains and hence can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts.

The original study was conducted for the performing arts sector. Baumol and Bowen pointed out that the same number of musicians are needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today as were needed in the 1800s; that is, the productivity of Classical music performance has not increased. On the other hand, wages of musicians (as well as in all other professions) have increased greatly since 19th century.

In a range of businesses, such as the car manufacturing sector and the retail sector, workers are continually getting more productive due to technological innovations to their tools and equipment. In contrast, in some labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing, education, or the performing arts there is little or no growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage, or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay, in 2006 as it did in 1966.

Baumol’s cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more depended on taxation level than growth in the GDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol’s_cost_disease

Ed Holston, at 3:55 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Another commenter said"One conclusion is clear: This is all a consequence of the fabled “market” at work!! I don’t notice anyone in Congress attacking Tiffany’s because its prices are higher than Wallmart’s.”

Actually, college education is an *odd* market, one seriously distorted by the very govt programs supposedly helping by subsidizing student loans.

Higher Ed knows it can keep charging more and the students just borrow more.

It’s funny how the same liberal advocates who campaign for ever more loan programs for students would be the first ones to point out the corrupting effects of similar tactics when it comes to military procurement for the DoD in the form of “cost-plus” contracts, which removed any incentive for suppliers to hold down costs.

newscaper, Instructor, at 4:10 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Re: College vs. no college

My sister went to a two year nursing program and is a scrub nurse and does hearts and eyes. She schedules nurses for their shifts. I went to a four year lib arts school for political science and then after a year break took 3 years to get a Master’s degree in Government. I have worked nine years less than my sister and she is doing much better than I financially. Unless you know exactly why you are going to an expensive school, go to a community college then finish at a state school and put off advanced degrees until either your employer can help pay or until you know your true passion. Higher education is what the person makes of it, not, what higher education makes the person!If you don’t count my first two jobs out of school (which were not in my field and paid so poorly that I had to work PT jobs to pay off loans)

scott in Falls Church, VA, at 4:10 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Missing some key factors

As a former business executive and technologist of nearly 30 years’ experience who has served as adjunct faculty, and as the parent of a college educated child, I think this analysis misses several powerful factors which have contributed to current perceptions of the value of higher education today. These include:

1) Increasing awareness on the part of the public of politicized classrooms and what can only be described in some cases as punitive faculty response to student opinions that challenge or conflict with the professor’s own opinions. Whatever happened to critical inquiry as a keystone of scholarly development?

2. Increasing awareness by the public of political correctness gone mad on the part of some administrators. What ever happened to common sense?

3. Increasing concern that scholarship here and elsewhere has been hijacked in too many cases to tendentiously support political or other causes, as with (for instance) the questionable Lancet article re: deaths in Iraq which failed to acknowledge that it was funded in large part by George Soros, or the perception that any scientist who attempts to describe the limits of current climate models risks being shouted down — not on the merits of the analysis but to sustain a pre-determined course of action.

4. Massive endowments on the part of some elite universities which benefit, indirectly, from tax exemptions. Couple this with questions regarding failure by some wealthy universities to properly declare income from sources such as room rentals.

Put these together and it is not surprising that many have come to the conclusion that the faculty and administrators of our colleges and universities are on average far less interested in cultivating thoughtful, educated citizens than they are in flaunting tenured privilege for which they cannot be held accountable.

One might sum all of these factors together with the single judgement: arrogance. Overweening arrogance.

The ancient Greeks called it hybris and warned of its effects.

It’s not a judgement I make happily.

(Note: the author of this comment did her undergraduate work at St. John’s College, arguably among the elite small liberal arts schools for whose handcrafted approach to education she is grateful. She holds an MBA in finance and operations and is currently completing a PhD in one of the sciences at a large public university.)

