Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Putting The "High" In Higher Education

We don't need no education.

No, this is not a post about marijuana use on college campuses.

Ed at Ginandtacos has an interesting post about the pressures to raise tuition for college.  He notes the building spree that went on during the boom years and the proliferation of useless administrators that suck up six figure salaries while doing nothing of real educational import.

My own comment in his thread stressed the psychology of high tuition costs.  I'll expand upon it for my loyal readers.... reader.

A few years back before the '08 Crash, three of the finest schools in the New England boarding school world considered offering tuition free education.  Andover, Exeter and St. Paul's had amassed such large endowments that they could afford to operate their schools without charging tuition.

They elected not to, and not just because the Crash pummeled their endowments.

Education has increasingly become a commodity.  We talk a lot about sculpting and caring and encouraging young minds.  We talk about educating the "whole student".  But we are also offering a "product".  Small class sizes, committed faculty and gorgeous facilities.

If we were to be able to offer that same product for no tuition, there is a part of the human psyche that would no longer value that educational "product".  How can something be valuable if it is "free"?

We send a lot of our graduates to NESCAC schools (Middlebury, Colby, Wesleyan).  These are fine schools that in some way replicate what we offer: smaller classes, beautiful facilities, an intimate environment.  One of my favorite students declined to go to Middlebury, because - as she said - I just spent four years in a place like that.

But they are also expensive.  And part of me wonders if perhaps they are popular BECAUSE they are expensive.  Looking at the USN&W College rankings, you have to go down to U. Cal Berkeley at 22 before you find a state university, or in other words a college with tuition less than $30K a year.  The University of Virginia clocks in at 25.

Really?

UVA and Cal are "worse" schools than Washington University in St. Louis?  Than Rice?  Vanderbilt?  Notre Dame?  Emory?

Or are they simply "cheaper"?

Go to the smaller "Liberal Arts College" list - expunge the service academies as being unique outliers - and you have to get down to #47 Rhodes College before you can find a school at under $35K - and it's barely under that number.  If Rhodes charged more in tuition, would it become more prestigious?

I mean, Middlebury charges over $50K a year.  It must be a good school, right?

Harvard, Princeton and Yale cost less than $40K a year.  Most schools in that top-20 category of National Universities peg their tuitions off that, falling within the $36-$43K range (only Rice falls outside of it).

Now, it would seem to me that a college - like, say Harvard - plopped right down in the middle of Boston would have higher costs associated with operating than Middlebury, which lies approximately in the middle of nowhere.

But tuition is not about "operating costs".  And while I think Ed is right that colleges have overbuilt (haven't we all in the past two decades?) and they have layered on too much administration, I think a fundamental problem is that we - as a society - have decided that education MUST be expensive to be valuable.

Middlebury would rather have a $50K tuition and provide financial aid to most of it's students than charge $25K and offer no aid.  Why?  Because a $50K school is better than a $25K school.  And that puts pressure on schools with smaller endowments - who can't offer the level of financial aid that Middlebury can - to keep up or look like they are the WalMart of the college world.

The discussion about the cost of college will likely accelerate in the coming years whenever we finally get the economy back on track.  Unlike health care, I don't think this is a monumental problem.  It's 50% fiscal-50% psychological.

This likely makes it unsolvable, however.

I hope Thing One and Thing Two can get into the Naval Academy...

No comments: