"Field Notes" is an occasional Connect column covering practical and philosophical issues facing admissions and registrar professionals. The columns are authored by various AACRAO members. If you have an idea for a column and would like to contribute, please send an email to the editor at connect@aacrao.org.
by Loralyn Taylor, PhD, Registrar and Director of Institutional Research, Paul Smith’s College
“Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle-class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working-class and the poor.
You can stop imagining. That’s the American system right now.”
--Robert Reich
Is higher education a public or private good? A generation ago, education was viewed and funded as a public good generating clear benefits to both students and our communities and enjoying strong state and federal support. More recently, declining state and federal support along with changing policies, clearly reflect a shift toward viewing higher education as a private good [1]. And as a private good, the benefits of a degree are viewed as accruing primarily to the student; and thus, the argument that the student should bear the primary cost. While higher education leaders have made the public good argument and the societal benefits of an educated workforce have been repeatedly demonstrated [2], the diversity of our institutions and their missions have worked against public perception of higher education as a public good.
Reich’s recent AlterNet article [3] “Why Is the Government Subsidizing the 1 Percent of Colleges?” is one of the latest in a string of articles asking if our elite higher education institutions can justify the public good argument. With elite endowments growing into the billions or even tens of billions of dollars, are the government subsidies of these institutions which run into the tens of thousands per student justifiable? The economist Richard Vedder has estimated the government subsidies through tax exempt endowment growth, tax deductions on donations, and overhead costs on research grants to exceed $54,000 per student [4] at Princeton compared to less than $2,000 at the public College of New Jersey. These results challenge the widely held perception that our public colleges and universities are the largest recipients of government subsidies.
Can these subsidies be justified as a public good? Reich believes not, pointing out that the highly selective private colleges have lagged both public and non-elite private colleges and universities with small endowments in a commitment to socioeconomic diversity. Reich quotes a NACUBO survey which found that in general, colleges with the largest endowments have an average of 16% Pell students compared with 59% for the smallest endowment colleges. In addition, because of their smaller student bodies, the Ivy League colleges combined educate fewer Pell students than the University of California at Berkeley alone. Further, the New York Times economic diversity index [5] of top colleges finds that the most diverse admitted between 20 and 25% Pell students, a far cry from the 36% of all students who receive Pell.
Reich argues that our elite colleges are also not educating a significant number of our future public servants as 70% of Harvard’s senior class submits resumes to Wall Street and almost 50% took jobs there compared to a total of less than 20% taking jobs in government, politics, health-related or public service fields. Other recent articles [6] have also decried the lack of student veterans [7] at our elite colleges and efforts to increase their numbers such as the Warrior-Scholar Project [8] and the Posse Foundation’s Veteran’s Posse Program [9].
Perhaps Reich’s most important point is that as we continue to argue for higher education as a public good, if we do not hold ourselves and our institutions responsible for living our words, our arguments will continue to fall on deaf ears.
Links:
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/From-Public-Good-to-Private/145061
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-higher-education-went-from-being-a-public-good-to-a-private-one/2014/05/22/50263a16-e1bd-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html
[3] http://www.alternet.org/education/robert-reich-why-government-subsidizing-1-percent-colleges
[4] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-03-18/princeton-reaps-tax-breaks-as-state-colleges-beg
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/top-colleges-that-enroll-rich-middle-class-and-poor.html?abt=0002&abg=1
[6] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/11/11/veterans-rarity-most-elite-colleges-essay
[7] http://chronicle.com/article/At-Elite-Colleges-a-Push-to/136459/?cid=wb
[8] http://michigandaily.com/news/warrior-scholar-project-helps-vets-transition-military-academic-life
[9] http://www.possefoundation.org/veterans-posse-program