Robin Burk, at 4:15 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Don’t forget the cost of books! It is a racket where the universities and the publishers make sure to always use the “latest edition” which is nothing more than the old edition with the text reordered so it is difficult to use an old edition. Now seriously, does the calculus and economics book need a new edition every year? Did Newton miss something? I won’t even start with the Profs requiring their own book for the class. Can you say conflict of interest? Or what about Teachers Assistants being paid almost nothing to teach the prof’s class! The university system is one of the most corrupt, lazy and unaccountable systems I have ever dealt with. I can’t wait until it gets replaced with internet classes. Then at least the Indian and Chinese TA can give the class without ever leaving his country.

beentheredonethat, at 5:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Been there

I worked in a state university as support staff for almost 5 years. It was like being in an island of socialism in a vast capitalist sea. I used to be somewhat more socialist in my leanings. But in 5 years:

1. I realized how much waste there was. They were constantly throwing out perfectly good office equipment, computers, etc. and getting new...for reasons I didn’t really understand. 2. How merit was determined by years there, not ability — and I got tired of doing the work of Ph.D.’s and getting the credit. 3. How there were too many people there! It isn’t a lie about admin being bloated! So many people were holding down second jobs in the office, granted, they did it because with out a PHD there was no hope for advancement or money, but it took forever to get things done, because people were never around...or working on consulting projects at their desks...so the university would hire more people to do very little.4. As someone with technical skills I realized by staying there every year I was killing my chances of getting a job on the outside. Corporations view working for academia as not really working...and they’re often right.

Now I work with capitalists. They give me more respect. More money. And I work from home....all they care about is results. I’m fine with that!

CC in Chicago, at 5:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Sitting ducks

You and your industry have a PR problem when:

- Your costs go up faster than inflation for more than three generations;

- More than 80% of the political campaign contributions by your professionals — mostly faculty in this case — are given to one party.

- A faculty member at Duke complains about lack of political diversity — she means the school doesn’t have enough Marxists and odd-ball left wing nuts — and no one seems surprised, and she’s not hooted out of town.

- The admissions process has two brutal steps — first, the schools flood the mailboxes of talented kids, who invest time and money to pick their school, then the top schools reject most of them, and sometimes 93%, of them.

- Your endowments place you among the richest institutions on earth, and your wealth-building successes are well known (Yale gets a 28% return on its investments, Duke gets $250 million a year from the Duke Endowment). No one knows why you have all this money, and you don’t follow, even voluntarily, the principle that is law for other non-profits: that you disburse 5% of your assets annually.

- You publicly acknowledge that you have a price structure that wildly discriminatory.

- Kids who don’t know better and probably have been misled by the schools pile on loans that they can’t possibly pay. Then they complain to their parents, who have been reading about the big endowments.

- Your trustees and boards have governance practices that, if the insider-protection plans were allowed by law for a corporation, would be the source of endless and very noisy outrage.

- A lot of you can’t keep your unions in check, and they and your faculty attack you from the left, which doesn’t help now that you’ve alienated everyone on the right.

For a bunch of supposedly smart people, you guys sure are dumb. Good luck

from california, at 5:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Why does Harvard charge anyone undergraduate tuition? The endowment is $34.9 billion. One percent of that, divided among the undergraduate enrollment, is $52,000 per undergraduate.

Anyone want to give an actually persuasive story of why Harvard couldn’t educate undergraduates on a per-undergraduate budget of $52,000 a year before federal grant money? An expense of just one percent of the current endowment per year? It is ridiculous to claim Harvard charges tuition because it is necessary. Charging any undergraduate any tuition, no matter how well-off the student’s family, only makes sense if the administrators of Harvard want money to engage in wasteful empire-building and status games.

Now, how far down the “biggest endowments” list can we generalize that? I don’t know. But I’ve found one bad apple at the top of the bunch; you’re going to need a really, really persuasive story to convince me the rot doesn’t go any further down.

Lunatic, at 5:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

To Ken Hahn

“First, institutions of higher education spend hugh amounts on junk education while spending as little as possible on education that actually helps students earn a living.”

Hear Hear! Just to reiterate: Every single dollar spent on a program that is nothing more than intellectual masturbation about a specific race or gender, and produces nothing more than inscrutable slosh of shoddy scholarship is a dollar wasted.

However, I must disagree here: “Academic tenure is increasingly seen as job insurance for elitist snobs who continue to demand that the rest of us support their opulent lifestyles. Let the professors compete for their jobs like anyone else.”

“Opulent Lifestyles"? In my discipline, I have never known any tenured professor to have anything approaching an ‘opulent’ lifestyle. We’re not Hollywood actors or overpaid CEOs. There is little that is opulent about academia.

“Finally, as the mess at Duke shows, academics couldn’t care less about students or parents.”

