Sunday’s session for presidents and chancellors had the following topics:  Vision and Change at BYU-Idaho: A Model for America’s Colleges and Universities, Information Technology:  Seize the Day, and a luncheon at which Terry Hartle, SVP of Government and Public Affairs of ACE spoke about the pending Department of Education regulations regarding Credit Hours, State Regulation, Gainful Employment, Accreditation, and Misrepresentation.  Later in the day, Yale’s President Richard Levin spoke about “Why Colleges and Universities Matter.”  I also attended a session hosted by Stan Ikenberry, former president of the University of Illinois and ACE, and George Kuh, Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington and the founding director of the Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), regarding assessment and ways in which institutions implement it.

Having the conference in Washington provided some benefits.  Eduardo Ochoa, Assistant Secretary of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education was an unscheduled speaker at the luncheon and provided a few comments regarding the administration’s position regarding higher education and reminded the group that he had served as a provost at Sonoma State University.  He also stated that he was unable to provide a statement about three of the issues because of a lawsuit against the Department.  Terry Hartle’s major points were that the industry can regulate itself and does not need increased federal regulation at a time when there are many changes occurring as well as innovations required in order to remain competitive.

Rick Levin’s lecture provided three main points:  (1) the basic research principle of our universities is a driver of our nation’s growth and healthcare improvements, (2) the diverse array of higher education institutions provides an education to a broad workforce, and (3) our colleges are the principal avenue of upward mobility for our citizens.  President Levin is an economist and unabashedly stated that his lecture had an economic focus although his sincere comment that “the most profound consequence of higher education is that it improves the soul” was not economically based.

As one of a number of presidents invited to attend the session on assessment, I was pleasantly surprised about the depth of discussion.  Our comments were recorded by a researcher for a project sponsored by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) and all of us participating received the prerequisite Institutional Review Board (IRB) disclosure.  Assessment has been an interest of the accrediting bodies for the last ten years or so, but usually is not a topic about which college and university presidents are conversant.  The group representing a variety of institutions ranging from public research universities to private liberal arts colleges to an online university.  All the presidents in attendance were focused on the measurement of learning outcomes at their institution.

Many years ago I took a course in oral history at Duke.  Interviewing people who participated in a historical event years after the event took place gave me an appreciation for the fact that reporters write about an event from their perspective which may not be the perspective of the participants.  While some of the lectures and panels at this year’s annual meeting have been discussed in articles published by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, those articles are related to specific topics.  As a somewhat regular attendee of ACE’s annual meetings, I observed a difference through the statements of the speakers, the questions of the participants, and the general tone of the conversations at the social events.  Usually, the major determinants of change in any sector are the market or the government or both.   This year may be the year where a need for change is finally recognized by the entire sector.

Alan Paton

The time, the people, and the events that Kumalo encounters on the trip comprise the richness of this book.  Kumalo leaves Natal for a trip to Johannesburg to find his sister, Gertrude.  He finds her only to discover that she is not physically sick but has become a prostitute and bootlegger.  He finds his brother, John, and discovers that he has become a leader of the black movement for freedom, while cautiously being more of an orator than an open law-breaker.  He finds his son, Absalom, after Absalom has been arrested for the murder of a prominent white engineer, Arthur Jarvis, who has been leading the national discussion about freeing the blacks.

I usually write reviews of non-fiction books but the beauty of a novel is in the way the author weaves the story’s narrative until the end.  In the event that someone reads this review and opts to read Cry, the Beloved Country for the first time, I have chosen not to write a descriptive narrative about the way the story ends but instead about its ending paragraph.  The book ends with Reverend Kumalo meditating on a mountain top at dawn.  Kumalo has a reason for his personal journey to the mountaintop, but Paton uses the ending as a metaphor for the dawn of the emancipation of native South Africans.   The book ends with a prophetic sentence that is almost a question:  “But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”

I selected Cry, the Beloved Country because it was a book that I had never read and a book that argued for equality of the races in South Africa long before there was an organized international outcry against apartheid.  In fact, the book was written before the Afrikaner Nationalist Party won the 1948 election and implemented the official policy of apartheid.  Paton’s description of the trials and tribulations of the blacks in South Africa was risky given his status as a free white South African.

