During my brief stint as a tour guide for this university, I was told, often to the point of saturation, that it was my responsibility to present the best conceivable face of Madison. I don’t know if I came remotely close to fitting that rather daunting bill, but I do recall the expectation went well beyond a pleasant disposition. It was essential to present the many pitfalls of the state’s flagship – and there are many – in such a fashion that our visitors did not go home intent on taking their business elsewhere.
Call it putting lipstick on a pig, but some of these deficiencies were fairly easy to render beneficial. And truth be told, there were times at which I cherished the creative strain. But nothing, absolutely nothing, was more painful than the four-word sentence which rendered all other concerns over college nothing more than background noise in comparison: How will I pay?
The response depended, above all else, on the policies of our administrators.
Take Chancellor Biddy Martin’s newly unveiled Badger Partnership. In an interview with The Badger Herald Editorial Board at the beginning of this semester, and throughout the following months, Martin has stated the initiative’s founding purpose is to move Madison to the middle of its peer group in terms of tuition. Such an increase, Martin indicates, will bring a refreshing taste of independence to a university beholden to a state government whose priorities often border on the deranged. Naturally, this will have the added benefit of maintaining our oft-touted reputation as an intellectual heavyweight in the international community. She has also been quick to point out that the increase will, of course, be offset by financial aid to our neediest students.
While another tuition increase is an inevitability, allusions to independence on one hand and a rather clich?d paranoia about our global competitiveness on the other are hardly a nuanced treatment of the question. It may very well be that, as far as the public debate is concerned, notions of larger good will sweep the most agonizing part of Martin’s admittedly impressive vision under the rug.
But we deserve the trifling courtesy of being forewarned: At none of our fellow institutions has informational outreach ever been sufficient to counteract the discouragement en masse of low-income students that results from tuition increases. Euphemistically titled sticker hikes may save our solvency and reputation, but that march to the middle will come at the expense of the same progressivism Martin seems at times intent on embodying.
Take the Brookings Institution paper by Thomas Kane and Peter Orszag, which states that “a $1,000 increase in tuition decreases the attendance rate of low income youth by an estimated 5.2 percentage points more than middle- and high-income youth.” Or there’s the case of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, whose in-state enrollment plummeted a whopping 13 percent the year after they began moving toward a high tuition, high-aid model, with low-income students composing a disproportionate bulk of the drop. Even the perennially admired University of Michigan saw its proportion of students whose parents earned between $10,000 and $74,999 decline by 10 percent between 1997 and 2007, a period in which that institution was embarking on the same price increases that cemented its current position as one of the nation’s most expensive public institutions.
No one can say we are doomed to repeat history simply because we can’t remember it. The bad hangovers that follow well-intentioned tuition hikes are splayed across the blogosphere for anybody to peruse at leisure.
What sets the debacle that is tuition apart from the other salient growing pains of a public university is its capacity to draw in both sides of the fringe, and seemingly no one else. Steve Nass and his legislative allies lambaste any price increase as a handout to the same liberal arts professors – such as Martin – he never made a trifling effort to understand. Meanwhile, the most progressive legislative candidate with any chance of winning – Ben Manski – clamors for the patently utopian solution of phasing out in-state tuition altogether.
In the process, a very serious conversation about what students should pay – and why – has been relegated to the same extremes that so frequently render civility impossible. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons why tuition should go up. But the thousands of affected parties deserve to know that, unless we are somehow exempt from the hard lessons of our predecessors, this campus will be perceptibly richer and whiter ten years from now.
If it’s any consolation, the folks at the Office of Visitor and Information Programs are, to a fault, articulate and sociable. If anyone can make it clear to low-income students that the price they see is far higher than what they will actually pay, it is my former colleagues in the Red Gym. But for every poor, debt-ridden high school they manage to reach, there are many more who have seen the numbers getting stacked against them for as long as they care to remember. They’d be right in thinking the conversation over tuition is much more poignant around kitchen tables than in administrative boardrooms. And besides. Even if all pigs are equal, some need a hell of a lot more makeup than others.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
