I’m pleased to report that metaphysical poets are not the only people able to yoke together two opposed ideas, and argue them with conviction.
Eight months ago, Governor Gregoire appointed a number of business leaders to a task force and asked them how to increase in the number of students graduating from Washington’s four-year colleges and universities. Now, the Seattle Times sums up their findings: “State task force says colleges, not Legislature, should set tuition.”
The problem is that, while constant reductions in state funding are starving university growth, the state has retained the power to tell state colleges and universities how to much charge for tuition. School leadership has chafed under this arrangement, but last year’s bill to allow tuition-setting to revert to the state schools failed to move out of committee.
While you can debate the “right” of higher education leadership to sail their own ships, there’s something fishy about the notion that if only tuition were raised, all would be well. (The task force “laid out the groundwork Monday for a 27 percent increase in the number of students who graduate from the state’s four-year colleges and universities by 2018.”) As I’ve mentioned before, while the state holds the tuition pursestrings, it’s done so fairly loosely: in 1991, UW tuition was $2,178. Last year, it was $7,125.
(Permit me the slightly ad hominem observation that if task force leader Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft, has great ideas that grow institutions by 27 percent over the next eight years, he should put them to work at Microsoft first. Shareholders would thank him.)
The methodology used to chart this growth is indefensibly simple-minded: Washington’s state schools’ tuition is compared to other, comparable schools across the U.S. and–despite Washington schools having received an “F” in affordability a few years ago — it is always determined that our prices are simply too low. Somehow, despite UW tuition having risen 327 percent since 1991, we’re still in the Wal*Mart end of the pool. Interim President Phyllis Wise says that if the UW aimed for slightly above the median, tuition would be around $11,000.
It’s as if — and stay with me, here — it’s as if all the other colleges were setting tuition based upon how all the other colleges set tuition. That might explain why, across the U.S., higher education costs have outpaced even skyrocketing health care costs since the 1980s. Every time one university rachets up its tuition to “join the club,” other universities have incentive to charge more.
Why this is possible — the higher education market is built on perverse incentives, thanks to student loans provided to people who have yet to discover cost/benefit analyses — is another story. But if our state schools exist to educate the citizens of Washington state, I am curious if the median wage in Bellingham, Ellensburg, and Cheney has seen increases of over 300 percent as well since the early ’90s.
On the face of it, the task force should have to explain, if low tuition is the problem, why tripling tuition over the last 20 years has left the state 36th, nationally, in the production of undergraduate degrees. Finally, since tuition increases are always couched in “soak the rich students” rhetoric, with all sorts of new aid promised for the deserving poor, so I wonder if we could see how this 20-year history of tuition increases has affected the post-graduation indebtedness of aid-dependent students?
I mean, when tuition at some private colleges is over $30,000 a year (nearing $40,000), $7,125 sounds like a pittance.
I’ll concede your point that if the U has less money via tuition to spend they won’t get into these pissing contests with other schools on spending. But I have to just point out that that’s the same logic Evil Conservatives like me use when we talk about reducing taxes so that “Big Government” won’t be so inclined to spend on wasteful programs.
Yes, it does sound like a pittance, but only because all of higher education is on this crazy tuition-hiking hamster wheel. I’ll accept the fiscal conservative label, if people want to call it that, but in this case, it looks like straight-up gov’t funding of colleges (coupled with cost control) was doing a far better job of keeping costs in line than gov’t backing of student loans.
The basic tuition cost of $7,125 is just part of the total cost of attending college. Add in all the new student fees, cost of books, lab fees, transportation costs, and then room and board we are well over $15,000 a year for a SUBSTANDARD public education with 200+ people in a class room. The trap of easy student loans that feed the ever spiraling unrealistic cost of tuition is a crime. The question no one is asking; is why tuition costs are going up so far beyond any inflation rate or actual costs? Especially since gradute students are teaching most of the classes?