This op ed was written on August 10, 2010 and I am unclear whether the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ever published it. It's all still true, alas. Le plus ça change, le plus c'est la même chose. 

Higher Education: Sound the Alarm

            We have rightly been proud of our system of higher education, with close to 5,800 public and private universities, four-year liberal arts colleges, and community or junior colleges.  (I will cite many such facts in this piece.  Since neither space nor journalistic mores allow room for citing  sources, I beg the reader to believe that I was reasonably conscientious in trying to get them right.  It has also often been rightly stated that the thriving of the United States depends on the health of these institutions—to provide the research for a dynamic economy, the training of those needed to run it, and the education of a competent citizenry—not to mention the broadening of minds that makes us a civilized country.  I here want to point to a trend that constitutes a danger to the health of these vital institutions, in the hope that greater awareness will lead to restorative measures.

            Not that multiple developments in post-secondary education have not frequently been cited and at times deplored.  I will cite them, briefly indicate why they deserve criticism, and will then try to claim that they are all part of a single underlying tendency.

            Begin with tuition and fees.  The startling fact is that in the last 30+ years, that amount has risen almost three times as much as general inflation—an increase even greater than that of medical costs.  To give a local and more recent example, in 1997-98, tuition at Pitt for Pennsylvania residents averaged approximately $4,500, while it was about 15,000 in 2009-10; for out-of-staters, the increase went from about $14,000 to c. 26,000.  I’ll let you calculate the percentage increase.  Yes, these numbers are offset by financial aid; but, you can be sure that such help did not increase concomitantly.  The fact is that in 2009, 58 institutions charged more than $50,000 a year.
            I turn, briefly, to some consequences of these increases before turning to their causes.  The most important is that higher education has become less affordable for many and that the debts of those who braved it have become ever greater—both serious effects because income has not similarly gone up in that period. 

            Further, these astronomical increases in cost have converted students and their parents into consumers, where they were once clients of educational institutions who knew best.  Among other consequences, this has led to huge college and university expenditures for buildings and staff that minister to students’ non-educational “welfare,” such as plush athletic and recreational facilities.  Nice perhaps, but diversions of funds needed for education—the point of college, after all.

            One reason for these tuition increases is the constantly decreasing infusion of public funds, especially from strapped state governments.  But another is the huge increase in administrative costs, thanks to the addition of what is euphemistically called support staff.  “Over the last two decades,” begins an April 20, 2009 New York Times story, “colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent. . . .”  I am guessing that the Northwestern dean’s office is today three to four time as large as it was when I left it in 1987.  These new folks are not engaged in evil activities, but few of them, you can be sure, serve the primary functions of teaching and research.  There is little doubt in my skeptical mind, that over time, administration has become an end in itself.

            But at the same time that “support” is more plushly funded, the funding for teaching has shrunk markedly, certainly relative to enrollment.  In institutions across the board—from prestigious private universities to modest community colleges—lecturers and adjuncts, full-time and part-time, have replaced regular tenured and tenure-track faculty. “In the 20-year period, the [same] report found, the greatest number of jobs added, more than 630,000, were instructors — but three-quarters of those were part-time (italics added).”  There are at least two consequences for education of this shift of teachers from regular faculty to ill-paid itinerants, an actual or potential Lumpenproletariat.  Granted that many lecturers do a conscientious job of teaching, not remotely are they selected with the same care as are tenure track faculty, not to mention the formidable hurdle that achieves tenure.  Second, the faculty cadre that debates and decides on educational policy, such as graduation requirements, is an ever-decreasing fraction of those who teach undergraduates.  (These are issues that “consumers” of higher education should worry about.)

            Last and indeed least in financial effect, there has been a phenomenal increase in the compensation of college and university presidents.  A New York Times article of November 2, 2009 reports that “23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million.”  It was not many years before that when any of them earned as much as half of that.  The financial impact of this inflation is small relative to the total cost of the system of higher education, but its symbolic significance could not be greater.

            University presidents have become CEOs, chief executive officers of institutions now regarded as corporations.  But colleges and universities are not like corporations.  Their mission is to not to invest money in order to make more money, ultimately the sole goal of a business.  Rather, the job of educational institutions is to accrue funds so as to be able achieve the multiple goals of educating undergraduate and advanced students, engaging in research that pushes out the frontiers of knowledge, and in serving society as advisors and helpmates—a different game altogether.  We must learn—and quickly—to tolerate and support institutions that are not built on the model of corporations.  For if universities don’t play the game of university, no other institution in our society will take their place.  We cannot afford losing them.