NGUPLUS

My book Why Public Higher Education Should be Freeis now available, and its central claims address many of the issues brought up at the last UC regents meeting.  My main argument is that if we just used current state and federal funding for higher ed in a more rational way, we could get rid of the need for tuition, student aid, and student loans.  I also argue that anything short of this holistic solution will fail to solve any of the basic issues.  Of course, we now live in a time of diminished political expectations, and so it is hard for most people to even imagine any large new governmental solution.  In short, after forty years of anti-government government, even our leaders can only think about short-term solutions and half-measures.

President Yudof’s farewell speech at the regents meeting was a great example of leaderless leadership.  Form his perspective, all that we can do is manage each crisis and try to find a way to maintain the status quo.  While he still holds out some hope that online education will be a real game-changer for higher ed, he is now even doubting the effectiveness of this possible solution.  In fact, during the regents’ discussion  (minute 28) of the new new UC online program, Yudof brought up the recent problems with Udacity and San Jose State University.  He even stated that distance education might not work, and we need to ask the students and faculty on the campuses if they even want online courses.

Yudof’s doubts were ignored by a series of regents who pontificated about the need to do this online thing faster and to use the money provided by the governor to ramp up the provision of online courses for UC students.  Of course, the governor never really provided additional funds for online education; instead he simply earmarked $10 million from money that was already going to the UC.  Next, the governor vetoed his own earmark, but the regents have seemed to have forgotten this fact.  Worst off all, Lt. Governor Newsome continued his promotion of all things digital by urging the UC to stop moving at a glacial pace.  In other words, he wants the UC faculty to give up its shared governance in order to quickly move to a system of education that is unproven and could result in both significant cost increases and reduced quality.

As I argue in my book, all of the problems in higher ed start with the failure to make high-quality education and research the major priority of these institutions.  My central point is that if you do not dedicate most of the funding to these core missions, you end up spending most of the money on expensive side projects like athletics, sponsored research, administration, and amenities.  Moreover, this lack of attention to the core mission results in non-educators running the show, and in the UC case, this can be witnessed by the regents’, the new president’s, and the state politicians’ lack of higher education experience and knowledge. 

Without a focus on improving the state of actual education, we end up with huge classes, reductive multiple-choice exams, and disengaged students and faculty.  In turn, this poor instructional quality opens the door for massive online courses and the call to move more students through the system in a faster and cheaper way.  Yet, on a positive side, the whole debate over MOOCs is helping to create a public conversation about how we define quality teaching and learning, and so it is possible that we may be able to rededicate our institutions of higher education to high-quality instruction and research.

While some will interpret my book as another attack on useless academic research, I try to make it clear that I also want to defend the importance of academic research, but I want to distinguish between corrupted sponsored research and the academic pursuit of knowledge and truth.   Just as our political system has been corrupted by the way we fund campaigns, our academic system has been distorted by the way we fund research.Study after study has shown that many research experiments in the sciences cannot be replicated, and one reason for the failure of science to be scientific is that researchers are beholden to the people paying for their research.  In order to correct this system, we need a commitment by the states and the federal government to provide funding for pure research; we also have to stop the hidden process of subsidizing expensive research programs by siphoning money out of undergraduate instruction.

None of these problems will be fixed if we continue to be led by leaders with no commitment to basic research and instruction.       

Almost every week, there is a new plan to make higher education free.  The latest two proposals come from Starbucks and a new group of former politicians called Redeeming America’s Promise; although there are issues with many of these new initiatives, the emergence of plans to change how we pay for college is an important first step.

The Starbucks policy has received the most news coverage and has generated the highest level of misunderstanding.  Although many people are reporting that Starbucks is going to pay for the tuition of its workers, what is really happening is the coffee company is making adeal to enroll some of its employees into Arizona State University’s onlineeducation program. In fact, it turns out that ASU is paying formost of the cost, and this new Starbucks’ plan replaces a previous policy that helped students attend a college of their choice.   

The Redeeming America’s Promise plan is much more comprehensive and ambitious, but its fatal flaw is that it is really providing tuition help to lower- and middle-income students, but it is not paying for the total cost of attendance.  The problem with this strategy is that on average over 60% of the cost of attending a public university or college comes from room, board, books, and other living expenses, and while federal, state, and institutional aid often covers much of the tuition, the total cost of attendance fuels high student debt. 

As the film Ivory Tower shows, one reason why most of student loan money goes to living expenses is that universities and colleges have engaged in an amenities arms race at the very moment states have been cutting back in their support for higher education.  In 2012-13, the average total cost of attendance at four-year public universities was $21,683 and the part going to tuition and required fees was $8,005. At community colleges, the total cost in 2012-13 was $13,277 and the part going to tuition was $3,080.  This means that for public universities, funding only tuition only accounts for 36% of the total cost, and for community colleges, it makes up 23%.  Thus, as everyone always talks about the cost of tuition, the biggest problem is the related costs of room, board, books, and living expenses. 

The RAP plan does address this issue of related costs by stating that students will be able to take out income-based repayment loans with a cap to pay for non-tuition costs, and they could write off on their taxes the full principle of the loan once they graduate.  There is also an effort to control tuition levels by tying them to a state’s medium family income level.

These efforts to make higher education free to the students should be applauded, but there needs to be a more realistic discussion of what is really driving student debt.