Chronicle of Higher Education
New York
When Cornell University professors, trustees, and alumni got together last week to consider whether rising costs threaten the notion that higher education can help anyone in America succeed, the event's location offered a taste of irony: It was held at the Cornell Club, an exclusive midtown haunt where you need a membership number just to buy a beer in the wood-paneled lounge near the front door.
Samuel B. Bacharach, a professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, seemed to acknowledge this as he introduced the speakers, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a Cornell economics professor who is an expert on higher education, and David J. Skorton, the university's president.
"We are in a room of privileged ones—all of us," he said. "Cornell has always been about education. But for me, and for many of us in this room, it is about mobility, about making it in American society."
The question of the evening, amid evidence of growing income gaps and class divisions in American society: Will higher-education institutions like Cornell continue to be able to provide the education that allows anyone to move up, regardless of their parents' financial situation?
Mr. Ehrenberg offered an assessment that was mostly bleak. The United States, he said, is no longer the leader in providing degrees for its population, and the parts of the population that are growing most rapidly are traditionally the most underrepresented in college. While Cornell's tuition equaled 28 percent of median family income in 1980, it was 57 percent in 2007, and it will increase next year.
The public subsidizes private colleges by allowing tax breaks on gifts to the institutions and by exempting from property taxes the buildings and land the institutions own. This public investment in private colleges, and the fundamental belief that even private institutions have some responsibility to offer education to every segment of American society, drove the recent Congressional scrutiny of, and pressure on, well-endowed colleges. "Absent continued evidence that the selective privates continue to remain accessible, Congressional pressure is not going to go away," Mr. Ehrenberg said.
But public colleges, which serve two-thirds of all four-year college students, are also increasingly expensive and inaccessible, he said. Tuitions there have increased at the same rate as that of the private institutions—about 3 percent above inflation—and promise to increase even more as declining revenue forces states to lessen their support.
Given those pressures, Mr. Ehrenberg said, "it is questionable whether we will be able to increase the fraction of our population that receives college degrees and to reduce the inequality of college-completion rates."
Fortunately, he said, there is hope. The Obama administration, unlike that of George W. Bush, believes that government spending and investment have significant potential to do good. States and the federal government need to increase their spending on higher education and provide incentives to colleges to enroll more students who qualify for Pell Grants, he said. Colleges, meanwhile, should be more open to accepting transfer students and should take a close look at increasing their efficiency.
He likened the typical college to Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, a beast that gobbles up resources and grows without regard for efficiency. In years past, there were no market pressures on tuition; families strove to buy the best education for their children that they could afford because they realized that an elite college might open more doors than one less esteemed (at the Cornell Club, indeed, a doorman opens the front door for visitors). But the market may be reaching a breaking point, Mr. Ehrenberg said.
Little Light on the Horizon
Dr. Skorton, for his part, dealt with the question of the evening through a discussion of the costs of running Cornell. He acknowledged the widespread perception that higher-education institutions are undisciplined with their budgets and that they are ill-equipped to adjust to an economic environment that will be much more severe, perhaps for years to come. Dr. Skorton said he expected colleges to be in tough financial shape for years, even beyond a time when the economy recovers.
He said colleges should try to figure out ways to improve their productivity, but without cutting employees' salaries or increasing their workload. Technology might be one way to do that.
He also said colleges should do what they can to protect and preserve jobs. Cornell, he noted, is the biggest employer between Albany and Buffalo. "We have to try to manage the university to blunt the effect on the work force," he said. "It is important to look forward to what our state economy should look like when it emerges from the financial mess."
Colleges should also take a more active role in trying to help the country emerge from this quagmire, he said. First, colleges should pursue research that will bring tangible benefits to the economy, through technology transfer and marketable inventions.
Second, more academics should take prominent roles in helping to form public policy. "Universities have abdicated their role to think tanks in the past 20 years," he said. "The leaders at the universities have been relatively silent."
Members of the audience asked questions about Cornell's future amid the economic uncertainty. One alumnus asked whether Ezra Cornell's goal to "found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study" was at odds with an increasingly common strategy in which colleges support their most successful programs and cut the less popular or useful ones.
"This is the toughest question [because] the only way to really save money at a university is to stop doing something," Dr. Skorton said. He said that at Cornell, unlike other universities where he has worked, it was hard to find areas to cut. "The decision to get rid of something at Cornell will be largely based on choosing between two unpleasant alternatives," he said.
But, he said, one cannot continue to reduce support across the board because all the programs suffer. Depending on how long the downturn lasts, he said, he may have to start making those unpleasant decisions.
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