I do not think that the Duke debacle is representative of the mindset of every university. I wouldn’t compare the academics at a huge state school or Ivy league with the ones you would find at a smaller private school. At the smaller schools, we actually care, because we don’t operate on much more than a razor thin margin — we don’t have the endowments that rival the GDP of a small nation.

Assistant Professor, at 5:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

You Are What You Eat

Ken Hahn nails it when he writes: ...Institutions of higher education spend huge amounts on junk education while spending as little as possible on education that actually helps students earn a living.

As a businessman who hasn’t stepped foot in academia since I graduated a generation ago I’ve seen how ill-prepared students are when they first make it into the workforce. However I don’t blame liberal arts per se; in fact I believe that the liberal arts can be some of the best prep courses for the real world that an institution can offer.

In my field of business intelligence, looking back at my own experience the class that best prepared me for my field was a freshman year philosophy course on logic. Other courses that prepared me well were mandatory writing classes and even the odd creative writing course.

For the most part these were basic courses meant to prepare students for academic success. However their impact continues to be felt today decades after they were taken.

I believe that the root of the problem is not missing narratives as Marthers asserts but the isolation of academia from overall society. Unfortunately many of those smaller liberal arts colleges mentioned are actually some of the worst offenders. I recall visiting some of these smaller schools back in the 1980s and was struck by the lack of connection they had with the communities they were embedded in. I often found that the students and the locals rarely mixed, and when they did there was often trouble. Isolation breeds resentment on one hand, and a kind of intellectual inbreeding on the other.

Academia functions best when it is open and serves society. When the walls of the Ivory Tower tumbles down and it is no longer separated, both it and society will be healthier.

Scott Kirwin, at 6:20 pm EST on January 26, 2008

In Need of Persuasive Facts

It’s telling that Dean Mathers poses skyrocketing college costs as a problem of narrative. If only a “persuasive story” could be found then Americans would be satisified with expenses that have been rising faster than inflation for twenty-five years now and leave families and students with crippling debt larger, sometimes far larger, than a substantial house down payment.

Dean Mathers waves his hands about “hand-crafted education” but provides no evidence that this is more true now than it was for previous generations. Nor does he provide evidence that college graduates today are any better educated today than they were earllier. Indeed, judging by the trendy PC nonsense and political monoculture of academia many of us suspect students are less well educated today.

huxley, at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Dr Marther’s article exemplifies, I believe, the mindset of academia. It is a work of breathtaking arrogance and folly.

“College and university leaders, most of whom were faculty members at some point, have the professor’s reflex against simplified explanations. Professorial skepticism toward neat, tidy, simple (but often inaccurate) answers is understandable and admirable. But politicians and reporters like to hear coherent and compelling narratives.”

Dr. Marther, because he cannot satisfactorily provide a clear explanation, first falls back on the fallacy of authority Perhaps things have changed since I was an undergraduate, but Occam still wields an effective razor. There is nothing admirable about asserting that things are too complicated for the common folk to understand.

Dr. Marther then gives a laundry list of “dominant stories….arms race to out-compete each other on rankings, wealth, prestige, student diversity, scholarships and financial aid, faculty compensation, teaching loads, and non-academic facilities. College professors are depicted as disinterested in students and eager to have decreased teaching responsibilities. College administrators are pilloried as overpaid, unnecessary bureaucrats…” The unfortunate part of this narrative, though, is that much of this is true. For the most part, undergraduates are not taught by the high-ranking professoriate; this duty falls to graduate students, teaching assistants, and untenured faculty. As for the size of bureaucracy, there is ample evidence for unfettered growth in the number and compensation for ever increasing layers of administration: this is Parkinson’s law writ large.

At no point do we actually hear why this narrative is wrong.

Dr. Marther then expounds on the virtues of the small liberal arts college. Not to be dismissive, but the endowment for Reed College in 2006 was $385 million. Tuition and costs approach $50,000. I yield to no one in my admiration for Reed, but with a student to faculty ratio of 10:1, that implies that each faculty member is worth $500,000. Exactly what is a student getting for this? When we strip away the high-flying rhetoric, there’s not much there. I’m sure that, if there were an incentive to do so, that higher education, like any other endeavor, could find a way to bring costs down.

