Sustainable. Resilient. Free.. John Warner C.
have this as their official vision, but by God, it’s their unofficial vision.” Some other schools dispensed with the machinations altogether and simply lied. For example, between 2005 and 2011, Claremont McKenna College submitted false SAT scores in order to boost its ranking.6
During this time, I recall an official from Clemson’s provost’s office inviting all non-tenure-track lecturers to a meeting, a rare occasion indeed. In the English department at the time, non-tenure-track faculty taught more than 70 percent of the total course offerings; each of us made $25,000 a year for teaching four courses per semester. Some of the lucky ones (including me) were eligible for health insurance. Others were not. The provost office official had a proposal: because the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees mattered in the rankings, wouldn’t it be a great idea if those of us without terminal degrees pursued a PhD in our spare time?
We had questions. Would Clemson help fund these pursuits? No. Would there be new titles or raises if we completed these programs? No. So why would we want to spend our time doing this? For the rankings!
Clemson ultimately did reach its goal. The school hit number twenty in 2015 before falling back to number twenty-three the following year. Currently, they’re at number twenty-nine. Admittedly, the school’s machinations did result in some improved metrics. Freshman retention increased from 82 to 89 percent, and the graduation rate rose from 72 to 78 percent. But unfortunately, those improvements came coupled with a move away from the mission of providing access to educational opportunities for the citizens of South Carolina. This pattern has played out at public universities and colleges across the country.
Country Club Public Universities
A 2018 report7 from New America, a nonpartisan—though more like a center-with-an-essence-of-left-leaning—think tank, illustrates how the chase for prestige in a privatized higher education marketplace has closed off educational opportunities for low-income students. Authored by New America analyst Stephen Burd, the report shows how the percentage of schools with an average net price—the cost to students after grant and scholarship aid is deducted from tuition and fees—above $10,000 increased from 34 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in 2015. As Burd notes:
Over the last 20 years, state disinvestment and institutional status-seeking have worked together, hand in hand, to encourage public colleges and universities to adopt the enrollment management tactics of their private college counterparts. For many of these schools, that has meant using their institutional aid dollars strategically in order to lure affluent out-of-state students to their campuses, rather than spend these funds on in-state students who can’t afford to go to college without help.
In other words, the chase for prestige has subsumed higher education’s mission of access and opportunity. Merit aid is used as a tool to enroll “desirable” students while aid for low-income families languishes.
Burd identifies a class of what he calls “country-club public universities,” schools that have a low net price but that also admit low numbers of students who are eligible for Pell Grants, a trait that is consistent with using merit aid to enroll desirable students who help in the rankings. Schools with a net price under $10,000 that also enrolled fewer that 15 percent Pell-eligible students include some of the highest ranked public universities in the country: the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the College of William and Mary. These are public colleges where large proportions of the student body are carved out for rich people. At William and Mary, for example, 56 percent of students come from the top 10 percent in terms of household income. Only 2 percent come from the bottom 20 percent.
Burd notes how a commitment to maintaining need-based aid actually hurts institutions in the competitive landscape. The University of Illinois, which still gives the bulk of its aid based on need, has made itself vulnerable to other states’ poaching of Illinois residents. According to Burd, “These carpetbagger recruiters have been remarkably successful. Today, nearly half of all Illinois students leave the state to go to college. That’s up from less than one-third back in 2000.”
Schools who chase prestige but lack the resources of schools like William and Mary or the University of Virginia are not “country-club universities.” They’re just plain expensive. This problem is particularly acute in states where legislatures have largely abandoned support for public institutions. The effect on Pennsylvania schools is particularly striking in this regard. Temple, the University of Pittsburgh, and all of the Penn State campuses have net prices over $16,000 per year. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which enroll large proportions of Pell-eligible students but couple that with high net prices, also fall into this category. South Carolina State has a 67 percent Pell-eligible student body with a net price of over $21,000. Grambling enrolls 82 percent Pell-eligible students at a net price of almost $17,000. This category also includes the University of Alabama, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Kansas, and, you guessed it, Clemson University.
All of this leads to a system where highly similar public schools attempt to poach students from each other’s states in order to be able to realize the increased revenue available through nonresident tuition. Applicants from Virginia who are rejected by Virginia Tech will instead enroll at Clemson, and applicants from South Carolina who are rejected from Clemson will instead enroll at Virginia Tech. This inevitably drives up costs for all students.
The situation has gotten so dire that it has become a trend for wealthy parents in the Chicago suburbs to sever their guardianship of their children so those children will be eligible for Pell Grants and other need-based aid.8 This was attempted by one family with a household income over $250,000 a year; they were living in a $1.2 million dollar home, but their savings had been tapped out by spending $600,000 on their children’s educations. Yes, we can judge these people for making the choice to send their kids to expensive colleges and living above their means, but they too are products of a dysfunctional system. But in the end, thanks to those who figure out how to game the system whenever it even slightly disadvantages them, it is the low-income students who are harmed the most.
Please pardon my language, but if our public colleges and universities are supposed to serve as an ecosystem that provides access to economic opportunity regardless of the accident of your birth, this is some fucked-up shit. We have broken faith with millennials and the members of Generation Z. The promise that hard work will translate into opportunities for education and prosperity is gone. And it isn’t the pandemic that killed it.
To break this cycle, we must recognize that we cannot view education as a consumer good any longer. Education—public education—is infrastructure, and we should treat it that way.
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