During the recent recession, the U.S.’s public universities crossed an important boundary—an ominous boundary from the point of view of making higher education widely accessible.
More than half of our public research universities, including UMass, now pay more than half their expenses with student tuition rather than with other sources of revenue. That’s one reason for the rise in the cost of attending these universities, a rise that’s saddling graduates with a crippling debt burden (see “Killer Loans,” October 14, 2010).
It wasn’t always so. These institutions—most of which, like UMass, were established by the Land Grant Act that embodied a nineteenth-century vision of accessible higher education—used to cover most of their operating costs with public money.
At UMass, for example, according to state Sen. Stan Rosenberg of Amherst, in the 1960s and ’70s the state paid 85 to 90 percent of the cost of running UMass. By the mid-1980s the state’s share had fallen to two-thirds. “Now,” Rosenberg said, “according to the university, depending on whose figures you believe, 18 to 25 percent is coming from the state. The rest is paid from grants, contracts, interest and alumni donations, but predominantly [55 percent or more, according to a 2008 study] from the students. We’re in a very different situation than we were 40 years ago.”
According to the 2008 study by the Delta Cost Project, the results of which were announced last summer, the situation at UMass is middle-of-the-road for the Northeast. In Connecticut, students pay 42 percent of the cost of running the state university; in New York they pay only 26 percent, the second lowest in the country (Alaska, at 22 percent, is lowest). In Maine, they pay 56 percent, about the same as at UMass. But in New Hampshire they pay a whopping 81 percent, the most in the country; in Rhode Island, 77; and in Vermont, 73.
Now a low-income family has to pay 55 percent of its total income to keep a child in a four-year public university.
And the playing field is tilted by the state universities’ practice of giving more financial aid to young people from wealthy families. In 2006 The Education Trust, an organization that studies issues related to education and makes policy recommendations, published a report called “Engines of Inequality.” According to the report, in 2003, state flagship universities and “a group of other major research universities” paid out $257 million in aid to students whose family incomes were more than $100,000 a year, but only $171 million in aid to students whose families had less than $20,000 a year in income.
The researchers found that between 1995 and 2003, grants to students from families with incomes of less than $40,000 a year increased 120 percent, but aid to those from families with incomes of $80,000 or more increased by 533 percent.
The costs of public education have been shown to cause retention problems in college. A 2009 study by Public Agenda showed that students who dropped out of college cited finances, or the difficulty of working long hours while trying to study, as the major reason for leaving school
If qualified young people who aren’t rich are increasingly shut out of college or unable to finish, it goes without saying that the effects on their personal and career development will be damaging. But there are costs to the society, too.
Sophisticated businesses like high-tech operations need educated workers. Other sectors are crying for workers trained in math and science; for years the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been warning that the number of people qualified to manage the country’s nuclear power plants and laboratories is dangerously low. We educate our people not just to enable them to “fulfill” themselves, as we will learn to our cost if we don’t make the public universities affordable again.
