Even college tuition isn’t immune
College campuses across California and beyond have dutifully closed along with most of the country’s schools and workplaces to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, sending students and faculty home to muddle through the rest of the academic year online. But higher education institutions are conforming to the ivory tower stereotype in another way: by insisting that amid global tumult that is unprecedented in the postwar era, their prices, no matter how exorbitant, remain eternal and sacrosanct.
Many universities have promised to refund a portion of room and board costs, which is the least they can do for students who are no longer living or eating on campus. But despite countless petitions to give students and their families a break amid difficult times and diminished educational experiences, they have also insisted that their tuition is not as negotiable as virtually every other facet of our economy and society in a pandemic.
The more than $17,000 tuition for Stanford’s spring quarter, which began Monday, “remains unchanged,” Provost Persis Drell wrote in an email to students last week, The Chronicle reported. She went on to discuss some of the acute fiscal hardships now facing the university, which has an endowment worth nearly $28 billion.
University of California officials, who have a curious habit of describing their tuition and fees as “mandatory” in most references, have taken much the same position, which is all the more troubling coming from a public institution. The UC regents’ chief concession to these extraordinary circumstances has been to table discussions of tuition.
Some higher education officials have cast aside their putative attachment to unfettered discourse to suggest that the subject of a tuition break isn’t even up for debate. The organizers of one Stanford petition said university officials had been “unwilling to engage with students directly” on the subject. A California State University representative has said not only that no tuition refund is forthcoming but also that the question isn’t “appropriate to discuss.”
These categorical statements have accompanied assertions that the value of the education universities provide is in no way reduced by its being conducted via Zoom or other virtual means. If that were true, which it’s not, it would raise difficult questions indeed, such as why students, alumni and taxpayers are paying for all those fancy buildings.
Granted, universities have bills to pay and already offer tuition breaks to many of their students as a matter of course, and they shouldn’t be forced to add to the swelling ranks of the unemployed through mass layoffs of faculty or staff. But college costs have outpaced inflation by 24% at nonprofit private institutions and 31% at public institutions in just 10 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and higher education debt more than doubled, to over $1.6 trillion, in a similar period. Such trends explain why higher education officials are so quick to reject any reexamination of their going rates.
Congress’ latest stimulus suspended federal student loan interest and payments for six months and included $14 billion in aid to colleges and universities, which one prominent higher education advocate called “woefully inadequate” and “far below what is required to respond to the financial disaster confronting them.” Much the same can be said of the institutions’ own response to the crisis facing their students and families.