Let me say some things in response to the very interesting series of comments on my most recent post. First, a word about the cost of books. My comment was rather cavalier and anonymous was right to call me out on it. Books are not part of the cost of tuition as anonymous, I think, recognized. Still and all, think about it for a minute. Suppose that 70 years ago, when I started my undergraduate education, one took 10 courses a year, five each semester. (Harvard required four each semester but since I went through in three years I took five.) In the humanities and social sciences, suppose that five dollars on average could buy you the books for the semester in a course (let me leave to one side expensive and repeatedly updated textbooks – that is a somewhat separate matter.) 10 courses a year, five dollars a course, books cost $50. $50 in 1950 is the equivalent of $520 or so in 2020. The books for 10 courses would cost more than that today but not $4800! So books have risen in real price much much less than tuition.
I should not comment on the cost of frequently revised
textbooks because I have been the beneficiary of that system over the past
half-century. Almost 50 years ago, Prentice-Hall asked me to write an
introductory philosophy text, which I agreed to do for an advance large enough
to allow my then wife to take a semester off from teaching so that she could
complete a book that she was writing. 13 editions later, that book has made me
$1 million in 2020 terms and although I think it is a good book, the revisions
were dictated by the desire of the publisher to make money (and of course
thereby to keep my royalties flowing), not by any desire to “keep up” with the
fast-moving field of philosophy. Think badly of me if you will – I will remain
silent on the subject.
More central to the topic of my post are the comments which
emphasized the enormous bloat of the nonacademic components of the modern
university. Once again, let me offer a personal anecdote. In the old days at
Harvard the University put out a slender paperback book with a Harvard crimson colored cover listing all of the “officers of instruction,” which is to say professors,
deans, research associates, and so forth, each with his or her address,
telephone number, etc. It was a convenient way to find someone around
the University. When I looked at that book 30 or 40 years later I discovered
that it had ballooned into a big thick volume even though the number of students
at the University had been increased only slightly by the addition of the women
who had previously been Radcliffe students. It was a physical manifestation of
the bloat that several commentators called attention to.
Let me add one more observation to this discussion. When the
tuition at Harvard and Columbia was $600 a year, a young undergraduate could
hope to get a job paying anywhere from $0.75 to a dollar an hour. At a dollar
an hour, the student would have to work for 600 hours to earn his or her
tuition. 600 hours is 15 weeks at 40 hours a week, which means that if you
really wanted to you could, as the saying then had it, “work your way through
college” with a summer job. Today, an industrious student could reasonably hope to get a $10 an
hour job which means that he or she would have to work 5400 hours to earn a
year’s tuition at Columbia. In short, this poor student would have to work more
than 100 hours a week year-round.
Now what on earth does the society have to gain from raising
the cost of a college education so much that it is impossible to work one’s way
through college and come out the other end unburdened by debt? Well, one simple
answer is that in such a world, bright conscientious progressive students will
be much less tempted, when they leave college, to go out and try to change the
world as opposed to conforming to its demands and securing a job that gives
them some hope of paying off their student debts.
As old-time Marxists would say, it is no accident that the
soaring cost of a college education began its precipitous rise during the late
60s and early 70s.
19 comments:
Price of books:
Here I have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Library of Liberal Arts (which no longer exists), bought in 1964 or 1965 (during my freshman year), with the binding stitched (which is hard to find these days): cover price 1.45.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Berkeley Medallion Paperback, a cheaper edition than the above, bought during my last year in high school (1963-64), cover price 60 cents
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Penguin Class, also from my freshman year, cover price 1.45.
Thucycides still exists in Penguin Classics, price in Amazon 8.99.
Prices of books have gone up a lot less than college tuition.
Minor correction to OP. I made the first point on books, not anonymous as the post says. Anonymous then agreed with and expanded upon what I said. (Not that it really matters...)
Re loans: I believe some professional schools have loan forgiveness programs for students who take public-interest-oriented jobs after graduation. Not sure to what extent these exist for undergrads.
The newest fad for these high priced universities is food insecurities. The students actually have food insecurities. Last decade it was inclusiveness, now its food insecurities. So the rich kid from the privileged home goes and pays over well over 50 large a year and they are all teaming up saying they have little food. Being a university president has to be hair pulling these days.
Anonymous:
“The newest fad for these high priced universities is food insecurities. The students actually have food insecurities. Last decade it was inclusiveness, now its food insecurities. So the rich kid from the privileged home goes and pays over well over 50 large a year and they are all teaming up saying they have little food. Being a university president has to be hair pulling these days.”
Food insecurity at a college does not mean that all students there are getting insufficient food. It means that certain students (namely, those from poor or lower middle-class households) are getting insufficient food and need assistance.
