A 'necessary' of modern life? A very expensive college education.

In 1844, Middlebury College in Vermont sued one Lyman Chandler for nonpayment of tuition. The college lost. The final verdict was rendered by the Vermont Supreme Court. Mr. Justice Royce summed up: "A collegiate education is not ranked among the necessaries for which an infant can render himself liable for contract." The statement inhabits the realm of common law. Chandler was an "infant" - he was fifteen when he originally enrolled, and thus below the age of majority. Under common law, minors could validly contract for "necessaries": food, lodging, clothing. Was higher education a "necessary"? The court noted that a "common school" education was a necessary since it was "essential to the intelligent discharge of civil, political, and religious duties," but college studies, "though they tend greatly to elevate and adorn personal character, are a source of much private enjoyment, and may justly be expected to prove of public utility..., are far from being necessary in the legal sense." As the court observed: "The mass of our citizens pass through life without [collegiate education]."

Tuition at Middlebury in 1844 was $20 per quarter (plus $7 for room, sweeping $4, library $2, board in town $50). Chandler couldn't afford it. In 1996-97, Middlebury's comprehensive fee - which includes room, board, and fees - exceeds $28,000 (sweeping thrown in). Could Chandler - can anyone! - afford it? (Middlebury must think so, since it has announced plans to expand the size of its student body.)

I mention this mini-bit of history to give perspective on the issue of the high price of higher education. Reflection all the way back to Middlebury. v. Chandler indicates the absolutely radical change in the place and price of higher education. Using the wholesale price index as at least a rough measure, costs have risen by a factor of about ten since the 1840s. That should peg current costs at Middlebury at $2490. But a Middlebury education is now over one hundred times more expensive than when Chandler could not afford tuition. Neither could most citizens in the nineteenth century, and most would have agreed with the Vermont justices that it was not a "necessary."

It is sobering to consider that higher education has always been unaffordable. I call Lyman Chandler as a witness, and the "mass of our citizens" who could not afford college up to the end of World War II. (Before World War II less than 5 percent of the U.S. population had college degrees; today 50 percent of the college-age population receives "postsecondary" instruction.) What changed everything was the G.I. Bill. For the first time in American history, lots of people could afford higher education. Once properly imbued with the college spirit, the G.I.-Bill generation and after were determined that their children should have the same advantage.

If college became somewhat more affordable through government largess (G.I. Bill, vast expansion of public higher education), social perception also changed: college education came to be seen as a "necessary" for economic and social reasons. Sociologist David Riesman claimed that a college degree - any college - is the American passport to the middle class. If higher education is perceived as establishing a life position, not a personal adornment, one can even change the philosophy of funding. Like housing, education is a life necessity to be subsidized (in public housing/public education or government grants and/or long-term loans).

Despite the fact that higher education has a long history of unaffordability - recently tempered by government subsidy - I think that the current situation is different and drastic. When discussing the extraordinarily high cost of higher education today, it is not cost alone that is an issue; it is the cost plus the social demand. When no one wanted to go - or even dreamed of affording tuition - the "high cost" was, in a sense, a nonissue. In the meanwhile, colleges and universities have become somewhere near one hundred times more complex and sophisticated. Middlebury circa 1844 had 1,500 books in the library, no scientific equipment, no gymnasium, and five ministerial faculty. Contemporary colleges have extensive libraries - often in the millions of volumes - cyclotrons, computers, football stadia, and cadres of highly trained specialist faculty. No wonder they are more expensive.

Why the current stir about unaffordable higher education? Some of it is illusion: the really high price spread is limited to about one hundred or so of the three thousand American colleges and universities. Harvard (or Middlebury) is not all of higher education, so it is merely titillating to think college must cost $28,000 per year and up. Most folks go to public universities - many of great distinction - where the tuition price is more likely to be $2,800 and down. Nor is private higher education all at the Harvard price: many smaller collegiate institutions, including many Catholic colleges, are priced at one-half to two-thirds the expensive Ivies. Then, community colleges are substantially free.

