The U.S. public university system is facing a crisis and much of the discussion centers on student debt. However, student debt is just one symptom of the actual problem confronting universities.
I am the president of a private college, but all of my own education, like that of the great majority of Americans, was at state-supported institutions. Our university system was, in my day, the envy of the world. It is still that way now, but unless we do something to address how our public institutions are funded, our country's competitive edge will decline further.
How did we get here? The crisis actually developed over several decades. It began some 30 years ago when the federal government severely cut funding to states. States responded by drastically reducing their support of higher education, forcing public educational institutions to look elsewhere for funding. Raising tuition was a partial solution, one made easier by the availability of student loans. But shifting the cost burden onto the backs of young men and women simply postponed the crisis. It didn't cause it. It was caused by decreased levels of state funding.
The kind of good higher education that our country is known for is not cheap. It uses highly skilled labor and requires expensive equipment and facilities. When government stops subsidizing it, most of our citizens can't afford it. It's that simple.
Decreased funding is the central problem, and it is time we start talking realistically about how to solve it. Yes, tuition has risen to unsustainable levels. Yes, student debt is too high. Yes, universities need to become more efficient and keep a sharp eye on the bottom line. But higher education can tighten its belt to the bone, and the problem will still remain. And, state legislators are unlikely to find much more money for higher education. Further, although our citizens value higher education, it is doubtful they will vote for increased taxes to pay for it.
Our political leaders and their constituencies decided they didn't want the state to continue to pay the cost of a good higher education. We have a product we can be proud of, a product everyone wants, but a product no one has the ability or the will to pay for. And very few honestly admit this simple truth: you can't have the same product if you don't invest in it.
Either education has to genuinely change -- and become a very different product from the one that made us the most competitive nation in the world -- or we need to find some other way of funding it.
Unless the conversation turns to the real issue (rather than focusing on mutual finger-pointing), we will not solve the problem -- and our country and our citizens will be the poorer for it.
We need to stop blaming and start looking for solutions.
Here are a few simple ideas:
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Ultimately, in the mind of the 1% they can always import college grads from developing countries like Iran (yes Iran), India, and China or export jobs to the same foreign workers.The sad fact is we import more and more of our grad students and scientists,doctors and engineers. So good luck convincing Republicans that we need investment in public universities.
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My question is - what value has been added to the college education that justifies a 12 fold increase in cost? way beyond any measure of inflation.
In the mean time, the campus has been on a building boom, yet the enrollment numbers havent changes much - why were the old buildings adequate then, but not now?
TRANSLATION: ‘How did we get here? Simple: We became make-work institutions for bloated unionized administrators, exponentially increasing the number of non-core personnel for every professor teaching, while at the same time using are cartelized protections to charge whatever we wanted to fund our rapacious salaries and benefits. More importantly, when finally our gluttony became so immense that the taxpayers--mostly the poor short-order cooks, store clerks, and landscapers--as well as the uneducated that have to fund our grand lifestyles through sales and income taxes, we then had no alternative but to turn to parents and students in order to fund our greed. We did this by, again, using our cartelized protections to allow us to change what we wanted since we are not in a perfectly competitive market. Parents wiped out savings and cashed in 401K’s and students took on ruinous debt to fund our extortive tuitions that our unionized employees demanded at the expense of the citizens, taxpayers and parents and students on which we prey. But rather than own up to the fact that we are greedy…we would rather claim that ‘decreased funding’ and the need to again put the screws to the taxpayer is the REAL problem.
Typical.
Kai
The corps could care less about education, they are only looking for tax breaks and welfare like the banks.
Smaller groups are better and more efficient.
You simply have to know your priorities. In the US they seem to be mostly football, baseball, basketball and tax cutting.
Isnt that what healthcare, banks and gov. Are doing? Seems costs go up no mattet what, yet quality is descending down.
No way would I go into debt for anything. Show me the money.
Ideally higher education shouldn't charge tuition, so everyone has access and nobody feels like they're "buying" their degree. It already does mainly depend on public money, regardless of where you go or how much students are charged. Even so-called "private colleges" are mainly funded by the government, either directly or indirectly.
Also, most of the "new funding reality" being described amounts to selling off those publicly funded assets to private individuals and groups. Like the oligarchs looting Russian state industries after the fall of the soviet union, the decline in the US is marked by the rich getting richer buy buying public property at a pittance.