Paton’s incorporation of the readings of Abraham Lincoln into the novel indicates that he believed that whites in South Africa could see the importance of helping the blacks achieve liberation and financial independence even though for a white to do so was unpopular at the time.  It took nearly 50 years after the publication of this book for apartheid to end, but it probably would not have ended as quickly as it did had there not been a group of whites like Paton who continually pushed to end the practice.

Cry, the Beloved Country describes the land that attracted the first white immigrants to settle it, the black tribesmen who were natives, and the tribes who migrated to South Africa.  All of them loved the land and cherished it in many ways.  I enjoyed reading the book given the retrospective viewpoint we have post-apartheid, and I look forward to my visit to South Africa.

While many books have been written about sports including college sports, there are a few that I found interesting for their background about the origins of the modern college sports “game” and its current state of commercialization.   John Thelin’s  A History of American Higher Education is a fairly comprehensive book about the origins and development of America’s colleges and universities.  In a chapter entitled “Alma Mater,” Thelin outlines major developments during the 1890’s to 1920, a time period that he calls the “age of university building” and the “golden age of the college.”  During this period, going to college became “fashionable and prestigious” and the national media covered the daily life of a college student in the same manner that the lives of the rich and famous are covered today.  During that period, university colors and mascots were conceived and adopted and the role of alumni associations and fundraising became very important.

Originally, intercollegiate sports were run by the students.  The coaches were unpaid seniors or graduate students and the athletic association funded the cost of team sports through the assessment of student fees or donations.    During this critical period of 1890 to 1920, the focus shifted from student-run to professionally run under the auspices of an athletic director and professional coaches.  Thelin provides a glimpse of how corporations and/or alumni contributed to the funding of the programs and how the professors were left out of the circle of power regulating the activities of athletics.

Carlisle vs. Army, written by Lars Anderson, covers the same time period in college athletics as Thelin.  Anderson, a writer for Sports Illustrated, chose to focus his book on college football, more specifically a game in 1912 between the Carlisle Indian School and West Point.   Anderson’s narrative focuses on the development of Jim Thorpe and Dwight Eisenhower as students and football players and the professionalism of Pop Warner, Carlisle’s coach, who was one of the innovators and pioneers of modern football.  The book is a very interesting read for anyone familiar with the story of Jim Thorpe and his athletic successes including winning the Pentathalon and Decathalon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.  The book is also successful at outlining some of the major events that changed college sports and why (Theodore Roosevelt’s summoning of the major college presidents to Washington to discuss the deaths and injuries of student athletes, the creation of the NCAA in 1906, etc.).

Derek Bok, former President of Harvard, addresses the commercialization of college sports in his book, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education.  Bok states that college athletics are the “oldest form of commercialization in American higher education.”  He also provides some interesting insights into the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the NCAA as well as the difficulty college presidents have in controlling the spiraling costs of athletics as well as the constant pressure on coaches and athletic directors to win.  Bok also cites the dismal academic performance of recruited student athletes, the relaxed admissions standards for athletes at public and private universities, and their graduation rate that is lower than that for non-athletes.  Bok portrays the costs of all but the most successful programs as an example of commercialization attempts by colleges and universities that do not provide the payback originally intended.

I enjoy watching college sports and have purchased season basketball tickets to Maryland and Duke men’s basketball games.  Watching is entertaining.  When I think about the complexity of the underlying athletic enterprise including facilities, fund raising, recruiting, etc., I am grateful, however, that “our athletes don’t play games” at AMU and APU.

Graphic from Measuring Up 2006, a publication of The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, showing the increasing costs of various consumer goods and services in relation to the Consumer Price Index.

As a recipient of financial aid in the 1970′s when I attended Duke and Tulane, I can relate to the continual and ongoing debate about the affordability of college.  I was fortunate to have parents who believed in the benefits of higher education and who told me to “go to the best school that you can get into and we’ll figure out how to pay whatever the financial aid office says that we have to pay.”  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Fast forward a few decades and it’s difficult to pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about the issues surrounding the affordability of higher education.  The subject is complex, solutions are complex, and many people have opinions on the issue.  Robert Bliwise writes an article in the July-August issue of Duke Magazine that articulates the view from his vantage point as a professor of public policy.  There are a few highlights that I’ll mention and will certainly resurface in a few ongoing pieces about the financial aid debate.

