I’ve long been concerned about the state of state colleges. In article that I wrote for the Atlantic last year, I talked about the growing reliance on adjuncts to teach undergraduate classes, their exploitation (do you really want your daughter’s professor to get paid less than a McDonald’s worker?), and the pressure on tenured faculty to publish at the expense of classroom teaching.
This morning, the Chronicle revisits this issue. There is less money for needy kids at state colleges, as colleges compete for slots on the ranking lists. Scholarships are going to athletics and high academic achievers. With the decline in state funding, they recruit out-of-state students who will pay higher tuition.
Apt. 11d 
This worries me too, and my college has gone this route to some extent, with the hope that bringing in the smartest students will have a kind of trickle-down effect; eventually we will become “known” as a better school – as does happen to some state schools – and this will allow us to operate at capacity. We all want to serve the students like the one in the article, but we have to exist to do it, and not go into more debt..
There’s been a persistent decline in enrollment, another 5% down this year, and state support for us has dropped from about 60 percent 10 years ago to 40% this year (which is the cause of the raise in tuition and of the “gap” between our cost and what the neediest students can pay – and believe me, everyone here is well aware that this exists). There’s no federal money to make up for this, and we have done all the investing in niche programs and popular majors, done just enough to make the campus attractive without (usually) being wasteful. I’ve been trying to figure out a solution to this, and though I don’t like the shift in funding to the top students, I recognize that our administrators are trying everything to keep the place afloat. There are no good solutions, except for taxpayers to recommit to providing higher education for everyone. .
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“There are no good solutions, except for taxpayers to recommit to providing higher education for everyone.”
Wait–was there ever a day when taxpayers anywhere on the planet committed to providing a four-year degree to literally all comers?
Even in the old Soviet Union, there was a limited number of slots per area of study (with a lot of government nudging toward desired vocational specialties) and ferocious competition. I believe there are a number of European countries that are similar.
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I don’t know about “everybody,” but it’s hard to argue that the concept of a public university education is being destroyed right now.
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I don’t mean “everyone” literally; I meant to imply everyone who’s qualified, can benefit from it, and is willing to work at it. There was much greater commitment to this even 10 years ago.
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Because performance metrics have become all the rage and some outcomes are awfully hard to measure. So first, you start doing calculations of how much each program brings in and then how much you can spend on it. Some programs come out well, and so those are invested in, in the hopes of making them even ore profitable. And you say all the while that you understand that your mission is to serve, and these tweaks are going to allow you to support those with true need better. But, ultimately, you find that the weak are just not pulling their weight in the system and abandon them.
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“Scholarships are going to athletics and high academic achievers.”
So the demand for athletes and achievers drives up the value of the “merit” scholarships for these students. There are only so many athletes and achievers to go around.
What if colleges were forced to offer scholarships on the basis of need only? No merit scholarships, no sports scholarships?
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“What if colleges were forced to offer scholarships on the basis of need only? No merit scholarships, no sports scholarships?”
Well the full need schools do this, just not the state publics. And the state publics don’t do it because they think that attracting those high performers & athletes is essential to the overall well-being of their university. As AF says, they have to pay the bills. The logic is sound. It just starts the schools on the slippery slope where their mission starts to become attracting the merit scholars and athletes, not educating the students of their state. Didn’t we once talk about the slippery slope of taking the investment banking job in order to earn money for other endeavors (on this blog, with a story where Laura knew someone who had made it work)?
I think the current data shows that making state publics available to the poor depends on keeping prices at a reasonable cost for everyone they admit, rather than trying to play selective cost games where the price one pays depends on one’s value to the university (not surprisingly, since the poor aren’t very valuable to the university, since they have no money, potentially more needs).
I looked at the US news and world report rankings (Laura made me look!) and I’m struck by the difference in cost for in state publics. There’s enough variability there to see how the strategies plays out for different goals.
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In those states with a fairly regressive tax structure (mine! for example) it seems to me that state colleges are kind of a transfer from the poor to the middle class. People who pay sales taxes and 5% income taxes on the top $15000 of their $30000 family income, and whose kids don’t go to college, are a fair amount of the support for the nice William’n’Mary/ Christopher Newport/ Virginia Tech which is available to my kids. Climbing walls and all.
In Lake Wobegone, all the children are above average. Here in the United States, half of the children are below average. Having actually gone to a Directional State myself, as part of a checkered college career, I saw a lot of kids who I think had been sold a bill of goods: this is going to make you rich! And it wasn’t gonna, and wouldn’t now. To succeed in college, someone should be of at least average intellect, and a bit better than that is a huge help.
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And yet there are a lot more Americans than ever before winding up with four-year degrees. Weird.
I think it’s more than a coincidence that the golden age of US state higher education occurred when relatively few Americans were taking advantage of it, i.e. maybe it was a golden because far fewer than today were in the system, and it was a more rarefied group.
By the way, while I’m thinking of it, I believe in the old Soviet Union that undergraduates would get monthly stipends (living allowances). That would be the rough equivalent of our Pell Grants, with (if I’m remembering correctly), the interesting addition that the stipend would be bigger or smaller depending on whether the Soviet government was trying to encourage more students into certain specialties.
Frankly, I think it’s nuts to think that public universities in the US should be cheap to all comers, regardless of high school grades or test scores, regardless of major chosen. It’s predictable that people with certain academic profiles are going to go splat when they hit college coursework–let’s encourage them to do community college until they demonstrate that they can handle the big time. I also don’t believe that 4-year public colleges should have remedial courses (any remedial work should happen at the community college level). I think there should be a sliding price scale, according to a publicly available formula using grades, SAT/ACT scores, AP scores, previously taken college coursework, etc, and I would encourage the creation of well-publicized state scholarships for particular areas of study (without going full Soviet–the state can’t realistically predict what courses of study to steer everybody into). For instance, I would suggest each state sponsor a certain number of well-publicized, highly competitive full-ride scholarships for future math or science teachers with the expectation of five years of teaching when they come out. I realize that there is already loan forgiveness for underserved areas, but my idea would be to encourage people into teaching who would normally never consider it. Free college would do that for a lot of people these days.
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