It Gets Worse

It gets worse.

You've been betrayed by the banks, the investment firms, the government. You skimp and borrow and try to send your kids to the best college they can get into; or you work the night shift at some bar and put yourself through college; or you've got a bachelor's but no job and so you decide to go graduate school, undergo another hundred thousand dollars of more debt, in hopes that another degree will increase your chances of success in the future.

You figure if you can't depend on Wall Street or on Uncle Bernie, you can put your faith in this country's temples of higher education, trust that institutions with vaunted names and golden pedigrees will deliver that which they've promised--the pursuit of excellence, wisdom, and insight, the enrichment of society through the cultivation of the human spirit, first rate instruction and research. Every other foundation of society (public schools among them) may be going to hell; you know if you're good enough, try hard enough, and pay enough, you'll get your money's worth at one or another of this country's universities.

Well, times are tough. Private universities are concerned about the prospects of fundraising and the size of their endowments. They don't want to part with their highly paid directors who know how to develop relationships with highly generous alumni. They don't want to scale down their astronomical building and expansion plans. They certainly don't want to lower tuition rates or housing or other fees. So they sacrifice the interests of the most innocent and least protected segment of the academic community--the students--and trust that no one will know the difference.

It is a moral outrage that, for some time now, many colleges and universities around the United States have devoted their energies to enlarging the size of their endowments at the expense of the education and well being of their students. It is an even greater outrage that some of those universities are coping with the current economic crisis by shortchanging their students on the level and quality of instruction they were promised, by chipping away at student aid and scholarship funds, eliminating work study and assistant lectureships, creating new, "continuing education" degrees the main purpose of which is to feed the endowment by charging regular tuition but dispensing with less--much less--than what students in other faculties receive.

How do they do this while maintaining their stellar reputations and the constant stream of applicants knocking on the gates? They hire a few high profile professors, a Nobel Prize winner or two. They admit some PhD students that they will coddle and nurture for the next thousand years, letting them linger at the school tuition-free, giving them assistant lectureships that provide teaching experience should they ever decide to leave the school and teach somewhere else. They put all that on their website.

Then they go back to the real world and tell their students there will be no more TA-ships or AL-ships or any other way for them to subsidize their education. They give the "cash cow" department as small a budget as possible, eliminating the possibility that the students might benefit from any of those grand and alluring "extras" the university website flaunts so brazenly. They fire their most experienced, and sometimes their best, faculty (those who don't have tenure or some kind of contract), fill those spots with new hires for a fraction of the older ones' salaries. They hire everyone part-time, so they won't be eligible for benefits. They actually instruct those instructors not to work too hard, or too many hours--to avoid any possible claim to benefits.

Ask the deans and directors of these colleges (I have) if they feel the slightest smidgen of guilt over using the school's good reputations to shortchange students who will have to pay for their degree with years of hard work and sacrifice, and they will look at you like you're an imbecile. Ask them if it's fair for the college to charge everyone equal tuition but reserve its resources only for a select few of the students, and they will pretend they haven't heard the question.

Meanwhile, students who have spent time and money on the promised degree feel they have invested too much to walk away or start over somewhere else.

Comments

[wlantry]

So, Gina, let me get this straight. While the university system (from which you've benefited for at least the last decade) crashes and burns around you, along with the rest of the economic world, you launch into an anti-university screed? What are you thinking? Do you think *your* university will survive unscathed, and that you're safe? There are a lot of good people suffering already, and more who will soon fall into the vortex. Are you one of those who will self-righteously dance while the universities burn, and then write a book about how they deserved it? Is this why you've written those novels and taught all those students, just to arrive at this point?

[DRaymond]

It would be a really great article if it actually had a single specific in it.

Endowments are not evil. So why is wanting to have a larger one automatically evil.

Is there really any difference in an economics class for example at an ivy league school versus a state college or even a good community college? Is the course content any different? The textbook? No, prestige is what they are selling. Music doesn't sound better on an iPod rather than a music player half the price and food is niether more tasty nor more nutritious.

So what those attending top universities are buying is prestige. What makes prestige? Fancy new buildings, Nobel Prize winners on the roster, yadda yadda yadda. Its like grumbling over why Apple spends tons of money on advertizing and big MacWorld dog-and-pony shows when they could make the iPod twenty dollars cheaper.

[TomInJax]

Maybe it's just my gay genes, but the below line is just so... suggestive:

I"t is a moral outrage that, for some time now, many colleges and universities around the United States have devoted their energies to enlarging the size of their endowments­..."

Who doesn't want a larger endowment.

[walk0nwalls]

Yeah, the endowments are why, even though my school alternates between 1st and 2nd in the nation for English, 70% of the campus is still dedicated to Chemical Engineering R & D

[KillTheMessenger]

At a typical German university the German Language department is so poor that they will give you an angry call for wasting their printer paper if you accidentally sent your output to their printer. I kid you not. Happened to me twice. The woman on the phone was screaming at me and I promised to get them a couple thousand pages for free if it ever happened again. At the same time we (in the CS department) were buying a million bucks worth of hardware. And that is how it should be. English (German) majors have nothing to add to this world. We need more scientists and engineers.

[LitDr2B]

English majors have nothing to add?!? Who is going to teach students how to write? Just because you're in the sciences or engineering doesn't mean you will not have to write. In fact, most positions require some writing (lab reports, inter-office communication, technical manuals, etc.)

And having -taught- your vaunted scientists and engineers, most -cannot- write to save their lives. University-level writing requires both critical reading and thinking skills, which all students across the board lack right out of high school. Students come into my class not being able to engage with a piece of sophisticated argument (whether humanities or science based) on anything but a very superficial level.

This problem, though, goes straight back to the broken public school system in the U.S.

[NoPCZone]

It's Morning In America...
Chickens do come home to roost. From 1972-today we have had exactly ONE Democrat in the White House- Jimmy Carter and he was a fairly conservative southern Democrat. Bill Clinton (DLC) was a moderate Republican in democratic clothing.
The simple fact is that America has embraced the Rethugnican idea set for a generation now and it has consequences. This is but one of them.

[quindy]

There is another thing they do: they hire a big name professor and the big name goes immediately on a two or three year sabbatical with full pay and benefits. They also buy expensive housing for these big names and hope nobody will find out. If parents would know where the tuition money goes they would be shocked. My children went to a well known university and they only had classes with adjuncts. Big names were missing in action.

[LitDr2B]

Don't knock adjuncts. They are usually professors who have a true love and desire to teach. Knock the system, that wants to basically use adjuncts as slave labor because they don't want to pay a decent wage or for benefits.

The big problem (as I think someone else has said) is the sheer over-production of PhD's, because schools want tuition dollars and the slave labor teaching force comprised of grad students.

I do feel your pain about the big names missing in action, though. Maybe there needs to be an entire re-vamping of the system: have a "teaching" faculty and a "research" faculty, and pay both a fair wage. In many cases, research sabbaticals are funded by external grants anyway. The system can be re-vamped. We're fighting against inertia, though, and the "S-c-r-e-w you, I got mine" mentality of (some--not all!) senior faculty.

[shamaniceconomist]

College is too expensive. We've got to come up with a more efficient way to study.

[KillTheMessenger]

In most developed countries you can get it for next to free. It's paid for by the government using tax dollars simply because having a highly educated workforce pays for itself. No need to charge the individual for something everybody profits from. In any case, students do pay for their education with extremely hard work while they are in school. Only people who haven't been there to get a degree will deny that.