Many of Dr. Marther’s other assertions are risible. For example, “colleges can argue that they provide their students a unique lifetime affiliation that accrues benefit long after the last tuition check gets paid. How many firms can say that about their product?” Many, actually. Auto companies provide warranties. Jewelry stores often provide lifetime service on their products. And does this “lifetime affiliation” refer to the almost constant mailings for donations which I, for example, receive from my various alma maters? Some affiliation!

orthodoc, UW, at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Speaking as a recent Reed graduate, it would’ve been nice if Reed had put a bit more of that very high tuition to work at helping grads find jobs. I’ve found that schools that charge a lot less often do a lot more in that regard. Actually bringing more employers outside the NGO/non-profit sector to campus to recruit would be a good place to start.

The beautiful, life-changing education is great and all, but there’s sometimes a bit of an inability to see beyond pure academics.

Kenneth, at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

The Cost of Higher Education

Reed College certainly has an excellent reputation and may well be able to justify what it costs to educate its students. However, perhaps the public becomes skeptical of what it hears from university deans and presidents when it reads in the New York Times that NYU has purchased a $5 million apartment in order to recruit a faculty member for its law school, hiring her away from rival Columbia. Regardless of the source of the funding (in this case from a foundation), that’s the sort of high profile news that is bound to anger any parent who has to pay out $50 K each year to send a kid to college.

Simon, Professor (retired), at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Why is tuititon high?

As a professor at a private Midwestern University (I teach medicine) and as a conservative, I’m a bit amused to read comments as to why tuition is so high at our universities.

I thought it was obvious.

We charge high tuition because ... we can get it.

It’s a market solution to a market problem.

My own institution has about a 11 to 1 ratio of applicants to seats for the undergraduate college, and a 6 to 1 ratio for medical school. Our graduate schools, divinity schools and law schools are world-renown and thereby swamped with superb young applicants.

Of course we have a high tuition. We can get away with it.

Rather than concocting schemes, new laws, or societal pressures to force the Ivies, the Stanfords, the Chicagos, etc to lower tuition, the market solution is simple.

Create more and better universities. Current universities need to upgrade themselves in the market. Some already have done this: there are superb small liberal arts colleges around the country, and there are some world-class public universities (e.g., Michigan). More of this is needed.

And the very rich (hello-o-o-o Mr. Soros!) need to endow new universities, not just existing ones. John Rockefeller endowed two new universities with his money. Today’s rich could do the same.

The elite universities and colleges need more competition. That will bring down tuition costs (perhaps), and will force current schools to refocus on courses, majors and policies that add value.

Steve White, Professor, at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

This is a story long in coming. There has been a consistent (purposeful?) increasing separation between “Town & Gown” aided and abetted by PoMo and the boomers from the 60ies.

We are now in the a situation not seen since the end of the 18th century, where the universities were looked upon with ridicule — as gloriously depicted by among others Voltaire & Holberg. A little revolution may not be a bad thing once in a while to rectify the situation.

When it becomes necessary even in medicine to educate new candidates in the basics they should have learned in college, then there is less time for what should be the prime objective in a postgraduate world.

- and don’t get me started on the contents of ‘education’ in the liberal arts as I have seen them over the years. The nicest word I have is indoctrination. These young minds should have been given the tools and the background to use them. Instead they often sound like agitprop drones.

- If higher education is to fulfill its promise it has to return to the basics, i.e. teach history, literature etc. with a clear understanding of where it came from, why it uses what concepts etc.

- Higher education will need to jettison the fluff inherent in ‘area studies’ most of which doesn’t tolerate light being thrown upon it.

- Until such time the ‘academe’ will increasingly be looked upon as a hindrance rather than a facilitator for knowledge and for society in the main.

- It has not gotten better in the more than 30 years I have been following and participating in education.

Hejde, UB Medical school, at 8:50 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Tuition is not earmarked

An often overlooked fact is that tuition money is not earmarked. Unlike many if not most donations to the endowment, or the overhead charged to research grants, it can be spent on *anything*, and is therefore disproportionately valuable.

Harold, Priced out of my college degree...., at 10:15 pm EST on January 26, 2008

Why is it that Hillsdale College’s tuition has barely increased in the last 10 years, and certainly not beyond the rate of inflation? Hillsdale hasn’t had to hire a squadron of administrators because they aren’t required to follow idiotic federal government rules. There’s a correlation here, folks...

college prof, at 6:15 am EST on January 27, 2008

For a long time now, I’ve been semi-seriously advocating a federal tax on the employers of college graduates; $1000/year for each BA hired, $2000/year for each MA and so forth.