So it’s false to say “they [all the college students or many] are all teaming up saying they have little food.” The rich, upper middle-class, and probably middle-class students are doing fine in terms of food.
I can think of many legitimate reasons for criticizing universities and colleges today but providing food assistance to poor or lower middle-class students is not one of them.
And I would not consider this a “fad.” Just consider the extreme, grotesque income and wealth inequality in the USA today; the overwhelming demand at food pantries nationwide, which relates to general food insecurity; the immiseration of the poor and working-class during the pandemic, etc. And see Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ and ‘Capital and Ideology.’
In these times, why on earth would you mock or ridicule those who are not getting enough food to eat and need assistance?
One mechanism underlying the bloat is "speed up". An academic these days has huge demands put on them (that's the singular 'them') to publish. A lot. Much more than the old days. If you do that you recoil with horror at the idea of being department head much less dean (or deanlet). So the administrative class is no longer something that academics rotate in and out of. It becomes a class in itself. With all that that entails.
One approach is to pile up additional costs, some more useless than others. Another is to inquire why students will pay up so much for Ivy League Schools and other elite schools. It's worth a lot of money, they are buying credentials to join the upper and close to upper classes.
It would be instructive to compare what students in Professor Wolff's day did with degrees from these select schools with what they do now.
I'd bet their earning power has gone up perhaps proportionally with the costs.
Simple classical economics
I graduated college in 2018 with a degree in engineering and I remember most required textbooks were $300+. A few of the textbooks would cover two semesters (one textbook for say Organic Chemistry I and II) but I distinctly remember spending $499 on a physics textbook that I used for only one 5 credit hour course.
Pay a lot for college, spend a lot on overpriced books. Have the presidents make high six figures or more and give the professors a comfortable living with possible royalties. Come out with such a financial burden that you are beat down and have to conform? If this is the case University Presidents who make high six figures on down to the comfortable professors should be ashamed of themselves. Higher education is a racket that fleeces the students while they rationalize that they are giving the students knowledge. Just as bad as the insurance or pharmaceutical industry. 499 dollars for one physics book while students go hungry? Who in higher education needs to rebut this to feel better? Probably someone from either the Ivy league or the Phoenix scammers.
Given the complaints expressed above, the common theme is that there is some sort of injustice going on, that the colleges/universities are requiring increasingly higher tuition, and that the payors of that higher tuition are not receiving fair value for their expenditure. For example, even a student who graduates with a fairly good academic record, a B average for example, may go unemployed for months and never land a job related to their major, and today will still be burdened with enormous debt. This circumstance describes an inequity, and it is often said that under the American system of justice, for every injustice there must be a remedy. Which, being an attorney, set me to thinking – is there a remedy in law for what the commenters on this post clearly believe is an injustice? (The first thing that law students are told at their orientation is that the law school is going to teach them to think like a lawyer, something that a lot of people would say is a curse, and the first step in training people to think in unintelligible, long-winded explications that no one else cares about, and some even resent. Sound familiar?)
So, what possible legal remedies could there be? Four come to mind: lawsuits claiming (1) breach of oral or implied contract; (2) promissory estoppel; (3) unjust enrichment; (4) violation of a state’s consumer protection act. The first two would be non-starters – even assuming that the student could prove that the college or university (hereinafter “college”) made some sort of contract with, or promise to the student, the terms of that contract/promise would be difficult to pin down. Where was this contract or promise made; by whom on the part of the college, and what, precisely was promised? There have been such lawsuits, and they have generally been thrown out of court. The college says we never promised anything beyond providing an education, which the student, if s/he put in the work and dedication expected/required, received. There was never any promise or guarantee that s/he would get a job based on the education.
The third legal theory, unjust enrichment, has some more promise. A claim of unjust enrichment alleges that student A paid college B a substantial amount of money, which enriched the college unfairly, because A did not recoup the value of what s/he paid. Here again, however, in the case of most students, the college would simply defend by stating that what you received in exchange for you tuition was an excellent and invaluable education which at least equals, and in most cases exceeds, the monetary consideration you paid for that education. However, I believe there is a category of students who could succeed in making such an argument stick – the student athletes, especially at the schools whose football and basketball games are televised and which reap enormous sums of money for the colleges, for which the student athletes receive not a penny, except, perhaps, an athletic scholarship, but under NCAA rules (which may be changing) they are not allowed to use their celebrity in order to make a profit.
(Continued)
(There is more to this comment, but I refrain from posting it without Prof. Wolff’s express permission.)
