Why Administrators Won’t Keep Us Safe: The Higher Ed Spending Trap

The previous post, “Was it dangerous to keep residence halls open?” explained the CDC’s recent affirmation that yes, it was extremely dangerous to gather large groups of people on college campuses during a pandemic. But why did administrators think that something so dangerous was a good idea?

Massive declines in federal and state funding over the last forty years have been accompanied by what is effectively privatization for much of public higher education. Costs have shifted to students (who take out pricey loans to afford college) and to universities. Only about a tenth of Miami’s revenue now comes from public sources. Desperation for revenue has turned administrators into speculators who borrow massively to pay for fancy residence halls they hope will attract customers.

Administrators at Miami and across the country have been borrowing massive sums on the backs of our students, who not only pay to rent living space, but also, through nontransparent fees, are saddled with paying the interest on the loans. Recently, Miami has paid over $30 million annually in interest alone. This fall, Miami drew $28 million or so out of its (luckily robust) reserves — not to retain faculty and preserve educational quality during a crisis, but just to cover housing and dining debt.

While we must charge higher-ed administrators here and elsewhere with putting our students, staff and faculty in danger, we must also change the system that has turned them into sad-sack pseudo-entrepreneurs — entrepreneurs who have little capital to speculate with, so they claw back funds from academic programs, find new ways to extract revenue from students, and put our universities in hock to lenders. It’s students and workers who pay the price. Student fees and debt loads rise while faculty and staff lose jobs or see their workloads increase.

Public education, while it continues to make important contributions to our communities, has in large part become a privatized engine for increasing inequality, enriching our financial elite more than it does our communities.

Investing in public education is an investment in health and shared wealth for all of us. It’s time to reclaim public education for our communities— and changes in Washington present a rare opportunity to put higher ed back on the right track.

Will college presidents and provosts stand with students and academic workers to demand change, or will they continue to lose sleep serving the wrong masters?

For the moment, the latter seems more likely. So it’s on all of us to build an alliance across academic workers, students, parents, and communities and save Ohio higher education for the generations ahead.

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