[Stirner]

After 36 years of teaching, I retired from a major university. I was happy to leave. I never did enjoy participating in a con game. The University, as most, is bloated with superfluous administrators, most with their own office and secretary. No one ever questioned the proliferation of this leisure class, who neither teach nor learn -- but are very expensive to maintain. We have such ludicrous administrators as an "Assistant Vice-President for University Mission" or, my favorite, an "Assistant Sports Information Director" -- the administrative staff now numbers well over the number of faculty. Coaches and their subsidized "scholar athletes" abound -- in my university they were helped through the formal process of education by an "Athletic Academic Adviser" -- this "Adviser" (a rather jolly fellow) insures that his charges are taken care of by faculty who are (1) either intimidated by the Athletic Department (flunk a cretin who is a gridiron hero?) or (2) like to have free tickets to the games. Graduate Students, themselves untaught, are called upon to teach, but their names never appear in the list of faculty. A clear case of misrepresentation. I advise all parents, who are now preparing to be crushed under tuition costs, to take a look at the catalog of the school you are considering. Check out the ratio of these expensive academic time-servers to the actual teaching faculty, and just how many of the "renowned" faculty play more than a public relations role.

[shamanbart]

Good concept for an article -- how about naming some names so I know which ones to avoid during my daughter's college search?

[philopatris]

Why don't you send her to the University of Texas Austin, a celebrated bargain in higher education, and not the only one? I am retired 2 years from it, after teaching there 40 years and watching it get better every year. Look at its web page. ANY day there are 5+ stories fit to knock your socks off about the excellent research they do.
For that matter, how it hurts students to have endowments that can build them gorgeous world class gyms to work out in and spectacular high tech classrooms and computer labs is beyond me.
All my life I have watched people crab about universities and how only TA's educate their children and how we don't deserve tenure and how only the football team gets any money. And how we are all commies and Bill Ayreses at heart. And blah blah. Then they or their representatives from the Legislature come in breathing fire, find out that it's a LOT more complicated than that, fall asleep as we try to explain, and do nothing after all, because they'd have to eat crow in public if they did.

[Stirner]

"gorgeous world class gyms to work out in" -- wow! sure is a lot more fun than learning! And think of all the coaches and "Assistant Sports Information Directors" that would employ! Yup, you and our "Athletic Adviser" would get along quite well.

[KillTheMessenger]

The smart solution to all of that is free university education for all students paid for by tax dollars. Works everywhere in the world. And because it is the smartest solution it will never be adopted by the most stupid country in the world.

[LitDr2B]

It would never work here because the idea that -everyone- should go to college is so culturally entrenched. Isn't the European system organized around "tracking," where only students who show the ability to succeed in higher education are able to attend for free?

I teach at one of the UC's--a highly-ranked one--and I lament the sheer waste of resources that go to students who really do not have the aptitude or desire to be in college. We need to stop de-valuing skilled labor and the blue collar sphere, and wisely use university resources for those who want to be there, really want to learn, and either have the skills necessary to take advantage of what the university has to offer, or who honestly can -learn- those skills in their first year or so.

[KillTheMessenger]

"Isn't the European system organized around "tracking," ...?"

Not quite a tracking system. Germany has a three tier system for reasons of history, but if you end up in one of the lower tiers than "Gymnasium" these days your life is set up to suck. And most students who visit a Gymnasium end up in higher education one way or another. When I was in school we made the transition from masters degrees to doctorate degrees as the standard. Chemists needed a Ph.D. to find work long before that but in the early 1990s even physicists ended up having to have one. And it makes perfect sense. One can not learn any science in four years and be ready to do real work anymore.

"and I lament the sheer waste of resources ...."

That's almost impossible. The US has to import scientists just to keep up with the rest of the world. We need to at least double the number of gifted students in science and engineering or we will be toast in no time. If we can't find gifted students I suggest we start probing the water supply because something must be poisoning the minds of our kids.

Being a first year student is tough. But it is for sure tougher in Europe and Asia than it is at any UC school. I've seen UC freshman classes. They are good but rather limited in scope in comparison to what I had to learn.

[vyfareon]

You forgot to mention how the cost of tuition has grossly outpaced inflation in General and that these students often end up with six figure loans when they graduate.