Bliwise begins with a description of a book published twenty years ago by Charles Clotfelter (Duke ’69) called Buying the Best.  Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke, examined the way selective colleges and universities competed for the best students and awarded aid.  Students weren’t price sensitive about an elite education in those days and financial aid was growing faster than any other area of campus spending.  In the article, Clotfelter discusses the issues between need-based aid and merit aid.  Clotfelter defends need-based aid as “a guarantor of the brand,” and states that the value of the institution would be diminished if only the affluent could attend.  I agree, personally and professionally.  Bliwise quotes Duke’s undergraduate admissions director, Christoph Guttentag, as stating that there’s now a competition between the “haves and the have-mores” in demonstrating the social contract balancing the affluent and the needy.  Bliwise provides a list of thirty-six “elite” schools that have created more generous financial-aid packages for families with incomes ranging from $40,000-$100,000 per year.

While the efforts of the “have-mores” are laudable, they don’t go far enough.  One of the biggest reasons we have a problem is that colleges increased their tuitions at a rate much higher than the increase in the average family’s income over the past twenty-five years.  I believe that my tuition and room and board at Duke was approximately $4,000 in 1972-1973.  $4,000 was thirty-two percent of the average family income in America that year which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau was $12,625.  Duke’s tuition, room and board in 2006-2007 was $43,155 which was fifty-five percent of the average family income of $77,315 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  Using more recent data from the Spellings Commission’s final report, families making a combined income of less than $34,000 could expect to pay forty-one percent of their total family income for a public four-year institution after grant aid in 1992; by 2003, that same group could expect to pay forty-seven percent of their family income after grant aid for the same school.  Had tuitions increased at the same inflation rate as family incomes, perhaps more families would consider higher education or higher education options beyond community colleges as affordable.  I wonder if my parents would provide the same encouragement to me today that they did three decades ago.

Federal aid programs have not kept up with the increases in tuition and increasingly, student aid packages have higher percentages of loans versus grants.  Debt loads of undergraduate students influence their choice of post-baccalaureate careers and also determine whether or not they decide to attend graduate schools.  Bliwise cites a study from the Project on Student Debt, an offshoot of the Institute for College Access and Success, which shows that “debt levels for graduating seniors from private universities increased from $11,356 to $22,125 over the past decade.”  It’s not unusual to hear of students who exit professional graduate schools with debt exceeding $100,000.  Prospective students from lower income families are not considering the higher cost institutions because the tuitions are so high compared to their income levels.  Minorities, particularly Hispanics, are reluctant to borrow to fund their education and their numbers continue to increase as a percentage of the students graduating from our high schools today and into the future.
 
No wonder then that Richard Kahlenberg, editor of America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, is cited in the article as “not[ing] that a visitor is 25-times more likely to run into a rich student than a poor student on the nation’s elite campuses.”  Bliwise ends his article with an interview with Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar with the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education (and a speaker at the ACE Annual Meeting in 2008).  Mortenson says that “families will be looking for strong signals that they can absorb college costs” and “they’re not likely to feel assured until higher education forges a fuller and more forceful social contract.”

The discussion that Robert Bliwise provides is oriented toward the manner in which Duke and other elite institutions have handled some of the biggest issues in financial aid.  However, there are more than 3,000 colleges and universities that are not considered elite.  Some have patterned their tuition increases to run parallel (as a percent) with the elites.  They cannot afford to provide the “free college” guarantee for certain income levels.  Public institutions are under pressure from increasing costs and reduced funding from their legislatures.  Regardless of the pressures, it’s clear that continued increases in tuition beyond the Consumer Price Index leads to reduced access at a time when America’s competitive place in the world depends on increasing numbers of college graduates.  I don’t think that the federal government can be counted on to fund the difference between affordable tuition and today’s average tuition at a private college or university given the projected budget deficit that our next President and administration will inherit.  We’ll see how the marketplace of higher education adjusts over the next few years.