Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [37]
Though there is growing recognition of the problem, there is no consensus about how to deal with it. One proposal circulated in Washington called for securitizing student loans and selling the debt on financial markets. That is, we should solve the financial problems of higher education by turning them over to the bankers who brought us securitized mortgages and credit default swaps!
In the short term, college and university enrollments continue to rise. Indeed, when economic times are tough, everyone seeks a competitive edge, and college looks attractive. There is, however, no guarantee that enrollment growth will continue. Nationwide only half the students who begin college receive a four-year degree. With rising costs and less money available for financial aid, more and more students will be forced to trade down by attending cheaper schools, and a growing number of young people will be unable to afford to attend any school. A decline in enrollments would be devastating for financially strapped schools that depend on tuition income.
Faced with pressure from every side, the tried-and-true sales pitch of colleges and universities no longer rings quite so true. For years, admissions officers have been hawking their product by claiming that over their careers, college graduates on average earn more than twice as much as non–college graduates. But with a price tag of $220,000 for four years at an elite college or university and an average of $122,000 for all private schools, and rising, and with only 19 percent of the class of 2009 with jobs at the time they graduated, many students and their parents are beginning to ask whether it is worth going deeper and deeper into debt for four years of study that often does not prepare graduates for contemporary life and thus holds little promise of employment. In a 2009 article in The New York Times entitled “The College Calculation: How Much Does Higher Education Matter?” David Leonhardt asks a question that is heard with increasing frequency: “How much does a college education10—the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus—really matter?” The findings he reports should raise concern for people involved in higher education.
Last month, National Public Radio ran a segment called “Is a College Education Worth the Debt?” in which an economist noted that 12 percent of mail carriers have college degrees—the point being that they could have gotten the same jobs without the degrees. In January [2009], “20/20” ran a similar segment, in which somebody identified as an education consultant and a career counselor summed up the case against college. “You could take the pool of collegebound students and you could lock them in a closet for four years,” he said, and thanks to their smarts and work ethic, they would still outearn people who never went to college. I heard a more measured version of these concerns when I recently sat down with a group of college students. They were paying tuition and studying hard, and yet they weren’t sure what they would find on the other side of graduation.
In the past several years, I have also heard similar concerns voiced by many of my students. While the value of a college education is surely more than financial, it would be a mistake not to take the growing apprehension about the cost-effectiveness of higher education seriously.
Plummeting assets, increasing liabilities, decreasing liquidity, increasing costs, debt crises for governments, colleges, universities, students and parents, and on top of all of this decreasing revenue—this is not exactly a prescription for financial health.
With these thoughts swirling through my head, I left my office on a beautiful day last spring to attend the final meeting of department chairs for the year. Workers in the Columbia quad were busy assembling the platforms and bleachers where forty thousand students, family, friends and faculty would soon gather