The Manichean Paranoia Patch

Wow, it’s been over a month since I posted in this thing. I have been extremely busy month- mostly with school and being Student Government President at my college. Which leads me to my next post. I was quoted in the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday on October 23rd, 2007. They interviewed me on Monday and I had a very enjoyable 20 minute conversation with Holly Hacker, the woman who wrote the article. I actually met Ms. Hacker on a plane coming back from a UTSSAC meeting and she overheard Ana (my VP) and I talking about some school policies and introduced herself. Then, a month later, I received an email from her, randomly, asking me to call her back if I had time to give input on a story she was writing. Very cool.

DMN is the local paper in my area so it was pretty exciting for me. You can read the article here. The article was about tuition increases in Texas and how rapid their increases have been since tuition deregulation. Texas went from being one of the cheapest states for higher education to being the 19th most expensive in only a few decades. You can read the article for more info on the what, but I want to give some of my analysis on the “why.” The following is the text of an article I wrote for one of the campus newspapers, A Modest Proposal, explaining my thoughts about the tuition issue as it relates to our school:

American culture is filled with contradictions. Often the values that we hold most dear are in active opposition to one another. Two ideas that are fundamental to the American identity are that of meritocracy and equality. We believe that rewards should reflect effort and ability, that the best and brightest should be fostered and promoted to the highest levels of society so that they can use their talents to achieve the greatest good. At the same time, we believe that everyone deserves an equal chance to succeed, regardless of background, race, gender, or even ability. In practice, however, it is often difficult to achieve both these laudable goals at the same time.
This battle is at the very heart of the difficulties involved in school tuition. On a fundamental level there are always two choices that a college can make: it can reduce prices and therefore services to try to boost enrollment numbers or it can increase the quality of the education and prices to target a smaller population of more talented students.
Now there are clearly some qualifications in this statement which ought to be explored. First, higher costs don’t necessarily equate to a superior education. Certainly nobody will deny that efficiency and money allocation plays a huge role in monetary effectiveness.
However, efficiency can only carry you so far. Nobel Prize winners cost more to attract than Ph. D. students, expensive laboratories that are necessary for advanced research and advanced researchers cost quite a pretty penny and the new buildings that are so appealing to prospective students and parents aren’t cheap. All efficiency issues aside, the more money a university takes in, the more it can spend on improving itself. Period.
The second big qualification is the subtle implication that talented students ought to be higher income students, since higher costs result in higher quality students. This is certainly not necessarily the case. However, think about it in terms of scholarships.
UT Dallas gives out hundreds of scholarships at varying levels. This talent-based financial break serves to attract the high-SAT-score, National Merit Scholarship-winning, top-ten-percent-of-their-class toting students that the school is so proud of citing.
The importance of these students is twofold. First, they are the most likely students to go out and become famous or wealthy alumni that will give back generously to their ol’ alma mater later in life.
Secondly, these students will build the reputation of the university as a prestigious place to get an education, thus attracting more students in the future. Unfortunately, the cost of attracting these students often falls on everybody else. The more scholarships you give out, the more everyone else must pay in order to subsidize the discount.
From the university’s perspective, this is clearly a wise investment because the payoffs more than outweigh the costs. From the student perspective… it depends on where you stand. However, in meetings with the Provost, I have heard that even from a strictly financial standpoint, scholarship students more than pay themselves off when you consider the long-run returns.
So do colleges support the meritocracy or the egalitarian aspects of American society? Clearly the answer is a little bit of both. In their struggle to remain affordable, college and government officials alike continue to worry that an expensive education is an under-utilized education. Surely public education should remain open to the public and not just to upper-middle class families.
Anyone who is paying attention knows that there’s a lot in the works on this campus: a new NSM building, the new Residents Hall and dining facility, new degree plans, the Confucian Institute, and the Campus Beautification Project are just a few of up-and-coming improvements to this campus. However, with approximately 50% of our students receiving some form of need-based financial aid, nobody – student and administrator alike – is insensitive to the cost of these improvements.
In the last twenty-five years, Texas has gone from one of the cheapest states to receive a higher education to the 19th most expensive. In the last few years, state funding for the UT system academic campuses has continued to drop steadily.
Tuition deregulation hasn’t helped keep costs down. Transferring the tuition-setting authority from the legislature to the individual schools under the authority of the Board of Regents has resulted in faster tuition increases than before.
This is especially true at the higher quality institutions such as UT Austin and UT Dallas where it seems that the price-increasing competition over high quality faculty and high quality students has overwhelmed the price-cutting competition for maintaining enrollment rates. Indeed, as long as enrollment growth remains steady, there is little incentive for these universities to lower tuition.
It might sound like I am blasting these schools or arguing against tuition deregulation, but this is not the case. I can’t speak for UT Austin, but I think there’s a good argument that the rising cost of attendance at UT Dallas is a natural, even inevitable process as our school continues to pump out new buildings and nationally-recognized faculty.
I have confidence that a degree from UTD is only going to appreciate in value as this school continues to build its national reputation for excellence.
I do think, however, that the legislature needs to do more than they are now to ensure that the cost of these improvements doesn’t come directly out of the pocketbook of the student. More funding towards education is absolutely essential to make sure that everyone can take advantage of these exciting improvements.
In the attempt to weigh the excellence of a meritocracy with the opportunity of equality, there may not be one right answer. However, the more money colleges receive from the state and federal governments, the easier it will be to find a balance that can please everyone.