My apologies for the length of this forward, but It struck me that some
here might be interested in this.
Carter Pate
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 05:00:28 -0600
From: Mike Salovesh <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ANTHRO-L] Tuition costs and University expenditure
Personal experience has given me some pretty good perspectives on questions
of tuition costs. I've had to struggle with such questions for years.
All through the 1990s, I was an elected member of the Faculty Senate at
Northern Illinois University. (For four of those years I was Vice
President of the Senate. That doesn't sound like much until you know the
structure: the Senate President holds office ex oficio; Vice President is
the highest position for which only faculty members are eligible to vote.)
NIU faculty members and our Faculty Senate, acting as such, had very little
power to affect the budgetary process. We did keep a very close eye on
budget policy, a somewhat different kettle of fish. It was our job to
raise significant questions and open public debate about the overall
direction of the university's budget and the policy principles governing
its allocations.
NIU is called a "state supported" university. When I joined the faculty in
1970, Illinois actually paid close to 70% of our actual instructional costs
out of the state's general budget. Sometime around the end of the 1980s,
the state's contribution declined to less than 50% of instructional costs,
and the downward trend has continued ever since. I believe that the state
now pays about one-third of NIU's instructional costs. NIU today is a
"state assisted" university; the bulk of the university's support does not
come from the state of Illinois.
Instructional costs have to be paid. The only way the university has been
able to continue to provide the education it offers has been to raise
tuition. The rate of increase in tuition has far outstripped the rate of
increase in costs because it had to. That was the only way to make up for
the declining level of support from the state.
There was another alternative that was used heavily from 1971 to the late
1980s. In nearly every year in that period, average raises for faculty and
other people working for the university hovered around 50% of each year's
increase in the Consumer Price Index. If the cost of living increased by
5% in a given year, the average salary increase would be a whisker on the
short side of 2.5%. There was one period of three years when there were
effectively no raises at all. Things have been marginally better recently,
but in no single year out of the last 30 was the rate of increase in
overall salaries equal to that year's increase in the Consumer Price Index.
That means of balancing the budget has pretty much been stretched to its
limits.
When it comes to the balance of support from tuition and support from other
sources, NIU's experience parallels what has been happening at universities
all across the U.S. and Canada. The same trend has affected Great
Britain. I don't know for sure what has been happening in other countries,
but I get the impression that we're in a period of worldwide withdrawal of
public support for the costs of higher education.
For my first year in college, I lived at home with my parents and they paid
my educational expenses. From then on, I lived away from my family and
paid both my living costs and the cost of my university education myself.
That was a realistic possibility because tuition at the University of
Chicago in 1946-47, my first year there, was only $360 per academic year.
It was only around $1000 per year three years later. You could still work
your way through college without accumulating much in the way of longterm
debts. (I doubt that many students stood a chance of borrowing their way to
a degree back then, anyhow: there were no student loan programs, as such.)
Today it just isn't possible to work your way through the University of
Chicago as I did in a long-ago past.
As public support for higher education dries up, the burden of the cost
falls more and more on the private resources of students and their
families. Many private U.S. universities will charge $30,000 or more in
tuition per academic year in the fall of 2002. There's no practical way
for the average student -- or for the family of an average student -- to
pay those kinds of costs out of current income. In the U.S., more than half
of those who complete bachelor's degrees have accumulated debts of more
than ten thousand dollars in loans that covered their educational costs.
Those who graduate from private universities usually have much, much higher
debt loads.
The increasing price of college to the student isn't driven by burgeoning
budgets for Offices of Minority Affairs or political correctness. Those
kinds of costs come out of pocket change. They're not driven by
stratospheric pay hikes for faculty and other university employees. (NIU
is not unique in having quite a few fulltime employees whose salaries are
below the poverty line. Those with pay below the poverty line include some
fulltime faculty members who aren't on tenure track appointments.) Even
the sky-high increases in technology costs and computers -- truly
necessary costs, in this day and age -- don't tell the full story of why
costs to the student have been going up so fast.
The cost of going to college keeps going up by leaps and bounds because
public policy regarding who should pay what part of those costs has
changed. Governments simply do not provide the proportionate share of
educational costs that they did in the past. That's notably true for state,
provincial, and national governments in the U.S. and Canada -- but for once
I'm not talking about North America. I see the same thing going on in
Russia, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Germany, or Argentina, and pretty much on
across the world.
Among other things, withdrawal of public support for higher education is a
stealth product of policies of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. It's the expectable result of economic policies promulgated
by a new religion whose Mecca is not far from where I live: the economics
department and the College of Business at the University of Chicago.
It's foolish to blame tuition increases on such ephemera as minority
studies programs when the same thing is happening in countries where
minority studies programs don't exist. "Neo-liberal" economic policies are
much closer to the real source of the problem. If you have to blame
anybody in particular, pick on Milton Friedman or the nest of economics
Nobelists at my old alma mater.
-- mike salovesh <[log in to unmask]> PEACE !!!
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