If a college degree really adds to an employee’s value these are nominal fees. But what I suspect would really happen is that many employers would suddenly discover that high-school grads were fine with a little training and the number of college applicants would drop sharply. Not only would many young people start life without the crushing academic debt they now carry, but market forces would reduce tuition so that even those who did go on to college would graduate with a smaller debt.

Well, it won’t happen. But it’s interesting to speculate about.

PersonFromPorlock, at 11:55 am EST on January 27, 2008

So wrong

Ed you stated — “Baumol’s cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more depended on taxation level than growth in the GDP.”

Labor is not the sole component of productivity. In public hospitals much of what was done by hand is now computerized. A doctor no longer puts pen to a chart but issues ’scripts off a pda and is auto dispensed in the pharmacy. Same in hiher education. More and more course material is online as well as the instructor. No longer do I create a course zero sum. I utilize materials from other instructors and universities (with permission) to create the CV. What took 2 weeks can be accomplished in a day.

The core problems of HE is dabbling in issues not part of the institutions reason to exist:

- Speech codes. This adds no value to the institution. Let alone the fact that every time it is challenged they are removed.

- Speakers. A valuable asset? Yes. Problem is why is the university paying $10k for someone like Edwards to speak? 40 years ago speakers considered it a privilege to speak at significant institutions for free.

- Chairs. Increasingly such positions are used as a sop at considerable expense. More onerous is their use for political ends. Pay someone $40k to teach 2 courses? Unbelievable.

What triggers all this? Yes, profit motive. Considering universities are like most nonprofits generally compensations are delivered in ways other than salary. Bigger offices, titles, chairs, directed grants, etc. Might be novel if a university offered pay per course taught.

John McGinnis, at 2:10 pm EST on January 27, 2008

cost of higher ed

Duhhhhh. At public universities (I can’t comment on private universities), the number one reason for the rapid rise in tuition is that state governments have been slashing the amount of money they invest in higher education. Thirty years ago or so, state governments covered approximately 75 per cent of the costs state universities had. That has dropped below 40 per cent and it continues to decline. And politicians complain about and make political hay from the fact that tuitions are going up faster than inflation? Politicians are the number one cause!

Lamont Cranston, at 9:40 am EST on January 29, 2008

Upper Middle Class?

I realize that this author probably lives in or around Portland, Oregon. I’m not sure what the cost of living is there...but where I live, in the suburban Washington, D.C. area, $120,000.00 is solid middle class and will afford you a “no frills” lifestyle. Up to $180,000.00 doesn’t give you much more around here. So colleges do need to consider this income range for financial aid/scholarships, especially if the family has more than a couple of kids! Harvard and Yale are absolutely right in considering that an income range that might need help, especially for people living in expensive metropolitan regions. Many families looking at those schools make well over $300,000.00 a year, so in comparison, the $120,000 — $180,000 families would be hard pressed to afford it.

Mary Y, at 4:25 am EST on March 6, 2008

The overarching theme in the comments is that we’re spending more and receiving less. While there are, and should be, differences between academia and the world of commerce and industry, this is clearly a huge probelem for the students, the payors, and the country. Yet, government regulation is the last thing we need. So, what’s the solution? Griping on blogs isn’t. Has anyone ever tried to organize parents into some sort of effective bargaining force?

Brad Davenport, at 2:10 pm EST on March 7, 2008

College Costs

While I appreciate Mr. Mathers argument that a hand crafted educational experience would be more valuable than a mass produced, cookie cutter approach to higher education, where the argument breaks down is the lengths ordinary families must go just to avail themselves of this educational quality. What kind of educational system requires qualified students and their families to sacrifice much of their life savings and or take out huge loans just so that young person’s potential can be realized? A potential that when properly shaped not only benefits the individual student, but society as a whole. Our country’s higher educational system like its healthcare system has become distorted. We must strive to become like other advnced nations which not only provide for the health care of their population, but also provide for higher education to all who qualify.

Steve Newman, at 10:45 am EDT on May 17, 2008

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