This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
It was February, 1970. American involvement in the Vietnam War had changed only incrementally since Richard Nixon won presidential election in part on a platform to end that conflict. This was two years after Columbia University students staged their first occupation of Hamilton Hall, and two years after a 27-year-old Joseph R. Biden Jr. would walk past an active anti-war demonstration at University of Delaware, remarking to his friends, “Look at those assholes.”
Yet in the hallowed hamlet of Cambridge, MA, a peculiar history was beginning in earnest. Interviewed in Harvard’s daily campus newspaper The Crimson, acting dean John T. Dunlop spoke on the faculty’s decision to raise tuition costs for more than two years in a row, the first time this had been done since 1949. Elaborating on the decision, Dunlop explained, “From now on, unless inflation is halted, there’s no choice in the matter but to continue raising tuition.”
Never mind that Harvard University, founded in 1636, had been witness to wildly fluctuating levels of national inflation before. This includes the unwieldy wartime and immediate post-war era of the 1940’s, during which the Federal Reserve instituted the Bretton-Woods Gold Standard to combat inflation, a system that Nixon would end in a series of sweeping financial measures in the early 1970’s. These policies, the “Nixon Shock,” would help instigate America’s most notorious period of double-digit inflation.
Needless to say, the invocation of inflation as an excuse to exploit the working class is an American tradition, one that Dunlop seemed only too eager to utilize in 1970. And while Dunlop’s implication of uselessness in his Crimson statement (a billionaire-endowed institution has “no choice” but to swindle 18-year-olds because of a market force as old as the idea of money itself) is gross, Dunlop is nowhere close to alone in this tactic of “price-trolling.”
Price-Trolling and Sticker Price
This “price-trolling” takes shape in many forms. You’ve probably heard the blithe financial platitude about college tuition that “sticker price” is different from “net price”; that the exorbitant prices of tuition actually aren’t indicative of the price that the “average” family will spend per year. This “real” price factors in scholarships and grants (all students have been eligible for Federal Pell Grants since 1978.) Yet implicit in this “average” calculation is the exclusion of student family income data. While many colleges have certain provisions in place for assisting lower-income students, these “net price” calculations say nothing about how many lower-income students these universities admit. A fascinating article from Forbes (of all places) in 2019 elaborates on this obfuscating tactic, “The average American family income is $57k, but the average family income of Harvard students is $168k…because 15% of Harvard students are from the top 1% of US family income, [Harvard’s] generous aid policy isn’t fully reflected by “Average Cost” numbers.”
Let’s also take a minute to recognize the infuriating misdirection of the “sticker price vs. real price” debate. College tuitions are still rising at astronomical rates. That’s the issue. If I were to borrow money from a friend at incremental increase rates of $10 per day, it wouldn’t particularly matter by day 365 that some complicated investment structure was actually saving some amount of this money. The issue is that I keep asking for more and more with little oversight or justification. Why?
Lazy Rivers and Lazy Logic
This brings us to the second category of college “price-trolling: the “ever-rising operating costs” of college. In a 2019 article titled, “Some colleges cost $95,000 per year, and they’re only getting more expensive. Here’s why,” CNN writer Nicole Goodkind points to a disparity between wage increases and “efficacy” increases. Goodkind cites Gallup research consultant Catharine Hill in the unhinged contention that industries aside from academia have been able to offset “labor costs” (wage increases at single-digit percentage points higher than inflation) through “productivity advances that reduce their reliance on skilled labor — things like AI and robotics.” Hill states, “We pretty much produce higher education the way we used to…there haven’t been efficiency gains to reduce that cost.” I’d love to hear Goodkind and Hill’s analysis of educational costs at the Library of Alexandria after Archimedes developed his ancient Antikythera computer. I’m sure the high-priests had to raise tuition substantially to keep up.
This instance of price-trolling is founded on two basic, faulty assumptions. The first assumption is that our society can’t possibly be bothered to provide higher education for its own people that doesn’t serve the whims of the marketplace (this runs directly antithetical to America’s founders’ understandings of government’s role in higher education, which I’ll explain below.) The second assumption, one grossly implied by Hill, is that these exponential raises in tuition cost are 1 to 1 increases in the salaries of professors. This just isn’t true. A study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that salaries for instructional faculty rose about 9% between 1970 and 2010 when adjusted for inflation. Compare this to the rise in administrative faculty observed at public and private colleges across the nation. At the University of Pennsylvania alone, executive, administrative, and managerial staff have been hired at an extremely higher rate than instructional staff in the last decade.
