The Lake Michigan Social Club
The shore of Lake Michigan is a wonderful place to be in the springtime — if you can afford to be there. (And I’m not talking about the inane brouhaha over beach passes.)
In this morning’s Times, we find a story which is really quite disturbing, and which underscores for me a fundamental point about college which I think gets lost in the debate. I quote:
Alexandra Baldari and her parents have talked a good deal over the past year about how to pay for her college education, and the upshot is this: If she enrolls at the University of Miami in the fall, she will bear much of the cost, which could total $40,000 or more a year, on her own.
“The problem here,” said Ms. Baldari, who lives in Parkland, Fla. “is I’m 18 and looking to go to college, and my parents are looking to retire.”
Ms. Baldari’s parents earn about $100,000 a year, but her mother, Anne Angelopoulos, said little is left after paying for housing, three cars, gas, food and utilities, as well as saving to contribute to Ms. Baldari’s 11-year-old brother’s education. Ms. Baldari’s parents prepaid for her to attend a public university in Florida, but she does not want to go to a public institution. The Florida Prepaid College Program allows parents to lock in the cost of college in the future by paying at today’s prices.
“We did in fact plan for this and anticipate this and have it covered, in our opinion, but she has made a choice,” Ms. Angelopoulos said, adding that the prepaid money could be applied to tuition at a private university but would not cover all of it. She said that while the family was trying to come up with ways to reduce how much their daughter would have to borrow, they did not see how they could take on more debt. “This is where we draw the line.”
More middle- and upper-middle-class parents are drawing similar lines, limiting what they will pay for higher education. While financing has long been a strain, parents seem willing today to pass more of the burden on to their children, financial aid officers say. Many are worried about affording retirement and say their fixed costs eat up their income. Others have not saved enough or are helping pay for care for their aging parents.
This is apiece with the general “conservative” agenda: cutting back on loan programs for middle-class students, lowering the tax burden on the wealthy and thereby reducing federal coffers, and encouraging middle-class families to hold up the economy on their own by taking on more consumer debt.
And, like resonance destroying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, that pressure adds to the bizarre reluctance of higher education institutions, like Northwestern, to do anything to lower the cost of attending the university. Tuition continues to rise at an average of 5 percent, significantly above the rate of inflation, and the university is unwilling to touch any of its enormous endowment to lessen the pain for current and future students. No one can even explain why tuition increases arithmetically, but it’s frustrating to watch new buildings, used by fewer and fewer students all the time, going up and see tuition going up. (An aside: I realize that capital-improvements fund raising is easy and general-fund financing is not, and you can’t mix the two, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.)
In the end the combination of higher cost and lower aid is squeezing out the students who once turned Northwestern from a small institution of wealthy elites into the Midwest’s premier academic institution: the middle class students who arrived in the postwar years. It’s not a new phenomenon — but this article is no less disturbing.
My roommates and I are microcosmic of the situation, as I see it, a question of fortune and parental willingness to help. I’m fortunate enough that my parents can pay for my education without having to go into debt, without having to make significant sacrifices. Gus is fortunate that the university is allowing him to attend at virtually no cost, because otherwise there’s simply no way he could have attended college. And Louis’ parents are willing to do what they can to send both him and his brother to Northwestern.
But over time these impulses will turn private universities from a democratically oriented institution into an elite social club, populated by a large elite class of wealthy students whose parents can afford to pay most or all of the cost of college out of pocket and a small group of the “worthy poor” to whom those elites deign to offer scholarships to attend. (Remember, Northwestern doesn’t offer merit awards, which are often the only salvation of middle-class students priced out of private schools.) This trend should even come to be true at state-financed universities over time, although the number of ‘elites’ would be much larger; the University of Illinois’ total cost of attendance will reach $18,000 next year, which is still a huge sum of money by any definition.
A well-groomed social club with an economic under-class of students receiving free tuition, room and board doesn’t sound like the Northwestern I know, but it sure sounds a lot like the finest British private schools, or like the prewar Ivy League. And it doesn’t sound like any university I’d want to attend.
I don’t have any important policy prescriptions to make, any suggestions for how to remedy it, because it’s a complex situation. Americans should be assuming less consumer debt, their government should be more willing to help them out, and their educational institutions should do everything in their power to hold the line on college tuition, or at least hold it to inflation. And I think it’s reasonable to ask parents to help their children pay for college. (I’m very lucky that my parents have never once suggested that I repay them for any of the cost of college.)
Yes, such a program would require personal sacrifice and probably higher taxes for the families that can pay for tuition out of pocket. But we, as a society, have always believed that education should be available to everyone… and we should do that which is in our power to guarantee that it is preserved.
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