Think College Is out of Reach? Think Again.
From recent events, one could assume that rising tuition costs are shutting college doors for thousands of Americans:
* This summer, President Clinton signed into law a bill creating a commission to study college costs. The National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education, which will be comprised of seven experts in higher education and business, is to provide a final report to the president and Congress before the end of the year.
* Days after this legislation reached the president, the Council for Aid to Education, a subsidiary of the Rand Corp., released a study called "Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal Crisis in Higher Education." It said what many have suspected - that college costs are increasing so rapidly that higher education soon will be closed to half of those who want to take advantage of it. The report was released around the time Mr. Clinton proclaimed that a college diploma should be as common as a high school diploma.
* Not long ago, The Public Agenda, a public policy think tank, released a study examining public attitudes toward higher education. Researchers found that Americans agree nearly universally on two points: First, that a college diploma is a "gateway" to "life in the American mainstream." Second, that the gateway should be open to any "qualified and motivated" student. Americans believe, in effect, in a social contract regarding higher education, a covenant our nation is "breaking," according to the study's authors.
News media's spin
High-profile news stories have popularized the idea that college has become "too expensive." Typically, these stories focus on tuition increases at a single institution or some select institutions that, as Time magazine says, have to "spend heavily to recruit and keep the best faculty and meet the growing demand by students for more course choices, more diversity, more access to professors, and ... more amenities...." The implication is that because colleges are spending lavishly, tuition prices have risen astronomically - and access is compromised for all but the elite.
These reports and stories consistently ignore one important fact: As a nation, we're sending a larger share of our college-age population to college than ever before, even as our proportion of national spending on higher education remains steady.
From 1961-62 to 1991-92, the college enrollment rate of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 more than doubled, from 24 percent to 53 percent (see chart). With more than half the traditional college-age population enrolled in college, it is difficult to assert with a straight face that college is limited to "the elite."
While it is true that the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to higher education expenditures increased from 1.7 percent in 1961 to 2.7 percent in 1970 (a result of the coming of age of the baby boomers), the share of GDP devoted to higher education has been stable ever since. One could reasonably conclude that our national spending on higher education is consistent, predictable, and manageable.
However, it's one thing to talk about overall college costs as a share of GDP and quite another to talk about college tuition - the share of total college costs paid by students and their families. According to the US Department of Education, this share is relatively small (about 29 percent). Yet, tuition is the piece of overall college cost most familiar to families, and it, as we all know, has increased faster than other prices in the economy.
In other words, while the nation's higher-education bill has remained relatively stable, the part of the bill passed on to families has grown - dramatically. Between 1965-94, tuition and fees grew by 70 percent or more, depending on the type of institution, according to the US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That is staggering. Considered another way, the average annual tuition bill took about 10 percent of median family income in 1994 compared with 6 percent in 1976.
Yet, as a share of the nation's GDP, higher education consumes no more national resources today than it did five years ago and only marginally more than it did in 1969-70. How can this be? Some pundits say families are paying more so professors can earn more doing less. As Time magazine put it, "Gone are the days of shabby gentility."
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