Survival Through Reinvention : Higher education: Top-to-bottom rethink needed

The door to higher education is slamming shut, and nowhere more loudly than in California. Many college graduates now in the work force had their education paid for by Mom and Dad. Others recall working their way through college and imagine that this option remains alive for today’s younger generation. But for many, that option is dead: The shortfall is simply too great to be made up.

Nationwide, the cost of a public four-year degree rose 1.5% from 1963 to 1970, actually declined 0.8% from 1970 to 1980 and rose 39.9% from 1980 to 1989. What fiftysomethings, forty-some-things and even some thirty-somethings had to pay is peanuts by today’s standards. And that 39.9% public-college increase balloons to 59.5% for private colleges.

If part-time work can’t close the gap, what about loans? The “CAL-Loan” program soon to come to the floor of the state Senate will help some Californians to stay in school. It deserves passage. But loans are not a long-run answer: Someone without means who borrows the full cost of an advanced degree will graduate with a Ph.D. and a “degree mortgage” the size of a home mortgage. And scholarship aid as practiced by many private schools has reached its limits. “Need-blind” admissions are increasingly a thing of the past.

Because education is so often a local or, at most, a state story, the closing of the higher-education door has not reverberated nationally as it might have. California’s problems are not unique. But California’s are at least uniquely acute. Last January, the California State University raised its fees 35%; the University of California raised its fees 36.7%. And the end is not remotely in sight.

What can be done? There can be no single solution, but the time is clearly past when the only answers were more tax support, higher tuition, bigger loans, more scholarships or more outside work. Looking at the problem this way takes higher education--with all its unexamined folkways as well as its genuine achievements--as a given and asks only how money can be raised.

Among the questions that must now be asked: Must research expenses grow so much faster than teaching expenses? Must administrative expenses rise so much faster than either? Can technology be used to increase productivity? And, not least important, why is productivity, as a concept, anathema to so many academic planners?

With a few welcome exceptions, higher education has not asked these questions of itself. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, education, in the coming year or two, will suddenly be seen as too important to be left to the educators.