First Person
Keeping higher education
affordable will take effort
Amid the various issues and controversies that almost daily constitute
the life of any university and any university president, one has gained
such prominence that it merits description here. While one can ponder, in
its almost medieval complexity, the relationship of a great university to
the religious institution that was central to its founding, and while one
can contemplate with some trepidation the ways in which the monumental expenses
of modern medicine and health care threaten to obscure the other fundamental
activities of a modern research university, there is one issue larger and
more worrisome than either of these.
I speak of the possibility that higher education in this country might
soon prove so expensive that its price will go beyond the reach of everyone
save the wealthiest Americans.
In early June, the Commission on National Investment in Higher Education,
a group made up of academic and business leaders, issued a report titled
"Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal Crisis in Higher Education."
The report says that if present trends continue, higher education will fall
some $38 million short of what it will need to serve the student population
that will want to go to college in the year 2015. If present spending growth
were to be maintained, tuition would have to double by that year. The consequence
would be devastating: half of those with college on their minds would simply
not be able to attend.
Of course, such a report can be dismissed by optimists who put little
credence in such dire predictions; "something will turn up," as
they might say in their Mr. Micawber way. But those optimists would have
to reckon with the fact that all of the analyses of higher education come
up with pretty much the same picture, and that there are no analyses useful
to optimists. Why the dire predictions?
The fundamental reason is that colleges and universities have gotten
used to paying steep prices for the things they need and have also gotten
used to certain inefficiencies that are integral to their identities. These
habits have been ingrained in the culture of higher education.
Increases in what Emory, along with all its sister institutions, pays
for goods and services (including faculty salaries), shot up more than sixfold
from 1961 to 1995. And when one compares, as one naturally does, the rate
of growth of providing higher education to its students to the Consumer
Price Index, one finds that the former has exceeded (by a percentage point
or more each year) the latter during the last 15 years.
On top of this damaging asymmetry is piled another fact: public support,
by way of tax revenues and felt enthusiasm for what higher education is
up to, has also waned. The report says that public support per student has
barely kept pace with inflation since 1976; during the same period, the
costs of educating a given student have grown by some 40 percent.
And any reader of the many books criticizing what their authors believe
to be the foolish exoticisms, the wasted time, the poor teaching and the
obsessive focus on useless research will know that such books have fallen
on fertile soil in this country and have not been effectively answered by
those (like me) who believe that what is right about the academy is more
true of it than what is wrong with it.
But what to do? How can costs be lowered, inefficiencies reduced and
public affection for what we aspire to do for the best young people in the
country be recreated?
The commission makes some reasonable suggestions. One is to limit the
power of individual academic departments, and this Emory is already proposing
to do by way of stimulating and rewarding, at every step, cross-disciplinary
research and teaching. Another is to share the resources of different institutions,
particularly those in the same city or region, and this, again, we have
begun effectively to do by way of our membership in the six-school consortium
known as the Georgia Research Alliance. It directs valuable research funding,
made available from the Georgia Legislature, to schools that work together
in common research undertakings. And we have inaugurated some other important
joint efforts with our strong neighbor, Georgia Tech, to explore what we
can do more effectively, and more cheaply, by combining forces.
Higher education has long persisted in the happy, but expensive, belief
that each institution can go it alone. That era will soon come to an end.
And it has also thought that it could outrun the iron laws of costs, prices
and consumer satisfaction. That too will have to end. And, by so saying,
I am reporting to you what will form a central part of our future strategy
at Emory. That strategy, now under intense discussion, will be the topic
of one of my next reports to you. In the meantime, I urge you to send to
me your suggestions about how Emory might ameliorate a situation second
in importance to none.
This essay by President Bill Chace originally appeared in the Autumn
1997 edition of Emory Magazine and is used with permission.
Return
to January 12, 1998 Contents Page |