The year is 2007. The scene, a family around the breakfast table on an April morning. Seventeen-year-old Sophie has just been accepted by several of the two dozen colleges to which she applied for admission, a process accomplished entirely at her personal computer through a standardized, on-line system managed by the National Webstation for College Applications.
Earlier this year, using real-time video conferencing, Sophie checked out admissions policies, financial aid, academic and diversity counseling, life-coaching and sexual-preference assistance departments, remedial math and geography programs and spiritual, cybercompetency, and holistic services centers. She visited each virtual campuses via her personal power-goggles, and prepared multiple statistical analyses of the estimated lifetime incomes associated with a variety of possible career and academic program choices.
It's time to decide. In addition to a dizzying array of special services, features, and price discounting, each institution has promised a financial aid package tailored to Sophie's "unmet need" of funds, a deficit approaching, on average, 90 percent for a middle-class family such as her own. Her top-choice college, and astronically priced private, is offering a small outright scholarship, 15 hours a week of work-study, and a long-term, variable-rate jumbo loan. With her parents as cosigners, Sophie would commit to begin repaying the loan, with interest, upon graduation -- which could be just three years away, since most colleges now encourage students to pursue the accelerated, three-year undergraduate degree.
"Honey, are you sure you want to borrow so much? It's going to takeyears to repay $200,000."
"Daaaad! The only way I can get a better sticker-price is to major in
English or history. You know I want to go into cybergenetics!"
In the end, Sophie decides to stick with the sciences, despite the lab and equipment surcharges that most schools have started assessing for these hard-ware She does opt to take most of her core requirements as interactive computer courses, which will reduce her overall cost. Passing on the weekly aromatherapy sessions, life-coaching seminars, and single-sex classrooms offered by some of the private colleges on her list, Sophie decides her first-choice public -- UMass Amherst -- is the school for her. As a state resident, she qualifies for in-state tuition and fees, so her annual cost will come to $40,000 a year rather than the $80,000 she would have paid at Smith or Amherst.
A farfetched scenario? Maybe we won't be wearing personal power-goggles anytime soon, but a marked increase in the cost of attending UMass, or any other college, only ten years from now is not improbable. Our estimates of Sophie's choices were exaggerated to reflect the widespread belief that college costs are rise more dramatically than they actually are. Still, if they continue to climb at the rate they have during the last decade, the price of attending UMass in the year 2007 will be $22,572 a year.
Everywhere there is handwringing over this situation. The press regularly cites increases of more than double the rate of inflation over the past 15 years. Reports of steep tuition hikes -- an average of six per cent this year, according to the latest College Board study -- unnerve parents and the more foresighted of their children. (Massachusetts parents may be especially unnerved, given some of the most expensive private colleges in the country are located in the Commonwealth.)
State universities have not been immune to the soaring-tuition syndrome -- far from it. A recent Time magazine article reported that the cost of a state-university education has "doubled or quadrupled" since 1980. Tuition increases really gained speed in the late `eighties, when the economic recession began to take its toll on state coffers. In a kind of domino-effect, state revenues dropped, state university budgets were dramatically -- traumatically -- reduced, and tuition and fees spurted upward.
The impact on UMass was painful. Paul Page, vice chancellor for administration and finance, recalls a year in the early 1990s marked by a series of unannounced cuts, or, rather, revocations. "We would come in on a Monday morning and look at our computer screens and see that money had been taken out over the weekend," he says.
"Strip-mining," is the word used by Terry Hartle, a vice president of the American Council on Education, for the treatment of the UMass operating budget in the early '90s. Use of state schools as "cash cows" was not uncommon elsewhere during those years, says Hartle, "but the situation in Massachusetts was more dramatic, and the cuts were deeper." Like many research universities, the state university system was forced to eliminate programs, ignore crumbling buildings, and cut faculty and staff. And students and their parents were asked to assume a greater financial burden, as tuition was raised and new charges, such as the tax-like "curriculum fee," were added.
"A university can't just go out of business," Page points out. "Students have started programs, there is the tenure system, union contracts , a whole host of other things that make it difficult to adjust to that dramatic a situation. We cut where we could, but the bottom line is that an increased portion of the costs were being passed on to the students. There's no getting around that."
The debt burdens carried by today's students are a kind of signature of the times. Hefty increases in need-based financial aid for students have helped maintain the education-for-all ideal of public institutions. But they don't really lessen the cost of a college education, since a growing percentage of aid is in the form of loans which must be paid back rather than outright grants, scholarships, or even work-study.
"The majority of students work, and they work a lot, and when they graduate they have debts often in excess of $10,000," says history department chair Bruce Laurie. "They make a great sacrifice to get an education, with work loads and debt burdens that were unimaginable 30 years ago."
Nicolas Lemann, writing in Time , notes that "even if a state-university education pays off richly in the long run, allowing it to go from practically free to expensive changes the bargain between the citizen and the state." Within a spectrum of colleges ranging from practically free to expensive, UMass Amherst has often appeared near the expensive end of average for state schools. It's currently hovering around the $10,000 mark, not out of line with peer institutions. And tuition and fees have held constant for three years, even dropping a bit in 1996.
