Reforming schools Starving the Beast
The cost of attending a public university in the United States has risen dramatically during the past few decades, leaving new graduates saddled with an average of more than $35,000 in debt before they ever hit the workforce. University administrators and regents frame this as a budget issue, with the cost of educating each student constantly increasing, forcing institutions to charge more in tuition and fees. Critics, including the media, politicians, and even students and faculty, tend to blame it on bloated administrative salaries and poor resource management.
“Everybody knows there’s a tuition problem, and everybody knows there’s a debt problem, but what people don’t get into very much is how this happened in the first place,” filmmaker Steve Mims told Pasatiempo. Mims is the director of Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt and Reform America’s Universities, opening at Violet Crown Cinema on Friday, Sept. 23. Bill Banowsky, owner of Violet Crown and founder of Magnolia Pictures, served as producer.
In 1980, an average of 60 percent of a public university’s budget came from state government. Now that percentage is about 12. Starving the Beast shows that this is a direct result of public policy implemented by politicians who do not want taxpayers funding education. Tuition has gone up because of a core philosophical conflict between those who consider education to be an investment in the public good — an idea established by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln — and those who believe, as many pundits in the film do, that education is a commodity no different from a house or a car.
“It’s a total flip-flop from where we started in this country, historically,” Mims said. “The idea behind public research universities was to invest in citizens who would repay their debt by becoming educated, contributing members of society. Now the idea is that students are customers and their degrees have market value.”
“The issues in the documentary are really broader than higher education — it’s about the role of government in society,” said Banowsky. “For close to 200 years, public higher educahas tion been available to everyone, regardless of economic class. The biggest effects of this crisis will be on the average person, who will no longer have access to the same level of education as the wealthy.” Through interviews with policy makers, univerand sity administrators faculty, and such pundits as James Carville and Jeff Sandefer (of the Acton School of Business), Starving the Beast looks at how state legislatures, politicians, and lobbyists have altered operations at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Virginia, the University of New Orleans, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Wisconsin. The movie lays out a tremendous amount of information about hidden tax hikes, manipulative trustees, challenges to classroom instruction, attacks on tenure, changes to accreditation, and student financial aid solutions from free-market-oriented think tanks. No easy answers are provided.
Though Mims and Banowsky believe personally in the value of public higher education, the documentary is not an advocacy piece for that particular view, because they also recognize that the public university system is in need of repair. Banowsky’s father was a president of two universities, so he understands this world from the inside out. “We were very purposeful about not taking a side in this, and to let some very smart people from both sides of this issue express their views about it. However you see the issues, we hope that you can see valid points that support your view in the film,” he said.
Many critics of public higher education interviewed in Starving the Beast are fundamentally troubled by the nature of the typical college experience. “A lot
of professors see themselves as change agents for young people,” says Jay Schalin of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “They feel that it’s their job to rip them out of the ideas they developed through family, church, local community, their high school ... and introduce them to a different way of thinking. And very often that way of thinking is somewhat to the left. This is not what education is for.”
The liberal arts and humanities have long been the target of reformers like Schalin, who do not see the value in paying for esoteric or potentially biased fields of study that mostly involve reading. Now, however, research budgets are being targeted as well. American universities have been at the forefront of medical and agricultural innovation since World War II, but much of the discovery takes years in the lab and is not cost-effective in the short term. Free-market advocates would prefer such research be privatized within industries or relegated to private colleges and universities with large endowments, like Stanford and Harvard. But if research budgets are stripped from public university teaching budgets, then only the people who can get into and pay for such toptier schools will be able to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math — the same STEM fields that politicians and educators consider so important to the future of the American economy. One of the main concepts addressed in Starving the
Beast is how free-market advocates embrace “disruptive innovation” as a cure for the higher-education funding crisis. In the film, Wallace Hall, a regent at the University of Texas who would prefer to start the system over from scratch, describes this as forcing public higher education to compete in the free market whether it wants to or not. In other words, the universities must fix their problems, or the market will do it for them.
“There is inefficiency built into the mission of universities,” said Banowsky. “Our film is not trying to suggest that these reformers need to go away, but we challenge people to take a closer look at radical reform measures like disruptive innovation. What we
found is that disruptive innovation is not a sustainable business idea — it’s more of a sound bite that people deploy all over the place when they want to come in and do something different. That’s when I say, ‘hit the pause button.’ ”
The “disruptive” ideas presented in the documentary include changing the way colleges and universities are accredited in order to widen the playing field for which institutions are eligible for federal financial aid, potentially opening the door for places like churches and private businesses to offer bachelor’s degrees. Another idea, “income-sharing agreements,” would allow private businesses or individuals to invest in a student’s education so that instead of repaying the money as a loan, the recipient would tithe back a fixed percentage of their salary for a period of up to 30 years. There would be no way to break this contract, not even through bankruptcy or inability to work.
“This is a federal law that’s being proposed by Marco Rubio,” said Banowsky. “They’re trying to turn financial aid into an equity arrangement instead of a debt. It’s a good deal for investors. They can invest $250,000 in your engineering degree, and for the next 30 years they’re going to get 15 percent of your income. They come out way ahead. It’s an astounding idea. It’s indentured servitude.”
“We’re talking about the diminishment of public universities, which have always acknowledged that people with no money could be rocket scientists,” said Mims. “If you take all the money out of public universities, then you’re saying that people who want to get that kind of education need to go to private schools. Our mission is to get the public briefed on a situation they probably don’t know about so they can take action after seeing it. We tried as best we could to boil it down to the primary concerns that anyone who went to a public university, or hopes to send their children to a public university, should be aware of.”
“Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt and Reform America’s Universities” opens Friday, Sept. 23, at Violet Crown Cinema (1606 Alcaldesa St., 505-216-5678). For showtimes, see Page 53.
Tuition has gone up because of a core philosophical conflict between those who consider education to be an investment in the public good — an idea established by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln — and those who believe, as many pundits in the film do, that education is a commodity no different from a house or a car.