Hyperbole (and Progressive Bloggers) Fail Me: The End of Public Higher Education
by zunguzungu
At a certain point, public universities will have ceased to exist. We will only have a variety of private universities, some of which will be subsidized a little bit by tax-payers. Depending on where you draw the line, the University of California might already be at that point — student tuition now makes up a larger portion of the UC’s budget than state funding — but the long-term trend is undeniable: since 2004, the amount of money the UC has gotten from the state of California has been cut in half, and has continued to decline, every year, with utter and complete reliability. And where the UC and CSU systems are now, every other public university will soon follow. This is not a trend that’s going to end tomorrow. This is a trend that ends with the end of public universities. It just depends on where you decide to draw the line.
With a handful of exceptions, people outside of academia seem to be strikingly oblivious to this simple fact, even people who should be allies. Take erstwhile progressive Californian blogger Kevin Drum. It’s not that his post today, “Is Harvard Worth it?” is wrong, exactly. The problem is that Drum displays a the same obliviousness to the elephant in the room that so many progressives seem to have. After noting that “I ended up graduating from Cal State Long Beach, and I did pretty well during my pre-blogging career,” he tosses out the line “If you can only afford to go to a state university, don’t fret about it too much.”
“If you can only afford to go to a state university, don‘t fret about it too much.” Except this: Kevin Drum went to a state university that does not exist anymore. When he graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1981, he paid $160 in fees. If he graduated from the same institution today, the tuition he would have paid for this year would be $4,335. They officially call it “tuition” now, because it’s not meant to be a nominal “fee” anymore. It’s simply the price you pay for your education, as a customer, and next year it will be higher, a lot higher. Unless the direction of things change soon, it will be $6,450. And the year after that? It will be even higher. Fees/Tuition in the Cal State system have risen significantly every year since when Kevin Drum went there, and they have risen by around 400% since 2002. Given the complete intransigence of California republicans, tuition will most likely rise by another 32% next year.
What if it rises by another 32% in 2012? What if it rises by 400% by 2021? It probably won’t, though only a fool would pretend to know what the end-point of the death spiral is. But the numbers are not the point, and you can’t correct for inflation when you’re comparing a nominal fee (1981) to a large financial investment. The difference is in kind, not in quantity. A fundamental shift in the social contract has happened since the state of California paid for Kevin Drum’s degree in 1981. Today, the state of California subsidizes a small part of the degree which CSU students pay for by themselves. Next year, they will subsidize less of it than they do today. The year after that, they will subsidize even less of it.
In short, the option of going to a “state university” which Drum is taking for granted is already nearly gone, and his evasion/obliviousness on this point is infuriating. Whether he knows it or not, whether he means to or not, he is closing his eye to what is happening. Talking about how state universities will survive without state funding — or quietly presuming that they will — is like trying to guess how wheat and barley prices will be affected by the sun being blotted out. An artificially supported commodity stops getting produced when you remove the price supports, and since CSU Long Beach was founded at a time when the state of California committed to paying for the education of California citizens, why should we expect that Kevin Drum’s alma mater will even continue to exist now that they don’t? At a certain point, I suspect, rising tuition will simply reach the level at which students are no longer willing or able to pay. And then universities will start to disappear and many fewer people will go to college.
I don’t expect Kevin Drum to have the answers, and we can debate what it will look like when this bubble finally bursts. Some people think it will be a good thing; I think it will be a clusterfuck for the middle and lower classes. But we all need to open our eyes to the fundamental transformation of American society that it represents. The generation before Drum’s made it possible to get an excellent education even if you couldn’t afford to pay the $9,000 that Stanford charged in 1981. Kevin Drum’s generation enjoyed the benefits of that system and then they dismantled it. My generation is muddling through by going deep into debt. The next generation will not.
[...] From zunguzungu on where public universities are headed (spoiler: to oblivion): At a certain point, public [...]
There’s another aspect of the strangling of the CSU system that you don’t mention; while the cost to the students escalates every year the product diminishes. Every year throughout the system there are fewer employees working to provide students that education they are paying for. We went through system wide furloughs in FY 2009-10 and staff layoffs have become an annual feature of campus life. Though this doesn’t have as visible an impact on students as faculty reductions, it does have a multiplier effect.