Admissions director Arlene Cash believes that "the tide has definitely turned at UMass." Citing the recent leveling-off in tuition, Cash also notes that increased numbers of applications and and improved SAT scores and high-school class- rankings among freshmen. This may be the silver lining in the dark cloud of higher tuitions: bright students who would once have attended private schools are now choosing UMass as more affordable.
"The higher costs of college have made parents and students into more savvy consumers," Cash says. "They are a lot more sensitive to the dollar value of what they are buying." More and more students are asking, "How will such and such a degree impact my future earnings?"
Cash says the $12,000 average debt burden at UMass is the lowest among the New England publics, because the institution funds grants and work study at a higher level. Fear of high debt, however, sometimes turns bright students away, and "that is the tragedy," she says. "Sometimes we have to be very careful about how we package a loan and how we talk about it. If your family income is $12,000 a year, a $4,000 loan can seem staggering."
Certain schools have committed themselves to keeping cost increases in line with the rate of inflation, and UMass is one of them. But the university is also committed to increasing scholarship money as a percentage of aid. And that, says financial aid director Burt Batty, "is part of the reason the price tag for UMass Amherst is on the high end of average." Those who can afford more, pay more, so that those who can't afford the full tuition can get help.
Batty goes on to say that "students are investing more heavily in their education through student loans. And there is a willingness to do that because what's the alternative? No education?"
Batty's rhetorical question evokes the metaphorical rhinoceros-in-the-room -- the huge, underlying issue of opportunity denied. "The alternatives in life are so bleak for people who don't graduate from college," says history professor Ron Story, who served as interim academic vice president of the five-campus system. "What will happen to them?"
In discussions about the costs of a college education, hand-wringing is second only to finger-pointing in popularity. But an examination of the subject yields no real culprits or villains.
Are we top-heavy with faculty and administrators? UMass is understaffed by many standards, having lost some 800 faculty and staff during the budget-cutting years. Still, when costs go up, many members of the public assume inefficiency, incompetence, and overstaffing are to blame. Royster Hedgepeth calls this the "fat-cats mentality."
Hedgepeth, the vice chancellor for university advancement, says the cost of running a university has gone up faster than the cost-of living indext partly because universities' needs differ from individuals'. Educators refer to a "Higher Education Price Index," or HEPI, to differentiate it from the the more slowly rising consumer-price-index.
Skyrocketing paper costs or postal increases, for instance, might not affect a family's budget very much. But if you're sending out acceptance or rejection letters to 1000's of applicants, housing assignments to 10,0000 students, or an alumni magazine to 140,000 readers -- well, you get the picture.
And how about those faculty hours? Carol Angus of Five Colleges Inc. says the image of the tenured professor who teaches a few hours a week and has summers off is a "pernicious stereotype." Faculty members at the institutions in the five-college consortium, which includes UMass, Smith, Hampshire, Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke, "are very generous with their time with students, and they prepare for classes, and they work long hours. A lot of that time spent is hard to measure." somebody else needs to be quoted in addition, preferably w/ an impressive estimate of working hours. working hours. working hours. working hours. working hours.
A less obvious source of expense is the increase in student services. Remedial courses and career development offices are two examples cited by Smith College treasurer Ruth Constantine; administrators at both private and public schools say the demand, and real need, for such services appears to be with us for the foreseeable future. But the reality is that the nature of education is changing even for the best-prepared students, and those with the best career prospects. As just one example, students now rely heavily on computers to write papers and do research. Enormous resources are demanded for the physical and human intrastructure to support computer use: fiber-optic cables, software seminars, help-desk staff.
Fortunately, there appears to be help on the way. The UMass administration has committed itself to its first large-scale campaign for private funds, and Chancellor David Scott declares himself "moderately optimistic" that state government will once more invest in its land-grant university. The legislature's recent promise to match some privately raised funds, says the Chancellor, is an indication of renewed attention to the role of public higher education. With two-thirds of all alumni remaining in Massachusetts after graduation -- a much higher proportion than among graduates of the Ivy League schools -- "We have got to be the economic powerhouse for the Commonwealth," Scott says.
For its part, the administration is committed to not only raising money but saving it by streamlining operations. To the academic ear, this may sound suspiciously corporate. But one streamlining effort that should be music to everyone's ears is the effort to cut red tape in such areas as purchasing and human resources. Chancellor Scott, discussing how the university needs to change the way it does business, describes multiple forms, multiple approvals, multiple signatures, and the multiple journeys these forms, approvals, and signatures must make in order to make something happen. "We need to eliminate all those useless signatures, delegate authority, and, especially, assume that people will do things right," he says.
Finally, these administrators say, as we properly ponder the control of costs we must remember to ponder value. Vice Chancellor Hedgepeth says we "have not done enough to talk about the benefits of accessible, public, higher education. We have to restore confidence in the system and focus on that 'margin of excellence' we have at UMass. After all, our mission is a profound one." Chancellor Scott, whimsically but in equal earnest, suggests we mentally divide $10,000 in tuition by 365 days -- and consider the stupendous added value of a UMass education over that many nights' lodging at a budget motel.-Patricia L. Gray
