As a rule, I don’t write “Back in the good old days” posts. Nostalgia doesn’t cloud my memory enough that I forget all the bad things that went on when I was younger. The “good old days” were the bad old days in lots of ways. When I was teaching, I even refrained from shaming my high school students by telling them how much better we were back when I was a boy. I seem to remember the rallying cry of my youth was “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!” Not to mention, “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.” Makes it kinda hard to take the moral high ground over today’s kids.
But here’s one thing that was definitely better back in the day. College tuition. When I went to University of California, I paid in the neighborhood of $50 a semester. California state colleges were about half that, and junior colleges—that’s the name California gave to community colleges—were tuition free. College students had to find a way to take care of room, board, books and miscellaneous expenses, but tuition wasn’t a serious financial consideration.
Which is why the reasonably thoughtful editorial in the Saturday Star, Regents should tighten UA, ASU admissions standards, pissed me off. The editorial said university admission standards should be tightened because graduation rates are too low, which indicates that too many unqualified students are being admitted. That’s a reasonable stance. I don’t entirely agree, but it’s reasonable. But the kicker was an admission by the editorial board that it used to feel differently until tuition went through the roof.
What has changed our thinking about admissions is the high cost of failure. Annual tuition and fees at the UA total about $10,890, up 66 percent from five years ago.
The next paragraph should have explained that tuition isn’t a force of nature that goes up and down like the ebb and flow of the tides, that the legislature, in its never ending battle against publicly funded higher education, keeps cutting funding, so tuition keeps rising. But it didn’t. The next paragraph jumped right back to graduation rates.
The Star’s change of heart plays right into the hands of the conservative agenda: Starve the education beast; complain schools aren’t doing a good job, so they don’t deserve the funding they’re getting; then cut education funding even more because, why should we continue to pay through the nose to support those lousy schools? Rinse and repeat.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2015.
I’m showing my age also but I went to the U of Wisconsin-Madison as an out of state student (agitator) and paid $550/semester tuition. Worked as a bartender my last three years for food and drink and graduated debt-free.
The AZ Constitution mandated tuition to be as close to free as possible.
How quaint. Maybe the legislators should read that document assuming they have the skills.
We have college profs making $100,000+ per year and education should be free, or close to it? Be easier to amend the Constitution than to balance the costs and tuition.
Madison and Berkley. hmmm
David W, I said University of California. I didn’t say Berkeley. In fact, I went to U.C. Riverside when it was a quiet little backwater in a reasonably conservative community. 5,000 students, including the large agricultural department (I spent summers working in the campus orange groves). There may have been Commies and revolutionaries there — that’s what you were implying, right? — but they didn’t run the campus.
No. I threw Berkley out there to see if you would identify the campus. You seem a little touchy about your past. Is there anything else you want to share with us?
My sister worked for the Riverside School District in the 70s. It did seem to be a reasonable community.
Professor salaries are a long way from the thing that costs colleges the most. 100,000 bucks for someone who earned a PhD isn’t unreasonable. At UA, most don’t earn that until they’re in or close to their 60s, except in big money programs like business, law, medicine, and maybe a few others. UA has long been known for losing faculty to other schools who offer more.
Easy loan money is likely the biggest driver of tuition hikes, followed by state reduction in commitment of public money (in the case of public universities).
“Never trust anyone over thirty.” I must have done something wrong; I paid tuition.
I, too, was disappointed in the Star editorial. My first semester tuition at UA for a full load of courses was $146.00. And the top 3/4s of Arizona’s high school graduates were granted admission to Arizona’s 3 universities by law. Then, we had legislators and governors who valued other peoples’ education, not just their own.
The Star appears stuck in a time warp when it was common to graduate from a university in 4 years. Contemporary thinking suggests that if a student does not graduate within 6 six the student and the university has not succeeded. But the fact is, the high cost for students of a higher education today dictates that many students must work and take fewer courses per semester. Graduation rates are higher if an eight year criteria is used. Also, many students move and graduate from another university in another state. That’s not failing! And many students learn enough before graduating to get the job they want and don’t need to graduate. That’s not failing either.
The Star’s recommendation that Arizona’s high school graduates be made to attend a community college when they want to attend a university is wrong, mean spirited and counter productive; if a higher education is valued. If the Star’s advice is followed, Arizona’s universities will become more and more a place for out-of-state students.
I agree, the Star’s editorial was a big disappointment. Thank God Tucson has an alternative newspaper: The Tucson Weekly.
Remember The claim of brain drain to taxpayers & tuition payers
Thanks, David, for covering this important topic. I agree with you that the Star editorial is taking the wrong position. When tuition goes up, it may take students longer to graduate, as other commenters have pointed out: students may have to work more hours to pay the bills and take fewer courses at a time. I have a friend who took 9 years to get her undergraduate degree, while working full time to support herself and pay her tuition. She subsequently got a doctorate in biology, did post-doc work at Yale, and became a college professor. Does the fact that it took her 9 years to complete the B.A. mean that she, or the institution she attended, were failing in any way? I don’t think so.
The fact that some students take longer to complete a degree should not provide an excuse to push lower performing students into community college programs instead of the U of A. Public universities are supposed to perform the function of providing the state with an educated populace — and this has benefits other than economic benefits. Education is not just about “workforce training,” though some would like to make it so.
Here’s an article of interest in The Nation which looks at trends at the U of A and ASU as examples of what happens when you slash funding to public universities:
http://www.thenation.com/article/gentrification-higher-ed/
The situation is no better outside of the land grant universities. Tuition and expenses in private universities have gone up somewhere in the neighborhood of 300% in the last 30 years.
And how is “financial aid” used in these institutions? By-in-large, not to help those who need it most. Here’s an article from Forbes that gives a glimpse of the consulting firms that help universities figure out how to grant tuition “discounts” in such a way that they get the maximum amount of tuition dollars out or their undergrad populations:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/07/30/the-invisible-force-behind-college-admissions/
What exactly is going on here? Would we be wrong to conclude that some parties are very interested in making access to higher education a privilege available only to certain economic classes? Who benefits from the ready availability of a poorly educated labor force that has no better employment options than low-entitlement, low-wage jobs? Or a labor force so overloaded with non-dismissible student loan debt that they are essentially a class of indentured servants for a few decades after they finish their degrees?
Still think profs aren’t making $100,000+? Please take a look:
http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/index.php/page/university_of_arizona_salary_database
40% of the teaching faculty at UA are adjunct faculty.
http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/201…
1/4 of adjunct faculty live below the poverty line.
The real problem is not the students or the faculty, but rather it is the Governor’s and the Legislature’s lack of commitment to public education. It is too bad that the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial did not address this fact.
David W- As can be seen in the database, the profs that make 100k are generally FULL profs, who are normally not the majority of their departments. Additionally, their numbers are few: far fewer than those of associate and assistant profs, and certainly fewer than adjuncts of various sorts and TAs. In most departments, you’re very far along before you hit that salary mark. Like I said earlier, “big money” departments like medicine, law, business and maybe a few others (optics, perhaps?) offer much higher salaries than those in Social Sciences and Humanities. Many loooooongtime profs from my own days at UA still haven’t hit 100k, and these are people with +/-25 years there, or at least since earning their doctorates. No one who pays attention to faculty compensation in higher education would allow themselves to argue that UA profs are overpaid compared to their peers at similar universities across the country.