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Letters On Pragmatic Hope

Debt Burden is Unnecessary

Written by

dkeller

I recently stumbled across an article announcing a large increase in applications to Wesleyan for this coming academic year (“After Selective Year, Univ. Expects Increased Diversity, Science Interest in Class of 2013,” Apr. 3, 2009, Vol. CXLV, No. 12). This news made me quite happy, especially considering the difficulties facing similar institutions. I hope that it marks the beginning of a trend and Wesleyan continues to appeal to more and more high school seniors.

However, considering the source of Williams’ and other liberal arts universities’ problems, I could not help feeling somewhat troubled. The cost of higher education in the United States is simply out of control. Tuition and mandatory fees at Wesleyan in 2008-2009, one of the most expensive schools in the nation, are $48,570 for frosh and sophomores. For an entire undergraduate education, the cost is roughly $200,000. In most other countries, higher education (even at elite private schools) costs far less.

The result of the immense financial burden imposed by American higher education is that many students who cannot afford to pay their full way end up saddled with large debts when they graduate. It may be difficult or impossible to pay back these loans with the kind of jobs many starry-eyed recent graduates would love to take – teaching or working for NGOs, to name a few. Ironically, a system designed to prevent limiting students’ choices for financial reasons often simply postpones these limits until after graduation. At my commencement last year, Barack Obama made a call for us as Americans to begin serving the greater community. He implored us to be teachers, public defenders, community organizers. It is an honorable request. But the reality is that many simply cannot follow our president’s call, no matter how much they would like to do so.

As a university and as a country, we must change this system. Wesleyan, for its part, can further reduce loans as a percentage of its financial aid packages. The government, for its part, can improve and expand debt forgiveness programs for students who go into public service.

Comments

5 responses to “Debt Burden is Unnecessary”

  1. David Lott, '65 Avatar
    David Lott, ’65

    Mr. Stern:

    Someone is going have to pay these costs.

    If the students are further subsidized, then the subsidy money must come from government or charities. Wesleyan is struggling financially, as are federal and state governments. Governments will have to borrow to pay these costs. For the present Wesleyan can’t afford it.

    If you want to call for this benefit, you can’t act as if it is free. You make no attempt to justify why government should further subsidize private education when it has difficulty paying for the public schools. In short, if you wanted a cheaper education, you could have gone to a public university. There are lots of good ones.

    You also betray considerable ignorance when you say that education costs less in other countries, even at “elite private schools.” There are virtually no private universities, “elite” or otherwise, outside the United States. The high cost, high prestige private university is an American phenomenon.

    Life is full of choices. Wesleyan and similar institutions have chosen to use their market power to raise costs at double the rate of inflation for decades. Students chose to go to these schools knowing what the cost is, and that they may have to borrow.

    Maybe Wesleyan would do its graduates a favor by trying to remove the stars from their eyes as part of their education.

    By the way, President Obama famously did not mention military service as an opportunity for public service when he was at Wesleyan. You can serve in the military and be paid reasonably well. If you play your cards even halfway right, they will pay for a good part of your education. A lot of students in less “elite” public universities understand this opportunity and use it to lower the cost of their education to n ear zero.

    Reply
  2. Ralph Stern '08 Avatar
    Ralph Stern ’08

    I find your attempt to personalize this argument a bit disturbing. My call was actually not for myself, as I am lucky enough to have very little debt. My call was more a consequence of noticing the steep drop in the quality of American education for most students.

    Do you really think there are no elite private institutions in other countries? In my current home, France, I can name several. They are not universities, per se, as the educational system here is different. U.S. universities do not educate the entire world, and it is pretty surprising to see a Wesleyan graduate who would think so. The ignorance on this issue is yours, my friend. Just because they cost less does not make them public.

    How to pay for it? Simple. Eliminate agricultural subsidies and replace them with educational spending. Eliminate government support for “private” lenders and offer a combination of grants and more attractive loans to students who need them. Currently, we subsidize plenty of things that are not worth it. Why don’t we spend the money instead on education?

    Reply
  3. David Lott, '65 Avatar
    David Lott, ’65

    Since you can name several private French “universities,” please do so. I don’t think you know what you are talking about. The government in France pays for higher education.

    Now, as to your idea of eliminating “unnecessary” debt burden of student loans by eliminating agricultural subsidies: You have been in France too long. The chance of ending agricultural subsidies in this country is absolutely zero. Your suggesting is completely impractical.