Except that there is no free lunch or learning. Anguish about "the high cost" of higher education needs to distinguish with pellucid clarity cost and price. The cost of delivering the product - instruction plus library plus sweeping - is more or less the same at public and private institutions of the same scope and caliber. It is the tuition price that differs and startles the consumer. But if parents protest tuition at pricey private schools, taxpayers protest the cost of public education. Recent drastic cuts in public university budgets suggest that taxpayers are as reluctant to pay for public higher education as individuals are for high-tuition private colleges.

If the current price structure of higher education annoys tuition payers and taxpayers, what are possible scenarios for the future?

* Private colleges will be utterly priced out of the market. That's unlikely for the really high-priced institutions. Princeton is nowhere near setting a "market clearing price" (the price that is so high that it exhausts the number of potential buyers). This is a sempiternal truth for institutions of high prestige. Someone will pay (almost) anything for Ivy-ish credentials. The pressure in the private realm is on second-tier, often moderately priced institutions of lesser "prestige." Their competition is the public institution in the next county which is currently a real bargain. However....

* Public universities will boost tuition. A harried public university president told me that his budget had been cut so drastically that he no longer considered his institution a state university, even a state-supported university - "state-located" was the best he could suggest. Given the closing down of the state treasury, public institutions have already and will continue to increase tuition sharply. Out-of-state tuition for some of the flagship state universities is already at $10,000 - at a level with the modest-priced privates.

* Private and public higher education will become financially similar. United States private universities already are heavily dependent on government funding. A major research university may receive - through research funding, government grants-in-aid to students, and federal loan programs - more than half its aggregate income from direct or indirect government sources. Public universities, on the other hand, often receive only modest funding from their home state. The University of Vermont gets about 16 percent of its budget from the state; only 25 percent of UCLA's budget is state-funded. If the state does not/will not fund, high-tuition public education is the likely result.

I am reasonably confident that these predictions will prove accurate. Students at public institutions will pay more in tuition, because taxpayers will pay less. (President Bill Clinton's tax break for college education is a Band-Aid at best - and since he is also advocating higher education for everyone, I cannot imagine that either the federal or state tax resources can keep pace with that possibility.) Some equalizing between public and private price will benefit the privates, assisting them in dealing with falling applications and high financial-aid costs. Unfortunately for taxpayers and tuition-payers alike, these sorts of changes do not alter the aggregate economics. Nothing so far said lowers the total cost of delivering higher education. If taxpayers and individuals combined are not willing or able to pay for all this academic elegance, inexorable economic pressure will lower the aggregate cost. Can that be done?

There are two opposite scenarios for greater efficiency in higher education: command economy or demand economy. Saint John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, approximates a command economy: there is a fixed four-year curriculum, all faculty teach across the curriculum, all students take the same course of study. Theoretically this is 100-percent efficient, no redundancy. At the opposite pole is a demand, free-market curriculum. Community colleges approximate this model. It is also 100-percent efficient in theory because faculty are appointed only on an as-needed basis: no tenured redundancies. Of the two models, I expect the free-market model to prevail since a command model requires the sort of philosophical consensus that modem universities find virtually impossible to reach. Thus, it is reasonable to forecast:

* More adjunct faculty: part-time instructors employed on an as-needed basis. This avoids long-term, costly tenure contracts and present fringe benefits. This cost-cutting strategy is already widely practiced, and regarded as "scandalous" by traditionalists.

* Out-sourcing: a refinement of adjunct faculty. Instead of a labor market of free-lance adjuncts, some bright soul will create the Einstein Consortium, so that colleges can out-source physics as they do food service.

* Programmed instruction: technology has a history of replacing costly services. Programmed instruction in the past has been awkward and amateurish. No more. I have reviewed a CD-rom precalculus course offered for credit in one state college system. It has compelling graphics and contains everything, including the homework and final exam.

