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Inflatable Movies Screens at University and College
They seek and devour every resource in sight, with few constraints and even less restraint. At least that’s how Ronald Ehrenberg describes it when explaining the big question on the minds of so many:
Why does college cost so much?
“Our sole goal is to find cookies and stuff our mouths,” says Ehrenberg, who directs the Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University. “Colleges and universities like to grab as many resources as they can. We want to make ourselves as good as we can. We want the best facilities, students, resident halls and labs, so there’s this tremendous drive to be better, and that costs money.” For a long time, he says, “there’s been no check on this drive to get better, because the lines of students wanting to get into institutions keep getting longer.”
Of course, the U.S. higher-education system has long been the envy of the world. A college degree has become a requirement to enter almost any profession, and can increase lifetime earnings by a million dollars or more.
So could it be that those who are outraged at the cost of tuition are somehow romanticizing the past? We’ve heard the stories: How kids could once walk to the corner store without Mom or Dad to keep them safe. How you could fill up the tank for $10. How you could work summers to pay for college.
The reality doesn’t always match. Violent-crime rates have plummeted over the past 15 years. The real price of gas has fluctuated over a century. But when it comes to tuition, the stories check out.
If tuition and fees had risen at the same pace as inflation over the past 30 years, today it would cost $9,900 annually to attend a private college, $2,300 to attend a public. Instead, the average tuition bill is $25,000 and $6,600 respectively, according to the College Board. Even adjusting for inflation, what you paid for a full year’s tuition in 1978 will barely buy you an academic quarter today.
Add food and a place to stay, and the cost of attending a prestigious private university can now run $50,000 a year — a cool $200,000 for that undergraduate degree. Multiply that by two, three or four children, and you can see why even the wealthiest are upset.
Yet only a sliver of all that extra tuition is being put into classroom teaching. According to an analysis by the nonprofit Delta Cost Project, much more has gone into areas like student services, academic support and research (which often pays for itself through outside grants). Universities these days spend just 35 to 44 percent of their budgets on teaching their students.
One way universities have kept instruction costs down is by employing fewer tenured professors and more low-paid adjunct and part-time faculty. Twenty years ago, two-thirds of university faculty and staff were employed full-time, while these days, it’s barely half. Among full-timers, wages vary according to rank. At the University of Washington Seattle, for instance, professors are paid an average $122,000, associate professors $87,000 and assistant professors $77,000.
Over time, two forces in particular have been responsible for much of the run-up in tuition — one at the public institutions, the other at the privates.
For public universities, the problem has been with state governments, which have systematically taken money away. Facing spiraling costs for prisons, health care and K-12 education, lawmakers have time and again taken their axes to university finances. In the early 1990s at the UW, students paid for a third of the cost of their education, while the state picked up the rest. These days, students are paying 58 percent of the freight.
Outside the public system, something else has been going on. Twenty years ago, private, liberal-arts colleges collected all their tuition and then gave back about 19 cents from every dollar in the form of scholarships and financial aid, helping out certain students. These days, the colleges give back about 33 cents of every dollar. That means more help for some, more cost for everyone else.
While some of the extra help has gone to poorer students, much has gone into the heated competition for academic achievers. These top students are lured with “merit-based” scholarships. If a college attracts better students, after all, it can lead to a better reputation, better professors, better rankings. And, in the end, more cookies.
Driving east to Walla Walla, Wash., you can measure the miles by the changing fragrance of the crops. First come fields of mint, then hops, then sweet onions, and finally, grapes.
This small Eastern Washington town, miles from anywhere, is home to picturesque Whitman College, the only selective liberal-arts college in the state that ranks anywhere near top East Coast colleges like Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore. Whitman accepts less than half its applicants and boasts a 10-to-1 student-teacher ratio. Freshmen typically enter with a grade-point average of 3.9.
The cost of attending Whitman? About $48,000 a year. That includes tuition and fees of $37,000, room and board of $9,000, books and supplies. About 37 cents of every tuition dollar comes back to students in financial aid and merit scholarships.
Taking a tour of the campus is Marie Anderson, 17, a high-school senior in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her mom, Nancy Anderson. The family has toured about a dozen similar campuses. Nancy says a private, liberal-arts college is the best fit for her daughter’s learning style.
While Marie has been looking at schools, Nancy has been polishing her resume. After years as a stay-at-home mom, she’s looking for work to help pay the enormous college bills that are about to start arriving for Marie and her two younger siblings.
Cost is a huge concern, says Nancy, whose husband is a software salesman. “We’ve been saving since she was born. I was told back then it would cost $200,000 by the time she was college age. I remember laughing at that. But it turned out to be dead on.”
On the tour, a student guide, Alex Thomas, tells visiting families about how, beyond the classroom, nearly three-quarters of Whitman students play sports — everything from Ultimate Frisbee to lacrosse. There’s not much reason to leave campus on the weekends, Thomas says, what with the giant inflatable movie screen, the casino nights, the moonlight paddling trips, the farm-fresh cafeteria food and the resident advisers who try to take care of your every need.