I have spent my career (luckily) teaching at 3 Ivy League universities: in my first job, in the late seventies, the ratio of faculty to administrators was 8-1;in my second,in the 90s and early 2000s,it was 4-1; in the job I hold now it is 1-1. There are multiple reasons for the growth of the administration, some legitimate and of value, but the explosion of tuition costs is in large part determined by this bureaucratic metastatizing. Also, university presidents are now paid like corporate CEOs, about which many things could be said, but not least that this explains much of how they understand the role of the university.
The talk of administrative bloat rubs me the wrong way. First of all, as David Y (on the 12/20 post) and other commenters have noted, many of the new administrative positions are the result of the professionalization of a wide range of student services (advising, student affairs, etc). In my experience (at highly ranked public universities, but I think this is a common development across all of higher education), those services are very important to ensuring that a racially and socioeconomically diverse student body successfully navigate a system that is in many ways still set up to serve upper-middle class white students. Those jobs are also overwhelmingly occupied by women and people of color: this part of a university is, in my experience, far more diverse than the faculty.
Honestly, reading these complaints of bloat, while looking at the people who hold these positions and the work they do, it feels like listening to republicans complain about the bloated federal bureaucracy in, say, food stamp administration or something.
(That feels like a cheap shot, so let me add: I don't think this accounts for or justifies the tuition price increases being discussed! I think there are other factors at work that are much less justifiable. I just hate to see the good work being done to help our diverse student body thrown under the bus in these discussions.)
The food chain at a university is basically A few big fish, and the rest minnows. There used to be a middle but with a convenient position name change you can decrease their salary 40%. And sometimes the endowment is used Maddoff-esque. Thank god the markets are doing well, as soon as it tanks a lot of universities will go down too. The students and professors are captive each trying their best with the professors apologetically giving the students the best they have but they are trapped too. Too much theatre, too little advancement.
I'll second David G's comment above. It's also worth noting that public universities are one of the last bastions of unionized employment in the State of California and perhaps this country, and cutting "administrative bloat" would inevitably lead to a reduction in public university staffing across the board - with a corresponding reduction in unionized jobs with the salaries and benefits those jobs entail.
A very long time ago, no, not such a very long time ago; let us just say, at a time when the world was all new to me, and having few fixed ideas of my own -- though it would be going to far to say I had no fixed nature of my own -- whatever was impressed upon me became the mold in which my future impressions were held and hence took shape ...
let's skip the rest of this inexcusable prolegomenon and get to the point at once:
When I was five I had a plastic money bank in which I stuffed all the spare change I could snatch from my father's hat which was always left in a convenient spot. He was in equal measure generous, tolerant and indifferent to the missing penny; so either unknowingly or kindly feigning unawares of the regular pilfering he "let" it go on; so that the hoard grew and grew. And when when they'd have guests visit, sometimes the visitors would spend a minute or two with me, in my childish domain, where then I'd point to that shining gold object (it was a golden plastic mold in the shape of a local bank building!); and they'd say, "What're you going to do with all that money?" And I'd reply, proudly, overflowing with sincerity and self-satisfaction, "It's for my collegeeducation!" They'd beam with that benign supervening beaming elders bestow upon tykes, repeating, "Yes! Your college education!".
Some of these elders were shopkeepers, one was a leather belt-maker; one was a carpenter. Without exception, in my family circle anyway, the shopkeepers, the handymen, the leather-maker, all were veterans of the depression and of the war; they were well-read as any college professor might be; they had not been to college -- that chance they hadn't had, but they never rued it: in their day it'd been a sort of avocation for the Brahmins (and we didn't know any of them). But they were full of ideas and could make the points well and with vim! And on top of that they all had that Jack Benny act in their bones. They could have been his understudies. Their *wives* by the way had been to university.
But back to the point with which I began: that I was to go to college was the natural order of things. And same for all the rest of us in that generation too. Our folks had seen it through: we'd not be "slaves to the business"; we'd have our own writing desks! And maybe a secretary; and paid vacation too! They were slaves to the business; for them a two-week paid vacation would be paradise. But for *that* -- you needed a collegeeducation. They hadn't needed it. No. They were schooled adequately, but by the war, by the depression; by the legacy of their parents who'd taken boats across the sea, leaving behind the evil old-world (every stone of which, if you'd turn it over, you'd find was soaked with blood) and some just in the nick of time too.
A coda to all of this: today a shoe salesman must have a collegeeducation to apply for his position as "sales associate". Most all of those administrative positions the professionalization of which is described above are filled by the newly created "peers" of the baccalaureate. Why is university so much more expensive now than before? My hypothesis: the cost has risen in direct proportion to the rise in demand!
As pointed out by American film director Boots Riley, even Karl Marx had to sell books...
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