🔒Harrison: Controlling higher-education costs

Controlling higher-education costs

An enormous amount of attention is currently being paid to this national issue.  When politicians do polling, concern over the cost of higher education always ranks near the top of voter concerns.  Virtually every candidate for the presidency in 2016 has a plank in his or her platform on this issue, and approaches vary widely, from free public college to decreasing guaranteed student loans. 

Those of us who lead colleges and universities must devise our own thoughtful and targeted approaches, and in my view we must come up with two systemic approaches: one for public universities, and one for private colleges and universities.  Public universities are faced with growing reluctance by taxpayers to fund the subsidies that make them less expensive to the consumer, while privates—which do not, in the main, receive public subsidies—need to find ways to reduce costs while still paying competitive salaries to faculty and staff. 

I suggest we take a long look at re-imagining the guaranteed student loan program in order to make it more of a mix of grants and loans, tied in some way to tuition.

Closing the socio-economic divide

We must make our American universities more accessible to students of all socio-economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds and, at the same time, allow for honest discussion of our differences.

Incidents at Yale, Missouri, Ithaca, and elsewhere have focused attention on this issue, which many of us have realized is a major challenge for a long time.  As with the first issue, there is no easy way to solve this.

The future of the American democracy rests with our continuing to develop a well-educated citizenry and a well-prepared workforce.  American universities were founded before the American republic.  Originally for white men only, our universities are now open to women and men of many different groups. But the challenge remains: to educate all people, regardless of race, religion, ethnic group, or economic background.

This is a very personal issue for me.  My grandfather, a penniless Jewish immigrant came to this country without any public education; my father graduated from the University of Michigan, which in the 1930s was one of the few public institutions in the Midwest that was completely open to Jews.  Their grandson and son now heads a university whose undergraduate student population is one-third non-white. 

My challenge is to make my university as welcoming and as much a gateway to prosperity as Michigan was to my father, and as 19^th century America was to my grandfather.  This is our collective past; all of us in higher education—indeed all of us in America—must embrace it as our collective future. 

Utilizing technology

In an age when technology is rapidly changing all of our lives, leaders of higher education must find a way to balance the rapid advances in educational technology with American universities traditional role in socializing our students: teaching them to live and learn in communities with differences in backgrounds and philosophies but with common democratic values.

A university in India now boasts that it enrolls 5 million students, mostly through technology.  While no American university has anything like that number of students, this example is a clear statement of the problem facing us all.  We must embrace technology but—in my view, at least—retain the democratizing role of residential universities.

[See what others are saying on HBJ's Economic Forecast 2016 page]

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