UNIVERSITIES: MORE GREEDY CORPORATIONS

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ANDREW DELBANCO IN NY TIMES -In "Sicko,"Michael Moore's film
about greed and collusion in the American health-care system,
he lists the price of college among the great injustices of
American life. The comment comes in a voice-over that almost
seems a teaser for Moore's next movie - in which, perhaps,
we'll find him with his trademark bullhorn standing outside
some lavish college president's house, demanding to know why
students carry mountains of debt while the prez gets driven
around in a luxe limo.

Whatever the merits of Moore's films, his analogy between
medicine and education is not a bad one. Health care has
become an inescapable political issue because most Americans
are angry that it costs so much, while at least some
Americans think it's wrong that only the relatively rich can
count on getting the best of it. The same inequities are
evident in higher education, and public concern,
if not yet an outcry,is on the rise.

For many parents, the cost of college casts a long shadow
before and beyond the time their child actually spends in
college. With financial aid lagging behind tuition at
private institutions and state subsidies declining at
public ones, it gets harder every year for low-income
students to pay their way. Like hospitals, colleges have
generally got the benefit of the doubt on the question of
why they cost so much, and many people still regard them
as selfless institutions above and beyond the self-serving
rules of the marketplace. But their reputation for probity
and virtue is deteriorating fast.

It's happening at every rung of the academic ladder. A few
months ago, the board chairman at Roger Williams University
resigned after using the "N" word at a board meeting. Not
long before, the president of Eastern Michigan University
was fired for covering up the rape and murder of a student,
and more recently, a review panel sharply criticized the
senior administrators at Virginia Tech over their handling
of the shooting rampage on campus. Last April, the admissions
dean at M.I.T., known for counseling students to avoid
padding their résumés, resigned when it turned out she never
attended the schools from which she claimed to hold degrees.

As for the faculty, once portrayed affectionately in fiction
and film as bumbling bookworms, today's professors are more
likely to be seen as jet-setting self-promoters. And students
don't fare much better. Think of Tom Wolfe's college novel,
"I Am Charlotte Simmons," in which students have their mouths
fastened perpetually to the spigot of a beer keg except when
taking a break to have sex. Some seem capable of doing both
simultaneously. Of course, such images of campus life amount
to something between satire and slander, but they do expose
a problem with the standing of higher education in the public
mind - even as the struggle for admission to selective
colleges  gets more ferocious everyyear. It all suggests an
unhealthy mixture of desire and distrust.

Last December. . . Senator Charles Grassley, then the
Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, convened
hearings on whether colleges were turning their tax advantages
into perks for their supporters and themselves. Grassley was
prompted in part by "The Price of Admission," an indignant
book by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Golden, which
charged that big donors to private colleges are, in effect,
buying slots for their children by giving gifts that are
tax-deductible for the giver and tax-free for the recipient.

The larger question on the senators' minds was whether private
colleges and universities are abusing the public trust. After
all, they pay no taxes on tuition revenue or on the income
from their endowments, of which Harvard boasts the largest -
$35 billion, which has lately been earning around $5 billion
a year. In order to keep their tax-exempt status, other
nonprofit institutions (charitable foundations, for example)
are required to give away a hefty percentage of their money.
Hospitals are required to care for indigent patients. But what,
exactly, are colleges doing to justify their public subsidies?

College presidents, naturally, are armed with answers. They
point out that America's colleges and universities are the
best in the world,in large part because of the uniquely
American partnership between public financing and private
philanthropy. Universities create jobs, develop new
therapies and technologies and train America's young people
for the modern knowledge economy. All this is true. But
comparable claims could be made for a pharmaceutical company.
What makes the modern university different from any other
corporation?

There is more and more reason to think: less and less. Driven
by big science and global competition, our top universities
compete for "market share" and "brand-name positioning,"
employ teams of consultants and lobbyists and furnish their
campuses with luxuries in order to attract paying "customers"
- a word increasingly used as a synonym for students. Since
1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act permitting
patents on discoveries made with public funds, universities
and faculty members have been raking in royalties from
technologies developed with the help of government grants.
More recently, universities have been expanding into adjacent
neighborhoods (Harvard into Allston, Columbia into Harlem,
Penn into an undeveloped tract near its current campus) and
establishing satellite campuses abroad. Yale has announced the
acquisition of an entirely new research campus outside
New Haven -from, as it happens, a pharmaceutical company.

How are college students treated in this brave new academic
world? Not very well, at least not if this year's spate of
bad news articles is any indication. Last spring, New York's
attorney general,Andrew Cuomo, charged financial-aid counselors
at several universities, including my own, with profiting
personally from business ties with private lenders to whom they
were sending students in need of loans. Since then, Cuomo has
begun a new investigation into whether study-abroad programs
amount to price-fixing schemes. Meanwhile, to compensate for
the loss of state subsidies, public universities appear to be
billing students for "energy," "technology" and "incidental"
fees, which can add up to as much as a 40 percent surcharge on
tuition. And what are students getting for their money?
After years of fanfare, the Harvard faculty concluded its
curriculum review, prompting this low assessment from the student
newspaper: "Instead of crafting a meaningful statement of what
it means to be educated in today's world, professors only seemed
to care[about]their parochial corner of academia . . .
leaving Harvard with an uninspired retread of its core curriculum."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30wwln-lede-t.html?_
r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print


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