How to Make College Better and Cheaper
Cultivating non-college alternatives and returning universities' primary focus to academics should raise the quality of higher education, while lowering its cost
It’s the second week of February, which means flower shops and chocolate aisles are teeming with procrastinating spouses and paramours, rushing to fulfill their Valentine’s obligations. Less amorously inclined individuals, taking a cue from Punxsutawney Phil, have followed the world’s most famous rodent back into hibernation until at least mid-March, dismayed at the little guy’s glimpse of his own shadow on Groundhog’s Day and the six more weeks of winter that it portends.
Also, half the country is depressed over the result over the recently concluded, ferocious battle. Not the election, the Super Bowl. (Oh, who am I kidding—everyone outside Kansas City and Swift Nation is happy).
And college students are in their second, or so, week of their second semester, and they and, typically, their parents have just paid their second installment of the year for their tuition, room and board. Parents, for their part, are contemplating the fact that, just as their kids start to take a smaller bite out of the family budget at Christmas, they take a much larger bite before and after, when their school bills arrive.
And the good old days, when student loans plus grants and scholarships plus, possibly, a work study could cover the cost of college, are far behind us. As I discovered in a story I covered as a reporter last decade, students’ anticipated out-of-pocket costs are now built into universities’ price tags. Their designated share is known as the “Expected Family Contribution” (EFC), and it’s factored into the formulas that schools use to determine their costs.
Of course, there’s more to consider about the cost of college than its ultimate price. There’s also the question of value, what enrollees get for their money. Some schools provide lavish accommodations and other premium enticements that gloss up the exorbitant packages that they offer to students.
However, one of the primary purposes of these inducements is to justify university sticker prices. This raises the question of whether these perks are necessary to provide students with the best possible educational product.
What constitutes an optimal higher education depends on the point of higher education. Higher education does lots of things. It supplies training for specialized fields. It gives individuals in their late teens an environment in which to enter adulthood while learning and learning about themselves.
Less honorably, its outrageous cost shackles hordes of young people to chronic debt, many for the better part of their lives. And it further ingrains classism into society, along with other forms of division, as college degrees become admission tickets into certain professional and social worlds that are barred to those who lack them.
These realities point to other questions that we should be asking about higher education. For instance, is it always the most effective method of providing training for specialized positions? And is it the only constructive, transitional opportunity we can offer those kids who–like oodles of us before them–are more comfortable entering adulthood with training wheels on? And how can we limit its cost so that people aren’t stuck with student loan payments for the rest of their lives?
Promotion of alternative pathways
In seeking to optimize higher education, the first point to acknowledge is that it shouldn’t be mass-marketed to everyone. For certain fields, it isn’t the most straight-line route to entry. Individuals seeking to get into these professions could also obtain the requisite knowledge and skills through vocational training or apprenticeships.
Federal and state policymakers should create new vocational education and apprenticeship programs and expand existing ones. They should also foster the creation of private organizations that provide the same kinds of programs by making such organizations eligible for grant funding and tax-deductible status. Further, folks who are part of these programs should have the same eligibility for student loans, grants and scholarships as their college-bound peers.
Moreover, programs such as Americorps and the Peace Corps should be expanded, and new service programs should be created. Policymakers should also support the creation of private service programs by increasing their eligibility for grants and other public funding.
Meanwhile, participants in federal service programs should be able to apply for the same grants that are available to higher education students and be able to use that money to boost their stipends. Participants should also be able to get service-learning credits toward a degree if they are already a higher education student or if they decide to enroll after their service.
The expansion of these programs will provide people with an array of alternate pathways, aside from higher education, that they can follow and still reach their goals at their own pace. This will lessen the demand for higher education and make universities compete with these other programs for applicants and funding, both of which should help drop college’s price.
Now, promoting non-college options for high school graduates is directly counter to the public policy thrust of recent years. A large number of Democrats–who, until recently, held the White House and the Senate–seek to make college both free and universally available. Other blue-team proposals don’t go that far but are still focused on widening access to higher education.
Expanding access to higher education should be a priority, as should expanding access to vocational training and service opportunities. Because optimal education policy isn’t to increase college admissions totals just for the sake of doing so, but to help young people and others find the pathways that will be the most helpful to them in reaching their desired destinations. That may or may not direct them toward higher education.
Cost reduction
Another obvious way to improve higher education is to make it cheaper. As indicated, the promotion of alternative pathways can be a key strategy in helping hold down costs.
Forcing schools to compete for applicants and dollars with enhanced alternative programs should exert downward pressure on costs in a couple of ways. First, it should decelerate the obscenely lavish facilities and amenities build-up that began on American campuses in the early 21st century, which has been analogized to an “arms race” between universities. Second, the imperative to reduce costs to compete with programs that offer less expensive and less extended career routes will force schools to pare down to the essentials of academics, which will guide staffing decisions and result in decreased bloat.
Stopping the arms race
We should concede that, in earlier eras, competition for students actually led to rising educational costs, as schools tried to one-up each other in building extravagant facilities. However, this trend also priced out a lot of potential students. In fact, despite the ongoing push to expand access, American university enrollment actually declined by three million between 2012 and 2022, and two-thirds of that drop happened before Covid.
