CHINA’S GAIN?
The shrinking access that has overtaken California’s 50-year-old master plan for a comprehensive, open-ended system of higher education, largely free to the less advantaged, is a tragedy that threatens more than the system itself. This is so not only because California is the largest and once most-prosperous state, but also because the three-tiered system has been a model to other states and other nations striving to make broader access to advanced learning the foundation of economic competitiveness and greater prosperity.
Shrinking access is not California’s problem alone. In every state, higher education is confronting budget strains of varying degree, driven in part by the lingering recession, but more heavily by competing priorities, and particularly by higher education’s own failure to better control costs. The health care for the uninsured, supported by Medicaid is eating deeply into every state budget, moving ahead of both elementary-secondary and postsecondary education. Whether the health care reform that President Obama finessed through a reluctant Congress will ease this competition, by broadly reducing the ranks of the uninsured, is a question that only proposed reforms can answer over time.
This crisis illustrates how far our national hopes and priorities have gone askew since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose Republican reign more than doubled the national debt. From it came the misguided notion that we must forever stand as the world’s lone superpower (as if such a fiction could long endure).
We’ve paid a staggering price that is still growing, with the national debt redoubled again in the presidency of George W. Bush. Our great manufacturing centers have been sacrificed on this alter, with Detroit escaping the grave by a federal bailout. They have been replaced on two tracks: first by apparel and high-tech producers who exploit low-cost labor abroad by exporting the better jobs once filled by our middle-class wage-earners, and second by our pampered weapons makers whose contribution to national security is rarely free of crippling cost overruns.
Adding to the irony is the replication of the California model that is now underway in China. By buying up vast amounts of U.S. public and private debt, the world’s greatest communist regime is growing rapidly as both the second superpower and the leading player at capitalism. It is using the wealth in part to upgrade both schools and colleges, to further leverage the competitive power of its workforce. At the same time it is buying, in whole or in part, successful companies, to make more jobs for its growing middle class of highly skilled workers.
Europeans also are also experimenting with the California model, following China’s lead, which is likely to further leverage global educational and economic competition facing the United States.
I knew Prof. Ted Bell, from shared roots in Utah politics, before he became President Reagan’s secretary of education. I heard him say more than once that when foreign educators visited his Washington office, they frequently wanted first to know more about our community colleges, and the bellwether California system, whose enrollment in the last generation has been as much as one fifth of the nation’s students earning college credit.
But despite the enormous strides in college access that are realized by community colleges and federal student aid — overwhelmingly the Pell Grants — American higher education has in the last generation been, in some ways, inching toward the elitism that dominated our campuses before World War II. Until the first GI Bill flooded colleges with veterans coming from all walks of life, a college education was more a matter of accident or privilege, spun by family wealth, scarce scholarships or a nearby campus, than a general aspiration or right. (Our mother persuaded dad in 1929 to take a job in Provo, leaving the coal fields of Utah, for the very purpose of putting my sisters and me on the doorstep of BYU.)
State budget pressures are not alone at fault. The inflation in college costs has been steadily outpacing increases in the CPI since the 1970s, thus raising important questions about its causes, while eroding the promise of access. Is the inflation fed solely by economic factors, or by the elitism which is endemic in academic traditions?
The results of these trends are not promising for either national progress or national security. The U.S. no longer stands at the forefront of nations in public education. And, its workforce is growing less, not more, competitive in the global marketplace.
As fruitful as the Pell Grant has been in boosting access and workforce development — abetted, of course, by Work-Study, student loans and state aid — its power has been diminished by the incessant inflation in college costs. As very popular as the program has become with both lawmakers and the public, some conservatives cite it as an example of how federal handouts become self-deflating. As some have observed, once the Pell Grant puts the less-advantaged student in college, there is a temptation to embellish the opportunity with readily available student loans, whose avowed purpose is to help the student stay the course — though it doesn’t always work that way. Individual need for loans has been and is driven also by exorbitant textbook costs; they too have inflated faster than CPI increases.
Is it fair to say that colleges themselves generally have shown no more than passive resistance to that temptation arising from loan-inflated revenue? The campuses welcome the income from the tuition and fee increases that Pell Grants and student loans help induce, and that legislators are too often willing to ratify. Invariably, the schools
have no problem finding good uses for the sweetened revenue. They justify the inflation by saying it helps them attract top talent in building competitive faculty. Yet it begs the question of whether the academy is still what it used to be — scholars consumed in a discipline essentially for the love of it. Or, have they, too, like their colleges, succumbed to the temptation to live more abundantly?
Most Americans agree, as they long have, that good educations are the surest path to personal success. But the question they face, as global competition intensifies, is whether they are willing to walk the walk. First, we must make ourselves ready. It won’t be easy, not by a long shot. The sacrifices that will be necessary in a hardening of national priorities, by which our public schools may again share global leadership, and by which our middle class will regain lost ground, will be a rugged test of national will.
A very promising omen is the progress and performance of American women in education, the professions and the marketplace. They still give us global leadership in gender. But it’s a subject that deserves far larger treatment than can be given here.
