So It Goes

Wrestling With the Growing Cost of Higher Education

AMONG ALL THE DEPRESSING END-OF-THE-DECADE RETROSPECTIVES we've been seeing over the last week or so, the Washington Post today ran a story about the skyrocketing price of a college education -- coupled with a shrinking pool of available sources of financing for the families of college students. The article's headline calls it a "crisis of costs."

Just what I need to hear. As a parent of three kids, who are not yet in college but will be before I know it, I've been watching with dumbfounded awe how the cost of higher education has shot up in recent years. But nothing drove it home better than a chart the Post ran with the story, showing that college tuition, room and board nationwide has gone up more than 120 percent since 1980, as median family income went up only a tick more than 17 percent.

When I hear from those with kids in college that they're re paying roughly $20,000 per student per year at a state-funded university and between $40,000 and $50,000 at a private institution, I simply don't understand how they do it. My neighbor, who has sent two kids to private universities in recent years, has a good line; it's like buying a new Mercedes every year and pushing it over a cliff.

Of course, unlike a wrecked Mercedes, there's a lot of value to mine from a college and graduate school education. And the good news is that I see so many families go through the experience and come out whole -- or not devastated -- on the other side of it. Very heartening.

That's sort of how I used to rationalize riding roller coasters, which, well, are not my thing, to say the least. I would watch all these people, who had just been screaming their brains out, get off at the end of the ride safe and usually smiling. If they could do it, I reasoned, so could I. (But I hated it just the same.) The only problem with that analogy, of course, is that some people actually enjoy the sensation of speeding down a 70-degree incline and doing loops and such. Some like to be scared for the fun of it.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "depressing" when I introduced this post above. There are much worse things in life, and I'm sure we'll get through what will be a worthwhile investment. We will make it work, I'm sure, though I'm not precisely sure how.

But why have things come to this in our country? Why is the cost of an education, one of the most important factors in the success of a person -- and of our nation as a whole -- why is it so much of a reach for even a middle-class family like mine? Why does it seem that only the super rich have comfortable access to what should be available to all? (Why does this sound like the argument health care reform?)

And what about those with far fewer resources? Yes, there are grants and loans, but even many of those are drying up, according to the Post article. States have less money to give to schools than they used to, university endowments and other of their funds for students in need are more scarce and many of the financial products that have historically enabled families to pay for college have been devastated by the recent financial crisis.

Colleges and universities are the lifeblood of American power. It's what powers our innovation, which is what has made American the global leader it is. Just ask any of the many students from around the world who clamor (if they have the money) to enroll in our schools. Just ask some of the emerging-market nations that are trying to improve their own higher education infrastructure. Even many of the Arabian Gulf nations recognize that oil and gas, which have earned them vast riches will take them and their people only so far, and they are building their own Western-style universities to stay up with the U.S. and Europe in the long run. They all want a piece of the magic. They know that it is education -- at all levels that has made us strong.

The question is whether or not we as a nation know that or whether we take it for granted. I'm not going to lavish blame on state legislators and members of Congress for not understanding this. (I don't know enough to know whom to blame.) They do, and there's nothing politically unpopular about giving more money to education. But the dollars aren't always there for them to give.

Why is that? What does that mean for the future of the country? How do we turn that trend around?

Discuss.

Jeff

Just Being a Kid

EARLIER THIS WEEK on the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page, Joseph Epstein, one of America's best and most delightful literary essayists and one of my college writing professors (and, as no loyal former student should fail to mention, the author of a recently published collection of essays called Friendship: An Expose), argues that parents today spend too much time catering to the needs of our kids, who seem too anxious to fill their time to the brim with overly meaningful pursuits.

