There’s a national scandal in higher education, but it’s not the one that got revealed this week. It’s been obvious to anyone who has paid tuition or attention for quite some time. The real scandal is not just news that Hollywood and Wall Street elites can bribe their way through the gate, it’s that middle-class people can no longer pay their way through it honestly, even with sacrifice.
That’s not always been the case.
Sometime around Christmas in 1964, my dad dropped out of the University of Tennessee with less than two years of academic credit under his belt, admonished by my grandfather after a lackadaisical quarter that he could “shoot pool cheaper at home.”
A mill worker who’d never darkened the door of a high school, my grandfather just couldn’t waste precious nickels, literally nickels, on half-efforts. My dad, who is the hardest working person I know, got his act together and went to work as a union cable-splicer for AT&T. Eventually he went back to college, carrying a full academic load while working the midnight shift at a full-time job, doing his homework over the racket of a crying toddler in the house trailer that sat in my grandparents’ Appalachian front yard.
Fifteen years later, my dad, by now a self-made middle manager, was paying for college again, this time cleaning out his thrift savings account to send me to Rhodes College, a wonderful liberal arts school in Memphis where I learned a ton and got ahead. Tuition and fees for me were roughly $9,612 — quite expensive, but only about half as much as the tab at America’s gold standard private school, Harvard, that year: $18,210.
If 18-year-old me had fully appreciated my parents’ financial position, I could’ve followed the more reasonable path of going to their alma mater, U.T.-Knoxville, for the bargain price of $1,466. My freshman year of 1988, it turns out, marked the all-time historical high water mark for per-pupil state subsidies of public higher education. It’s been downhill since, as Medicaid has crowded out sheepskins in state budgets.
My father did not bribe the admissions office at Rhodes College to get me admitted, nor did he create the fraud that I was an elite athlete. His salary was too much to qualify me for need-based aid but not enough to pay tuition without it. He had to empty his savings, add a few merit scholarships and place the expectation on me to earn my own paycheck. And I did it. That’s the story of most American parents; they worked hard and struggled and played by the rules and put their kids in a better place.
By 2005, 13 years after I’d graduated, tuition at Rhodes College had doubled, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since then, it’s gone up another 53 percent, almost twice the rate of inflation in the rest of the economy. Today Rhodes costs $46,504, not much less than Harvard’s $48,949. And those ridiculous price increases are the norm, not the exception. The leading college tracking magazine, U.S. News and World Report, says the average private school tuition topped $35,000 this year, while public schools are over $9,700. Room and board at either costs another $10,000.
Some parents have always spent more than the sticker price, no matter how pricey. Buying your kids’ way out of bad test scores is nothing new in America, and it wasn’t invented by William Rick Singer or the allegedly cheating parents on the indictments and wire taps we read about this week.
The names of other bribers from decades back are chiseled on the ivy-covered exterior walls of dormitories and laboratories on campuses everywhere. A big check to the university’s endowment has always been able to buy a plaque and a discreet nudge for an underwhelming applicant who displaced someone more worthy. And for gravy, those bribes qualified for tax deductions.
This is not to fault the donors or their kids, who took advantage of that traditional honest graft; they played the game by its rules, inequitable as they are. But we should fault the college decision-makers who for decades sold out their admissions standards, one choice at a time, and who more recently have put their tuition rates out of reach of all but the most wealthy or the most debt-laden.
A sidebar to the American dream has always been the idea that if you make good grades in high school and your parents make good choices and scrimp some, you can go to college with a part-time job, a sense of intellectual inquiry and a commitment to live on ramen noodles, cheap beer, and cafeteria food, and come out four years later with a degree.
That sidebar has been erased by administrators who did nothing to control tuition inflation, who stayed in the arms race to build the largely nonacademic amenities that drove all the costs. Every rock climbing wall or lazy river pool in a college recreation center put the school out of reach for a few more kids who could’ve done the real academic work at the core of its mission.
Is it any wonder that an industry whose core business model is layering crushing debt burdens on so many of its clients would eventually produce a few bad apple doorkeepers willing to pocket some grease to get the children of soap opera starlets in the side door?
College admissions in America today are a scandal whether you go in the front door, the back door, or the side door. Let’s hope the audacity of this admissions cheating scheme forces us to re-evaluate the whole system and force cost-control, transparency, and merit to run the admissions process.
Brad Todd is co-author of The Great Revolt with the Washington Examiner‘s Salena Zito.
