As an alum of the graduate business school at Tulane, I followed the events in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.  Three years later, it’s not just the weather that seems to have improved.  Last Thursday, Tulane cancelled classes for this week and ordered an evacuation of the campus on Saturday, with students who were unable to obtain a flight home from New Orleans being evacuated to Jackson State University in Mississippi.  The Tulane website has included a daily announcement from President Scott Cowen entitled “The Scott Report“, a “New Wave” column that includes items such as photos of the facilities crew cleaning up the post-hurricane debris, and a daily live chat.  Tulane’s executive team traveled to Nashville and has been in communication with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin throughout the crisis.

The press reports that since Katrina the levees haven’t been secured in New Orleans to survive a Category 3 Hurricane.  Fortunately, Gustav’s landfall was west of New Orleans with winds down to the levels of a  Category 2/Category 1 by the time of landing.  Regardless of the levee situation, which I hope the Army Corps of Engineers is able to resolve, it appears that there have been some lessons learned from Katrina and communication and evacuation plans at the municipal, state, federal, and university levels worked well this time.

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.

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