The New York Times recently released a report on income inequality at American colleges and universities, and the results were less than flattering.
The report was based on a study of anonymous tax records that showed institutions of higher learning in the United States are “economically segregated,” which essentially means that American colleges and universities are primarily comprised of students who come from wealthy (think an income of more than $100,000 a year) families. Meanwhile, many schools have very few students whose families are in the bottom quintile for wealth.
Like many other schools, my college, the College of the Holy Cross, was included in the report. There were many categories of schools featured in the report, including Ivy Leagues and selective public universities, and Holy Cross was placed in an “elite” category of 65 schools that included peer institutions like Vanderbilt, Georgetown, and the UCLA. According to the profile of Holy Cross, the average student from my school comes from a family with an income of roughly $171,000 a year, and 13 percent of students from my school are from “one-percent families” who make $630,000 or more a year. Meanwhile, only 4.1 percent of enrolled students come from families who are in the bottom quintile of income earned a year. Holy Cross’s peer institutions largely reported similar figures.
I have one educated guess about why schools, especially private schools, are so chock-full of kids from wealthy families, and why so few kids from poorer families do not attend these schools. The annual tuition at Holy Cross, including room and board, is $59,642, and it is not unlike other private schools in that regard. According to the college board, a “moderate” or “average” tuition at a private college is about $50,000. Even with financial aid, it can be difficult for students from poorer families to foot that kind of bill for four years.
But why is college so expensive? Education has always been pricey, to be sure, but the situation wasn’t quite as serious for our parents’ generation. According to Forbes, college tuition rates are “soaring,” and the cost of college is rising out of pace with the rate of inflation. “Since 1982 a typical family income increased by 147 percent more than inflation but significantly behind the huge increase in college costs. College costs have been rising roughly at a rate of 7 percent per year for decades,” the Forbes article states. Furthermore, “Since 1985, the overall consumer price index has risen 115 percent while the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500 percent.”
The article also states that the reason behind these massive increases are primarily labor costs. Many colleges are vastly increasing size of their administrative bureaucracies, sometimes even while reducing numbers of professors. The article further reports with regard to colleges in the U.S. that “[w]hile enrollment rose between 1993 and 2007 by 14.5 percent, administrators employed per 100 students rose nearly 40 percent and spending on administration per student rose by 66 percent.”
In other words, part of the reason that college has become so expensive is because student tuition must help pay the salaries of huge numbers of administrative officers. Some other problems include large numbers of tenured professors taking frequent sabbaticals, and a decrease in the number of young people in the US as compared to the baby boom generation.
These conclusions tell us several things. For one, education does not have to be as absurdly expensive as it is; colleges can function without massive administrative bureaucracies. It also tells us that college administrations are becoming too bloated, and that the best way to ensure income inequality at more colleges across the country would be to cut down the number of individuals who are making cushy salaries as college administrators on the dimes of college students and their families.