"I feel a slight sadness when I contemplate their energy, their too-early-in-life resume-building, all devoted to a path of success set out for them by others," he writes. "If they perform well in school, have lots of extracurricular activities, work weekends at homes for battered husbands, they might just have a shot at one of the country's 10 or 12 hot colleges. And once they get there, with more stellar classroom performance, more extracurricular activities, weekend work now with orphaned hummingbirds, the right internship junior year might just turn up. Which can't hurt when it comes to that tricky application to law or business (less nowadays medical) school, after which . . . "

This is a topic that my wife and I discuss often, and we try to calibrate our kids' activities in a way that their lives will not look the way Epstein sketches it above. We've decided that, outside of their regular education, while there are some basics that we want them to get (learn a musical instrument, lots of reading, a sport or something that will get them moving around, Jewish education), we think that breathing room and down time are valuable too, if only to save us from all the driving that goes along with it.

As Epstein points out, that requires real restraint in a culture right now that stresses that successful kids (especially the ambitious middle class variety) should be doing everything. When our oldest was finishing kindergarten, a parent of one of her classmates approached us to see if we wanted to put her on the same soccer team with her daughter and their other friends. "I don't want to press you or anything," she said, "but if you don't get her in now, it will be very hard for her to break into a team later on because these teams tend to stick together for years." And we had to make our minds up in a day or two.

She was probably right about that part about breaking in later. But to hear this woman tell it, this was major step in our daughter's social development, and we didn't want to miss it. The trouble was, our daughter wasn't interested in soccer, so we figured we'd take our chances that sitting out this critical opportunity might not mean the beginning of the end of her soccer career and her ticket to a Rhodes Scholarship or a Nobel Prize.

Okay, I'm being a little smug about it, but we've encountered quite a lot of that attitude out there that says that if you don't have your kids take advantage of every possible special enrichment opportunity, she will, alas, go to a "second-tier" college and eventually live a life of quiet desperation. It's hard not to let this kind of thinking sweep you away, and many people let it drive them -- and their kids, of course -- nuts.

But while some kids also willingly to play that game, some just want to experience what it's like to be kids while they can. Last week, over the morning papers, my 11 year old suddenly said that she was glad she wasn't Freddi Adu, the young phenom for the DC United pro soccer team who was signed three years ago at the age of 14.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because he's missing out on being a kid," she said. Though she's a person of good perspective from whom I come to expect insights like this, it's surprising even from her, a budding soccer player. Would even she not find it a little cool, if beyond her realistic reach, to be living such a glamorous life as Freddi Adu.

But, as Joseph Epstein says and as we all ought to know if we just step off the hamster wheel of life  and think about it, racking up all the trappings of meritocracy (though in Freddie's case, he probably had no where else to play) isn't always a recipe for success and sometimes can lead to a big letdown.

"What I would like to do is to remind them of all the geniuses who didn't do well in school," Epstein writes, "Tolstoy, Henry James, Paul Valery -- and all the other successful men and women whose attendance at merely OK colleges didn't slow them down in the least (Warren Buffet comes to mind), and still others (Bill Gates, for one) who chose to drop out of putatively superior schools (in his case, Harvard) because they were bored midnight blue by what went on in class. But they wouldn't believe me. In their hearts they know that the meritocracy is merciless, and hardest of all on those it would at first seem to favor."

Jeff

Did Good News About Public Education Get Buried?

ON FRIDAY, JULY 14, THE U.S. Department of Education quietly released a report by its National Center for Education Statistics that compared the performance of public schools with that of private schools. The results, generally, were that public school students performed about as well and in some cases better than students of comparable socio-economic or racial backgrounds in private schools, except when it came to eighth grade reading.

Some observers are crying foul, charging that the Department deliberately downplayed the study because it conflicted with the Bush Administration’s general emphasis in favor of private schools at the expense of public schools. They’re saying that when it came time finally to raise some sorely needed confidence in the value of public schools, the Department backed off.

That’s a charge that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings vehemently denies. “I celebrate public schools every single day I am secretary,” NPR quoted her  as saying at a recent news conference. “And we need a lot more of it.” 

