College tuition and fees have risen about three times as much a median family income since the Reagan administration, reported a new study this week from the Center for Public Policy and Education. The president of that center, Patrick Callan, noted that "if this goes on for another 25 years we won't have an affordable system of higher education." This may be a gross understatement, in my opinion, since for millions of students there isn't an affordable one now.
I have been teaching in universities since 1969. I have seen the tuition costs for students rise from a few hundred dollars a year to thousands. I have seen huge numbers of undergraduate courses since the 1980s come to be taught by part-time lecturers on a course by course basis and by graduate students, exploiting the former who function as a kind of lumpen professional class in the world of university teaching and forcing the latter to extend their graduate studies by years as they teach courses that previously were taught only by full-time faculty.
I have no great nostalgia for the "good old days." Universities were always filled with self aggrandizing types who operated on the Tom Sawyer principle, that is, getting associates like Huck Finn to do the teaching the way Tom got Huck to paint the fence and then take credit for it. Career academics sometimes prefer to use their talents instead to acquire research grants, outside offers from other universities and praise from strategically placed friends in order to either create and/or inflate reputations and gain huge rewards from universities where they rarely taught students, only participated in faculty governance when their immediate interests were involved, and in some cases rarely showed up.
But these negative characteristics of the public university system have grown far more extreme since the beginning of the Reagan era because they are now linked with a corporate model for higher education. That "corporate model" as applied to public universities where a substantial majority of students are located, has seen a spectacular rise in the salaries of university presidents and top administrators, the intensification of income inequality both between underfunded public university and well off private ones and much deeper inequality in income/status among faculty.
In New Jersey for example, we have come to accept that the highest paid public employee in the state and the highest paid individual connected to the educational system is the Rutgers football coach, an unreal reality which is the norm in a great many states. Thanks to the spread of the corporate model in universities, Tom Sawyer faculty with administration support have become a self-advertising group of free agents, birds of passage. They con administrators the way administrators con the working faculty and students. This has happened against the background of university administrations which often talk about support for student and faculty diversity and social service but pursue policies toward faculty (labor) and students (consumers) more brazen than many large corporations.
Patrick Callan makes the point that even after the recession is over, "the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very had to be competitive. Already, we are one of the few countries where 25 to 34 year olds are less educated then older workers."
That is the most damning fact of all against the model of an elite "research public university" among the "publics" (the term that contemporary university administrators use in ways that are similar to the way that Wall Streeters have long referred to companies which sell their stock on the stock market as "public corporations"). The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges issued a more "optimistic" report, contending that low and moderate income families have "choices" ranging from community college to four level institutions. But they, like Callan, who realizes that students education is funding by a mountain of student and family debt, have no real solutions to the crisis, which is as much a part of that "free market" pro-corporate, anti-labor philosophy which President-elect Obama declared during the campaign to be an utter failure.
Let me raise some points that usually evoke smirks from the sort of administrators that I have mentioned. At its peak, free tuition public education existed in two of the largest and most productive systems in the U.S. and the world, the City University of New York system and the University of California system. Many other public systems, although not all, had low tuition which was affordable for most students, who might do some work study and/or work in the summer to supplement their incomes. Most students in systems like these did not have to have work long hours at outside jobs during the school semester to pay bills, as millions of students do today.
What can be done to reverse the negative trends of the last three decades. Callan suggests that tuition costs should rise more when the "economy" is doing well and then be held down in periods of economic downturn. Although his group's study is excellent and hugely important, this is a band aid.
Just as we have got to establish a national health program, we have to build the comprehensive public university, with a real commitment to scholarship, teaching, and service, realizing that the education of millions and millions or undergraduates is the foundation of the entire system. From the late 19th century to the late 20th century, the US led the world in public higher education. To a considerable extent it still does, although today many students from abroad come here to study in facilities that do not exist in their home countries, especially in the sciences, creating a sort of negative "in sourcing" of US educational services to "complement" the outsourcing of productive jobs.
Reforming higher education should start on two fronts. First there should be a serious new federal investment in higher education. This new aid should be guided by an education policy that rewards universities that construct the comprehensive public university model, show that full-time faculty are doing most of the teaching work and begin to seriously reorganize science teaching and scholarship. Universities that reduce tuition and implement ways to limit student and family debt should be rewarded. Universities that continue to pursue the corporate model at the expense of working faculty, staff, and students should be punished with reduced support. It would also be a great idea for the federal government to actively support unionization for faculty and staff by withholding federal funding to those university administrations that pursue anti-union policies.
It will take massive social investments in higher education to make the US what it once was, the best and most productive system of higher education in the world. This is the sort of higher education policy that the Obama administration should be exploring. It is both necessary and possible. Like a single-payer national health care system, it would take enormous burdens off of moderate and low income families and strengthen the progressive forces by winning over those working families, including many who currently support conservative politics, to policies that would give their children a brighter future without burying them in debt.
--Norman Markowitz teaches at Rutgers University and is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
