If your children’s college tuition has gone up this year, blame
business. The administration and congressional Republicans are attacking
higher education to avoid providing that sector more money, and business,
which benefits from a strong educational system, isn’t doing
anything about it.
That may sound harsh, but hear me out. For companies, higher education
contributes to innovation, technological pre-eminence and job and
income growth — just what the U.S. economy and business need.
However, colleges and universities find themselves under assault after
the steepest jump in tuition at public institutions in three decades.
The College Board says the 14-percent increase over the previous year
reflects the need by schools to make up for recession-caused state
funding cuts and the long-term erosion of overall support.
All of this has left the public seething and looking for someone to
blame.
The price increases couldn’t come at a worse time. Congress
is working to renew the Higher Education Act, which provides more
than $60 billion in federal loans and grants to students. The deep
federal deficits make boosting federal aid problematic, and that has
made Hill Republicans and the White House even edgier about political
fallout from this year’s sticker shock as they head into next
year’s elections.
To deflect blame, the Republicans are taking the offensive. A House
panel recently issued a report lambasting institutions for making
higher education unaffordable, and Rep. Howard “Buck”
McKeon (Calif.) has introduced legislation that would impose price
controls by withholding federal money from schools that raise tuition
and fees much faster than inflation. More ominously, the White House
is weighing seriously mounting its own attack on public colleges and
universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that
President Bush wants to blame them for the high costs and for not
providing a quality education.
As Tom Macon, chairman of Grantham University, one of the nation’s
largest online schools, put it, “The reauthorization of the
Higher Ed Act is being politicized.” That’s the worst
way to make policy and deal thoughtfully with higher education’s
needs and problems.
Who can end these games? Given their tight ties with the Republicans,
business leaders are the only group that can tell the White House
and its congressional allies to stop demagoguing the issue and develop
serious solutions.
Will they do that? It’s questionable. Corporate America traditionally
has defined its interests narrowly. “The attitude of business
leaders is that [higher education] isn’t our issue,” an
observer of the business-and-higher-education relationship told me.
That’s a shortsighted view. “Whether you’re talking
about old economy, new economy or something in between, for decades
we’ve depended on a consistent flow of educated people to move
forward,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic
Policy Institute. “One of the great inputs into our economy
is college-educated workers.”
Bernstein said the data demonstrate that higher education contributes
to business’s well-being. Over the past 25 years, the share
of college-educated workers has doubled from 15 to 30 percent. Their
typical unemployment rate has been in the 1- to 2-percent range. “That
shows how our economy absorbs these workers and how critical they
are to our productivity and technological gain,” he said.
Moreover, labor economists have found that workers generally get a
7-percent increase in income for each additional year of schooling
they have beyond high school. “This obviously provides a huge
boost to consumption and to growth,” Bernstein said.
College and university presidents are partly to blame for the pickle
they’re in. “We come in contact with the business world
on policy issues, but there’s not an established linkage,”
said a university lobbyist. But it’s the insular business outlook
that’s worse. Said an observer, “Business hasn’t
made the translation yet about the direct impact downstream that an
administration attack on higher education could mean for it.”
Washington’s power constellation puts the responsibility on
business to be the voice of reason.
“The pressure of the ‘free-lunch bunch’ to reduce
the public commitment to higher education is destructive of helping
people move ahead,” warned John “Til” Hazel, a highly
respected Virginia business leader who has led the fight to adequately
fund his state’s colleges and universities.
Until business leaders push for adequate resources, they will indeed
share the blame for the higher-education mess.
Bruce Freed can be reached at BFFreed@att.net.
He also does commentary for Public Radio International’s Marketplace.
