The Plight of America's Public Universities. (November 29, 2005)

     The US magazine Nation was founded in 1865 and may be described as assessing "news and analysis on politics and culture from the left."  Its editor since 1995, Princeton graduate Katrina vanden Heuvel, also writes a blog she calls Editors Cut.

Ms vanden Heuvel opens her November 27 Editors Cut with "There's a crisis in this country in higher education... To pay for the rebuilding costs associated with Hurricane Katrina, House Republicans just last week passed $50 billion in budget cuts, eviscerating student loan programs, Medicaid and food stamps while simultaneously seeking to enact a five-year $57 billion tax break for millionaires and corporations." She continues, "The New York Times recently reported that for the year starting July 2004 inflation increased only slightly, by 2.2 percent, while tuition at public universities rose by 7.1 percent (it increased by 5.9 percent at private colleges.) If you want to send a child to public university in your own state, you'll now pay an average of US$15,566 per year. If your child wants to attend a private college or university, you're looking at an average annual cost of nearly US$32,000. [The estimate includes costs such as room and board in addition to tuition.]
Predictably, the enrollment gap between rich and poor has widened in recent years."

Vanden Heuvel then turns her attention to the quality of the US higher education, "At the same time as costs are rising, the quality of what those costs are paying for is decreasing. Colleges are using part-time professors to teach their classes. Course size is swelling, and a professor at Cornell who wrote a book about rising education costs told the Times, '[universities] are having great difficulty maintaining the quality of the education they provide.'

    "Take Wayne State University, in Detroit. According to Insidehighered.com, the state government cut the school's funding forcing Wayne State to eliminate 200 staff jobs and 'close one college and combine two others to save on administrative costs.'

    "The University's provost told the website 'We literally couldn't pay our bills,' and Wayne State increased tuition by 18.5 percent this year alone because the situation was so desperate. And what's happening at Wayne State is happening nationwide as state colleges are victimized by a federal government which is short-changing education, and state governments which are slashing funding year after year. [According to the Times] 'taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades.'"

Summing up, the Nation's editor writes, "[O]ur nation needs to put a new emphasis on the educational principles that the Washington Monthly identified in its groundbreaking First Annual College Rankings issue published this past September. The magazine said that 'three central criteria' should determine how we judge the success of a college in fulfilling its public mission to the American people.

    "'Universities should be engines of social mobility,' the Monthly wrote, 'they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service.'"