COLUMN: Tuition increase idea is unreal

There’s a myth that has made the rounds of this campus for the past few years. It’s a hackneyed cliché, born out of decades of grandiose thinking by ambitious managers, grievously out of touch with everyday reality.

You’ve heard versions of it employed at student body meetings and in flowery speeches by university administrators.

Seasoned managers might call it the “Bigger is Better” fable. And one finds an excellent example of it in President Kermit L. Hall’s latest bombshell – a 43 percent tuition hike to be spread out over three years – dropped, rather unceremoniously, at a time when thousands of students across campus are grappling with already inflated tuition costs.

The content of the myth is boringly repetitive: Briefly, we’re expected to invest inordinately large sums in tuition in exchange for what Hall terms an “increasingly better education.”

Not to be too much of a naysayer, but thus far, that has amounted to mere cosmetics – new buildings (some of them questionable), improvements to the campus bookstore, better computers and sundry upgrades and facelifts.

Yet, qualitatively, according to U.S. News and World Report, we remain a Tier 3 institution whose graduates aren’t exactly given the red carpet treatment in a ruthlessly competitive job market.

That aside, there’s a deeper, philosophical problem associated with such excessive tuition increases – and it has the potential to seriously damage the academic environment on campus.

As one faculty adviser put it, “Exorbitant tuition will change the relationship students have with the school. Education will turn into an entitlement.”

Essentially, students will begin to view the academic experience as a buyer views a product. And this has consequences.

Listen to Natalie Fenton, a senior lecturer at England’s Loughborough University, commenting in The Guardian on a similar problem affecting schools in the United Kingdom: “[An increase in student contributions] will lead to a greater concentration in subject areas that are more profitable as provision adapts to the market.

“Litigation by students will increase as the product they buy suddenly appears to be faulty (the required grade was not achieved) or wrong (it did not provide what was stated ‘on the packet’)…For lecturers, the risks in being innovative or adventurous will be too high.”

Fenton has a point.

We’re already faced with student-sanctioned limits on faculty speech in the form of a politically-slanted Academic Bill of Rights, passed by the Associated Students of USU last year.

As student groups become more market oriented, might it not be fair to suggest that they may be less willing to accept alternative points of view? After all, if I’m paying top dollar for a product, am I not going to demand my money’s worth?

Clearly, this approach corrodes the very values upon which the entire academic system is based.

What’s more: Things aren’t likely to get any better.

Consider the trend in higher education spending in recent years. As states wrestle with mounting budgetary demands, primarily due to rising Medicaid obligations, parents and students have been asked to contribute an increasingly large share of the public higher education tab.

And that scenario is not likely to change in years to come as Medicaid expenditures are expected to grow rapidly over the coming decades.

Moreover, states don’t seem keen on restoring funding to higher education even during periods of economic prosperity.

In a policy brief for The Brookings Institution, economists Thomas Kane and Peter Orszag note that in many states, the cuts imposed on higher education during the last recession in 1990-91 were not made up in the subsequent recovery.

“State appropriations have fallen from an average of roughly $8.50 per $1,000 in personal income in 1977 to an average of about $7 per $1,000 in personal income in 2003,” the report observes.

“Since personal income currently amounts to more than $9 trillion, state appropriations would be about $14 billion higher – or about 20 percent higher than their actual level – if appropriations had been maintained at the same ratio to personal income as in 1977.”

Administrators like Hall rely on this fact as a lever to crank up tuition, but their solution is a Band-Aid at best. Kane and Orszag point out that “despite their size, the tuition increases have only partially offset the decline in state appropriations in allowing public colleges to keep up with private ones.”

Additionally, they contend, “The quality of public higher education seems to have deteriorated relative to the private sector.”

So, to suggest that a tuition hike would correspond directly to a high-quality education is a misleading statement – one that hard-working students juggling three jobs and supporting a family ought not to tolerate.

To be fair, President Hall’s goal of creating an “academics first” institution is a noble one. But his tuition proposal is immodest, unrealistic and quite insensitive. It must not be allowed to sail through.

To quote an old Chinese Proverb on education: “The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water; but to walk on the earth.”

Leon D’Souza is a senior majoring print journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.