Simultaneously, as part of the drive to widen access, colleges have had more federal funds at their disposal. From 2008 to 2015, yearly, inflation-adjusted per student spending (including student aid, grants and federal contracts given to universities) rose 23% to almost $9,100, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Department of Education. And in 2018 alone, U.S. universities amassed over a trillion dollars between public and private funding, according to the Treasury Department’s Data Lab.
Staring at a dwindling pool of applicants and awash with funds–but with no imperative to contain costs–universities began to use construction as a recruitment strategy, vastly expanding their facilities and amenities in what has been compared to an “arms race.” Dorms were renovated or remodeled with posh accommodations, like high-resolution TVs. College cafeterias started to offer catered-quality cuisine, and campuses added other fine dining venues. Student athletic complexes were upgraded to the point where they were suitable for professional sports teams. And schools constructed theme park-like amenities, like lazy rivers and water slides and installed other premium attractions, like movie theaters, bowling alleys, rock walls and giant hot tubs.
Because competition for students is partly responsible for causing the explosion in higher education costs, it’s fair to ask how promoting alternative pathways, such as technical training and apprenticeships, would lead to lower costs. Because the net effect would be that universities would face even more competition.
But, universities are competing to give students the “full college experience,” usually including a full-time class schedule, on-campus residency, a 14 - 21 meal-per-week meal plan and near-daily recreational and social events. In contrast, stronger vocational training and apprenticeship programs would offer more direct pathways to a career, bypassing the scenic route provided by the “full college experience.”
Competition from these programs would force universities to apply a laser-like focus on the actual educational product that they offer and cut frills in the process, which would reduce their price tags. Colleges would have to put a premium on education, as there would be lower cost alternatives that could get people into the fields they want to enter faster.
And if purely market-based approaches aren’t enough to keep schools from wasting money building fun-lands and play palaces, their federal funding could be tied to spending a set percentage of funds on academics. Or a spending-on-academics threshold could just be legally mandated.
Eliminating bloat
Moving learning and instruction to the core of university life will also force schools to reduce bloat, which is one of the primary drivers of runaway higher education costs, as modern college administrations have practically transformed into administrative states. Between 1990 and 2012, the ratio of administrators per faculty and staff dropped from 3.5:1 to 2.2:1 at U.S. colleges and universities, representing a 64% increase in administrators, according to a 2017 study from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. In the 2020 - 21 school year, Yale actually had 8% more administrators and managers (5,066) than undergraduates (4,703), a figure that was slightly skewed by the pandemic, but still wasn’t far from the university’s 2019 numbers of over 5,000 administrators and managers and about 5,900 undergraduates.
Refocusing schools on academics should naturally result in them shedding bloat. As schools return to being heliocentric universes with academics at the center, they will have to prioritize those staff positions that most pertain to academics, making other posts primed for reductions.
Schools could slice off even more fat by prioritizing courses of study that actually lead students toward careers. Scaling back on programs with less real-world utility would reduce swollen departments.
Now, jokes about Liberal Arts degrees, Art History majors and underwater basket weaving classes have been around for years, and they obviously portray an exaggerated stereotype. Still, universities charge students lots of money to provide lots of academic offerings, lots of which are pretty limited in terms of their direct career prospects.
Society validates this approach because of the widely shared belief that having a college degree in anything is better than not having one. And, in the context of current earning power, it’s difficult to dispute that. According to a February 2023 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, college graduates between 22 and 27, who are employed full-time, make an average of $17,680 more per year ($52,000) than non-college graduates ($34,320) in the same age range with the same employment status. College graduates also make an average of $822,000 more over their lifetimes.
Underneath the top-line numbers, though, there are enormous differences in average earnings between different fields. College graduates between 22 and 27, who are working full-time and have degrees in Family and Consumer Sciences ($37,000), Social Services ($37,000) and Psychology ($37,400) barely make more than their non-college counterparts.
These figures cast doubt on the notion that any college degree is better than none. Because low-earning college graduates may have something else that their non-college counterparts don’t: oceans of student loan debt that they will be drowning in for the rest of their lives.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that academic programs that yield a low return on salary or have high rates of underemployment should be axed, but just that schools, in order to bring down costs, should seek to trim bloat wherever it exists. And, from administrations to academic departments, the place to find bloat is in areas that aren’t producing for students.
Policymakers could nudge schools to shed bloat in several ways. Universities’ federal funding could be linked to having high ratios of students to administrators and faculty to administrators. Meeting these thresholds could also be required by law. And if these steps still don’t sufficiently reduce the cost of higher education, student costs could simply be hard-capped.
Budget reduction steps shouldn’t be treated lightly. “Cutting bloat” translates to “people losing their jobs.” That’s always a difficult situation, and employees who are displaced as a result of university reorganizations should receive transition assistance.
The need to cut also has to be balanced against the need to maintain schools’ vitality. Besides being major employers, universities are a magnet for economic development. College towns and surrounding communities are also particularly attractive to many alumni and others who settle in the area because they want to be part of a vibrant university community.
However, making universities put education first, second and third won’t make college towns any less desirable for development. In fact, it’s likely to make them even more appealing, as schools begin to churn out students that are even more coveted by employers, which should lure more businesses to town.
Portions of this post have been adapted from my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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