A $10,000 Education

Texas Governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry challenged leaders in higher education to create a $10,000 undergraduate degree during his State of the State address. He said,

“I’m challenging our institutions of higher education to develop bachelor’s degrees that cost no more than $10,000, including books.” He suggested using online classes, “innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures” as means to reach that goal. In a letter to university presidents, he also suggested, “… blended classes… no-frills campuses; credit for prior learning, dual credit and Advanced Placement; and open-source textbooks”

Interestingly enough, Texas already has a $10,000 degree, and one that might not be around for long. At Brazosport College, you can get a four-year degree in Applied Technology for under $10,000 (not including books). The Texas legislature looks to eliminate all funding to Brazosport and other community colleges in their new budget. This underscores the tendency to overlook community colleges as a viable and more affordable option for students.

Note that Perry doesn’t suggest a $10,000 price tag, but a $10,000 cost. This isn’t a return to increased state support for public universities, but a call for universities to come up with a degree that costs $2,500 a year, or about $100 per credit.

The discussion is varied, ongoing, and largely unoriginal. We have been debating the cost of higher education for decades.

Richard Vedder, the author of Going broke by degree: Why college costs too much suggests increasing government subsidies ($5000/student) and asking most faculty to teach 6 hours a week. Others suggest that cutting the cost of higher education inevitably means cutting the value of the education. Some are hopeful, believing we have to change otherwise we are “wasting our investment.”

The LA Times suggests that increases in tuition haven’t benefited students, but the increased funds go primarily to athletics, administration, and increase in tenured faculty salaries. Perhaps we could return to the 1970s, when a degree cost about 10% what it does today.

Is a college degree worth its current cost? The Pew Center says that most people believe college is too expensive, isn’t a good deal for the money, but it’s been a good investment for them personally. People believe (and research shows) that college graduates make about $20,000 more per year. 94% of parents expect their children to go to college, even if they think it is overpriced.

Our internal stakeholders are also losing faith in the American system of higher education. Faculty believe that we are longer the best in the world, though about half of college presidents believe we are “one of the best in the world.”

Do students get what they pay for? What do students think they are paying for? Are they paying for intellectual growth, personal growth, a chance to grow-up, a football team to cheer for, or a piece of paper?

According to a recent UCLA study, students say they choose the colleges they do because of a good academic reputation, because their graduates get good jobs, and because they were offered financial assistance. For students, academics are important, a future job is important, and affordability is important.

Is it realistic to provide great academics and connection to a future career for $10,000 a year?

The Economist suggests cutting education funds by only charging students for teaching. Students could vote to charge themselves fees for use of technology and facility improvements and research would be funded by grants and state subsidies. This sounds good, until you examine the actual savings of cutting all research. The Chronicle of Higher Education cites that, without research and development, the university only saves about $3,000 per student.

Higher education is more than lectures, tests, and assignments. In fact, Pew research suggests that people value character development more than the learning achieved in the classroom. If we moved to online learning, and part time instructors, we may get through the same syllabus but have missed an opportunity to develop students.

A shortage of funding and growing lack of belief in the American system of higher education from internal and external stakeholders has made it clear that we are in need of a recovery. What if higher education were to take a page from the most successful recovery program in history? Here is my adapted version of the 12 steps for higher education

1. Acknowledge that we have a problem.
2. Acknowledge that we (politicians, faculty, administrators, students) can’t do this by ourselves.
3. Actively return to focusing our mission on student learning.
4. With that mission in mind, assess everything we do from the lens of students.
5. Identify people, programs, and policies that will get in the way.
6. Remove those things that get in the way.
7. Acknowledge where we can get better, and put our attention there.
8. Address where we’ve neglected identities and marginalized people and people groups.
9. Make specific outreach to those groups.
10. Reassess whether we’re reaching our mission.
11. Do everything possible to address what students need most.
12. Empower other universities to do the same

Perhaps by realigning our mission we can cut programs and decrease tuition. More importantly, if we’re able to actively re-align our priorities around student learning, maybe we’ll learn how to work together, accomplish our mission more effectively, and re-gain the confidence of our internal and external constituents.

Do we have a budget crisis on our hands? Maybe. Is a $10,000 education that accomplishes what students and stakeholders want from an education realistic? Probably not. Perhaps we have an opportunity to re-assess who we are and where we’re going. Maybe future student affairs graduate students can look back on this decade and see the example of leaders who were willing to ask difficult questions because our students are worth it.

Access and the cost of higher education

The increasing costs of attending a higher education institution in the U.S. have in recent years deterred many students from pursuing a college degree, especially low-income and underrepresented students. In spite of federal government efforts to making college education available to all, the reality of today is that affordable four-year college education is unattainable for many students.

Tuition increases are a common denominator not only in for-profit institutions but also in public higher education colleges and universities. It is not surprising that the for-profit college industry continues to recruit students; this industry has applied and utilized a business-corporate based model that inherently perceives and treats students as commodities and consumers. Consequently these institutions have destroyed the fundamental humanistic and democratic values of public education.

Education is a public good and thus so essential to a democracy. The State (government) should guarantee access to education to all its citizens. An educated citizenry will benefit society at large and the economy. However, the “era of affordable four-year public universities heavily subsidized by the state may be over.”

How then do we provide opportunities for underrepresented and low-income students to have access to college? How do we instill in these students the value of an education without the fear of eternal college debt?

One of the most prominent thinkers of our times, Noam Chomsky, in a recent speech (delivered this year at the University of Toronto at Scarborough) on the rapid privatization process of public higher education in the U.S. points out citing economist Dough Henwood that “it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S. it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. (The nominal GDP of the U.S. economy was estimated to be nearly $14.9 trillion in 2010), The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That’s the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system.” However, he also acknowledges that the introduction of these facts into an electoral campaign would be “suicidally insane” How then do we impede the increasing trends of state budget cuts in higher education?

As an advocate for social justice and public higher education I suggest that all stakeholders (government officials, policy makers, faculty and college administrators) should seriously debate the social and economic consequences of the current situation and take action to rescue the fundamental democratic values of our public education institutions.

Derrida suggests that “when higher education is engaged and articulated through the project of democratic social transformation it can function as a vital public sphere for critical learning, ethical deliberation and civic engagement.”

Thus, democratization or should I say, re-democratization of public higher education is essential to continue providing a forum for critical thinking, embracing ethical values and taking collective action(s) in defense of social justice

Given the urgency of the times, Toni Morrisson suggests the need for all members of academia to rethink the purpose and meaning of higher education:

“If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”

In the wake of the rapid implementation of the neoliberal ideology and corporate culture in our higher public education institutions, it is essential that all members of academia take action to protect and preserve the democratic values of public education.