April 12, 2010
Numbers Game
By Iain Crawford, University of Delaware
Having quoted Harriet Martineau’s somewhat gloomy prognosis for Harvard College in the mid-1830s last week, let me begin this week’s post with a more positive vision from Cambridge. We have, after all, come a long way from a time when a woman with Martineau’s extraordinary gifts had no access to institutions of higher education, and a fine example of how much things have changed is to be found in Harvard’s 2007 appointment of its first female president. In her installation address that October, Drew Gilpin Faust offered a moving definition of just how important education has been to America’s ongoing process of national self-definition:
From the time of its founding, the United States has tied its national identity to the power of education. We have long turned to education to prepare our citizens for the political equality fundamental to our national self-definition. In 1779, for example, Thomas Jefferson called for a national aristocracy of talent, chosen “without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance” and “rendered by liberal education ... able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow-citizens.” As our economy has become more complex, more tied to specialized knowledge, education has become more crucial to social and economic mobility. W.E.B. DuBois observed in 1903 that “Education and work are the levers to lift up a people.” Education makes the promise of America possible.*
The past half century offers abundant evidence to support these claims. Think, for example, of the enormous broadening of access to higher education that the G.I. Bill gave to millions of Americans after World War II, the expansion of the community college system and the educational access it has given to non-traditional populations, or the opening up of elite colleges first to select women and later to students from a wider range of economic classes and ethnic groups. Our progress as a society, as President Faust suggested, has indeed historically been mirrored in and furthered by the diversification of educational opportunity and its growing availability to ever wider segments of the population.
More recently, however, that access has come under threat, especially among those high-quality residential institutions that serve a traditional population of students aged 18 to 22, that have been the bastions of liberal learning within American higher education, but that also are the most expensive kind of institutions for students to attend. This year, the nominal cost of attendance at Dr. Faust’s university stands at $51,850 and, while that is certainly at the higher end of the scale, total annual costs of between $45,000 and $50,000 are by no means unusual among the institutions in top 100 liberal arts colleges and private master’s universities. Take even the lower end of that range, extrapolate modest 4% annual increases and, by 2020, many of these same institutions will be approaching $70,000 a year.
Now, to be sure, sticker price and the actual burden upon students and their families are two very different things, and nostalgic yearning for the days when that benchmark figure was a mere $30,000 or even $35,000 is unlikely to be productive. So too, there’s much to be applauded in the Obama administration’s recent leadership for changes in the Pell grants and the student loan system. But the rub remains: though we appear to be emerging from the worst of the recession, that recession has fundamentally changed the American economic equation. According to the Wall Street Journal, American families lost $11 trillion in 2008, or 18% of their net worth and, as many of us know ruefully, much of that loss has come from the decline in home values. While retirement funds have come back a lot, what hasn’t returned are house prices and the pool of home equity they created and upon which so many families depended to pay for college -- in the year immediately before the financial collapse, something on the order of 36% of the cost of higher education was paid for through borrowing. Moreover, anyone who has bought a house in the last year, has likely felt the national tightening up of credit at the very personal level of learning how much harder it has become to get a mortgage.
If family wealth has been so diminished and the ability to borrow for education thus reduced, where does that leave families, and where will it leave those high-cost institutions that have been at the forefront of innovative practice in American higher education? To be sure, there will always be those families for whom cost is not an issue, but what of those on the margins, those whose social identities make any access to higher education difficult and for whom liberal learning may seem especially distant? As we come out of the recession, then, how much of our capacity to, in President Faust’s words, “make the dream of America possible” will we retain, and what will be lost if that capacity is diminished? It is indeed a numbers game, and so much more.
Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.
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