* Microsoft U.: Bill Gates announces the opening of fifty colleges in the major cities - all instruction on sophisticated computers and interactive television.

It all sounds implausible? Nothing could have been more implausible to Lyman Chandler than half the "common school" graduates attending colleges at one hundred times the price. And will Microsoft U. be a good thing or a bad thing? In the minds of its patrons (and providers?), higher education seems to have become a "necessary" in the past century. "Necessary" has retained its basic economic direction: higher education gets you a job which provides food, lodging, clothing. Higher education is viewed as an economic necessity: acquiring skills for a high-tech job market. If one shudders at education by TV, CD, et al., education by technology for technology may be just dandy. If traditional higher education (with texts and teachers and all that) is to have a future, it will have to be because it can be shown truly to "elevate and adorn personal character" [see, Stephen J. Pope, page 12] and be a genuine "source of much private enjoyment." That is a challenge which makes the financial problems of higher education seem rather simple.

Mary Winters

Kids Get the Day off from School

Through the canyons of the garment center march the twenty million. A ticker tape parade for the masses: rats.

The king and queen with their children in an open convertible smiling and waving, the car loaded with bouquets. Rats on duty in the subway cheer through the grates: a dynasty known for its ability to procreate, a great-great-great-etc. aunt's footprint found with a dinosaur.

What counts is a new generation. The rodents' genealogical chart a pyramid with an ever- broadening base. The Adam and Eve rat at the top, never in any sense thrown out of Paradise.

RELATED ARTICLE: A vocation for Catholic higher education?

Tuition, room, and board for many Catholic universities runs on average between $20,000 and $25,000 per year. The cost of tuition continues to rise faster than both income and inflation. Add transportation, books, fees, and other miscellaneous expenses, and the total cost of a four-year bachelor's degree often tops the $100,000 mark at the most prestigious schools. About 60 percent of students at all private four-year institutions receive some form of financial aid, and about half of all students are forced to borrow to meet expenses. The steep debt incurred over the course of four years typically requires many times that number of years of repayment. Given this expense, many fear that in the years to come only the most affluent may be able to afford a Catholic college education.

This cost should be placed in the context of the growing income inequality between the rich and poor in our society. On June 19, 1996, the United States Census Bureau reported that since 1968 the average income of households in the bottom 20 percent of earners rose a mere 0.8 percent (from $7,702 to $7,762) while the average income of the top 20 percent of earners rose a staggering 44 percent (from $73,754 to $105,945). The economic value of a college degree continues to rise as the widening income gap between those with and those without a degree demonstrates. College, more than ever, is a long-term financial investment that, on average, pays substantial economic dividends. But the rising cost of this education, coupled with the economic benefits that it yields, raises questions about the relation of Catholic universities to the poor and less affluent.

Add to this combination of the escalating costs of college education and the rising income inequality in our society, the danger of increasingly isolating college students from the poor and making them less sensitive to poor people's proper worth and rightful claims. Catholic higher education should not become simply one more familiar route for the recycling of the upper middle class, in essence no different from other private universities. Catholic universities cannot simply be places where well-to-do students receive a good education in order to assume their place in the next generation of corporate and professional elites. How does education of the relatively affluent (and sometimes the absolutely rich) relate to concern for those on the other end of the social and economic spectrum?

Two theologians, Jon Sobrino and John Henry Newman, have something to say about the inevitable tensions underlying this question. According to Jon Sobrino of San Salvador's Central American University, compassion must have the central place in the life of the Catholic university. College students and universities themselves must learn to embrace the "preferential option for the poor." Sobrino argues that if the Catholic university is to exist in a world of massive suffering and not function simply as an "ivory tower," it must be committed to the poor. Far from paternalistic philanthropy, the preferential option entails solidarity - identifying with the poor, being converted by them, and participating in movements for their empowerment. If the Catholic university does not actively side with the poor in appropriate ways, it will tacitly side with the status quo and reinforce present structures of injustice, oppression, and exclusion.

