Commentary

College Out of Reach

This past summer I went to my 25th college reunion at the University of Notre Dame. Even though I often go back to see football games, I am still amazed at each visit by how big and lavish the campus has become.

The campus was always beautiful. Visiting my grandparents as a child—my grandfather, a South Bend fireman, lived several blocks from the campus—I would walk among the gothic brick dormitories with their steeply-pitched roofs and their stone decorations, flanked by trees that blazed red and yellow with their autumn foliage. As a student I was always struck at the beauty of the campus during a night snowfalls, with giant clumps of snowflake drifting out of the dark into the lamp light over the sidewalk. The old architecture gave the campus an organic beauty and the feel of permanence.

But now the campus exudes a sense wealth that it once didn't have. The physical size is double from 25 years ago, and so many of the building are new, though, thankfully, with an architecture that settles them in with the older buildings. The student body is also about twice as big. But it's not the increased size that is jarring, it is the obvious wealth of the university. I ate in a dining hall that was Spartan in style, with simple, painted walls and fluorescent lighting; now this dining hall has wood panelling and beautiful lighting fixtures. While before the food was reasonable, it was still only cafeteria food, of a limited selection. Now the food is similar to that found on a restaurant buffet.

Along with these changes, perhaps driving these changes, are an increase in tuition rate and an increase in the threshold for acceptance. At the reunion, one of my old friends remarked that now, not only couldn't he get in with his high-school grades, he wouldn't be able to afford to come even if he could get in. Despite all of its growth and its tuition increases, Notre Dame is still becoming more and more exclusive because of the demand for its education.

Notre Dame's problem is that over the past half-century it has become an elite university, with rising demand not only from the children of alumni, but among the broader international community. This gets to the heart of the high cost of a university education: while the universities have expanded enrollment, they have not expanded enough to meet demand. As a consequence, tuition rises, and the increased revenues go to finer buildings, finer accommodations, higher faculty salaries, and lower teaching loads for the tenured faculty. It is very much the situation that the airlines were in under government regulation in the early 1970s.

As discussed recently by Richard Vedder in National Review,¹ government programs add to this inflationary pressure. Government remedies usually rely on covering the tuition increases through scholarships, grants, and student loans, but these actually make the problem worse by increasing demand without affecting supply.

Universities have two other sources of money: contributions from alumni, and government research grants. The alumni contributions support the funding of tenured faculty and the construction of new buildings. Notre Dame uses football tickets as inducements to contribute; I recently received a contribution form that explicitly reminded me that if I wanted to get football tickets for next year through the alumni lottery, I had to contribute to the university before the end of the year. The research grants support the purchase of equipment, the salaries and tuitions of graduate students, and the salaries of postdoctoral researchers.

The modern university and the federal government are therefore the modern patron of science, replacing the patronage of the kings and princes of centuries ago. At the modern research university, a tenured professor is no longer teacher, but a head of a research teams. He is commonly required to teach only a single semester-long class once a year, and often this class is a graduate-level class. My impression is that research faculty prefer teaching at the graduate student level, which generally means teaching one's own research projects. I recall one Harvard professor telling me she refused to teach undergraduates, because they were not up to her level (“Harvard must have a stupidity quota at the undergraduate level.”).

The structure of the typical research team is to have a tenured or assistant professor lead one or two postdocs and several graduate students. The highest salary in this group is the salary of the professor, which is supported by the university's endowment. The postdocs, who are usually temporary hires, make relatively low salaries supported by research grants. The graduate students make almost nothing, with most of the research money supporting them going for tuition and university overhead.

One consequence of this research structure is that the universities overproduce Ph.D.s. Everyone who has ever applied to a physics assistant professorship has received a letter explaining that the position they applied for has attracted 200 or 300 applications. If a university desired to expand its staff to meet the demand for undergraduate eduation, it would find that the pool of available professors more than adequate to meet that demand. The high price of college tuition is therefore not a consequence of a shortage of Ph.D.s. To understand why university tuition continues to increase, look elsewhere; look to the role of the large endowments at private universities, to the research grants from the federal government, and to the government scholarships and loans for student tuition to understand why market forces are not keeping tuition down.