At their September 2014 meeting, the Regents of the University of California voted to award pay increases by as much as 20% to administrators at Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Merced, and Riverside. In addition, they set the new UC Irvine chancellor’s salary at $485,000. A short few months later, the UC Regents announced a plan to increase tuition on students by 5% each year for the next 5 years due to insufficient funds.
Predictably, these contradictory moves did not sit well with students. In November 2014, at the UC Regents meeting where they would vote on the proposal, the Regents were met with protesters from across the UC system in the culmination of a week-long series of rallies. Despite opposition from state officials on the board, including Governor Brown, Lieutenant Governor Newsom, and Speaker Atkins, the proposal passed with flying colors. Tuition was set to increase for all UC students for each of the following five years.
This narrative is not unique – Even as the value of a bachelor’s degree decreases, the costs of getting one continue to increase. Tuition has been rising in public universities and institutions of higher education all around the country.
There’s an age-old anecdote that describes how a frog placed in boiling water will leap out, but a frog placed in water that is then slowly heated will gradually be boiled alive. Tuition increases have operated under a similar system, with incremental hikes occurring consistently but sparingly and in such a way that, by the time the next major tuition hike rolls around, the students who dealt with the previous one have either already graduated or are about to. These incremental tuition hikes can create the illusion of a “sustainability plan” in the short term, but when examining tuition increases in the long term and observing how student fees at many universities have literally tripled since 2000, it becomes clear that universities are effectively putting a lid on the proverbial boiling frog pot.
Even as tuition continues to rise, many student aid programs are being cut. The Pell Grant, the most coveted federal student aid grant, has fallen from covering around 77 percent of the average annual cost of college in 1980 to about 36 percent today. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have pushed for budget plans that would eliminate guaranteed funding of the grants. The grants have not adjusted to inflation over the years and are subject to policies that further lower qualifying family income levels.
Adding tuition and subtracting aid creates a logical yet quintessentially disastrous solution: more students taking out loans to pay for college. Total student loan debt has passed a trillion dollars, leading many to name it the next major economic crisis. An entire generation of young achievers is drowning in the debt accumulated to get the degrees needed to qualify for even entry-level jobs, leaving them weighed down and with limited opportunities and capacities to fully engage in the market. The housing market has already felt the impacts of this as the young people generally most prone to buy new houses are often no longer able to. The inability of an entire age bracket to fully engage in the economy will have disastrous implications for the future of the country.
At each compounding level, the situation seems to be growing worse. The only source of reassurance would be if colleges and universities were rapidly adapting to the changing climate of student fees and growing more frugal, accordingly. This does not necessarily appear to be the case.
Across university systems, it is difficult to find truly groundbreaking efforts to cut costs, lift the burden of higher education off of students’ wallets, and bequeath it once more upon the state. Criticism of university spending often draws attention to administrative salaries. The average college president makes more than $400,000 these days, a number that is steadily increasing. Administrative salaries have come under special criticism as it becomes more apparent that the highest positions are often primarily political. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Former Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, now the President of the UC System and the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively, could not more clearly demonstrate this.
Cutting salaries of the highest-ranking officials in universities alone will not solve the tuition crisis. However, it would be a brilliant first step, and it would look much better for these already political institutions than if they continue this parade of inflating administrative salaries while simultaneously claiming to not have sufficient funds to keep tuition affordable. In order to truly prevent college affordability from developing into the next major economic crisis, states must be more willing to fund public education and universities must spend more efficiently.
At the University of California, after months of student protests and lobbying visits to legislative offices, Governor Brown ultimately released a budget that kept tuition frozen for in-state students. However, the plan allows an 8% annual increase in fees for nonresident students and calls for tuition hikes for all students once again in two years. Students nationwide are fighting tuition increases, and many of them are succeeding, but in order to stop the water from boiling altogether, long-term solutions must be developed. From acquiring more state funds by fixing corporate property tax loopholes such as California’s Proposition 13 to adopting Scandinavian or German systems of higher education funding, many viable options exist. Students can no longer work their way through college as current lawmakers once could. Higher education has evolved over the decades from being a public good to a private commodity for the wealthy, and unless that changes, an entire generation will be trapped, frogs in a pot.
This post was edited by LinkedIn Campus Editor Dahlia Peterson.
Rigel Robinson is Vice President of Membership at Cal Berkeley Democrats. Follow him on Twitter: @rigelrobinson.
Rigel Robinson is Vice President of Membership at Cal Berkeley Democrats. Follow him on Twitter: @rigelrobinson.
THE AUTHOR: Tom Eakin is the author of Finding Success and the Success Engineer at BoomLife. He's the cultural expert who who helps leaders and business owners who are serious about engaging key stakeholders (like employees and customers) to create opportunities for innovation, growth, and profits so they can close the gap between their cultural dream and reality.