The university is a place where students and faculty search for the truth, make discoveries, and communicate findings and insights to the wider world. Sobrino believes that speaking the truth is the best remedy for social injustice. Above all, knowledge must be put at the service of the poor. Only in this way is the Catholic university's true catholicity affirmed - that is, its openness to the worth of all people and not just the economic elite.

The Catholic university cannot therefore be understood in Sobrino's analysis as the scene of "value-free," politically neutral intellectual activity. It should be conceived Christocentrically - in light of the Cross and as an expression of Jesus' uncompromising love for the poor. Sobrino poses to the Catholic university the question: "What can we do to take the crucified people down from their crosses?" Whereas knowledge has all too frequently been used to support oppression, it ought now to be put at the service of the poor and for the eradication of their suffering. Not only theology and philosophy, but also political science, sociology, and other disciplines can be taught in a way that gives centrality to the needs of the poor.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to Sobrino's position is found in John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University. In his fifth discourse, Newman examined the question of the utility value of a college education (something a lot of undergraduates wonder about during final exams week). Human beings naturally desire to know and the principal virtue of the university lies in its service of this need rather than any other. In contrast to even the most learned and intellectually demanding training in the professions and business, liberal education in the true sense of the term is not intended to serve what is beyond itself. This is not to say that it is a good thing for college graduates to be driving cabs or bartending, only that the most important feature of college is how it expands the mind, not the wallet. It is both true and good that higher education and knowledge also provide career opportunities and financial advantages, but these benefits are not the primary object of education.

But what about compassion? Newman regarded knowledge as valuable in itself, whether or not its discovery is either justified directly by utility or, by implication, motivated by compassion. "Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largess and justness of view faith....Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman." By "gentleman" Newman meant not a polite person with refined sensibilities, but rather one who has a "philosophic habit of mind" and "a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life..., the connatural qualities of a large knowledge." This "enlargement of mind" continues to be a powerful antidote to bigotry, apathy, and social myopia.

Though a creature of his time, Newman provides a helpful corrective to the danger of an exclusive focus on what Sobrino sees as central, compassion. Insisting that the search for knowledge be motivated primarily by compassion amounts to a drastic elimination of one of the most fundamental features of what makes us human. The university ought to be a place where students come to greater understanding of things worth knowing for their own sakes, a place where the love of learning is not supplanted by other objectives, however legitimate in themselves, and where knowledge is not instrumentalized to other values.

Yet, upholding the intrinsic value of the "enlargement of mind" need not be at odds with acknowledging the place of compassion in the life of an educated Catholic. Catholic higher education includes not only intellectual development but also the further cultivation of those traits that are characteristically Catholic and Christian, including love of God and love of neighbor. If this is true, then we need to recognize that the well-spoken and prosperous professional who makes substantial financial contributions to university development funds but is utterly indifferent to the suffering of the poor should not be taken as a model graduate of a Catholic university. Catholic universities have certainly generated graduates who fit this image, but we ought to recognize this for what it is - a university's success in financial and social terms but not an exemplar of its core ideals. Sobrino is fundamentally correct on this score: The credibility of the Catholic university lies neither in its endowment, nor in its graduation rate, nor in the power and status of its alumni, but in whether its graduates are genuinely concerned about "taking the crucified people down from their crosses."

Most people will agree that to graduate from a Catholic university and somehow not to have significantly enhanced one's ability to think more deeply about the world, one's nature, and one's identity is to have "missed the point" of college. We should regard compassion in an analogous way, recognizing that to graduate from a Catholic college without a more developed awareness of the needs of the poor and one's own social responsibility to them is also really to have "missed the point." Institutions of higher education that are at once true universities and genuinely Catholic must be characterized in terms of both an "enlargement of heart" and an "enlargement of mind."

Stephen J. Pope is an associate professor in the department of theology at Boston College.

Dennis O'Brien, president emeritus of the University of Rochester, is a frequent Commonweal contributor. His All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education will be published next fall by the University of Chicago Press.