    Your idea of eliminating government support for private lenders and substituting grants and “more attractive loans” achieves nothing. Grants have to be funded. Loans are still loans whether they are “more attractive” or not. If you think that “more attractive” means they need not be paid back, they cease to be loans, and you have to find funding for the cost.

    The notion of substituting public for private grants and loans also is not a plan for payment of the costs you want to incur. The cost is the same regardless of whether the payment for it is public or private. You are just shifting the source of payment, not finding a way to fund the cost.

    You also evade my basic point. If people in this country want an “elite” school, they should be willing to pay for it, either out of pocket, over time by borrowing or scholarships (which are really a form of earned but nontaxable income to the recipient.) But why should the government and the taxpayer be further subsidizing the inflated costs of Harvard, Williams, Wesleyan and the like when public institutions provide good education and need more funding? This is an issue of morality and fairness that you completely ignore.

    I never even hinted that U.S. Universities educate the entire world. You made that up, apparently because you find it easier to refute a foolish statement that was never made than to come up with an ethical justification or practical financial solution for your idea.

    Reply
  4. David Lott, '65 Avatar
    David Lott, ’65

    Mr. Stern: Here is a 2006 New York Times article on the French university system. One reporter’s view to be sure, but it’s not an uncommon view:

    May 12, 2006
    Higher Learning in France Clings to Its Old Ways

    By ELAINE SCIOLINO
    NANTERRE, France — There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no student-run newspaper, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.

    The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only 30 of the library’s 100 computers have Internet access.

    The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many have no office. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day the campus is largely empty.

    Sandwiched between a prison and an unemployment office just outside Paris, the university here is neither the best nor the worst place to study in this fairly wealthy country. Rather, it reflects the crisis of France’s archaic state-owned university system: overcrowded, underfinanced, disorganized and resistant to the changes demanded by the outside world.

    “In the United States, your university system is one of the drivers of American prosperity,” said Claude Allègre, a former education minister who tried without success to reform French universities. “But here, we simply don’t invest enough. Universities are poor. They’re not a priority either for the state or the private sector. If we don’t reverse this trend, we will kill the new generation.”

    It was student discontent on campuses across France that fired up the recent protests against a law that would have made it easier for employers to dismiss young workers. College students were driven by fear that their education was worth little and that after graduation they would not find jobs.

    The protests closed or disrupted a majority of France’s universities for weeks, labor unions declared solidarity and eventually the government was forced to withdraw the law.

    “Universities are factories,” said Christine le Forestier, 24, a 2005 graduate of Nanterre with a master’s degree who has not found a stable job. “They are machines to turn out thousands and thousands of students who have learned all about theory but nothing practical. A diploma is worth nothing in the real world.”

    The problems stem in part from the student revolts of May 1968, which grew out of an unexceptional event at Nanterre the year before. One March evening, male students protesting the sexual segregation of the dormitories occupied the women’s dormitory and were evicted by the police.

    A year later, Nanterre students protesting the war in Vietnam occupied the administration building, the first such action by students at a French university. The student revolt spread, turning into a mass movement aimed at transforming the authoritarian, elitist French system of governance. Ultimately 10 million workers left their jobs in a strike that came close to forcing de Gaulle from power.

    One result was that the country’s university system guaranteed a free — or almost free — college education to every high school graduate who passed the baccalauréat exam. University enrollment soared. The value of a bachelor’s degree plummeted.

    But the state failed to invest much in buildings, facilities and professors’ salaries to make the system work. Today the French government allocates about $8,500 a year to each university student, about 40 percent less than what it invests in each high school student.

    Most students are required to attend the universities closest to their high schools. Although certain universities excel in specific fields of study, the course offerings in, say, history or literature are generally the same throughout the country.

    Compounding the problem, France is caught between its official promotion of the republican notion of equality and its commitment to the nurturing of an elite cadre of future leaders and entrepreneurs.

    Only 4 percent of French students make it into the most competitive French universities — the public “grandes écoles.” But the grandes écoles, along with a swath of semiprivate preparatory schools, absorb 30 percent of the public budget.

    They are well-organized, well-equipped, overwhelmingly white and upper middle class, and infused with the certainty that their graduates will take the best jobs in government and the private sector. Students are even paid to attend.

    The practice in the United States of private endowments providing a large chunk of college budgets is seen as strange in France. Tuition is about $250 a year, hardly a sufficient source of income for colleges.

    But asking the French to pay more of their way in college seems out of the question. When the government proposed a reform in 2003 to streamline curriculums and budgets by allowing each university more flexibility and independence, students and professors rebelled.