This “administrative bloat” is commensurate with the evolving competition among public and private universities. Colleges want to attract more students with deeper pockets, increase the size of their endowment, and compete better in annual rankings. This doesn’t mean that competition leads to better experiences for the students. The bells and whistles that colleges are largely spending on (better sports teams and coaches, souped-up facilities, more elaborate study-away programs, rock-climbing walls, lazy rivers) don’t necessarily give students from lower-income families a better chance of climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. They do, however, make the schools more attractive to wealthy families.
Colleges and universities have been ratcheting up tuition costs for decades now. These costs have led to larger endowments and a narrowing of who “gets” to go to college. The rationale behind these increases isn’t some vague, mysterious economic plight of inflation locusts; it’s pure deregulation and greed. Why are colleges getting more expensive? Loosened restrictions on tuition turned higher education into a Wild West oligopoly. That hasn’t stopped the commentariat from coming up with ever-more-creative means of explaining away the problems as anything but ruthless capitalism.
Dynamite in the Quad
I’ve spent some time now researching why college tuition costs have gotten out of control. Funny enough, there’s little debate across the ideological or even partisan spectrum that college tuition has become far too expensive. Nobody seems to argue that tuition for in-state residents at public universities has grown 56% in the last two decades. Nobody seems to argue that, over the last four decades, tuition has risen by 174% at private universities and 159% at public universities (all of this is adjusted for inflation.) Nobody seems to argue that student loan debt has increased 76% since the turn of the century, or that public confidence in higher education has vastly eroded in the last decade. People seem to be very keen on shifting the blame toward anything other than a rarefied oligopoly for the top 1% and a cutthroat system of capitalism for the bottom 99%.
I’ll spoil it for you now, this is why college tuition has increased so disgustingly over the past four decades. This was no accident. For centuries, the prevailing wisdom regarding higher education in this country has tended toward socialism. James Madison, writing in 1822, asserted, “Enlightened patriotism … is now providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.”
This American commitment to an educated populace remained fairly consistent until the middle 1960’s. It was then, during U.C. Berkeley campus protests in response to the Vietnam War, that neoconservative policy on higher education coalesced in earnest. Governor Ronald Reagan ordered an infamous crackdown on U.C. campus protests in 1970. During a press conference a week before the California gubernatorial election that year, Reagan’s education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke plainly on the governor’s actions, leaving little to the imagination. “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective about who we allow to go through higher education.”
If this feels like a familiar tale in our current chapter of American history, let me validate those feelings. As is the basis for most history in the mid-20th Century, vast investments and advancements in infrastructure, education, and labor movements brought more prosperity than at any point in human civilization. These “advancements” also devastated the environment and further destabilized the colonized world (most scientists mark the Anthropocene as circa 1950.) They also unintentionally created a generation of inquisitive students raised on mass-media, willing to question the system that provided them with food and shelter. Founding Father James Madison would doubtlessly have been confused by many of the social movements that erupted across the United States in the 1960’s. Regardless, the social “turmoil” that was produced was undoubtedly the result of Madison’s ideal society, in which an educated populace would vociferously question the legitimacy and laws of the powerful.
Our Greedy President
And as is the case with so much of the legacy of the 1960’s, Ronald Reagan’s neoconservativism encapsulated the death knell of this American ideal. As Governor of California in 1967, Reagan grumbled in response to criticism of his unprecedented decision to make California residents pay for in-state tuition in the U.C. system. Ever the financial guru, Reagan reasoned that the new cost of college would be “accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation…“
Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States. While his administration was busy ignoring the AIDS epidemic and destabilizing Central and South America, Reagan’s new Secretary of Education, William J. Bennett, was busy “price-trolling.” Bennett proposed in a 1987 op-ed in the New York Times that the skyrocketing costs of college were actually due to federal assistance. Surprisingly aptly-titled “Our Greedy Colleges,” Bennett quite cleverly spun academia into a tweed version of Reagan’s “welfare queen,” claiming that financial aid was encouraging colleges to increasingly off-set the costs of college by anticipating what students would be able to spend alongside federal assistance.
