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| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
Let me start out by saying no and no. I do not believe college
tuition should be so high. When in-state tuition, room, and board hits $15,000+
dollars a year and tuition at private colleges can be four or five times that
amount, college tuition is, in my humble opinion, too expensive.
There are a lot of reasons why college has gotten more expensive
in the United States. Costs for property, plant, and equipment have increased.
Labor costs have increased. In the case of public universities, state
legislators have reduced the amount of funding provided per student. But the
one reason you don’t hear much about is competition.
When I graduated high school in 1979 and went off to college I
was one of approximately 1,559,000 high school graduates who did so out of an
estimated 3,160,000 graduates that year.[i]
That equals slightly less than 50% of the students who graduated high school
the year I did.
Contrast that with the number of high school graduates
thirty-five years later, in 2014. Approximately 3,500,000 students graduated
high school that year. Of that number an estimated 65% went straight on to
college, or 2,300,000.[ii]
This figure does not include students coming to college in the United States
from overseas.
The growth in the number and percentage of high school graduates
going straight into college equals about 741,000 students or a 47% increase in
the number of students competing for seats in college classrooms. Based on the
economic laws of supply and demand, it makes sense that college costs would
increase due to the number of students competing for placement.
Indeed, according to a CNBC report, “Public and private colleges
and universities expanded their payrolls by 28 percent between 2000 and 2012,
more than 50 percent faster than the previous decade, according to an analysis
of higher education staffing by the Delta Cost Project. That build-up largely
tracked the rise in enrollments.”[iii]
According to the principal researcher, Donna Desrochers, "Many of these
new positions appear to be providing student services, but whether they
represent justifiable expenses or unnecessary 'bloat' is up for debate."[iv]
The inescapable fact is, spending on college campuses to attract
and retain the best faculty and the most promising students has driven college
costs up at a rate much higher than inflation since the 1990s. The greatest
increases have been at public 4-year colleges and universities, and the reason
for that is primarily political. Deep cuts in state budget funding for public
higher education have pushed more of the cost onto the students and their
families.[v]
Into this morass of ever increasing college costs comes the idea
that everyone is entitled to a free college education. Bernie Sanders wooed a
lot of young voters with the idea that they could go to college free of charge.
The young, college age voters loved the idea. They also had no clue how much
other people, tax paying people, were going to have cut out of their paychecks
to make it possible for them to go to college for free.
Now that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee
for President, she has her own plan to help students reduce their college debt.
Her plan is not as ambitious as Senator Sanders, but the Former Secretary of
State does have a plan to help families pay for college. It is a complicated
plan with income caps and step increases and would only apply to in-state
tuition at public universities.[vi]
The Clinton plan would also cost federal tax payers $35 billion
dollars a year and would rely on states, who have for well over a decade been
cutting back on money for higher education, to provide matching funds to those
in-state students.
With all that laid out, the real question as I see it is whether
or not the government should be providing free college education to everyone.
When I look at the disdainful way large numbers of students treat the free
public school education they are receiving I wonder what the point would be of
giving these same students free access to public colleges and universities.
Wouldn’t it bring a lot of the classroom problems now experienced in middle and
high schools into the college classroom? Or would there be certain discipline
standards as well as academic standards a student must meet in high school to
get into college for free, and then must keep up in order to stay in college.
Would admission to the best public universities still be competitive with only
the top students being admitted, or would they have to lower their standards?
I understand student debt is becoming an increasing problem.
I also know it is often a self-inflicted wound. Many students choose to attend
schools they know they cannot afford, get degrees in fields where they know
jobs are few and far between, and then protest because they can’t find work and
can’t pay off their student debt. Will giving them free access to in-state
colleges and universities cause them to make better decisions? No one knows. As
far as I know, no one is even asking the question.
Would it be wonderful if every student who wants to go to
college could go for free? Yes, of course it would. Wouldn’t we all like to
receive something worth tens of thousands of dollars without having to work for
it? Yes, of course we would. I know my students are in favor of the idea of a
free college education. Then again, my students are in favor of a free
anything.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
[i] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d99/d99t187.asp
[ii] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
[iii] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/
[iv]
ibid
[v] Ibid
[vi] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-hillary-clinton-college-tuition-20160711-story.html
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