    They saw the initiative as a step toward privatization of higher education that they feared would lead to higher fees and threaten the universal right of high school graduates to a college education. The government backed down.

    At Nanterre, Alexandre Frydlender, 19, a second-year student in law and history, complained about the lack of courses in English for students of international law. But asked whether he would be willing to pay a higher fee for better services, he replied: “The university is a public service. The state must pay.”

    A poster that hangs throughout the campus halls echoed that sentiment: “To study is a right, not a privilege.”

    Professors lack the standing and the salaries of the private sector. A starting instructor can earn less than $20,000 a year; the most senior professor in France earns about $75,000 a year. Research among the faculty is not a priority.

    Because students generally are required to attend the university closest to home, most do not live on campus.

    At Nanterre, for example, there are only 1,050 dormitory rooms and a long waiting list. The amenities are few. Twenty-two students share three toilets, three showers and a small kitchen furnished with only a sink and a few electric burners.

    “There’s no place where students can hang out, no place to play cards or to watch a movie,” said Jean Giraud, 20, a second-year law student who lives in one of the dorms. “People come for class and then go home.”

    While students are ready to protest against something they dislike, there is little sense of belonging or pride in one’s surroundings. During the recent protests over the contested labor law, that attitude of alienation contributed to the destruction of property, even computers and books, at some universities.

    The protests also were the latest warning to the French government and private corporations that the university system needs fixing. Officials, entrepreneurs, professors and students alike agree that too many students are stuck in majors like sociology or psychology that make it difficult to move into a different career in a stratified society like France, given the country’s troubled economy.

    The fear of joblessness has led many young people in different directions. Students who have the money are increasingly turning to foreign universities or private specialized schools in France, especially for graduate school. And more young people are seeking a security-for-life job with a government agency.

    In a speech at the Sorbonne in late April after the labor law was rescinded, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin pledged “a new pact between the university and the French people.”

    Mr. de Villepin, a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, the grandest of the grandes écoles, promised more money and more flexibility, saying that as in the United States, a student with a master’s degree in philosophy should be able to become a financial analyst.

    When a student asked him to explain how he proposed to do that, Mr. de Villepin had no concrete answer. Instead he talked about the “happiness of the dog that leaves its kennel.”

    But flexibility is not at all the tradition in France, where students are put on fixed career tracks at an early age.

    “We are caught in a world of limits where there’s no such thing as the self-made man,” said Claire de la Vigne, a graduate of Nanterre who is now doing graduate work at the much more prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. “We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible. Our guide is fear.”

    Reply
  5. Ralph Stern '08 Avatar
    Ralph Stern ’08

    Mr. Lott-

    First, a tip (not intended in a hostile manner): links are your friend, no need to post the full article.

    A “University” in France is not the only form of higher education. I did not want to go into the details, but since you pressed me, here they are.

    Students go to high school then choose one of two routes if they want to continue their education: a public university or 2-year preparatory classes which are required for entry into what are called “Grandes Ecoles” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles). Preparatory classes and the “Grandes Ecoles” are frequently, though not universally, private. The institution I currently attend – ESSEC – has an undergraduate program, multiple masters’ programs, a PhD program, and several MBA programs. All of these programs are private – and the total cost for most of them is less than one year at Wesleyan. Other schools include Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, and Ecole Polytechnique.

    And here’s an economic argument for you. Sure, individuals gain plenty from going to an elite school. But society does as well. Having an educated voting public and technological progress (especially in medicine) lead to tremendous social gains. One example: did Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb only benefit him? Clearly not. Everyone benefits from being able to light their homes and utility companies and manufacturers make truckloads of revenue from it. Not to mention the taxes they pay, which benefit the federal government (and hopefully us, too, if they spend wisely).

    Also, your only response to my suggestion for funding is simply to say it is a “transfer” of the source of costs. Well, this is not entirely true. If we eliminate the profits private lenders skim off the top, that cuts the total costs of supporting higher education. If the government offers more grants as a result, the benefits are obvious. If they loans with lower interest, students end up paying back less money for the same principal. Also, I’m sure it is politically possible to eliminate some wasteful spending and put it to better use, even if agricultural subsidies were a poor example. Finally, the increase in future economic growth from increased human capital would increase future tax revenue, and help to offset the current costs.

    Your point about public universities, however, is a good one. My one caveat: not all public universities are created equal. Without a good public school to attend in-state, students would still have to pay dramatically higher out-of-state tuition costs.

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