As as example, when there are fewer classes being offered, it becomes more difficult to plan your path to graduation. It becomes more difficult still when you can’t get in to see an advisor because their workload had increased because there are fewer of them working and more students needing their services.
There are also fewer departments with dedicated administrative managers and assistants, fewer IT people working to keep the systems up and running (to say nothing of upgrading them, even fewer accountants and student aid advisors to handle the increased needs for student financial aid.
These things feed on each other and it won’t be long, I am afraid, before the system itself collapses. It is no longer, as you noted, the system that Drum (and I) graduated from 30 years ago. Even the system as it currently exists, though, cannot be sustained.
Talk about liberal obliviousness. Your twitter post links to Natalia Cecire’s recent post on stipends at Berkeley, and she has this to say:
“In fact, graduate stipends in Berkeley’s English department are commensurate with those offered at much wealthier peer institutions. For instance, although we joke about our transbay colleagues at Stanford (“You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!”), the truth is that their fellowships don’t materially exceed ours.”
The first commenter on her post called her out on her callous failure to check the facts, and she managed to respond with mindless non sequiturs. Just because she’s your friend doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call her out on her own astonishing obliviousness.
[...] Hyperbole (and “Progressive” Bloggers) Fail Me: The End of Public … [...]
Yeah, and none of it has to do with state welfare programs and pension costs. Get real. Californians vote their priorities, and they are social welfare, public sector unionship, and making sure chickens have a good life before they are eaten.
You morons should review the spending growth Of the state budget over the past 15 years before mouthing off on the lack of government spending. Seriously, CA legislative analysis office posts the budget summaries for almost the past 20 years. Look at the numbers yourself before committing to progressive myths. The colleges were a lot better off then with half the spending.
Or California could raise taxes.
That chickens don’t live their entire short lives in disease-ridden and feces-strewn cages is not so much about chicken welfare as it is about public health.
[...] zunguzungu on the end of public higher education. [...]
[...] increases in the cost of getting one. The question of the hour is: is higher education a bubble?Consider:“If you can only afford to go to a state university, don‘t fret about it too much.” Except [...]
It’s a theme today – check out this excellent post from Informed Comment on the Koch Brothers FSU endowment, complete with strings attached.
http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-state-universities.html
Also, excellent ricle.
Consider also that , as soon as the government subsidizes tuition, the cost of education is increased.
State and federal grants, guaranteed student loans, and direct subsidies to public colleges and universities lower the apparent price of obtaining a college education. This leads to a higher demand. College administrators then feel justified in increasing tuition and fees, realizing that many if not most students are subsidized in one form or another.
The cycle is born: raise tuition; give out more aid; raise tuition again.
There is a signaling effect too, especially among private universities — the more expensive, the more prestigious.
[...] shed my sneering faux-hypothetical rhetoric, this was my point yesterday: in 1981, a college education at a university like California State was virtually free. You paid [...]
[...] in the cost of getting one. The question of the hour is: is higher education a bubble? Consider: “If you can only afford to go to a state university, don‘t fret about it too much.” Except [...]
[...] shed my sneering faux-hypothetical rhetoric, this was my point yesterday: in 1981, a college education at a university like California State was virtually free. You paid [...]
[...] Aaron Bady discusses recent writing on the costs of Higher Ed by liberal/progressive writers, responding to Kevin Drum and Annie Lowrey at slate. The mass defunding of public higher education is a part of this story [...]
[...] Consider: “If you can only afford to go to a state university, don‘t fret about it too much.” Except this: Kevin Drum went to a state university that does not exist anymore. When he graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1981, he paid $160 in fees. If he graduated from the same institution today, the tuition he would have paid for this year would be $4,335. They officially call it “tuition” now, because it’s not meant to be a nominal “fee” anymore. It’s simply the price you pay for your education, as a customer, and next year it will be higher, a lot higher. Unless the direction of things change soon, it will be $6,450. And the year after that? It will be even higher. Fees/Tuition in the Cal State system have risen significantly every year since when Kevin Drum went there, and they have risen by around 400% since 2002. Given the complete intransigence of California republicans, tuition will most likely rise by another 32% next year. [...]
[...] quote myself: At a certain point, public universities will have ceased to exist. We will only have a variety of [...]