Like all high falutin ReaganSpeak, Bennett’s assertion is cloaked in some airs of truth. There’s no doubt that increased federal assistance allowed higher education institutions an excuse to raise tuition costs. What Bennett conveniently leaves out of his philippic is that federal grants cover fractional amounts of tuition compared to student loans, an industry which itself rose to prominence in direct response to Ronald Reagan’s defunding practices as governor of California in the 1960’s and as president in the 1980’s.
Still, Bennett’s “own the libs, blame the government” reasoning became successfully ingrained in the national consciousness. It stayed relevant years after Bennett’s tenure as Education Secretary, and even after his 2005 remark that aborting exclusively Black fetuses would lower the national crime rate. “Our Greedy Colleges” has become a de-facto piety about the “complexities” of rising tuition costs in the United States, so much so that liberal thought-purveyor Vox and neofascist think tank the Heritage Foundation discuss it with equal measures of respect.
Twilight of the University?
All of this disgusting language is used to launder brutal, exploitative policies through “rationale.” There is no rationale behind the staggering costs of higher education in this country other than greed. Chris Hayes (of all people) outlines this quite brilliantly in his book “The Twilight of the Elites.” In Hayes’s view, the “Principle of Difference” overwhelms the coveted American ideal of social mobility.
In American higher education, this is on full display. Universities want more money, Americans have been successfully indoctrinated to attend them out of fear that a lack of degree is equal to poverty, and thus costs raise in perpetuity without any meaningful oversight at the federal level. It’s important to note that, in the context of American capitalism, there is nothing “wrong” here. This is the system working exactly as it should, bullying the working class, selectively offering the ladder of economic stability to those who can afford it, and keeping a populace either uneducated or saddled with crippling amounts of debt.
It’s not going to last forever. There’s evidence to suggest that, amidst the rise of online learning’s affordability and accessibility, at least part of the system is already collapsing. This news comes to me with some bittersweet overtones. I loved college. I loved the people I met there, the education I received there, and the life I fostered there. I couldn’t imagine so thoroughly enjoying the transition between adolescence and adulthood any other way.
But I have no illusions about my ability to experience college. Even for me, whose background was relatively privileged, acceptance into and affording college was no cakewalk. And in the decade since I was accepted, raises in average national tuition costs have caused my younger siblings and parents anxieties that truly make me furious. I wrote this article hoping to vent. Using the vocabulary I helped accrue at an extremely expensive university, I’ve successfully vented.
In my attempt to find some kind of rebuttal to Bennett’s pigheaded reasoning, I found Thomas L. Wayburn’s amusing essay “A Litany of American Myths.” The paper is in response to a lecture that Bennett gave in 1989 titled “Why Western Civilization,” in which Bennett encouraged academia return to a consensus on the exceptionalism of “the classical and Jewish-Christian heritage.” I suppose Bennett’s not interested in Christianity’s history of reluctance in accepting Judaism, never mind tens of millions of indigenous people as well. Wayburn’s specific chapter on academia included a terrific tirade on the moral failings of higher education in America. Universities have foregone educating our youth in search of money and prestige, which Wayburn asserts are “different aspects of the same thing.”
I think about our country’s expensive universities with its sports teams, dining halls, giant endowments tied to apartheid states, lazy rivers, rock-climbing walls, huge research facilities, and billionaire-founded trade schools. All of this money and prestige I saw at my university, and yet I can’t recall a single time I found any of it educational. And then I think on everything I loved about college: the small classrooms that have so successfully evaded Catharine Hill’s coveted efficacy gains, the air of student activism that a future president met with disdain, and the professors who gently encouraged my fellow students and I to question our inherited beliefs just a bit further.
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” James Madison wrote in 1822. I have college to thank for so much of my knowledge, even if, someday soon, we must use that knowledge to govern the ignorance of a system that’s made college untenable for our people.
So, why are colleges getting more expensive? Leave a comment below!
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