You may not have noticed—not many people off campus did. But with the University of Washington’s proposal late last month to raise undergraduate tuition a staggering 29 percent, it seems that it’s time to trot out an old but necessary rant: In a civilized society, education should be free. Period.
The UW hikes face a tough road in the newly Democratic Legislature down in Olympia. Even with the increase, tuition at the state-funded school would be $4,008 annually by spring 2001—lots more than the 1998-99 cost of $3,108, but still a bargain compared to the $20,000 and up at some of the country’s pricier private universities. So it’s not as if the school’s request is unreasonable in the context of American higher education costs.
Still, the proposal represents the kind of thinking that has come to dominate our approach to higher education in recent decades. We seem to have lost the concept of a broad-based education as an investment in an informed, intelligent, participatory democracy. Instead of training successive generations to appreciate diverse parts of our social and intellectual heritage, to synthesize information, to think in a disciplined fashion—in short, to use the brains our creators gave us—colleges and universities have somehow become trade schools, job-training centers, and finishing schools for the basic reading and math skills many high schools no longer seem to teach very well.
The vision of college as primarily a way to get a better job has a corollary: Make the students pay. After all, they’ll earn the money back eventually. So what does it matter if school is too expensive unless your parents or guardians have been saving since childbirth, are blessed with an awful lot of disposable income, or are willing to co-sign exorbitant student loans?
It does matter, though, because it shuts out a lot of people who might like to go to college—and, more to the point, want to go because they want to learn, not because it will pad a r鳵m鮠This new barrier also comes at a time when an already disastrously low UW minority enrollment is expected to drop due to the passage of I-200. All the private scholarship programs in the world don’t change the fact that public education is an investment valuable enough for the public to make: If somebody can do the work and wants to go, we should send them. Any number of other democracies, especially in Europe, have provided free universities. America, sadly, has been a leader in emphasizing education primarily as a pay-as-you-go way to eventually make money.
As a result, the UW is run very much like a large private business, for which undergraduate students are among the least important income stream. Sure, they can hang around, if they pay their own way (along with debilitating Seattle rents and all other living expenses incurred while studying) and don’t distract the faculty too much from their corporate-funded research grants. It’s easily possible these days to get through a quarter at the UW, as an undergraduate, while being instructed only by graduate teaching assistants (who are themselves exploited by minimal pay for instruction, grading, and research work). The irony of these tuition increases—that they are being justified in order to raise faculty salaries—is that those students rarely see the faculty; the purpose of competitive faculty salaries is to retain high-profile researchers, not teachers.
The undergraduates thus become a lucrative pool of potential future alumni contributors, and they’re great color at the football games. But our treatment of them signals that we no longer view them as young adults needing and deserving a decent education. Neither the cutbacks in liberal arts departments nor the sustained growth of medical and hard science facilities has been a response to the direct needs of students. It’s all about money.
Gary Locke’s budget also contains tuition hikes, and while they’re far less—about 7 percent for undergraduates, and up to 20 percent for some of the graduate and professional schools—they still represent an impulse to make young adults (or any other student) pay more for education. (Tellingly, the UW proposal contains lower increases, of 6 percent to 10 percent, for professional schools.) Given how badly higher ed has been ignored by the Legislature in recent years, and how many demands compete for limited state money, Locke’s proposal may be the best the incoming class can hope for this year.
The problem is less whether money gets allocated to campuses, and more a matter of what’s done when it is—whether the money is going to offset basic education, or to underwrite endless layers of administration or research benefiting private corporations.
Those priorities have to change. A 29 percent tuition hike—when the Legislature isn’t even asking for it—suggests that someone’s got the purpose of universities ass backwards.
Misplace kicking
Speaking of misplaced priorities at the UW, why, exactly, is it legal for a state employee—the UW’s new football coach, Rick Neuheisel— to be paid the staggering sum of $1 million a year, plus perks, all essentially paid from a slush fund composed of department revenues and donations from corporations and other “boosters”? What if some other public employee—someone in, say, Fish & Wildlife—tried to pay his or her salary that way? Or the governor? (Of course, Gary Locke, poor guy, never quarterbacked UCLA in the Rose Bowl.) What’s even more frightening is that on the surface, Neuheisel might be worth it: Football raises an astonishing amount of money. But along with the tuition hikes, as a statement of educational priorities it sends a horrifying message.