If that’s the case, it doesn’t explain why the report was released with no news conference, no media advisory (which alerts reporters that its coming out) on a Friday, which is typically the time when organizations release information hoping it won’t get noticed because everyone’s thinking about the weekend. As a public relations consultant, I can tell you that such a release strategy means only one of two things: they had very bad p.r. advice and didn’t know what they were doing; or they had very good advice and didn’t want to get attention.

It didn’t help that a Departmental spokesman rather smugly described the report as being of “modest utility.”

It’s curious, too, that the Department regained its media relations composure just a few days later when it announced with a full-blown press event and release that the Administration (with concurrent support from Republicans in Congress, such as Representative Howard "Buck" McKeon and Senator Lamar Alexander, pictured left with Spellings at the press event) was renewing its “commitment to helping students achieve who are trapped in under-performing schools by requesting $100 million for the new America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids. Students should not be left behind as schools are in the process of restructuring…. America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids would provide competitive grants to States, school districts, and non-profit organizations, including community and faith-based organizations, for: scholarships for low-income children to attend the private school of their choice or; scholarships to receive intensive, sustained tutoring.”

I’m not a close or regular observer of the Department of Education (though I see its impact in the form of almost daily tests that my kids take as part of No Child Left Behind), so I can’t say whether this is out of the ordinary, just a coincidence of two events out of hundreds each year at the Secretary’s level. It could be bad timing. It could be that the report just got lost in the shuffle of business at the Department, or that the Secretary’s office didn’t understand what it really had in the report.

It could be, too, that the Department’s critics, as some of their critics have charged, were a bit overzealous and maybe self-serving in their attacks. Reg Weaver, President of the National Education Association, the union for public school teachers, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the buried report showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job.” Even I, a strong supporter of public schools, have a hard time buying such a wide-sweeping statement when I can see, plain as day, that not all public schools, as Weaver seems to imply, are doing “an outstanding job.”

On the one hand, I think that much too much can be made of a report that compares aggregate results, which can paper over differences among individual schools. In a statement to NPR, Spellings said something to the effect that, whatever the results of this national study, parents should still look closely at the performance of each individual school. That’s really where the rubber meets the road. I buy that.

But, on the other hand, why, if given an opportunity to give some needed faith in the public schools wouldn’t the publicly funded Department of Education help tout them?

All three of my kids are in public schools, and their experiences so far have been outstanding. We know lots of older kids who have gone through their schools and gone on to top-flight colleges and to successful lives after college. That doesn’t mean that all public schools are good -– they certainly aren’t –- or that public schools are right for every kid -– there are many good reasons why families choose private schools, including trying to avoid bad public schools in their district, so I don't mean to bash those people.

But I’ve heard all too often people bad-mouth the schools my kids go to and other public schools, people who have absolutely no firsthand experience with what goes on in those buildings. I have sensed in my lifetime a steady devaluation of public schools in the minds of most Americans.

Indeed, the Gallup Poll showed last year that while only “37 percent of Americans say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in public education; 39 percent have ‘some’ confidence and 23 percent have ‘very little’ or ‘none’ at all.”

“The last year that even a slight majority of Americans (53 percent) told Gallup they had either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the public schools was 1979,” Gallup added. “Since then, less than 50 percent of Americans have been that confident. The public's confidence level has been relatively stable at around 40 percent since the early 1990s, after being in the mid-to-high 40s during the 1980s.” Even 50 percent seems a weak showing for what is supposedly one of America’s beloved, bedrock civic institutions. Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann would be shocked.

The trouble with declining confidence in the public schools is that is can become -– if it hasn’t already -– a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people turn their backs on the public schools (and, again, I know lots of people with kids in private schools for their own good reasons), the smaller the base of support it has from parents and students (and the per-pupil dollars that follow them) to succeed.

And with incentives like the America's Opportunity Scholarships, there will be, to borrow Ross Perot’s famous image, a great sucking sound of students leaving the public schools. Why not plow that $100 million into public schools?

Jeff