The Obama administration has doled out a record amount of college loans this year to help students cope with the affordability crisis in college tuitions. Meanwhile, college tuitions became even more unaffordable. Gee, do you think there could be a connection?
Uncle Sam gave out $28.2 billion in Pell grants to students in the 2009-2010 school year, almost $10 billion more than the previous year. Since taking office, President Obama has increased spending on student aid by nearly 50%, to $145 billion total year, reports the Wall Street Journal.
“But college affordability remains a problem,” says writer Stephanie Banchero. Gee, do ya think? From 2000 to 2010, tuition and fees at four-year institutions increased an average of 5.6% faster than the inflation rate. Apologists for higher ed blame cutbacks in state appropriations, which declined 5% in 2009-2010. “There’s only so much cutting you can do before institutions suffer in fundamental ways,” weeps Terry Hartle, an official with the America Council on Education, a higher-ed lobbying group.
Cutting? Did the man say “cutting?” Higher ed has been one of the great growth industries of the 2000s. In a quick Internet search, I failed to turn up long-term historical data on higher education revenues, but I did uncover some figures covering the school years between 2003/4 and 2006/07 from the National Center for Education Statistics. During those three years, which appear to be representative of later years, total operating expenditures for all U.S. institutions of higher education increased 16.0% (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) over that three-year span.
Where did the money go? Here are the spending categories that came out ahead:
Instructional wages and salaries — 16.8%
Auxiliary enterprises — 17.8%
Institutional support — 19.0%
Academic support — 19.9%
Student services — 20.6%
Operations & Maintenance — 25.4%
Here were the relative losers:
Public service — 13.5%
Research — 11.7%
Scholarships & fellowships — 9.6%
Four of the most administration-intensive categories — institutional support, academic support, student services, operations & maintenance — raked in the most money. (For a definition of the categories, see “Trends in College Spending,” pages 19-20.) In other words, those higher tuition payments and bigger college loans are going largely to expand higher ed bureaucracies. But don’t worry, faculty members appear to be well taken care of. As for making college more affordable through scholarships and fellowships, who do you think colleges exist for? The students? Get real.
When higher ed spokesmen whine about “hardship” and “cuts,” they’re talking about the bitter, cruel, punishing years when expenditures increase only 1% or 2% faster than the general inflation rate. The faculty and administrators in the world of higher ed are one of the most protected classes in the American economy. No wonder the campus crew is overwhelming Democrat and liberal — they are the beneficiaries of one of the most expansive income transfer schemes in the nation. And who is paying for it? We, the taxpayers… We, the parents of college students… And the college grads who enter the working world with massive student loans.
Through the mechanism of runaway college tuitions, Middle America is subsidizing an intellectual elite that trashes our values, mocks our way of life, advocates the politics of wealth redistribution and transforms our children into a 21st century version of indentured servants. Tuition payers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
